There are a million thoughts and words in my head. They all intertwine with each other, sometimes turning into a frightening roar. And you can no longer distinguish each of them separately. What's happening? What if I go crazy? This thought makes me scared. What if I lose control of my mind? Or maybe I’m already losing him... Tell me about it? But to whom? No one will understand, and they will definitely consider you crazy.
Sometimes it also seems to me that the world is somehow unreal, illusory. Such thoughts arise especially often when I am depressed. Reluctance to live and lack of understanding of how other people can enjoy life and solve some of their own affairs. Why is all this needed: work, family, money?
“I think I’m going crazy”: manifestations of a phobia
Fear of madness is a popular phobia, but few people talk about it out loud. They suffer in silence. They rarely ask for help. And not at all because the problem is a trifle. On the contrary, the problem is one of the most painful and unbearable fears. The feeling of “going crazy” leads to frenzy. And this feeling arises among contemporaries more and more often. We'll talk about why below. Let's focus on the symptoms now.
A famous shot from the movie The Shining, where Jack Nicholson plays the role of a writer gone mad.
The main symptom is a frightening, intrusive thought. The content of this thought varies greatly. A person may be afraid of losing control over himself and harming himself (“I’ll go crazy and throw myself out of the window”). Others are driven crazy by the possibility of causing harm to others, including loved ones (“I’ll lose control of my behavior and kill my child”). Some are haunted by an obsessive “fantasy” about the state of a “vegetable” into which they can turn (“I will not be aware of anything and will stop recognizing everyone”). Some people torment themselves by replaying scenes of possible madness and antisocial behavior in their heads (“I’ll go out naked on the street and disgrace myself”).
Such thoughts arise suddenly. They come to mind on their own. They come and really scare you. Then they come back and scare us even more. And a person’s life begins to revolve around the attitude “I’m afraid to go crazy” and turns into a struggle for sanity. This is what people write who suffer from this phobia and decide to talk about it out loud.
“Help, I’m going crazy... After watching one of the programs about maniacs, I often began to wonder why people get the idea of killing... One day my husband and I were cooking in the kitchen, and he asked for a knife. A thought flashed through my head, similar to the desire to “kill.” The thought that I could stick this knife into my husband right now. I ran out of the kitchen in panic... From that moment all hell broke loose. The knowledge that I CAN kill drives me crazy. Sometimes it seems that a voice appears in your head that says “go and kill.” The first time this voice appeared in my head, I had a nervous breakdown... I'm afraid to be at home. I'm afraid to kill my husband or my child. Images constantly appear in my head of me walking into the kitchen, taking a knife from the cabinet and... Maybe I’m already crazy. Maybe I'm possessed by "demons". Please help me!!! Deliver me from this horror!!!”
Despite the shocking nature of this story, it is a classic example of madness phobia. The fear of going crazy was centered around the obsessive thought of causing harm to others (“I could kill my husband”). It constantly pursues, catches up and “covers”, and over time it also intensifies. The diagnosis, as they say, is obvious. But this diagnosis is not a mental disorder, but a phobia []. The question is - where did it come from?
Get plenty of rest this weekend
Remote work often becomes stressful not because of the work tasks themselves, but because of our inability to relax outside the home. It used to be like this: we work 5 days a week in the office, and spend Saturday and Sunday at home. Nowadays, many of us spend every day in the apartment, so it’s better to change the environment on the weekends.
You can go out of town, travel around the region in search of interesting authentic places. See what ecotourism is offered near your city? Maybe there's a cheese farm or the opportunity to go on a day hike.
If you can’t get out into the region, try to find something new in the city. Look for local activities, such as playing sports in parks or walking in the hills to watch the sunset. Try “street” hobbies - landscape photography, Nordic walking, scootering or rollerblading.
At the Origins: Causes of Fear of Madness
Why do people get sick in general? For example, why does a healthy person “suddenly” begin to suffer from cirrhosis of the liver? Obviously there is something behind this. Most often, this is due to uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages and viral hepatitis. Phobia of madness is also a disease. But not the body, but the psyche, which was seriously injured. When we talk about trauma, we mean mental shock or nervous tension, that is, stress.
We all come from the past
The origins of a phobia may be personal experience - the experience of a strong feeling of depersonalization and derealization, as happens, for example, with VSD. A person once felt that “he is not his own master,” and begins to fear that he can “fall into a state and not fall out.” A person returns to the memory of this again and again, and the phobia grows stronger and stronger - it is fueled by persistent and obsessive fear.
What is VSD? Each of us has experienced a state of altered consciousness - the so-called autonomic failure. It often accompanies a hangover, food poisoning, and severe fatigue. You are tired, and your body “carefully” went into a mode of mild anesthesia with all the resulting disturbances in the perception of the world and your place in it. And again - the feeling of “not being the master of your head” []. This can be very scary. If your head “failed” once, what are the guarantees that this will not happen again?
Sometimes the cause of a phobia is life experience in the form of the madness of someone close to you. For example, memories of uncontrollable outbursts of anger in my father, who “threw himself with a knife at my mother.” Or the strange actions of my mother, who “teared out her hair, broke dishes, howled.” A person thinks - “if this happened to her/him, why shouldn’t it happen to me?” It’s not for nothing that they say – don’t swear off jail or pay.
Much knowledge - many sorrows
“Much wisdom brings much sorrow, and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow,” said Solomon. Sometimes we ourselves are the “ancestor” of phobias - we have read popular articles on psychoanalysis, learned everything in detail and made shocking conclusions for ourselves.
For example, discussions about consciousness and the unconscious can provoke the following chain of thoughts: “Freud spoke about the human desire for death. Surely I also have this desire - to destroy, destroy and kill. Repressed into the subconscious, it can manifest itself at any moment.”
Worry develops into anxiety, and anxiety creates the confident thought “I’m going crazy.” The reader begins to look for the answer to the question whether this is so again - in books or from the “doctors” Yandex and Google. And he discovers, of course, if not all, then at least the main signs of his “mental illness.”
Taken on too much
Not only “readers” are at risk, but also “controllers” - people who live with the motto “you need to keep everything under control.” The “controller” spends a lot of mental energy on this matter. And he is very afraid of losing his controlling resource – his mind. After all, it’s scary to lose something on which so much (“everything”) depends. On the other hand, madness opens up the attractive prospect of getting rid of responsibility at once, which, frankly speaking, interferes with the life of not only oneself, but also others.
Things can “pile up” - a series of ordinary everyday issues and problems that have depleted the body’s resources. And the body could not stand it and reacted with overexcitation of the nervous system and an imbalance of glutamic acid. By the way, this same balance is disrupted if you overeat food rich in glutamates in a Chinese restaurant. Only there you ate too much soy sauce, and in our case, you “ate” stress, thereby violating the harmony between the processes of excitation and inhibition. And all this one day becomes the cause of a powerful vegetative attack, on the basis of which our phobia develops.
Somewhere deep down
Sometimes it doesn’t “pile up”, but “accumulates” - irritation, anger or anger. For example, a child is endlessly sick. Anger about this is considered unacceptable, and manifestations of this emotion are condemned: “how can you be angry with a sick child!” There is anger, however, but we suppress it. Forgetting that suppressing emotions is dangerous to health. Having accumulated, the experiences driven inside lead to affective outbursts (lashed out at her husband) and psychosomatic disorders (for example, phobias).
The good news is that going crazy is hard. And mental illnesses do not grow from phobias. Phobias have a completely different nature.
Create an activity plan for children
When working remotely, you need to learn how to plan. Make a list of things you can do to quickly keep your child occupied. This will help if you have to make an urgent call at work or a sudden task arises.
Practice anticipating unexpected situations. When you have a plan, it's easier to act.
To organize herself several hours of quality work a day, Pharmedu CEO Tatyana Khodanovich created a routine, like in a kindergarten. Leisure centers that offered various activities for children helped her with this.
Fulcrum: treating the fear of going crazy
Our problem is called obsessive thoughts syndrome (see more about obsessive-compulsive disorder). Obsessions are not at all the same as delusions and hallucinations in schizophrenia. A whole gulf separates neurotics from the mentally ill. Have you seen crazy people? Complete lack of criticism. Kohl believed that he was Napoleon - no one could dissuade him of this.
A person with a phobia of madness, on the contrary, is full of reflection, criticism and control. He has this in abundance, so in schizophrenia, as in any other mental illness, he is unlikely to succeed.
Meanwhile, something needs to be done about the problem (neurosis) as quickly as possible. Question - what?
"Calm down and pull yourself together"
Considering that 80% of people, including psychotherapists, have these types of thoughts, it is likely that many cope with them successfully. How? They don’t react and let you pass by. If the injury is minor, you can do the same thing - ignore it. Don’t waste your mental strength fighting these thoughts - tension increases neurosis (like putting out a fire with gasoline). Don’t try not to think about it - you’ll think twice as hard (like “don’t think about the pink elephant”). Let thoughts (any) calmly take their course.
Dr. Schwartz's method
Try working through a phobia using the Schwartz method. The doctor has developed an interesting and, most importantly, effective therapy that can bring relief to a wide audience - both a person with obsessive thoughts and someone addicted to bad habits (for example, the habit of biting nails or gambling) []. Working with obsession using this method involves performing a sequence of steps every day.
- Step one - call a spade a spade: “Yes, I have a problem. But it lies not in approaching madness, but in an obsessive thought.”
- Step two - we ignore the significance of obsession: “Yes, the thought is stuck in my head (and there are reasons for this), but it is not at all necessary to pay attention to it.”
- Step three - we switch our attention: “What I am experiencing now is only a symptom of an obsessive state. I’d like to get busy.”
- Step four is to rethink the previous three steps and realize that thanks to the “outside observer” and “analyst” you can learn to command the parade of thoughts.
Read more about the method in the article “Unobtrusively about obsessions.” And if you can’t overcome a phobia yourself or with Schwartz, it just means that the fear is well fixed at the level of neurophysiology and you can’t do it with “self-therapy” alone.
Follow your work schedule
The main problem of those who switch to remote work is time management. We often put things off, stretching out any task throughout the day. As a result, we sit at the computer for 12 hours, distracted by social networks and news, and then frantically finish our work at night.
Workaholics are discovering that they can get more done remotely. They use the time that was previously spent on the road for the benefit of their work. Then they have lunch at the computer. They don’t see a problem in working in the evenings or on weekends. As a result, their working day goes far beyond the standard 8 hours. But the body can’t stand it, and burnout begins.
The solution to this problem is to create a schedule and stick to it. If you are freelancing, then decide what hours will be working. If this is a regular job, just remote, then discuss your schedule with your manager. Agree when you will be in touch. The rest of the time, turn off your phone and prohibit yourself from going near the computer.
Editor-in-Chief of the Mail.ru Cloud Solutions blog Ekaterina Kushnir has been working remotely since 2010. Therefore, she is very familiar with the problem of mixing personal and work time.
As a result, she found a solution - to set a regime, the number of hours beyond which one cannot work. “Usually this is a standard office schedule - from 9.00 to 17.00 with a lunch break to be in touch with colleagues,” says Kushnir. — Sometimes I can work early in the morning or late in the evening, but not during the day. I also always have two days off a week, although it’s not always Saturday and Sunday.”
Watch your appearance
Corporate psychologist Ksenia Lukasheva believes that business clothes put us in the mood for work. Therefore, even if you do not need to leave the house, still change from home clothes to work clothes. Let it be at least jeans and a T-shirt, but special ones in which you “go” only to work.
“Start internal processes with external incentives,” advises Dina Maksimova, head of the HR department at Vezet Group. - Our brain is accustomed to rituals, use it. Don't start work in your pajamas, especially if you haven't done this before. Clothes, hairstyle and even makeup can help and encourage productive work.”
Rent an office
Problems in remote work sometimes begin due to the need to work close to loved ones. On the one hand, you are constantly distracted by requests and worries. On the other hand, it is also difficult for relatives to sit in silence all the time. Irritation builds up.
Try to find an “office” close to home. It seems that this option is only suitable for highly paid specialists, but this is not so. Often, a remote worker only needs a small, quiet space.
Look for rooms in old research institutes that have now been converted into office complexes - there is no luxury there, but the price is usually several times lower than in business centers. Or rent a small apartment. The costs can be divided among several people, as freelancers often do.
Pavel Molyanov, co-founder of the Let's Do agency, says that for the first six months he freelanced in a one-room apartment with a small child. To avoid distractions, I had to work with headphones.
As a result, he decided to rent a room in the basement and equip it as an office. “Work has become much more comfortable: there are no distractions, you might think,” says Pavel Molyanov. “I stopped feeling the discomfort of stressing my family by forcing them to sit in silence all day. Now I’m working at home again, but this is a different apartment, I have my own office and therefore no one bothers anyone.”
Prepare your work area
If the office doesn’t work out, make yourself a workspace at home. It’s not just a laptop and your favorite sofa - it’s better to organize at least a table and an armchair so as not to mix the space for living and working.
“Don't eat at the computer. First of all, it's harmful. And secondly, you blur the boundaries of your workplace and do not allow your brain to switch and change the environment,” warns corporate psychologist Ksenia Lukasheva.
In the office, your manager takes care of the arrangement of the workplace. At home you will have to think through everything yourself. According to Natalya Storozheva, general director of the Perspective business and career development center, it is important to work out technical issues: ensure uninterrupted Internet, good mobile communications, a comfortable chair or a fenced-off corner. “The ergonomics of the space is important so that business documents, work materials and a laptop are always at hand,” says the expert.
Strive for completed actions
There is an opinion that it is more difficult to get a promotion when working remotely; supposedly colleagues notice less the contribution of such an employee to the common cause. This is partly true - managers don’t see us remotely, many value personal communication more than correspondence.
Responsible remote employees suffer from impostor syndrome - it is difficult to objectively evaluate their own work. It is also worth considering the lack of approval, support and career prospects. For example, when we give a report to a manager in the office, he can immediately skim through it and praise it. Remotely, we simply send a letter and receive minimal feedback in return.
Director of HR and Organizational Development at S8 Capital Holding Tatyana Gladyuk recommends focusing employees on more specific and shorter tasks.
“This way people will understand what is required of them, quickly navigate the task and independently build steps to achieve results. Be sure to thank them for their work and express your support in other ways. This motivates employees to work better,” advises Tatyana Gladyuk.
If your work consists of long-term projects, then try to break them up into small pieces yourself - 1-2 hours of work.
Filter the information flow
This advice also applies to regular office work, but in a remote format it becomes especially relevant - control the flow of information. Avoid news rumors and fake news. The less bad news the better.
“In general, I would recommend not watching news on TV or reading newsletters in various chats like school-parent chats about the second and third waves of the pandemic and other horrors, but studying news on the Internet in reliable media. Take care of your psyche, it will be useful to you,” says psychologist and art therapist Natalya Koroteeva.
