Since I wrote this, I came up with more goal which is probably worth discussing. This one is meant to help me tackle one of the symptoms of my anxiety: spurious requests for reassurance.
Background: I have generalised anxiety disorder with a lot of characteristics of OCD. When things are bad, I very easily get obsessed with the idea that I’m sick, whether it’s because of a random bump on my skin or a random ache in my side or whatever. It’s not much helped by the fact that for two years some serious attacks of pain were dismissed by my doctors as being anxiety, but when someone finally did an ultrasound, it turned out my gallbladder was chock-full of stones. So I have this massive fear that some symptom or other isn’t really my anxiety, it’s a symptom of something being wrong, and maybe this time I won’t be lucky enough for it to be something operable like gallstones.
So I ask people to help me check. Is this a bump or am I imagining it? Can you feel something weird here? Does this look infected? Etc. And most of the time I know the answer is “if you leave it for a week, it’ll go away and you might even forget it was ever there”.
The problem with asking people to check is that it starts to reinforce the anxiety: irrationally, your brain goes “I’m fine because I checked”, not “I’m fine despite checking”. So you check more, but then you start to need the checking behaviour more often. At my worst, I’ve been known to text my mother several times a day asking about some innocuous symptom or other.
The thing is, the logical part of me knows what’s going on. The logical part of me is fully capable of stopping the cycle, with some support. In the past that’s just been pure willpower on its own with my wife/mother/everyone refusing to give me spurious reassurance, and I’m fortunate that has worked for me quite well. But I was getting some anxiety symptoms again after coming off my meds totally for the first time since my anxiety developed (so proud to have come that far!) and I thought, well, I’m using Beeminder for everything else…
To begin with, I’m going easy on myself. I can check in for reassurance five times a week, and it’s up to me when and whether I use those opportunities. (E.g. it’s not limited to once a day.) If I do ask for spurious reassurance, though, I have to enter +1 on the goal and lose some of my buffer. If I ask for reassurance more than five times a week, I’ll derail. So now I have that extra risk of derailing to make sure that when I’m seeking reassurance, it’s “worth” it. It isn’t worth it to check in for the seventh time about the bump on the back of my head.
Implementing something like this, it’s important to consider the fine print. Intense pain of unknown cause, vomiting “coffee grounds”, obvious infection, anything that obviously needs medical attention – dealing with that does not count as seeking spurious reassurance. And I think some leeway is also important: sometimes you just have to bend or you break, and sometimes my anxiety just gets so bad it needs an immediate outlet. I still have to enter that on my graph, but that’s why I’m allowed to do this at all, because having anxiety can be so horribly isolating. There’s no point painting yourself into a corner where you can’t ask for help at all: that makes it worse, too. You need room to mess up (and then you need to forgive yourself).
@dreev mentioned me possibly doing a blog post on this and I thought about maybe talking about other ways I’ve come up with for Beeminding mental health. Who wants me to do it (subject to his okay, obviously)?!