Living with a mental illness is difficult. It’s like a dark force is following you through life. One that constantly insists you mess up. It doesn’t matter what you call it; a Black Dog or some related anxiety demon, both do their best to de-rail every aspect of your life.
You know what it’s like when the dark force hits. You can’t think straight, every task becomes a nightmare of endurance– but life must carry on. It’s hard enough when you are living with a physical, visible illness that people can understand. I think it’s doubly difficult when you have re-occurring bouts of lunacy that are all but invisible! People just don’t understand.
“Mental Health problems don’t define who you are. They are something you experience. You walk in the rain and you feel the rain, but you are not the rain”
Matt Haig
So, with that re-occurring theme of illness in mind, how do I keep a full-time job, while dealing with my own issues.
Before I start, I can only offer suggestions on how I work while living with crippling anxiety and depression. I suppose you could transpose it to other illnesses, but I don’t want to assume it will.
How do anxiety and depression affect my work?
For a long time it didn’t, because I wasn’t able to work Twelve years to be precise. From 2009 to 2022 I stayed at home to look after my kids – at least that’s what I told the world. I was suffering with a variety of mental health woes that meant I ended up leaving a well-paid Civil Service job in 2009. We did decide that I’d look after our kids so my wife could go to work, but that wasn’t the primary reason. It was so I could hide.
Now that I am back at work, and have been for two years, I’m finding the following are the main problems I face when not doing well.
Primarily, I can’t concentrate on my job. It’s like my mind will work overtime to think about everything, and I mean everything, other than what I get paid to do! Last week I cleaned our wheely bin instead of writing a report. The bin stank and was covered in ants and other crap. I also got a face full of unknown stinky crud in the process. But it was still better than doing what I needed to do, what I was paid to do. I think the mentally unwell become masters of procrastination. I’m sure if I’d had the bin to do as a task, I’d have found something else to do! Over the years I’ve developed the ability to do everything tomorrow. It doesn’t matter what it is, I still manage to convince myself that I’ll do it tomorrow. Even though I know I won’t, I will still say it to myself. I don’t know why – maybe it’s my way of feeling less useless when I’m incapable
Which is harder to deal with, Anxiety or Depression
I cycle between both. The depression is hard as it demotivates me, but the anxiety is worse. Not only does it make it hard to think, but it stops me sitting still long enough to even start concentrating. Both, though, sap life from me in their own way.
As I’ve said, it’s bad enough being like this at home, but it’s a hundred times worse when your lively hood depends on it.
How do I motivate myself to work.
What works for me, is a little thing called the Pomodoro technique that I talked about last week. Simply put, you break the day into small blocks of time and concentrate on a single task, then take a short break away from whatever you’re doing, repeat three or four times and take a longer break; rinse and repeat as they say. Having to concentrate for a short period makes it easier to achieve. You don’t have to do 25 minutes though, that’s just what works for me. Heck, when I started it, I was struggling to make 5!
I see it as building up your mental endurance when you’ve been broken by illness, like going to the gym after a forced absence. Weight training for your mind.
I tend to use the first 25-minute segment in a day to break my day down into tasks, the simpler the better. Big tasks down into their components. The easier the task is to achieve, the easier it will be to complete it and the more likely you will be to attempt it, with the resulting reward of having completed a task. Ultimately, I think it’s the reward at the end of each block that helps, which is currently chocolate. I need to stop that soon as I’m getting heavier! But it could be anything, as long as it’s away from your workstation.
How do I decide which tasks to tackle.
The other challenge when your brain has turned to mush is working out what to do. So, first, I list all the jobs I need to consider.
To decide what tasks are important, and what aren’t. I use four virtual piles.
Pile one is things that must be done, business critical and that sort of thing. You know, get fired if not done level importance.
Pile Two is what I need to do, but not as important as one; No one will moan if they’re missed out.
Pile Three is what I’d like to do – stuff rarely touched when I’m dealing with mental crisis. However, this pile does get reassessed and moved to one and two if it needs to.
Pile Four is the crap I’ve got no chance of doing. This one gets ignored or passed onto others. It could be important, but often not.
I do have a fifth pile, but I’ll talk about that later.
That decided, I work through the day in 25 minutes segments, slowly ticking off the tasks. Then, each morning I start again, adding tasks I’ve missed from the previous day or week – sort of my own bullet journal.
Is it a perfect system for a procrastinator?
It works for me as it’s flexible. If I’m having a crappy time, I might drop the timer to 25 min to 20, or lower if it’s bad. Likewise, on good days I might up it to 30 minutes or more.
Sometimes, even with the timer, I struggle to concentrate enough to even do my lists. So, I shorten the timer and turn to my emergency list. This, I call the ‘F… it’ List. It’s jobs that require no thought, sending a simple email or organising a work folder. What it does is start me back on the road to better productivity.
Above all, I congratulate myself for each time block I work through, and every task I complete. I also try not to give myself too much crap if I fail, as that’s not useful.
I do other things to help me, but those two are the main ones – Lists and Pomodoro – I’ll chat about others in later blogs.
Remember, kindness is key. I am ill, after all.
Steve