Unreasonable anxiety about work

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Does anyone else get this? I only work 3 days a week, but each work morning I wake up with fear and panic about the day ahead.

I feel that other people don't get like this as bad as I do. With other people, work just becomes a part of their lives and they know how to get on with it. But to me, work feels like a prison sentence, or some other punishment.

I suppose it doesn't help that I don't enjoy my job much and don't want to be there. The company isn't a very nice company to work for, and the job itself is rather boring and grotty, and low-paid. I clean a nursing home, but it's more stressful than it sounds. I'm not keen on nursing homes anyway. I'm only there to earn money. I am looking for another job but that is taking a while unfortunately.

When I wake up on a work morning, anxious thoughts start going round in my head; "what if today's going to be a bad day?", "what if I get yelled at?", "what if we're short-staffed and I have to do twice as much work?", "what if I get overwhelmed and have a panic attack?"....and so on. The boss is aware of my anxiety/ASD/ADHD, but because the company is a greedy and unfriendly company to work for, the boss is under pressure to give us pressure.

Sir I experienced same situation about school but not work. Because i'm jobless! In my school years i was waking up like a zombie and i rarely woke up with alarm sound. I always woke up by my mother. She was struggling to wake me up and she was rotating my legs 90 degrees to wake me up. After i successfully woke up i was starting to think about school. I thought students will bully me. Sometimes i didnt go to school sometimes my mom forced me.

Yes, yes yes yes yes! I can't tell you how strongly I relate to what you said. I have always felt exactly this way any day I wake up knowing it's a work day. I can relate to feeling like it's a prison sentence. I felt this way about school too.

When I used to work retail, my first days on a new job ( and I was never able to stay at anything longer than six months tops) I would look around the place and quite literally feel like this was my "new prison" for eight hours five days a week, sometimes six.

I forced myself to keep on, just as you do, for all the obvious reasons, but it's horrible to feel like this every day. There were things I could enjoy within the work or even the occasional co-worker's company, and trust me, I did actively seek to focus on those elements just to get by and survive, but still it's no fun to basically hate what you do and where you have to be every day.

Things got better when I found self employed work that meant showing up to places vacated by my hirers, and I was completely alone and just getting on with my work. That actually became the nearest thing to blissfully ideal work I've ever had, aside from if it was work-from-home. This was the next best thing and my work related anxiety PLUMMETED back in those times. I felt much better about going out to those kinds of days.

But more recently the vacated situation is no longer applicable, and I'm experiencing acute anxiety again. So much so with one particular client, that I literally started having full, clinical-definition panic attacks on the mornings that I was due to deal with her. Things got worse and worse until I was being made so late by trying to get control of my panic attack physically and mentally, that I never made it out of the house. I eventually had to let this client go. I found her an upsetting experience to deal with, had forced myself to keep on anyway, but eventually when it was affecting me this badly on the "morning of," I couldn't handle it anymore.

Trouble is, that has now spread, almost in a PTSD manner, onto other situations work-wise, and I'm struggling to cope.

I don't know what to advise to you as I too am having this same issue where I'm filled with dread.

I do think most people, even without spectrum issues, feel a moderate amount of dread and loathing in the morning, about their work, considering that statistically most people are not working in something that is ideal for them anyway. My dad never seemed exactly in love with going out every day to his desk job, and I sensed that from him in waves.

But I think some of us, like you and I, have particularly stressful experiences of this.

I'm lucky enough to be mainly working from home at the moment - it's office work, but I do it at home with my own choice of music or in relative silence. I really do like this way of working and don't miss people at all.

But I worked in offices for 20 years and hated every minute. The new office we have is like it's been designed to be torturous to anyone with Asperger's (which I think I may have). Extremely bright lights, no sound barriers between desks (it isn't cubicles, it's entirely open plan). And hot desking so because I don't go in often, on the few occasions I do, I'm never sure who I'll be sat next to or if I'm sat in someone else's usual desk.

I also find when I do have to go into work, it takes me ages to leave the house as have routines I need to follow but I'm also very disorganized. That sounds like a contradiction but basically I have to do certain things in the morning before I can leave for work but I am bad at preparing things the night before. So I often end up rushing around in the morning, getting showered, doing ironing etc. And there never seems to be enough time. When I worked every day in the office, I was very often late into work because of how chaotic I was in the mornings.

hi ... I can empathize with your words ... when I was four yrs old I remember watching other kids and adults talking and flowing through conversations ... I noticed their body language in addition to their words and recall having no idea how they were able to sustain it for more than a few sentences ... I am now 62 and still marvel at how effortlessly people converse and interact ... for the past 58 yrs, I never knew I wasn't wired for those things to run smoothly ...

my recent Asperger's diagnosis was like a tsunami of understanding .... after all these yrs of wondering what the hell was wrong with me, I discovered there was nothing wrong with me .... there was something DIFFERENT with me ... it hasn't given me a pardon or excused my past erratic and bizarre displays of off-center social skills ... it hasn't made my social skills improve one bit ... what it has done is given me an EXPLANATION for all of it ... an explanation is worth much more than finding an EXCUSE for my behavior over the yrs ...

sorry for taking so long to get to the point ... I wish I could speak with people they way I write ... my life would be less choppy and more seamless in social matters ..

anyway ... every day I have gone to work (in any job I have ever had) I have dreaded the close quarters and customary (forced) socializing with others ... I don't dislike people ... I just have so few clues how to relate to them on a consistent level ... something always breaks down with people .... I may completely misread body language or find the person's comment ridiculous and have nothing constructive to add to the ridiculous thing they just said ...

I am not a snob either ... however, I am literal to a fault ... and ridiculous statements make me want to scream ...

so I do sympathize with your struggle and your suffering .. suffering (being off balance) is our most common shared human condition ... we all experience it ... so I send you good vibes to offset your anxiety ... anxiety sucks ... something else we all share ... hang in there ....