The anxiety annoyance cycle
2016-Jun-11, Saturday 19:41
This post is inspired by an article I saw about how procrastination is often caused by anxiety and not laziness, though I unfortunately can't find the source right now.
If something is bothering me, I have a tendency to let it slide for a while. Part of this is conflict avoidance, it's true, but part of it is that most of the time I'm legitimately chill and am willing to put up with a lot if I figure that it's going to be a short-term thing. The problem is that I let things go for a long time without saying anything, and then once I hit a particular threshold, I explode. Where normally I don't want to say anything because I don't want to upset things, or because I worry about what the other person will think, or because I can't figure out how to phrase my request properly, once I cross that threshold none of that matters.
The main example that springs to mind is cleanliness. I tend to prefer things almost completely spotless and the floor with no clutter on it at all, whereas![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
schoolpsychnerd doesn't mind a backpack dropped by the door or a few pieces of clothing laid out for the week. What used to happen is that I let things go for a while, quietly getting more and more annoyed every time I saw a cardigan left on a chair or a piece of mail on the table, until I went into a cleaning frenzy and scoured the entirely living space with bleach and soap. The first time schoolpsychnerd went to a grad school conference, I spent three hours cleaning the entire apartment. And this was our first post-Japan apartment, when it was three rooms, one of which was the bathroom.
I have gotten better about it since then. I'm more careful to bring up when something is bothering me earlier in a way that doesn't lead to everything seeming okay until it's suddenly, overwhelmingly wrong. But one thing I've noticed over the years is that when I get into the annoyed side of the cycle, I don't actually feel anxious. If I'm pissed off at a company because of something I think they did wrong, I can actually pick up the phone and call them to complain, and yet I dreaded making restaurant reservations until I got an app that let me do it without any human interaction. Somehow, I need to find a way to synthesize those two attitudes into a Voltron of healthy response to my circumstances. I'm working on that.
If something is bothering me, I have a tendency to let it slide for a while. Part of this is conflict avoidance, it's true, but part of it is that most of the time I'm legitimately chill and am willing to put up with a lot if I figure that it's going to be a short-term thing. The problem is that I let things go for a long time without saying anything, and then once I hit a particular threshold, I explode. Where normally I don't want to say anything because I don't want to upset things, or because I worry about what the other person will think, or because I can't figure out how to phrase my request properly, once I cross that threshold none of that matters.
The main example that springs to mind is cleanliness. I tend to prefer things almost completely spotless and the floor with no clutter on it at all, whereas
schoolpsychnerd doesn't mind a backpack dropped by the door or a few pieces of clothing laid out for the week. What used to happen is that I let things go for a while, quietly getting more and more annoyed every time I saw a cardigan left on a chair or a piece of mail on the table, until I went into a cleaning frenzy and scoured the entirely living space with bleach and soap. The first time schoolpsychnerd went to a grad school conference, I spent three hours cleaning the entire apartment. And this was our first post-Japan apartment, when it was three rooms, one of which was the bathroom. I have gotten better about it since then. I'm more careful to bring up when something is bothering me earlier in a way that doesn't lead to everything seeming okay until it's suddenly, overwhelmingly wrong. But one thing I've noticed over the years is that when I get into the annoyed side of the cycle, I don't actually feel anxious. If I'm pissed off at a company because of something I think they did wrong, I can actually pick up the phone and call them to complain, and yet I dreaded making restaurant reservations until I got an app that let me do it without any human interaction. Somehow, I need to find a way to synthesize those two attitudes into a Voltron of healthy response to my circumstances. I'm working on that.
