Working Alongside Anxiety

A few days ago, I suffered an Anxiety Attack. Here's how I'm recovering, and what I'm doing to work through it.

A few days ago, I was in my living room screaming about my dislike of the supermarket and their self-checkout lines that I felt were designed improperly.  I'm not going to go into the self-checkout verses cashier argument, that isn't what got me going.  I have problems in the grocery store, and I was there on a busy day making things worse.  I was already in a depressed state, so throw it all in a box with everything else I had been worried about and we found me unable to breathe in my living room.  I had what I call a freakout, also called an Anxiety Attack.  I couldn't control myself, my lungs were trying to exhale and inhale at the same time.  At least that's what it felt like was happening.

It was scary.  I didn't know what was going on in my head, but I came out of it with a very large hug from my wife.  Afterwards, I was sitting and sipping at a water bottle trying to calm myself down and bring myself back into the world at large.  It took some time, but I was able to get a bit more clear.  But I wasn't out of the clear.

The next day, I found myself home alone on my day off.  I could still feel my brain trying to have a freak out and go mad.  My attacks are never just done once the first panic started.  I feel the emotional toll for a few days afterwards.  Smaller attacks happen, especially when there is something that makes me feel nervous or upset.  And I have been feeling pretty nervous about things with these projects.

I want to grow this company.  I want to see a time when we are shipping printed books every day, writing new games and new materials for existing ones.  And to that end, I started looking at all the tools a company should have but aren't necessary to start.  It got me worried when my custom made e-commerce solution wasn't working the way I needed it so I could launch it.  I needed it to communicate more with ERP system I had installed so I could handle the inventory and accounting and all the little things.  I was worried about all of these things, and I still don't have a product to sell.  I spent so much time working on these problems I missed out on writing anything for the game.

I could go on about all of these problems.  I was getting all worked up about it and forgot my games.  I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to afford to publish anything, but I don't have anything ready for publishing.  And it all came to a head and broke free when I got mad at a checkout aisle being too thin.

From here on out, I'm halting work on my custom web store, crm, erp, and will be diving deeper into the games.  Looking for the writing help I need, the concept art for this site, and more.  I'm not slowing down this business or the way it works, but I'm just realizing I need to focus on the important tasks here.  Games.

Having an anxiety problem is no fun.  And discovering what I was causing my own problems means I can move forward and remember what I wanted to actually do.  Don't get distracted by the small things that take you very far away from the projects you have set for yourself.