Andrew Melder

My mind seems to be sabotaging me again.

Taking quite a privileged position at work and turning it into a “fight or flight” scenario; getting my anxiety up and wondering what’s next?

Once again, I find myself unfulfilled at work and I’m struggling with it. Most of the time (like right now) I can move forward and put my job as just a way to provide a lifestyle.

This morning was a different feeling though. A vagueness in my attitude, a lack of drive to do anything, a lack of energy just to move. Black dog, I know you well.

Thankfully I know the drill: you will come up with the worst possible scenarios to mull over. I have to identify them, accept it’s my brain being unreasonable, and move forward.

Always move forward. Never ignoring the minds tricks, but not wasting energy battling them and let it pass.

Context is key. I have choices here, my job itself isn’t actually bad, I have a reserve of leave available if I absolutely need it, home life has the usual stresses but we are in a far better position than most.

Balance. Not all about career happiness but not being afraid to pursue it. Not assuming the grass is greener elsewhere while also keeping the door open if something better is available.

Deep breaths. Slow the manic mind. Gratitude. Things will be fine.

Anxiety falls, clarity appears.

Move forward.

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed lately. Not entirely focused on anything, lacking any productivity.

So three days ago, I made a change: I disabled my Threads, Instagram and LinkedIn accounts.

Since then, I can’t say I’m magically more productive; however I do feel like the noise has been reduced in my world. I suspect this is the lack of algorithm-based feeds in my life with these three social networks removed. I’m still on others like Mastodon, YouTube & Reddit, but the ability to turn off or ignore any algorithmic feed (if they have any) is useful.

I can go into these services, use them and then move on without the pull of the dopamine reward of the pull-to-refresh function coming along.

Thinking about it further and reading a post from Lee Peterson on the subject, I’m starting to look at reducing my consumption of podcasts throughout the day.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, but many of them are simply background noise as I go through my day. This is not helpful for my focus, as the voices and discussion tend to hamper my own thought process.

So while I haven’t deleted my podcast app yet, I’m making a conscious effort to no longer randomly put them on in the background.

We shall see if any of these changes stick. I suspect professionally I may seek to reenable LinkedIn at some point. The dopamine part of me misses Threads, but I think about how at ease my brain has been since I disabled it. Instagram only exists to give me access to Threads, so that it pretty easy to keep off.