I’m experiencing a bit of a mental health episode right now.

I’ve fallen behind at work and am constantly whipping back and forth between, “I desperately need to cram and crunch to catch up”, and “I am so scared that when I sit down to work I’m going to hit an impassable wall.”

I get the sense this is a pretty common experience: fear leading to paralysis and procrastination that builds a self-reinforcing cycle.

I don’t know what to do about it.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

I wish there was a way to consciously turn my brain off and get past this fear. To sink into an auto-pilot that might still struggle with hard problems but wouldn’t add the fear of failure to that list of hard problems.

I feel like if I was talking to my therapist right now, the solutions to my problems would feel unhelpful.

• Take a walk
• Talk to your coworkers about where you’re blocked
• Be kind to yourself

None of these are a magic bullet to just eliminating that core fear. There probably are no magic bullets. I feel like I should have figured this out by now, and I’m frustrated that I haven’t.

I worry that this feeling is becoming a recurring thing with work, and I worry I’m not resilient enough to deal with it for a sustained amount of time.

I think everything above is accurate to how I’m feeling right now.

I don’t want to pretend like this isn’t the case, but I think years of therapy have also led me to avoid ending my thoughts on notes like that.

Let’s take a step back for a second:

• This feeling sucks.
• This feeling is isolating.
• I don’t know how to communicate what I’m feeling in a way that will help me deal with it.

AND

• This is not an impassable problem.
• I’ve solved hard problems in the past.
• There is more to life than this problem and there is more to life than work.
• No one thinks I’m perfect or expects me to be perfect.
• Being honest is important even if that honesty is “I’m scared and I don’t know what to do right now”.

I’m going to go take a walk.

When I get back, I’m going to clean up my office, take some notes, and set a goal to get 1 hour of work done. I will not set goals for what I’m going to accomplish with that hour. I will be satisfied that I worked for that hour and did my best.

I wish I had better answers, but this is the best I can do right now and I’m grateful to myself for trying.