Why There's HELL Inside My Head!!!

In one of my earlier posts, I had revealed that I suffer from a condition called Generalized Anxiety Disorder. It’s a very common mental disorder where the patient experiences severe, ongoing anxiety that interferes with daily activities. Now I have spoken about it to many of my friends and acquaintances and the usual reactions are on the line of “try-to-calm-down” or “relax-its-all-in-your-mind”. What people fail to understand is the extreme nature of stress that I experience.

EVERYTHING STRESSES ME OUT.

WebMD says “Generalized Anxiety Disorder (or GAD) is characterized by excessive, exaggerated anxiety and worry about everyday life events with no obvious reasons for worry. People with GAD tend to always expect disaster and can’t stop worrying about health, money, family and work. The worry is often unrealistic or out of proportion for the situation. Daily life becomes a constant state of worry, fear and dread. Eventually the anxiety so dominates the person’s thinking that it interferes with daily functioning, including work, social activities and relationships.”

Lovely, right? Now I am going to tell you how things work in my mind. When I wake up in the morning, the thought of the day ahead fills my mind with fear. I keep going over the tasks for the day in my head, over and over, devising ways to perform them better. The constant rambling of these compulsive thoughts in my head eventually raise my heartbeats and making me breathless. I would ususally be greeted by a text from my girlfriend but I wouldn't reply right away. When she'd call to check up on me - because she has seen me like this before - I would get yanked off from my chain of stress and sometimes respond with annoyance.

Then the fact that I am projecting my issues to my girlfriend starts stressing me out further, manifesting as a mixture of guilt and worry for my relationship. I somehow psyche myself to get out of the bed, sometimes repeating phrases like “You’re okay” or “Things are great” in my mind to make me feel better, and I get ready for the day.

Now, if you are an ex-co-worker, you might find this surprising, because you haven’t seen this worry on my face. That’s because I hid it well. Even then, I am sure people who worked with me closely often noticed it on my face: the worry lived just beyond the smile.

Now a big part of my job is analyzing numeric data, analyzing trends tracking numbers. And with time, I have found that inaccuracy in numbers stresses me out greatly. Decimals have proven to be my biggest enemies. When dealing with large numbers (lacs and crores), such as in retail sales, it’s customary to round up data for representation. This creates decimal errors when working with those numbers on a spreadsheet. Saying that this bothers me would be an understatement. IT DRIVES ME NUTS when numbers add up inaccurately. Minor decimal errors in store level data may change the final number total by a few lacs. I am compulsively trying to make all numbers match, up to 2 decimal places.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. My mind is a scary place. And tell you what, the thought that you’re thinking that, is also stressing me out a little. Anything that’s not the way I feel it should be disturbs me, at work as well as at other places. I constantly worry about my finances, my relationships and my future. Being me can be really tiring at times. Small things can get me riled up. An SMS from my boss informing me about some data he’ll need the next day can get me so worked up that I end up opening my laptop and working through the night on data that I could easily have put off till work hours. So naturally, all this takes a toll on my romantic relationships too.

My girlfriend tries her best to understand my state of mind, but I think it gets on her nerves at times. Especially the method that I have devised to drown the worry inside my head. You'd usually find me doing two things at once, watching TV and playing games on my phone at the same time. That’s because either one of those two activities individually won’t be enough to take my mind off my worries. Last year when I got treated for it, the psychiatrist had prescribed some medicines, which had worked well. But I stopped them because they were addictive and I hate to be addicted to pills.

Even without the medicines, I am still in a better state of mind than I was when I first visited the psychiatrist. I am still always stressed out but I don’t get panic attacks like I used to earlier. So that’s a good thing, I guess. Now maybe you’ll start to understand why there’s HELL INSIDE MY HEAD.

P.S. I was starting to worry a bit about if any of you will like this article or not. So I stopped worrying and started playing Tetris on my phone, while watching the second season of Castle on Amazon Prime. ;-)