I put too much weight on my decisions...

[indignity]

... every decision I make, I feel like it's a life or death decision...

 

I mean, it keeps me doing what I feel is right practically all of the time... but still, I don't think it's healthy.

 

My biggest problem is trying to figure out how to use my free time. When deciding whether to work on math, write computer programs, read... I feel like it's imperative that I choose the one that will benefit my future the most, and it's bad enough that I can waste entire hours doing nothing... trying to decide what to do.

 

Also, I can never enjoy spending free time doing anything non-productive... I don't enjoy watching TV, playing games, catching a movie... whatever... I feel guilty while doing it... feel like I should be doing something productive.

 

... this isn't typical behavior, is it?

[coquina]

I was sorta like that. My husband wanted to do something fun, but I had bookwork to do, or one thing or another. Then one morning I woke up and he was dead. No warning - he wasn't old, either. (Well, maybe you'd think he was old, he was 56.)

 

Both of us had all these plans for our future. The thing of it is, you don't know whether you will have a future. I'm not saying you ought to quit working and become a bum, but I am saying you should take time to smell the roses.

 

Erma Bombeck wrote this when she was dying of cancer:

http://www.gaylasgarden.com/menu/liveover.htm

 

Maybe it's outdated to, but there are some wise words there.

 

Use your free time to enjoy your life and other people.

[Sorcerer]

Its good, now you know you have a problem you can do something about it....... don't spend too long deciding how to do it though...... errrr catch 22?

[MolecularMan14]

lol, true, its quite a paradox. But you must understand that being productive is what matters. (I used to have this problem). Try something like distributed computing, to have something productive going on constantly. Know you're helping something, making a difference.

As for free time, relax, take it easy. Dont make a decision on what you want to do in your spare time, do what you feel like. Listen to music, take a bike ride, read a good book, walk in the garden or something. Just relax

[MadScientist]

... every decision I make, I feel like it's a life or death decision...

 

Must've taken you WEEKS to type this then, "What word... How shall I phrase.. Should I put a comma there or start a new sentence..."

So that's that excuse about every decision you make gone straight away, something tells me it didn't take you weeks to type this.

Now you know you can make decisions.

 

In other words, look around at the things you do daily and how you choose whether to do them or not. Simply stuff like "Shall I go to the toilet or carry on with what I'm doing for a few more minutes?"

 

 

 

I mean, it keeps me doing what I feel is right practically all of the time... but still, I don't think it's healthy.

 

It's not, it's stressing YOU out and shortening YOUR life span!! YOU are worrying YOURSELF to DEATH!!

 

And if you know you can make good decisions almost all the time where's the problem?? Learn to trust yourself to make good decisions. You probably spent ages deliberating over whether to post this or not, I'd say you made the right decision - to get help.

 

Dunno if this'll help, next time you have to decide what to do with your free time and you get that stomach churning feeling or whatever it is, forget about the decision and think of something that was intenseley satisfying get back to that feeling it gave you for a while. Then go back to the decision for a while then back to the memory. It's called swish patterning BTW.

 

 

My biggest problem is trying to figure out how to use my free time. When deciding whether to work on math, write computer programs, read... I feel like it's imperative that I choose the one that will benefit my future the most, and it's bad enough that I can waste entire hours doing nothing... trying to decide what to do.

 

Why can't you just do nothing with your free time??

 

Also, I can never enjoy spending free time doing anything non-productive... I don't enjoy watching TV, playing games, catching a movie... whatever... I feel guilty while doing it... feel like I should be doing something productive.

 

... this isn't typical behavior, is it?

 

Free time...

The devil makes work for idle hands. Did that set alarm bells off??

 

Where you once in an environment where all your decisions were made for you, prison, armed forces, parents??

 

High stressed job or one where you have to make important decisions for others??

[indignity]

... I suppose that there really weren't many decisions for me to make throughout highschool... I was a bit of a shut-in (which is probably an understatement), and everything just sort of fell into place.

 

Throughout school I didn't do homework because I didn't need to... I spent almost all of my time on a computer wasting time, and really enjoyed it =P

 

When college started, I kind of kept my highschool habits, even though they hurt my grades... and felt more and more guilt each time I sat down to do nothing... but did it anyway, even when I had homework that needed to be done (I'd relate it to how fat people just can't seem to put down that hamburger... which is something else I went through and beat back in highschool).

 

So I really spent 2 years feeling guiltier and guiltier each time I sat down to do nothing... and for some reason, just couldn't talk myself into... not doing nothing... even though it felt so horrible.

 

Now, even though I get all of my homework done, I have really high hopes for myself, and well... feel like I should be doing something productive at all times, like I stated in the first post...

 

now that I've thought a bit deeper into it... my problem really has a lot more to do with feeling guilty about "wasting" free time than making decisions...

 

 

*edit*...

I'm not sure that the quote applies to me. I don't do anything inherently evil with my idle hands... well, nothing I'd consider evil until recently, anyway. Now that I'm doing well in my classes and I realize that it's kind of a big deal to grasp math concepts as easily as I do. I feel obligated to make good use of the gifts I've been given. By not using them I'd be keeping the world from having something it should have... which may sound very egotistical, but even if it isn't true on a grand scale, it's true on a smaller scale (maybe replace the word "world" with "community")

[MadScientist]

... I suppose that there really weren't many decisions for me to make throughout highschool... I was a bit of a shut-in (which is probably an understatement)' date=' and everything just sort of fell into place.

 

Throughout school I didn't do homework because I didn't need to... I spent almost all of my time on a computer wasting time, and really enjoyed it =P

 

When college started, I kind of kept my highschool habits, even though they hurt my grades... and felt more and more guilt each time I sat down to do nothing... but did it anyway, even when I had homework that needed to be done (I'd relate it to how fat people just can't seem to put down that hamburger... which is something else I went through and beat back in highschool).

 

So I really spent 2 years feeling guiltier and guiltier each time I sat down to do nothing... and for some reason, just couldn't talk myself into... not doing nothing... even though it felt so horrible.

 

Now, even though I get all of my homework done, I have really high hopes for myself, and well... feel like I should be doing something productive at all times, like I stated in the first post...

 

now that I've thought a bit deeper into it... my problem really has a lot more to do with feeling guilty about "wasting" free time than making decisions...

 

 

*edit*...

I'm not sure that the quote applies to me. I don't do anything inherently evil with my idle hands... well, nothing I'd consider evil until recently, anyway. Now that I'm doing well in my classes and I realize that it's kind of a big deal to grasp math concepts as easily as I do. I feel obligated to make good use of the gifts I've been given. By not using them I'd be keeping the world from having something it should have... which may sound very egotistical, but even if it isn't true on a grand scale, it's true on a smaller scale (maybe replace the word "world" with "community")[/quote']

 

 

The quote is a common saying over here in the UK, I just assumed you'd know it. I have (sorry HAD ) things like that going through my head for years and they controlled me.

 

Readin stuff you just posted is a bit freaky for me cos it sounds a lot like how I got through life. Except I went the other way - instead of worrying about every decision I had to make I just stopped making them. I was letting the world around me control my life almost all the time. I slowly started to wake up but a couple of weeks ago a louder alarm clock went off.

 

A friend of mine showed me Neuro Linguistic Programming and how to use the basics of it.

 

How does NLP work??

Basically we all think in language, I say the word "cat" and all kinds of things go running through your mind, as well as my own.

Because you have the word "cat" linked to what your concept of a cat is, which is linked to other things. In your past your brain learned what a cat was and stored that, then all the things relating to cats and so on. But just as you probably stored those things unconsciosly you can alter connections.

It's a bit more complicated than just that...

 

An example is the neighbour who lives in my flat below.

I work nights, he doesn't work. So he can make as much noise as he likes and not bother about it. Shouting from one room to a person in an adjacent room, while I'm in another adjacent room trying to sleep.

This obviously drove me insane but my friend explained something to me in a few minutes...

 

I'd been thinking "Why is HE attacking ME like this??" all he told me to do was think about it differently - "This guy's just going about his daily life, you know that because you're not doing anything to antagonise him. So just stop thinking he is."

So every time he made too much noise I just excused it with "He's just doing his daily routine."

I haven't been woken up by him for about 5 days now which is crazy because beforehand, getting woken anywhere between 1 and 4 times a day was nothing..

 

So far NLP seems to be working for me.

I feel really calm and in control of everything in my life and it took hardly any effort on my part, just reading up on a few things.

 

So that's all I can do, suggest you do a websearch on NLP, look out for Richard Bandler, who's The Man in NLP, and book of his called Frogs into Princes.