Mental Health at Work

As with any high-pressure job, the adrenaline rush can be addictive.

Chasing it can lead to a high level of production while in the zone while leaving us susceptible to crashing sometime soon thereafter.

Whether it be through the continued celebration, or burnout from long hours. Some may find both to be true. Balance is something that has escaped me most of my life.

Then, why are you here?

If you're like me, labeled treatment resistant, been in therapy for decades, and still struggling with the basics.

You're still searching for answers.

I've struggled with mental health most of my life. From chronic abuse as a child to combat as a young man with a new family.

At work, at home, and everywhere else the thoughts of ending it all call too many days.

It led me to seek the language to describe my inner experience.

Along the way I found a community of veterans and began to write about the gaps I keep falling through for decades.

Chasing adrenaline for veterans in a healthy way is better than most things. With that singular focus though, exhaustion will set in.

This is when we're at our lowest and our negative inner influences dominate. Where we concentrate on all our failures, instead of resting and enjoying our successes.

Long ago in group therapy, I learned how meditation can help with stress. We learned about guided imagery and how to sit still long enough to gain peace.

Over time I use the skill only during times of high stress.

It's time to incorporate this back into my schedule and take time to de-stress. The last 3 weeks have seen a flurry of activity within the first three days, then dropping off.

There are so many areas I need to learn to get efficient at my job that it creates a bottleneck of stress.

So I'm all over the place trying to learn all these different things at once.

The crucible of tearing down all my weaknesses as I strive to gain strength in new skills, in the past was easy to burn through because of my youth.

Today, not so much.

So getting back to balance and rest is a form of productivity. Creativity, and being in the zone, are connections to creation.

The well of souls, where you are granted a quintillion words, and can only remember a thousand, is the highest.

Then the crashes started coming.

After riding highs from hitting goals in the first three days, when the last two remain hard to even get out of bed.

I can’t quit.

So I started falling back on my strengths in the beginning during cold calling on the phone when I was hitting walls and psychological blocks.

Since then I’ve been gamifying; sampling testing, adjusting, and repeating. And, trying to remember that thinking of nothing is the best time to remember everything.

Disappearing into social media is soothing when I'm writing and editing and creating content.

I can coast, and use the momentum to carry forward during the down times.

Self-shoothing getting lost in the love to write and create content, and research it's a way for me to disappear.

Getting lost in the process of creating and processing how they relate to my training and progress is transformative.

You are welcome to join us in community and acceptance, your story is part of the fabric of humanity, a thread in our collective history. Let’s share the fabric of our being.