Everything Can Be Taken

"Hyper-intention" and "hyper-reflection" are how I live a majority of my life. I convinced myself that I did not choose to live this way, and that it must have been my parent's fault for pressing upon me the need to do well academically. I had already "let the cat out of the bag" that I was intellectually capable of doing very well in school, so why should I let my parent's expectations down?

Realizing, or moreover, admitting I am faulty I tried looking at this from Viktor E. Frankl's point of view from his book Man's Search for Meaning. I was required to read it for an advanced English class my senior year and thoroughly enjoyed and absorbed every word.

Taking into account his wisdom I came to the conclusion that I had obviously chosen, in one way or another, to end up in this situation. Usually by deciding my attitude I had steered into having anticipatory anxiety about papers and essays and other projects pertinent to my grades.

"Anticipatory anxiety" is the anxiety one experiences before starting a challenging activity. Most often, anticipatory anxiety is just a build-up that psyches most people out till they actually start the activity, and after actually commencing that particular activity they probably will feel an immense feeling of release comparable to exhaling after holding your breath for a long time.

Why did I experience anticipatory anxiety? The panic response, otherwise known as my subconscious mind, was always trying to locate any Ð''danger' in order to protect me. When it couldn't find any Ð''danger' in the present, it looked into the future. Sometimes, the only possible Ð''danger' it could find is something that hasn't been done yet!

"It is characteristic of this fear (anticipatory anxiety) that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid," writes Frankl. So, by stressing about how academically up to par a paper should be I brought about the fear fulfilling itself, namely, me putting it off till the very last minute in trepidation of it not being good enough. The question, "Is it good enough?" results in other, equally perplexing, questions: "For whom is it supposed to be good enough?" and "What is good enough?"

Hyper-reflection has infested my mind over the span of my lifetime, slowly poisoning myself into believing that I could not change it. Fortunately, after reading and following Frankl's ideals I have helped myself to overcome the everyday minor problems, such as this, that turn into catastrophes. In my mind things get blown out of proportion and depending on how much anticipatory anxiety I have had over that subject I view it in either of two ways. The first being myself saying that the blown out of proportion subject isn't actually blown out of proportion at all, and that I am reacting justly to the situation I am in. The second being that the subject is not blow out of proportion and I say to myself that it needs to be, usually because it needs to be Ð''the best'. It keeps getting bigger and bigger in my mind until it is insurmountable and I cannot overcome