It’s Here Before You Know It
I’ve always thought of myself as proficient, intelligent, adaptable, growth driven, self-assured and positive. That was until I didn’t. Up until now I traveled through time not fully recognizing that it was a limited commodity. We are born, we grow, we learn, we get wiser, stronger, all the while getting older, right under our noses. Then there’s that one day when you take stock of where you’ve been and where you are and think, how in the fuck did I just turn 50? 50???
It’s a big, scary number. Nothing you do from here on out is considered amazing, unique, or talented. It’s just you and the stuff you’re supposed to know and do. Your life is half over, if not more. You have more responsibilities than is healthy. If you’re lucky, your parents are still around and can celebrate the milestone with you. But you know that time won’t stand still long enough to savor the day. It too will be over and you’re onto the next day, and the next. Time is funny this way.
There’s truth to the saying “time flies when you’re having fun.” When you are miserable, stressed, and near burnout, time will feel like it slows down just enough to make you extra sensitive to all of the bumps of your crises.
When you reach this mental state, you inevitably assess where you are and realize you don’t have a whole lot of time left to be what you wanted to be. It breeds anxiety, self-doubt, and depression. And it can affect every aspect of your life. Your life hasn’t actually changed, but your perception of it has. Your perception of what’s left of your life is also now filtered through a more pessimistic, conservative, if not fearful lens.
Powerful, gut wrenching anxiety was an emotion I had no familiarity with. Sure, I had some episodes of anxiety, but it was for what now seems like meaningless things, like putting together a presentation for the development team at work; you become anxious about being judged, sounding like an idiot, or worse, being ridiculed or called out in realtime. But it’s nothing compared to the anxiety that grows like an insidious cancer, bending you into the fetal position because you aren’t where you thought you would be at this age and don’t know if you’ll ever be where you want to be.
It’s easy to slip from anxiety to ruminating incessantly about past mistakes and how your life would have been different if you’d done one thing instead of another. You feel the weight of the guilt for each of the mistakes, followed by the shame of having made them. Why isn’t my life where I thought it would be? Why do I feel like I’m always chasing a dream that keeps moving away and shape shifting?
Primitive Brain
If you’ve never heard of your “primitive brain” and the job of the amygdala, you learn pretty quickly when you’re trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with you. The rabbit hole of psychology and mental issues runs deep.
The amygdala is part of a “lizard” portion of our brain, our primordial brain. Its job is primarily to warn us of dangers. As a species, when we were struggling to survive on the savannah among predators and adverse living conditions, we needed to constantly be on the alert for danger. That part of your brain can short circuit any rational thought and make you act faster than if you had to think about it. If you’ve ever stepped over a snake, then instantly jumped several feet into the air without pause, that was your primitive brain telling you to flee. If you had to stand there and think about it, that snake would have had the opportunity to strike.
It’s this part of our brain that can simultaneously keeps us safe, but can also overrule any logical ability to control our emotions and thoughts. Anxiety is a monster that grows and creeps into your day and can weaken you to the point of paralysis. It can keep you from waking up and just living your day like you used to. We have to fight the natural tendency to think negative thoughts and emotions that are relics of our past, meant to keep us safe.
My experience is that the decline can be sudden and feels exactly like a spiral downward into thought patterns that you can’t seem to control or break free from. The more you think this way, the more you will keep thinking this way. Your neural pathways strengthen in these negative directions and as you are walking through your day, can cause you again and again to cycle the same negative thoughts through your head until reaching some cataclysmic conclusion. Then rinse and repeat.
As humans we are gifted with the ability to think abstractly. We spend more than half of our time thinking of anything other than the present moment. Right now you’re reading this and wondering if this is true in your mind, or more likely if the rest of this is worth reading. I do the same. Even during sex we can’t seem to fully be present. No other animal on earth does this. We are the only species that both can’t seem to fully engage the present because it is constantly preoccupied with the past or future. This can be both beneficial and self-sabotaging. If you can’t be in the present, you can’t possibly work on your future. If you’re constantly thinking about your past, you’re wasting your time since there’s nothing you can do to change it. It’s over, you’re here, feel this moment. Live this moment. It’s the only thing we have. We only have the now. And if think about it, life is a series of nows bracketed by periods of unconsciousness when we sleep.
Life As A Series Of Nows
So how do we change this? How am I changing this in me?
I am in the middle of several therapies that have helped me get through my days, to keep doing what I know I used to like. See, when you fall into a depression, you lose interest in the things that used to get you excited. But it’s not that you don’t like them anymore, and not even that you’re not good at it. It’s just that you perceive them differently. In my case, I avoided working on my side projects for fear of not making them perfect. So what’s the point anymore? I still love to code and likely always will. But the notion that I would need to spend a lot of time making something that I doubted I could do perfectly would keep me from even trying.
It’s easy to stay in bed all day and not try to fight through it. I am blessed to have a wife that has encouraged me to plow through this. Keep moving. Don’t rest. One foot in front of the other. Whatever it takes to not leave an open gate for intrusive thoughts to come into your mind. Don’t give those thoughts the air to breathe because you need it for this moment.
Meditation is a huge help. I always thought it was some cultish thing meant for vegetarian tree huggers. But no. It’s amazing what spending 10 minutes a day can do for you. It clears your mind and you can see, acknowledge, and dismiss thoughts that would previously lead you into the deep rabbit holes of negativity.
Medication is another help. It’s not a magic pill (heh), but it’s available to you and can help you to keep your serotonin levels up. I’m specifically talking about Zoloft, or Sertralin. This type of drug (SSRI) help prevent the reabsorption of serotonin. The meds are not instant and can take some time to get right. Just don’t look at using pills like Zoloft as a failure to keep your mind sane. Instead look them as another tool. Think them as a cast for your brain, just like you’d have a cast for a broken foot.
Try to see your plight through the lens of another. One of my favorite speakers is Jordan Peterson. He’s very eloquent and you can see through him and his objectivity, what you are going through. And one of the most important take aways from his talks are that YOU ARE NOT ALONE. If you think you’re the only one who struggles, the depression will just keep piling up. Instead, Peterson makes it clear that life is a struggle. It is suffering. There’s a different struggle for every person, but it’s a struggle nonetheless. And that’s what life is. Once you recognize this, you can reframe your thinking about your situation. You can squeeze out some joy in the in-between times.
Don’t Stop
Keep going. No matter what you feel, if you let your emotions and that old primitive brain win, you’ll just spin in place. You’ll not break through and have good days, the days you remember, the days when you recall how you used to be.
