Let's Try To Look For The Positives Today!

[Guest Anonomous17645]

I got a new job today!

on the negative side, my obsessive thoughts and anxiety have just reached an all time high for the first time in months.

Edited October 15, 2015 by Anonomous17645

[taurean]

Snowbear's piece to cub was wonderful

:original:

Anonymous, on those rare occasions when I changed my job, OCD increased ( I think because of the stress/doubt/uncertainty).

In retrospect, I needed to have a little more self-belief - more confidence - that would have eased my stress down and so too, I think, the OCD.

Edited October 15, 2015 by taurean

[Guest Anonomous17645]

Snowbear's piece to cub was wonderful

:original:

Anonymous, on those rare occasions when I changed my job, OCD increased ( I think because of the stress/doubt/uncertainty).

In retrospect, I needed to have a little more self-belief - more confidence - that would have eased my stress down and so too, I think, the OCD.

It's hard because i find that my anxiety was at bay all day,and then it just randomly reached an all time high! and one thing that i really struggle with due to my anxiety is confidence, i literally have 0 confidence sometimes,and then go into panic mode :L

[Guest]

Negatives:

- My mentor at University has just left and I am not receiving the support promised and needed

- The lift in my accommodation is still out of order

Positives:

- New person

- Made my sister's Birthday present which looks great and now I realise has saved me a lot of money and makes me feel proud as I made it myself

- Went to town

- CMHT appointment tomorrow

- Going home for the weekend

- Got a lot done today

[taurean]

Four things went wrong today; none a disaster, and I dealt with them, but - having felt better when I woke up (got acclimatised following the innoculations) these dragged us down.

Positive

One is the heating playing up - but we have a service contract and an engineer is due tomorrow afternoon - and it seems to be labouring on meanwhile.

Another - the estate agent messed up some measurements; but she has gone back to re-measure.

We relaxed playing an Andre Rieu CD, and I have another ready to play now.

So I reckon its a score draw today - world 2 roy 2 :original:

[taurean]

It's hard because i find that my anxiety was at bay all day,and then it just randomly reached an all time high! and one thing that i really struggle with due to my anxiety is confidence, i literally have 0 confidence sometimes,and then go into panic mode :L

It may help to examine your core beliefs that are triggering the negative emotions leading to panic.

See if you can dig down and find out what the trigger today was. Was it getting the new job, then concern about confidence, then panic?

Stripping out the components that built the anxiety spiral, snd looking to reframe them can help.

And challenging that other core belief that undermines your confidence looks to be important.

You can use a "behavioural experiment" to do this.Codify this negative core belief first then consider, then note down, the evidence for and against reasons you should lack confidence.

Then work on any minus points , so that you can build UP confidence.

Best wishes

Roy.

Edited October 15, 2015 by taurean

[Guest Heryn!]

Negatives:

- My mentor at University has just left and I am not receiving the support promised and needed

Is this your departmental supervisor or a student support person?

Do make it a priority to chat to someone about it if you haven't already. They're there to help you.

[ecomum]

Positive: i just apologised to my husband for being so hard to live with since my latest belief that i have contaminated people and he said " its just because you are a caring person " ...

[Cub]

@Ecomum: My brother said something very similar when I explained my own feelings. And being caring is no bad thing, is it?

[taurean]

Its that caring character trait that the OCD targets, then alledges the opposite.

It's beastly, but understanding what its game is really helped me.

[Guest Guppy]

Negatives: Dammit, I really need to stop looking at patch notes. Seriously. Damn.

Positives: The weekend is coming. I've been pretty productive today so far, mostly because I've been trying to keep myself busy to avoid thinking about the above. It's mostly working.

Edited October 16, 2015 by Guppy

[Guest]

Negatives:

- Feeling very tired and low after opening up about all my problems again to a different CMHT

Positives:

- Going back home for the weekend

- Working tomorrow morning

- Assignment was handed in on time

- Get to see my family and my dog

- Nice homemade dinner tonight

- Get to sleep in my own bed

[benjamin]

Negatives is ruminating over things people say about or to you years ago, ie they put you down saying, "You'll never get promotion, you will always be a lackey" or "You'll never get a girlfriend". Wanna bet?

Positives is that people who say such things are probably jealous of you, ie you are younger than them and they dont have your potential. Jealousy breeds hatred.

[taurean]

I am stuck in this afternoon waiting for the gas engineer to fix the heating. But that will be a positive thing, because hopefully it will save another visit, as I have asked for the annual service to be done at the same time.

The estate agent has corrected the erroneous measurements of my mum-in-laws flat, and now put it on the market.

I drove to Curry's this morning and bought replacement batteries for the landline phone handset, and that is charging up.

Got a bit spooked by a trigger when purchasing some kindle downloads yesterday - but doing what my CBT therapist told me to do.

So the negatives are all being challenged and - hopefully - fixed.

[taurean]

Gas board guy was great. The ignition part in the boiler needed replacing but he had that part in the van.

He has to come back on Tuesday with a small replacement part that a fascia screw fastens into, but hey...

Mrs Roy was an hour late back from her West End shopping trip which caused me some anxiety.She doesn't like mobile phones and didn't take hers with her, but wants me to when I go out!

I need to work on her over this; if she'd called me, I wouldn't have been concerned

[Guest Heryn!]

Negative: A largely unproductive day. I want to stop feeling as if I must do things for people out of habit or because I 'should'. I want some people (not online) to stop talking at me as if they know what is generally best for my life. I want to start again.

Positive: Still here. Where else?

[Guest Guppy]

Negatives: It's Sunday -> Weekend almost over.

Postives: The side effects from starting citalopram have been much less this time (so far).

[taurean]

I woke feeling distressed and with a headache.

So we had a nice breakfast of toast, peanut butter and herbal tea.

Mrs Roy is doing sewing, which calms her down; I took a headache pill and popped here to the gym to lift some light weights and have a shower, and chill out over a coffee and the sports news.

[taurean]

Had a quiet day, and watched sport on tv all afternoon; but as my unwanted arousal is still up, and I am burning up hot, I am taking a small amount of blood pressure medication given to me by the doctor to use in such circumstances.

Some difficult personal family business lies ahead for us this week but, other than that, we are scheduling - on our brilliant week-to-a-page worksheet - some tasks which have been long in abbeyance, so that will be good.

[Guest Heryn!]

Negative: Non-stop rumination, obsession and long periods of loathing my life and who I am.

Positive: Not this weekend.

[Guest Guppy]

Negatives: Woke up ruminating about something I have zero control over.

Positives: After a couple of minutes managed to catch myself and stop.

[Guest]

Negatives:

- Missed lectures at University

- Woke up late

Positives:

- Have a girlfriend

- Resisting the compulsions

- Saw the CMHT and they agree I need help to overcome my remaining difficulties

[taurean]

It's been a difficult day today.

But have exchanged some great banter with one of my sisters-in-law whose hubbie has cancer, whilst she was at the hospital accompanying him for a check-up - she and I have been supporting each other for some time now, and have always got on well too - now we are very close and helping each other, as well as my wife...

And it's chow mein and bramley apple pie for tea!

N.b. still somewhat anxious, but hopeful a quiet evening of tv/reading/music will shift that.

Edited October 19, 2015 by taurean

[ecomum]

I have discovered keeping busy is amazing therapy for worrying. If i force myself to get busy (hard i know) it pulls me through ocd instead of dwelling and ruminating.Then when my spike is over i dont have to pick up all the pieces of the tbings i neglected to do when in a bad way.its a win win and i just thought this might help someone else too.

[Guest Guppy]

Negatives: Was a pretty difficult night last night. For whatever reason I couldn't sleep properly and kept waking up, doing the loop of waking up, catching myself worrying and stopping, drifting off and repeating.

In the end, I managed to snap out of it by focusing on building a wall of bricks in my mind and struggling with making the bricks wrap around outcrops and things.

I'm sortof calmed down now but tired.

Postives: Honestly at this point I don't know. I guess one of the things I was worried about turned out (as always) to be not true. So there's that.

The sun looks to be coming out. I'm finished with meetings for today.

I don't know.

I'm really struggling with being positive because so many of the things I use to escape are hooked into computers and I'm basically sick of the things. I'm also starting to see a pattern where I'm really really bad at the start of the week and then exhausted for the second half of the week with small flare-ups. Can't tell if that's real or just me seeing patterns where there are none though.

Edited October 20, 2015 by Guppy