My Anxiety - The internal pressure I put on myself

So I thought about writing this piece and diving a bit more into the “why” side of things, why my anxiety affected me the way it did. Then I began to think, what will people think of me writing this? What will they think I'm trying to achieve with this? Will they think I’m doing it to impress others and show people “look at me and look at what I'm doing with my life everyone”. I had to stop myself with that exact thought. Why is that thought going through my head, that's one of the exact reasons why I get anxious. Thinking about how others will perceive me and realistically getting it completely wrong, always thinking about the bad instead of the good. Sometimes I seem to think of the worst case possible first and that's never really the case. At least from dealing with those thoughts I can start to see where they stem from and I can try to nip them in the bud as early as possible. 

If I let the fear of what people might think or say stop me from doing what I want to do then I’d never do anything I want. Life is for living. There is no sequel to life so might as well do what I want while in here. I knew my personal experience with anxiety helped some people out and I seriously enjoyed writing about it so why wouldn't I keep doing it for another while. Some people might think the thoughts they have are mad and ridiculous. They might think are being silly and stupid for the way they are thinking. I just want to try and relate to them and show them that they aren't crazy for thinking the way they do. I think stupid and silly thoughts too. I wouldn't say they are stupid and silly tough, its just the way we are programmed and that’s life. All we can do is just try our best to change these thoughts and see the bigger picture in life, sometimes that can be quite difficult to do. Again all I can hope for with this is that some people can relate to my thoughts and experiences, maybe even start a few conversations amongst their friend groups too.

I initially wrote a much longer piece on what made my anxiety get so bad. It outlined some reasons why my brain was working the way it was. It discussed what was contributing to putting these anxious thoughts in my head. When I read it back it was so long and to be honest a bit boring. It felt like being forced to read a certain amount of pages in a book and you were just reading for the sake of it. So I've split it into a few different pieces to make it easier to follow and be more of a quick read than a long boring one. It’s what I'd rather read so I'm sure others are out there like that too.

Today I'm going to talk about internal pressure and how I began to put way too much pressure on myself. This and comparing myself to others on social media are probably two of the two main reasons why I get anxious. I do think more people will be able to relate to comparing themselves to others on social media but I haven't fully finished writing about my experience with it. All I will say is just stop comparing yourself to others, it doesn't really do anyone any good and I’ve learned (and still learning) the hard way. So yea I’d rather make sure I’m happy with it than just throwing it out there so I’ll wait till it's fully finished. 

I put an extreme amount of pressure on myself to do well in life, it's a blessing and a curse for me. It pushes my boundaries and makes me seek new challenges to further my skills and qualities. It’s great that I want to do well in life and do what is best for me. If I have a family in the future I want to try to provide the best life I can for them. Something my parents did for me and the older I get the more grateful I am for it. So it does help push me and make me go after things that I want in life. It’s just that I started to put way too much emphasis on it and I was putting unnecessary pressure on me to do “well” in life. It was beginning to rob me of my happiness and it just wasn't worth the trade off.

I do want to say the pressure I put on myself is the one of the main reasons I have excelled at anything I really wanted to go out and do for myself. People reading this might be thinking that too, the pressure they put on themselves to excel at sports, their career or whatever they really want in life is good for them. It is. I’m not saying to not put pressure on yourself because it will push you to do great things. What I found personally is it became such a constant thought and aspect of my life that it began to feed my anxiety and in turn got me real down about myself. It began to cross a point in my life where it was just too much and it took the fun out of wanting to do well. It’s something that's still part of my life but I've come to realize when it starts to get too much just remember the bigger picture. We are spinning on this little rock and nobody really knows anything. Nothing will matter in 100 years time, so just try to be as happy as you can be because who doesn't like being happy. We deserve it for the short time we have in this world. 

I would set certain goals in my life that I wanted to go and chase. It could have been something simple like getting a promotion in my job or making the starting team in the sport I was playing. I would work hard and try to chase that goal as best I could. After all the hard work and pressure I put on myself to reach this goal, I might reach it, then what? Nothing. Yes I would be happy for a brief moment or maybe give myself a small pat on the back but that was it. I had just reached what I wanted and I never really got much satisfaction from it, yet it’s all I was working towards. It messed with my head. The automatic response was “well you haven't done enough, you need to aim higher”. It was like dangling a carrot above my head and constantly going higher and higher to get it, but never actually getting it. Anything below that and I was a failure. I wasn't doing enough with myself. This was the new standard that was like the bare minimum for me, except I never celebrated the bare minimum. Yet it would always be getting higher and higher, a constant feeling of pressure being put on myself by me. It was like a vicious cycle where I could never be happy with what I had just done for myself. I just couldn't be happy with the good things I was doing. The pressure could be related to work, sport, physical appearance or even a hobby. There's a lot of things out there you can put pressure on yourself for.

There was more pressure being put on me by myself than anyone else. I was always being so hard on myself and discrediting what I did. I’d never say the same for any of my friends yet here I was saying it about myself. If I said something to my friends about diminishing their accomplishments it would be wrong to do that, saying that to the people you care about. Yet here I was constantly doing it to myself, like I didn't care how I felt. “You are your own worst critic”, that can be a very true statement. My family, friends and girlfriend at the time were way happier for me than I was for myself. I could never seem to be happy with what I did for myself. I was so fixated on what I wanted in life and the more I would go after it the more pressure I would put on myself. (This is something I asked people about and they suggested it’s something similar to imposter syndrome. So if you feel like this sometimes look up imposter syndrome. There are lots of resources on it and might help you to show you you're not alone thinking like this). This pressure I would put on myself would never go away because I was never doing enough for me even though people in my close circle could clearly see I was. This would just make me feel like I was never doing enough with myself and I was never going to amount to anything. I was going to fail at life and I wouldn't be enough for the people around me. This all fed my brain with anxious thoughts. 

Writing this now feels like I’m saying my life was terrible and nothing was going well for me. I want to emphasise again that this was not the case. I was generally happy in life as my close circle would know. It's just because all the things I have mentioned above were getting harder to deal and cope with, the joy and fun in my life was slowly being sucked out of me, that's why I went to get some help and opened up to my friends the way I did. We all have our own problems and mine are no different to a lot of other people too. It’s just you never get to see or read about other people's problems much so I thought it could be helpful for others to hear from someone they know or know of. A normal person as such.

I started to think that others would be seeing me in the exact same way I saw myself. I began to think that others would be thinking I wasn't fulfilling my potential because I wasn't following a path I created for myself, a path that they didn't even know about if that makes sense?

I had this idea in my head that whatever I thought of myself is pretty much what others were thinking about me. Like think about it. When's the last time you thought long and hard about what others are doing with their life? You might give it a quick thought then it's back to something else. We all have so much going on in our own lives we don't really have the time to think about others for that long. I almost thought everyone was looking at my life in depth, criticising my life and how it was going. In reality I wasn't doing that about anyone else’s and chances are nobody was doing that about mine too. It just felt that way for me for some reason. These are thoughts that still pop into my head to this day, it’s just when I notice them I have to push them to the side and ignore them now. They don’t matter in the grand scheme of things and they don’t add to me being happy in life. So they aren't worth thinking about. 

I could just never simply be happy with who I was in that moment and who I thought I was going to become. It was robbing me of my happiness and joy in life. I would think about where I was going to be in life in 5, 10, 20 years time. I would think if I didn't try as hard as I possibly could to be “successful”, I wouldn't be able to provide for my family in the way I wanted further down the line. Constantly worrying about future James and never taking time to look after James right now, he was always kind of just pushed to the side. Almost forgetting how I felt about my life right at that moment and worrying about what my life might look like in 5,10 years time. I’d say if most people put themselves in their shoes 5,10 years ago and thought back then how their life would look right now, a lot would be different. It's impossible to look that far ahead yet I was creating problems and scenarios that I didn't know would properly even exist. A lot of the internal pressure I was creating for myself was about my future and how it would look like. I would then just be getting anxious about the future, thinking I would never get where I wanted to be. Just feeling down and crushing my self esteem. 

When you're left alone with these thoughts and you don't speak to someone about them they can really manifest in your head. They just grow and grow and become a bigger problem as time goes on. So please if anyone is like what I am just speak to someone about it, it helps so much. 

Do what makes you happy today. Whether that's meeting some friends for a few drinks, going to the gym or working on a side project, whatever it is just do it. Don’t feel guilty about being happy today, it can rob you of your happiness I found personally. When you're older you’ll probably say “time went by so fast”. So for the time you have today, be as happy as you can be, nobody knows how long they have on this planet, enjoy it. Don’t have regrets later in life worrying about the future and what’s to come, you’ll start missing out on the great times you can have right now. 

Just some final thoughts on it all

What I'm slowly starting to realize and practice in my life is to just try your best to live in the moment. When I sat down and chatted to my friends about how life was going we brought this topic up and shared some of our experiences with it. I’d really recommend if you haven't done so just start talking to your friends about these things. It really does help, having a support group around you can be massive for getting through tough times. Share your problems with your good friends, you can hold a lot more of your life's problems together, rather than having to deal with it all by yourself. “Your job won't take care of you when you're sick, your friends will”, that quote kind of shows how important your friends can be to you. 

Anytime I would get down in life I was doing either one of two things. I was getting annoyed or sad about what had happened in my life and feeling somewhat sorry for myself or I was getting anxious about what was to come and having no idea how life was going to turn out. When I was always at my happiest was living in the moment. Whether that was playing a hurling match and just thinking about the game and nothing else, getting to leave work and meet your friends for a drink or just going for a walk and enjoying the outdoors. Just being in the moment and enjoying what I was doing right there and then is when I was at my happiest. By no means is this how my life is all the time at the moment. I still deal with anxiety and it affects me to this day but trying to incorporate some of these ideas and ideologies into my life really helps. They help other people and they have helped me too. I’m only properly discovering them and trying to incorporate them into my life recently enough. If someone can maybe try to think of just living in the moment because we aren't promised anything else when they start to get anxious about the future and it helps them out, then that’s what it's all about. You deserve your moments so enjoy it! If you do get anxious just remember there are loads of people feeling the exact same way at the exact same moment. You're not alone, it’s just nobody is going to be screaming from the rooftops that they are anxious but they are. It’s normal and don’t think it isn't, just try your best that's all you can do. 

It kind of feels like I'm finding myself a small bit with following my passions. The world feels a bit more fun and interesting to me. Life is still definitely tough and challenging but this has really had a positive impact on my life. I’m not sure what was stopping me before. I just needed a small push to jump into it and thank god I did. I’d encourage anyone reading this that is second guessing themselves on pursuing something they are passionate about to just go for it. Nobody really cares what you do and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Do what you want to do and what makes you happiest, who knows what will happen in the future so just go for it.

I know it’s a long weekend ahead so if you have plans to go places or are having some drinks with your friends, enjoy it. Don’t worry about the future and all the things that might or might not happen. Enjoy today and the moments you have right now.

Thanks if you read this far.

James