eric76 wrote:
ToughDiamond wrote:
Don't know if it counts as a phobia, but I'm often haunted by a strong feeling that I'm unwittingly "fiddling while Rome burns," i.e. I feel there must be some very important things I really need to get done instead of whatever I'm actually doing, and the consequences of ignoring those things will be terrible. An irrational or greatly exaggerated fear of wasting time.
I guess it's partly rational. I don't have the kind of executive function necessary to keep a good overview of my activities, and my hyperfocus makes me prone to get sucked into the detail of tasks to a ridiculous extreme, at the expense of efficiency. But for all that, the important things get done in time and my life doesn't collapse. So it really shouldn't bother me, but it does.
Could that be more anxiety instead of a phobia?
I'm not sure what the difference is. I tried looking it up, but couldn't find anything that explained it sensibly. The objects of phobia typically seem to be things which only turn up occasionally (e.g. spiders) but the object of my fear is almost always present, unless I'm working on a task I really feel is of paramount importance. I guess it's very rare that anybody can know for sure that they're putting their time to the best possible use.
Quote:
Every once in a while I become convinced that I need to do something but have no idea what I need to do. I think it is anxiety rather than a phobia.
It sounds much like my problem, though you say "something" (singular). My fear is that there are many such things. Some of them are clearly defined, e.g. repair the gutter, the rest are more vague but (I think) they're nearly always grounded in reality, in that I could identify them clearly if I stopped and thought. I guess in your case the "undone thing" that bothers you is never identified and probably doesn't exist?
Over the years I've noticed many tasks that I feel I really should do, but they have fallen by the wayside. There are so many that it would take a long time to list and prioritise them all, especially with my executive function problems - I've tried but I just got bogged down in the details every time - and if I got distracted into trying that again, I might miss a deadline while I was fooling around trying to create the world's greatest task-organising system. You could reasonably call my condition a morbid fear of deadlines, though often there's no definite deadline, e.g. fixing the gutter - the leak was only causing very gradual damage to the house wall.
My best coping strategy so far is a text file which I call my "at-a-glance to-do list." Any important tasks are in red, and assigned to a date, or maybe a particular month if the deadline isn't so clear cut. That way, when I feel this anxiety, I can just look at the file and feel reassured that AFAIK I'm up to date. It also helps to stay mindful that if I went into in a coma and was hospitalised for 6 months, once I returned to my life, the missed deadlines wouldn't be the end of the world.
Rather than medicalise my anxiety, I tend to see it as a bad habit in my thinking, acquired from many years of holding down jobs as an undiagnosed Aspie. I was given a lot of responsibilities and deadlines which often felt impossible, the taskmasters were assuming I could multi-task, understand unclear instructions etc., so I was probably burning myself out trying to find ways to somehow deliver, and to hide my limitations. I stopped going for promotion because I couldn't imagine surviving their increased expectations. So for a very long time there really were a lot of scary expectations on me, so many that I couldn't remember them all. Those days are over, but the anxiety is still there.
I'm also very aware that I procrastinate, and that's dangerous with important things. I delayed inquiring into an old pension of mine that I'd lost track of, because I feared finding out I'd somehow lost the pension itself (and I expected the process of finding out would be very hard, with phone calls to people who wouldn't be helpful). Of course logically, if I'd lost it, I needed to know about it, and the sooner I tracked it down, the more likely I'd be to keep it. I eventually sorted it out and it's fine, but I let it haunt me for years first.
29 Dec 2014, 2:25 pm
