Canadian Politics Today

Now that I am home with almost nothing on my plate, I am slowly filling up with anxiety... like a torpedoed submarine fills with water.  Something here may be related to rejecting a 2nd interview with a company that I was 50-50 on, and fearing there will be nothing more coming for months.

Do you get anxious ?  What do you do about it ?

I'm going to take the wife on a walk today to have lunch with a friend.  Maybe the company and exercise will work.

I have a granddaughter who has such severe anxiety that she cannot seem to function effectively in the world outside a very limited and safe space.  She tries to work but has not been able to keep a job and is on welfare.  She has been trying to get some kind of psychological or medical help for almost a year with no success.  I worry about her a lot.

I also see a lot of anxiety in young people and I wonder how this world looks to them.  Climate Change and leaders who cannot hold a civil conversation with each other, news that may or may not be true and lots of coverage of crazed killers who want to blow themselves and others up.   There is already some resentment against baby boomers and I wonder how that will play out in future as climate change begins to dismantle the good life so many of us have enjoyed.

Now that I am home with almost nothing on my plate, I am slowly filling up with anxiety... like a torpedoed submarine fills with water.  Something here may be related to rejecting a 2nd interview with a company that I was 50-50 on, and fearing there will be nothing more coming for months.

Do you get anxious ?  What do you do about it ?

I'm going to take the wife on a walk today to have lunch with a friend.  Maybe the company and exercise will work.

I've had different people in my life with severe anxiety.  I've read up on it too.  I've also had periods of unemployment & being on the job search like most people & being anxious about it & hating being home doing nothing.  Anxiety is often caused by fear and/or anger, among other things.  It's a mood disorder, so something is affecting your mood to make you nervous very likely.  Sounds like your joblessness.  Anxiety can also be related to feelings of depression (another mood disorder).

Since you're unemployed, the best advice I can say is for you to give an honest effort everyday.  Wake up every morning with a sense of purpose of what you're going to do & follow through on those plans, whether it be a goal of looking for jobs for a minimum of 2 hours and telling yourself you'll apply to at least 2-3 jobs that day.  You need to have goals, you need a reason to get up in the morning.  If at the end of every day you can say to yourself that you gave your best effort that daythan it's very likely you won't be anxious & depressed, or at least much less so.

Exercise is good, it releases more "happy" chemicals into your brain.

The worst thing for you to do is to sit around all day on the internet/PC/cellphone on these message boards.  You'll feel like a lazy bum and feel guilty for not putting in an honest effort to find that new job.  If there's no jobs to apply to, go online or to the library & find articles/books on how to make your resume better & to improve your interviewing skills.  Make sure to also get out there and interact with people, because staying isolated when unemployed & couped up in the house feels terrible (as much fun sleeping in until 11am can be LOL).  Get out & enjoy the sunshine.  To get out of the house and feel like you're working, you could also bring your laptop/cellphone to the library (or use their PC's) and connect to their wifi for a certain # of hours each day while looking for jobs online, it will give you more structure & feel more like you're going to your office to work on a task instead of staying in PJ's all day.

Also, try not to reject an interview even if you don't like the job, just doing the interview will give you more practice & confidence for the interviews you really want in the future.  You'll also be able to network a bit.  Good luck!

Ok.  So for today, wife has decided we're going to the CNE !

distract... distract...

Joan and I agree that we're using online surfing as a treatment for anxiety.

Again.

Wow - what was the effect ?

I've  dealt with anxiety my whole life.  When I was a little kid summer's off of school were fun.  When I hit puberty things got weird, when I was about 13 during the summer months off school I became a hypochondriac that summer, although I didn't know what that was at the time.  Went to the doctor, and I actually did feel sick, they didn't know what was wrong, they put me on meds that did nothing, but now I look back and can see that a couple of months off spent hanging around the house means your mind needs something to do anyways, and when it's not busy it will find something to think about, hence things like hypochondria and OCD.  When I went back to school in Sept i was fine.  As they say, a rolling stone gathers no moss.

I have a very active brain, always thinking or dreaming about something, i'm very analytical and creative, which is both good and bad, because if I don't manage my thoughts they can easily ruminate on negative things, or my mind will simply be too active.

My dad is the total opposite.  He uses his brain as minimum as possible LOL.  His mind is almost always in the present focused on the task at hand, he's extremely practical, he's not daydreaming in the clouds or worrying about this or that.  He's extremely mentally healthy, and very laid back.   I can be neurotic about things, him not at all.

A lot of anxiety is a fight or flight response (anger and/or fear), but some of it is your mind simply not being in the present.  That's why meditation is so helpful in my experience, it's more effective than any drug IMO, but more annoying because it takes a bit of time and work.

Been lucky to not have much depression.  Some of it like probably our friend ColinBlow is a genetic imbalance.  The times I've been depressed is when the reality of my life doesn't match my expectations for being happy. ie:  If you're a 45 year old woman and never had kids, but always wanted them, that's when you can sink into a depression.  So you either have to change your reality or change your expectations or you'll never be happy.

A therapist also once told that if you try your hardest, you won't be depressed.  That's probably an exaggeration, but it's great advice.  If you sit around all day doing nothing, knowing you probably should have done something productive, that can make you depressed.  Generally living life with no regrets.

It is genetic in my case. And since it comes from both sides of the family (though both my parents were lucky to escape it, and I'm assuming it is a recessive gene) my brother and sister have it too. Fun times.

I'll likely be on medication my whole life, as I think I went into "partial remission" after getting the new TMS treatment rather than total remission. (Some tms patients do.) I'm having it done again in a couple months. But suffice to say that after having the TMS treatment, the medicine actually works. It was doing a half-assed job before, and in my case--not saying you're wrong to try to treat your anxiety in other ways--other, non-medicinal treatments are ineffective, since we're talking about full-blown bipolar disorder here.

I do hope you get better. People don't realize how crippling mental problems like anxiety, depression, bipolar, etc are.