A New Approach

Lately it has been coming to my attention that I allow myself to lose control of certain things much too easily.

I like to know where I am, when and who with. I like to know how much money I have in my bank account, how much there is to go out and if I have ‘enough’. When I make a plan, I don’t like it to be changed. If I get ill, and have to change a plan myself, I seek justification and understanding from someone else before I can accept it as being okay.

I have noticed though that this need for control is much worse when I haven’t had enough food, water or sleep. These are obvious needs, but I often ignore them for something more interesting in the moment. Last night, knowing I had to wake up at 8am to drive my boyfriend to work for 9am, I spent 3 hours shopping for a New Year’s Eve outfit. I shopped until 2am. Then when I woke up at 8, I turned off the alarm, waking up 40 minutes later.

My emotions overcame me. I felt so completely and utterly helpless. I was almost sobbing, except there were no tears, just a guttural sound coming from my body. I lay unable to get up and do anything for a few minutes, heavy with the weight of knowing I had let someone down. I had let myself down, let my boyfriend down and, in my head, let down his parents, his employer and anyone who might be awake to see just how late we were.

And then my car was entirely frozen solid, and I felt even worse.

What I find really hard when something doesn’t fit exactly with the plan I had imagined is summoning the strength to get up and get on. I lose all motivation, want to curl up into a ball and sleep. I become weak and every little failure affects me.

I long to be the type of person with motivation on tap. However, even with the most pressing deadlines, sometimes I just feel so exhausted and drained that I simply do not care. I do not care that I have more work than time, or that if I don’t get up and get ready then I will be late for something important.

Of course, that is not entirely the case. The truth is that this feeling of not caring is a front for just how much I do care. My brain turns my intense fear of failing/need to do everything into this crushing weight of lack of motivation.

On the drive back from dropping my boyfriend off at work (10 minutes late), I thought about it and realised that perhaps the way to feel better is simple. I need more discipline. I need to go to sleep at the time that will give me 8 hours of sleep, and ignore the desire to stay awake because there are other things I want to do. I need to drink so much more water; I drink so little I sometimes worry I could be damaging my body. And I need to eat. Routinely, regularly, well.

Beyond this, when I have things I need to get done, I need to take a new approach. Rather than planning out time specific tasks, to be started at X and finished by Y, I need to give myself time to breathe. I need to think, and maybe write down, the day before, what general tasks I need to do and when it comes to it I need to do each task for as long as I can, for as long as I can motivate myself to.

It is an approach that feels risky, because what if I don’t finish every task within a set time frame, what if I don’t have motivation? What I need to remember though is that there are very few deadlines that are official, rather than ones I have created myself, causing only stress rather than fast progress. The deadlines that matter are university deadlines, work deadlines, all deadlines that despite stressing myself out along the way, I inevitably always meet. The way I meet them simply is not good enough anymore.

So, from today, I vow to try my hardest to ignore the self-made pressure to meet self-made deadlines, and to allow myself more freedom, and to take better care of myself, so that I can remain in control.