Stress and Anxiety - a day in the life of Chris.

Its been a mad mad week which is why little has been posted. My world seems to have become somewhat crowded with all sorts of stuff - PARSA, research, PARSA, gardening, socialising, PARSA, sport, PARSA. Its all interesting stuff of course (though admittedly, gardening wasn't quite the roller-coaster ride I was hoping for), but my life has become extremely hectic. This is entirely my own fault. I just keep saying yes to everything. The problem is that I think things have become even more hectic than they were in Melbourne when I was lecturing full-time and doing my Masters part-time, and trying to keep up with friends, and play sport.

However, I do think things are better now I'm in Canberra. However, I guess my current mind set is trying to understand what worth there is in stretching myself as thin as I am, given my initial plan was for Canberra to be a relatively stress free experience - you know - as *just* a PhD student. The problem, as I realised when I got here, is that I am not good at having spare time. Despite the fact that I constantly crave it, I am really pretty crap at keeping such spare time .. well .. spare. My head does strange things, and tells me I must be constantly doing something with my time - I must go out, I must do work, I must keep up with friends, I must do anything that stops me from feeling like I am neglecting the world in some way.

The problem with all this is that I am not a natural socialite or particularly good multi-tasker. To be completely honest, if I were not to care at all about my social and work obligations, you would hardly ever see me - I am very much a recluse in disguise. I find socialising stressful, I easily get stressed out by work, and more often than not, I would rather be on my own (or with Aff), away from everything. Don't get me wrong, this is not to say I hate people, or don't have great friends because neither of these are true - I just find living in day to day life, while often great fun and rewarding, an inherently stressful thing. The problem is that because I often feel like this, my fear is that if I let myself succumb to these feelings, I will become a recluse, with no good friends, and not fulfilling my potential. So my counter strategy is typically to over compensate as much as possible in the other direction, by constantly agreeing to go out, to volunteer for things, to organise social events (now you know the motivation behind three years of car rallies), always thinking about the next social activity, and basically not letting myself take the breaks I need from all this.

So where is all this coming from you ask ? well, as I said, its been a pretty stressful couple of weeks - but also, I recently have been attending weekly social anxiety workshops run by the ANU student counseling centre. There are ten of us in the group, and it has been great to hear from other people very much like me. What is also striking is that you would never know any of these people experience high social anxiety. We all interact, and talk to each other with what appears to be reasonable self confidence (of course, in the setting of a friendly group counseling environment, such confidence is naturally heightened). I suspect their impression of me is also of a fairly confident guy as well. In reality, however, I can sometimes feel pretty anxious in social situations, even around good friends.

Anyway, what a nice piece of self indulgent therapy this post has turned out to be. I feel all nice and exposed now. At least with a blog, I can hide behind David Hassellhoff and just pretend you can't see me :)