Thank you! This was useful advice (and you were right, I hadn’t really understood those aspects of the Work).
That sense of urgency and anxiety that came up around the end had continued to re-trigger itself, so I tried the approach in your comment after reading it. Roughly, the belief seemed to be something like “without this anxiety, I will get stuck doing useless things”—which felt kinda true, but I was not super-convinced that the feeling was particularly helpful concerning that problem… still, I had no clear counterevidence, and lacking it I would have gone down an IFS route previously.
But then I went through the steps until I got to “who would I be if I didn’t believe that this feeling is necessary for me to stop doing useless things and for actually getting work done in time?”
… huh. A moment of confusion; felt like a novel possibility. Then felt like it would be a big relief… mostly. I think there was some reconsolidation. But also some unease, some objection I didn’t quite uncover.
While I didn’t manage to get a firm grip of the next objection, the shift was enough to make the anxiety temporarily subside—which by itself was more than I’d managed to do with all the Focusing and IFS that I’d been throwing at it for the last couple of years.
And for the last two days, the anxiety has felt different. Now it has actually been good at pushing me to work, rather than stopping me from getting anything done. Got quite a bit done, and also didn’t worry about what the optimal thing was.
I think it would still be better not to need anxiety as a driver in the first place, so I still want to dig into that soon, but these two days were already a big improvement over Monday. So thank you!
Thank you! This was useful advice (and you were right, I hadn’t really understood those aspects of the Work).
That sense of urgency and anxiety that came up around the end had continued to re-trigger itself, so I tried the approach in your comment after reading it. Roughly, the belief seemed to be something like “without this anxiety, I will get stuck doing useless things”—which felt kinda true, but I was not super-convinced that the feeling was particularly helpful concerning that problem… still, I had no clear counterevidence, and lacking it I would have gone down an IFS route previously.
But then I went through the steps until I got to “who would I be if I didn’t believe that this feeling is necessary for me to stop doing useless things and for actually getting work done in time?”
… huh. A moment of confusion; felt like a novel possibility. Then felt like it would be a big relief… mostly. I think there was some reconsolidation. But also some unease, some objection I didn’t quite uncover.
While I didn’t manage to get a firm grip of the next objection, the shift was enough to make the anxiety temporarily subside—which by itself was more than I’d managed to do with all the Focusing and IFS that I’d been throwing at it for the last couple of years.
And for the last two days, the anxiety has felt different. Now it has actually been good at pushing me to work, rather than stopping me from getting anything done. Got quite a bit done, and also didn’t worry about what the optimal thing was.
I think it would still be better not to need anxiety as a driver in the first place, so I still want to dig into that soon, but these two days were already a big improvement over Monday. So thank you!