Nervous Breakdown, Covid-19, and Work. How Can I Overcome This? [UPDATE]
December 2, 2020 4:03 PM   Subscribe

My previous question was here: https://ask.metafilter.com/345655/Nervous-Breakdown-Covid-19-and-Work-How-Can-I-Overcome-This I'm giving an update with additional question and more answers now six months have passed.

- First off thank you for the outpouring of support, kind words, and people who messaged me directly with advice and kind words.
-Funnily enough, I looked back at my first Mefi post I wrote 7 (soon to be 8) years ago. https://ask.metafilter.com/232393/Graduating-soon-with-a-BA-from-a-Canadian-Uni-Job-search-help-please-I-have-two-years-writing-experience
- I had graduated with a Philosophy degree and was positive I would work as a journalism. It's funny sometimes how life works out! I never thought I'd be here today.
- I lucked out and got a job with the Federal government. I'm in help desk, working with a small team.
- I support a very specialized software suite in addition to regular support requests. While my job was interesting at first, I'm extremely bored right now.
- I did have offers with other companies (Managed Service Providers), but I felt those jobs would be high stress and demanding, which are things I didn't want to deal with while I got "better."
- Of course I know I will need to accept that I'm autistic, have ADHD, and struggle with anxiety/depression. These aren't things that hinder me, they simply make me who I am.
- I'm seeing a psychologist, and the psychologist follows an ACT model, or Acceptance Commitment Therapy.
- The core idea is I'm to embrace my thoughts, thank them, and then work towards bettering the thing I'm worried or upset about. For example: I'm worried that I'm not saving enough money, so I will create a budget, and follow it. As a result, I will feel great a few months or year later when I have a lot of savings in my bank account.
- The problem is I feel "stuck." I catastrophize that I'm not earning enough, I have a dead end job with the government, and I'm slowly losing my skills
- Of course this is silly, as life never ends - there's a lot of things I can study, and plenty of people go back to school in their 30s or 40s.
- An interesting quote I read today is "Is any profession worth it? Try doing the thing you like most every day, and eventually you'll get full of it. The same goes for your job. One day you'll wake up and say to yourself, is this all there is to life?! That's just how it goes I suppose. Try not to think long-term and instead enjoy each moment given to you. You'll hate your job either way you put it. Good luck."
- Overall, I will say I'm doing better than before, and I feel I'm on the right track in terms of learning to deal with my emotions.
- Any advice on what to do now? Apologies of my thoughts aren't coherent.
posted by GiveUpNed to Human Relations (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
You sound like you’re doing incredibly well, congratulations.

If you’re after a way to make lemonade of your lemons, the flip side of an under-taxing job is that it often leaves you the mental capacity to do something else in your free time. You mention study - why not start?

It’s easier now than ever with so much going online. Doesn’t have to be something that will improve your career prospects, just something you find interesting can be a great boost to your mental health. Doesn’t have to be book learning - it could be something physical like yoga or tai chi, or listening to a long series of educational podcasts and web surfing as you listen, chasing down interesting alleyways that come up.

Bonus mental health points might come from something that makes you feel a sense of progress, or that connects you with other people (even if asynchronously) though YMMV and you don’t want it to become a source of stress or pressure. Maybe hit up Coursera and see if anything takes your fancy?

It could give you enough of a sense of satisfaction to take the edge off the boring day job, while you do the important work with your therapist. Somewhere down the line you can reassess and see if you want to ramp up the career side of things by job hunting or serious studying. But you’re allowed to tread water and/or work on your mental health for a bit after having a tough time.
posted by penguin pie at 4:40 PM on December 2, 2020


Any advice on what to do now?

Live your life day-to-day and enjoy it as best you can? It's ok to take life easy for a while, especially since we all know we often can't.

You might enjoy Bertrand Russell's classic easy How to Grow Old, discussed eg here.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:41 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


I also like the advice to take it easy, enjoy each day and tend to your mental health. Self-care for the win.

The problem is I feel "stuck." I catastrophize that I'm not earning enough, I have a dead end job with the government, and I'm slowly losing my skills

- Of course this is silly,


I would take the time to gently interrogate your assumptions. What is "enough"? How much money do you want to be earning? Is there something you want to save up for? Is this tied to self-worth somehow (e.g. "I'm not making enough therefore **I'm** not good enough)?

Dead end job with the government - do you know what kind of work you would like to do? Take the time to do some reflecting on your strengths, interests, skills and what you wanna do. Then talk to people for ideas - coworkers, manager, other staff in your branch, division, etc. Make another post here for some career advice.

Skills: are there ways that you can build them, or learn new skills that you're interested in developing?

It's not silly! Please listen to your inner voice and don't brush it off. I think if you take the time to think about what you can do next about these things you're worried about, that will help you move out of feeling stuck. It's ok to go slow and take baby steps. And do it when you're ready, no pressure.
posted by foxjacket at 5:20 PM on December 2, 2020 [1 favorite]


You might try looking at the government job sites to see if there is another job you like that will help you move forward while still maintaining your benefits and years of service.
posted by CathyG at 8:54 PM on December 2, 2020


You say that you are bored at work. I'm assuming this is because it leaves you with a good deal of down time, or time that you're just supposed to be "on call" in case people need you. That is very similar to my own job, especially in its current incarnation.

And take it from me - this is a gift. For me, this preserves some of my brain power at the end of the day to work on my own things. It's been vital to my work-life balance (I've had office jobs where I did more stuff during the day, and it left me exhausted).

But - it also left me with the ability to teach myself new tasks. Sometimes on my down time at work I would research new skills, and then get the chance to put them into practice. Once on an early temp job I was reading the manual for the email software on my down time, and discovered the ability to send out an email with a poll in it that required the respondent to just click "yes" or "no" or something. An hour later, my boss asked me to send out an email that would let me use such a function and so I did. Every single other secretary in that office was calling me over the course of the next hour and demanding "that's so cool, how did you do that?" I got very positive feedback on that job as a result.

So - I suggest that if you are able, you could use any down time at your desk to research and train yourself in new skills. If there is some kind of software package you're a little rusty on, try an online course in that. If there is some kind of productivity system you'd like to learn more about, find an online course in that. A lot of online learning courses can easily be paused and returned to later, so if you're watching at your desk and you get a call to do something, you can easily pause and attend to it and then resume when you're free again.

It may of course be wise to check with your manager whether you can do this first; but I suspect that they will be comfortable with the idea, since your learning a new skill ultimately only benefits them. (In my own case, the stereotype of secretaries doing online shoe shopping during their downtime has a grain of truth to it, so when people discovered I was doing something more productive, they enthusiastically supported me.)
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:10 AM on December 3, 2020 [3 favorites]


I'm extremely bored right now
I used to be a contractor at a big tech company in a job that was hurry up and wait. The folks in my group had to work at a fever pitch and really hard when that was necessary and we did. Often, there was zero work for us to do but we had to be available just in case. Even when we had nothing to do, we were not allowed to read paper books, listen to music on our phones, etc. But we could use our computers to do anything not outside of work guidelines. So no porn or Netflix, but online courses? Sure! MetaFilter? Ubetcha!

If you are bored not because you have too much free time but because the work is so easy or simply tedious, consider looking for a more interesting job while also making the job you have more interesting. Also, I think EmpressCallipygos has it exactly right about learning new skills. Good luck!
posted by Bella Donna at 1:00 PM on December 3, 2020


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