When It Feels Worse Than It Should—Regain Balance

Our own lives are undoubtedly the most important thing to all of us. How we feel in every waking second of every day is experienced by each of us and is personal to us. We spend every moment with ourselves, and those small details make up the fabric of our lives.

And it’s the small details that are important to me. But I don’t think I was always THIS sensitive. I feel like the volume has been turned all the way up on the seemingly trivial things that happen in my life.

The small things mean a lot to me. Sometimes someone will say something to me, and my mind just keeps replaying it over and over. It’s usually something that doesn’t sit well with me.

Something that feels wrong, that just grates against my mind and leaves a sore spot. Or something will happen at work, and I just can’t forget about it. Again, something that rubs me the wrong way.

And it’s usually when someone is trying to manipulate a situation to their own ends or when they have misunderstood a situation. Of course, I can’t control what thoughts pop into my head, so it’s like my mind is beating me into submission by replaying these things over and over again. And when it feels like I’ve had enough, it stops.

And again, these are small problems that are made more important and annoying because of the constant repetition of them in my mind. And a lot of the things that give me the most stress are things that I’m sure someone on the outside looking in would think are trivial. Even I think sometimes that if I’m stressing about this small thing, then my life must be pretty good.

But the level of that stress is so disproportionately high that it’s like some torture. At certain times, my life somehow feels much worse than it should feel. Because of this magnification of the small things, I’m constantly micromanaging my life and making sure I pay close attention to all the small details because if I don’t, then it brings even more trouble for me.

Another part of my life where the dials are turned up is on social arrangements. I will turn down invitations to things which are most likely going to be fun because, for no rational reason, I feel strongly that I don’t want to do it. Of course, nobody truly knows why they like one thing and not another, or why they prefer to do this thing over that thing.

But the feeling I have is not exactly that I wouldn’t like to do it. When I get invited to something, I don’t want to do it because it feels wrong, like something I shouldn’t do, or it would be better if I didn’t do it. And until I deal with it and decline the offer, it will keep coming back to my thoughts again and again until I’m sick of thinking about it.

Fortunately, though, there is another way because often the thing that feels wrong will be canceled and will just go away by itself. So through my own actions and through things that happen outside of my control, I am able to always do the things that I should do and not do anything that I shouldn’t.

When Pain Becomes a Signal: Change Your Response

My health, and by that, I mean my general body condition, is important to me. I want to feel fit and feel good about myself, the same as everybody does. And I’ve always done some exercise in various forms since I was a teenager.

But I did also used to smoke, until my son was born, and then I quit. But strangely, even when I smoked, I thought I was pretty healthy. I guess it’s human nature to justify doing the things we want to do, even when it is doing us harm.

Like everybody, I have some things that I would call health issues, but in the last ten years, they have definitely multiplied. I probably get headaches every week and sometimes on the same day each week. These are the headaches that medicine won’t cure, and I just have to live with the pain until I’m released from it.

Going to the restroom is another example. I definitely go to the restroom more than anyone I know. And I’d say at best what I can get from it is...

feeling uncomfortable because I need to go, being embarrassed because I need to go again, and worrying about whether I’ll have the opportunity to go again in the future. These things are a constant problem and affect my whole day because I have to navigate through some tricky situations while also trying to cope with these health issues. Another thing that has multiplied in the last ten years is the amount of pain I have.

And by that, I mean actual physical pain. I’m not talking about anything major like fractures or breaks, but bruises, cuts, and scrapes have become part of my weekly routine. It’s honestly ridiculous.

I feel like there’s a weekly quota of pain that I’m unintentionally trying to achieve every week. And it’s probably the only area of my life where I really can’t see any rhyme or reason to it. Instead of "no pain, no gain," it seems to be more like "no pain....no pain!" But however pointless it seems, I still can’t avoid it, even though I’m very careful.

There are other times, though, when the pain does feel more meaningful. And it makes me think I should stop doing what I’m doing or that I shouldn’t have done the thing that I just did. There are times when the pain is like a wake-up call to change my behavior.

I’ll give you an example. I was at home in the shower recently, and I was stressing about a problem at work, and then I dropped the showerhead on my foot. It was painful, nothing serious, but it really made me snap out of my unhealthy thoughts and think that maybe I should stop stressing and think about something else instead.

And that brings me to the next thing I wanted to talk about: stress. This period of my life has without a doubt been the busiest and most stressful. And I’ve been under a lot of pressure in every area.

But after years of this, I do feel that it has had a positive effect, in that it has made me better at prioritizing what’s important and better at decision-making. The stress always comes in waves, and each time it comes, it pushes me to the limit or even beyond the limit of what I can endure, and then it fades away. All of my health issues are like this.

There’s an element of them taking me just past what I can bear, and then finally being released from it. But the two most important things that I notice about these issues are the repetition of them and the timing of them.