Overcoming Apathy

Mental health is not acknowledged much. People do speak up about depression and anxiety much later in life but the matter of fact remains – no one understands when it happens.

I experienced a severe case of vertigo few years ago. As my general physician advised, I got tested. The first thing that comes to your mind is the spine! Then comes imbalances in the ear. All my reports were normal. Eventually a LFT revealed some issues with my gastrointestinal system. I wasn’t eating at the right time.

Recently another episode happened. I went through the same process again with normal reports as earlier. But this time as my mother suggested, I visited an old family friend; a psychologist. And guess what, my rising levels of sugar, my digestive disturbances and the spinning of head were all related to stress. STRESS!! Can you believe that?

So I am writing this after a session of serotonic yoga with my mental health doctor. Now I realise, that my body was giving signals that I was reaching the threshold of my sanity with work, screen time and extra efforts to run faster in my career path. I didn’t listen. Let me tell you about one of the symptoms.

I am very dedicated to my work. I always give my best shot and I know it when I miss the catch. I try and rectify it the next time. But over the past two years I have been feeling a loss of interest to work on certain projects where I felt my expectations weren’t met. That’s apathy. To my amazement, that was the first symptom. When I looked back, I realised the same feeling occurred with a lot of projects and I ended up frustrated or anxious. It was slowly leading to fear of performance failure. As an engineer would do, I tried performance reviews to stick to a mechanism but the passion was missing.

A takeaway from the last session was, stress is the difference between expectations and reality. That triggered apathy in me. For me the problem is never about rising back to form, its about not knowing the source or cause of the problem. I realised, the projects weren’t faulty, neither were the clients! They were just not good enough to deserve my kind of dedication or performance which led to lack of understanding of efforts and thereby I as an individual never got the value or appreciation in some of such projects.

So how do I overcome this? Simple! Educate or let go. I finally found this beautiful way of letting go because this difference between expectations and reality is always going to be there. What matters is whether its a positive difference or a negative one!