This is an excerpt from my upcoming book Dear Charlotte, which tells the winding story of the triumph and folly of forever trying to better yourself. This letter is from the chapter on "The Pursuit of Happiness."
Hi Charlotte,
The state I'm in is so weird. I pace in the shower, then pace in my room, then shift uneasily in my computer chair, feeling like I have been listening to a theatrical epic unfold with the voices in my head. All of a sudden the Saturday afternoon sunset will creep in through my blinds, with the light beams bouncing off my brown shag carpet, and it will create an orange glow in this box of a studio apartment I live in. It is then, that I hits me I still haven't gotten dressed from the shower I took five hours ago. It's moments like these when it dawns on me that there's something wrong with the way I think.
On one of these Saturdays, in a fit of frustration, I just Googled random phrases like "Why do I think so much?" and "How do I stop over-thinking?" and eventually I found myself reading on Wikipedia about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). Through there, I found a page on this one special case of OCD called "Pure Obsession," or "Pure-O" for short, which led me to this book called White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts.
When I think of OCD, I'm reminded of that experiment with the mouse that hits a lever to get a dose of heroin. After the first hit, the mouse is in bliss and he doesn't touch it for a while. When the feeling wears off, he races around anxiously looking for the lever. Once he finds it, he gets another dose and he is at ease again. But the feeling doesn't last as long as the first time, so he has to return more quickly, and maybe hit the lever a few more times to get the same effect. After enough rounds, he smashes and smashes the lever over-and-over again until he finally destroys himself.
This is the similar to obsessive hand-washing, obsessive lock-checking, and in the case of Pure-O, obsessive thinking. For me, I start the day with an unwanted thought like, "I'll never find a career that makes me happy." This makes me anxious, and so just like that mouse, I search for something to calm me down. Initially, I ask myself some questions like, "What kind of tasks do you like?" or "What are you unhappy about at work?" To which, I respond, "I don't like having a boss, or I don't like spending 9-to-5 in front a computer, programming."1 Initially, this will make me feel good, to hear myself assert my preferences. But instead of me just taking those responses and moving on to initiating a job search, the anxiety returns back, and I think again, "I'll never find a career that makes me happy." So I search for more peace, and I return to problem-solving. I open a spreadsheet on my computer, and I list possible alternative careers, like "Web developer for political campaigns." Underneath them, I then write out epic amounts of pros and cons. When I'm finished and have a mountain of text on my screen, I feel like a champ and think I have my problem solved. But I actually haven't solved anything, and the anxious thoughts return, and so I have to quell them again with more thinking, and so on and so forth, until my brain hurts, my vision gets blurry, and my well-being is in the dumps.
After reading this book, I found out there's hope in the form of "exposure and response-prevention therapy." What this entails is to simultaneously expose yourself to the anxiety-inducing stimulus, while also preventing your response to it. It's kind of like how Ben Stiller's character in Along Came Polly willfully eats dirty food off of the pavement and licks his nasty fingers to prove to Polly (played by Jennifer Aniston) that he's finally conquered his play-it-safe, OCD-tendencies. Like Ben, you're supposed to just roll with the negative stimuli. If you're worried about germs, you just say, "Screw it, maybe I'll get sick and die, maybe I won't. Either way, I'm moving on!"
And so one time I did the unthinkable. While I was lying in bed, on the verge of launching into another Shakespearean inner-soliloquy, I confronted myself, "So you'll never find a career that makes you happy? Well... too bad, you'll never find a career that makes you happy!" and I cut myself from any further thinking. When I said that, I got a really big spike in my anxiety, but I managed to get out of bed before thinking about it too much. As I tried cleaning my room, I began to have a pounding feeling in my temples. A few times, I felt a magnet pulling me to my computer. My body so desperately wanted to fill out another online career assessment survey. But I remembered the therapy, and I yanked the power cord out from my computer, thus preventing a response to my anxiety. I then trashed all the scrap paper on my desk so I wouldn't be tempted to write down a self-analysis by hand in lieu of typing my thoughts out.
And then a magical thing happened: the anxiety went away on its own.
I then took a normal-length shower, dressed up, and went out for brunch at an unusual time for me: 10 o'clock. When I walked out, the sun was shining, beautiful people were jogging around in my neighborhood, and as inhaled the fresh air, I felt like I could finally abide by that maxim Carpe Diem.2
1 I was six months into my job as a video game designer at Aspyr. Six months later, I quit.
2 Pure-O still accurately describes what I was going through at the time, and while the knowledge of it did not immediately stop me from over-thinking, it did gradually peel me away from these harmful binges of just writing my thoughts down and pacing around, obsessing about those thoughts, and obsessing about those obsessions.
