Showing posts with label bleak. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bleak. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

From 'Super-Acheiver' to 'Frazzled-Mess', the Effects of Stress at Work: micro-blog from Desteni Universe

#EQAFEDISCOVERY
 



I have been working at a job for over 2 months now, and I had been becoming anxious about my performance as I was receiving no feedback, yet I knew I was in a probationary period where they could let me go at a moment's notice.

Finally my boss reached out to me to give me a review. According to her, I was the fastest and most accurate reviewer on the moderating team, and they wanted to give me more hours because I rarely made mistakes and moved quickly through the work. I hadn't received feedback because I was "the least of her concerns", was "the best one on the team" and so on like this to the point where I began to feel embarrassed by the flattery.

These were of course, the words I had always wanted to hear from a boss, or any authority for that matter, and I could hardly believe my eyes as I read them. "The best", "fastest", "most accurate". As I breathed them in and placed myself neatly onto a little pedestal in my mind, I didn't realize that I was setting myself up for a fall.

Now I had something to lose, a reputation to keep, couldn't afford to look like I didn't know what I was doing. Before that, I had been humble, trying my best, asking questions not afraid to show I did not know the answers. Now I was 'the best one' that 'never made mistakes'... I suddenly felt as though

I couldn't live up to my own reputation!

Then things in my life moved around a bit, with money and big decisions to be directed, and all together it triggered a serious 'stress' response in me. I could no longer focus on the work, would forget each piece of information as I moved on to the next, became fidgety and irritable, looking for distractions as I worked, and began displaying all the symptoms that had in my past labelled me as having 'adult ADD' by a psychiatrist.

When I looked back on my life, I noticed this very same pattern: I was the best runner at my level, until I made it to the provincial level and experienced the stress of real competition, and I choked. I was the best soccer player on my team, until I got old enough where soccer all of a sudden become a serious 'school pride' thing, now with pressure to perform, and I became the worst player. I started at my last job with a splash, and got a promotion before my colleagues that had been there for years before me, and ended up by having a breakdown from the stress.

I even developed a fear of survival point, where I hold the belief that I cannot provide for myself in this world with the system the way it is, because as soon as there is stress: I break.

And so begins my journey of finally taking on the point of stress creation in my mind, because I see that if I don't take on this point, this pattern of great falls will continue. I also see that despite my past falls and breaks, I did display a potential to be effective, and that is something worth fighting for.

My journey begins with the Atlanteans "Stress: The History, Origin and Nature". In this recording, the system, design and emotional experience of stress is broken down and explained. Interestingly, it begins in childhood, when our beingnesses, which are comfortable and content, react to the initial seed of unexpected and unexplained fear, for which we are completely unprepared! That 'unpreparedness' and 'unexpectedness' creates a stress response within the beingness, and then of course our physical bodies react as well. We live with this unquestioningly until it develops into an entire personality later in life - one with its own thought patterns, reactions, behaviours and so on, like an entity that takes over! This would explain how I go from a 'super-achiever' to a 'frazzled mess' as soon as my stress response is triggered and takes hold!

I have begun this journey by doing self-forgiveness on the first fears I can remember, and also on my response to those fears. I will listen to the series and apply the practical applications in each recording, and I will dig into this point until I uproot it and find living solutions that I can apply in my life to find that point of long-term consistency and stability that I had been lacking.

Thanks very much, and if you can relate, then enjoy this recording and join me in taking on The Stress System:


Stress: The History, Origin and Nature - Atlanteans - Part 97


 

Wednesday, June 12, 2019

Day 270 - Redefining Hope



My 'Positive Journal' assignment for today was to think of a negative experience that happened to me, where there was a glimmer of hope that kept me going.

Once again, I was completely blank! And I thought to myself, "oh no! I am hopeless!"

The way the journal described the assignment laid it out in such a way where I was supposed to have this 'negative experience' with some glimmer of 'positive' 'hope' within it.

I was first stuck on the word 'hope', as it reminds me of sugar, in a way. It feels really good when you eat it, but once it wears off you get a sugar crash and that feels terrible. So I actually have a negative connotation when it comes to 'hope'. It's like a drug, essentially, 'hope' is like 'dope'. You use it to pick yourself up when you are down, without actually practically doing something constructive.

Hope, to me, has been the act of projecting into an imaginary desired future outcome, and then feeding that projection with positive energy to make myself 'feel good' inside myself when I call it up in my mind. Inevitably, things do not turn out exactly as I had imagined (shocker: I'm not psychic!), and so I would crash into a negative experience, where I'd feel some combination of disappointment, heartbreak, victimization and disempowerment.

In fact, it is more when I do not have 'hope' where I actually tend to move myself more, to take more responsibility in a situation, and to take physical steps to work towards the desired outcome.


This is the dictionary definition of 'hope':

"A feeling of expectation and desire for a particular thing to happen."
But then there's also the 'archaic' definition, which is pretty cool and I can align more with, and that is:
"A feeling of trust."
When I am going through a 'bad experience', knowing that the 'bad experience' is simply my reaction to a situation or event, even in my lowest of lows where it seems as though all is lost, there is something inside of me, like a void, blackness, where it is as if some part of me is untouchable, unwavering, unending. It is as if there is some pocket inside of myself where I can hold myself and know that, even if everything fails, falls, gets destroyed or whatever, that in this pocket where some important aspect of me can fit, tiny like a seed, I know that that seed will be okay, and that it may be tough, but that I can re-grow from just that one preserved part of me. 
And it is a glimmer of this that has supported me through even the bleakest moments. Not a positive experience, but rather it is a trust that, so long as I keep deciding for it to be so, it will be so.  
And so within all of this, 'hope' to me is not about being 'positive' or projecting wants and expectations, or desires for certain outcomes, but rather the Trust in Myself that I will continue deciding that no matter what, I will be ok. The Trust in Process, that no matter what happens or how long it takes, it is done. And the Trust in Life itself, that Life will never give me more than I can handle, even if the outcome was not at all what I expected or desired.
And so, my redefinition of living 'hope' is:
The trust that enough of me will be ok no matter what the outcome.