Hi Adam,
This is a good observation. The moment you removed yourself (so to speak) too far from your usual pattern of worry and proved to yourself that you “could do specific, well-defined tasks while remaining carefree”, ‘you’, the worrier, stepped in and started to worry about not having any worries. This argument convinced you – because this had not been part of your ruminated thought process. And yet it is the same feeling of worry you are so accustomed to, merely on a meta-level.
What you thus found out that it is not the worry about certain subjects or topics that you are presently addicted to but worrying itself. Living without the feeling of worrying is unfamiliar and therefore deemed unsafe. A daring is required to cut the umbilical cord, abandon the apparent mantle of security which paints the world dark and dangerous, and take the plunge to being more and more naïve and carefree as an entirely new modus operandi.
Adam-H: The equation started to be a question of ‘am I willing to lose my job for this’, and I shifted to an approach that was slightly resentful. I was rebelling against the unfairness of how I couldn’t feel safe in my job without constant rumination. With that I was back in the more normal way of looking at things, where I started bouncing back and forth between that resentment on one side and trying to come up with new ways to approach my work that would eliminate the uncertainty/ insecurity on the other side.
You described it well – the swinging from negative to positivistic feelings but without changing the parameters of what you regard as ‘safe’ – worrying itself. You blamed the world but not ‘you’, the worrier.
Adam-H: What I’m going to try to do now is rememorate how I was when I was carefree, …
I am not sure if you are referring to being ‘carefree’ based on the rational thought-process described above, which obviously did not go far enough to give you confidence. The magic lies in the recognition that I am my feelings and my feelings are ‘me’.
Perhaps you can instead rememorate how you were experiencing the world during your PCEs, or how you were when you were genuinely naïve and the world was a wondrous place to explore and appreciate? It’s enjoyment and the very appreciation of it which has the capacity to enhance feeling good, and then feeling better and feeling great. When you feel great a lot of imagined/ anticipated problems reveal themselves as phantoms – but this is not the outcome of rational thinking alone, it comes from feeling good first.
Adam-H: [What I’m going to try to do now is rememorate how I was when I was carefree,] and try to consider the possibility that doing what I can while being happy and harmless is all I really need to do for my job, and that perhaps all the things I think I need to watch out for are just phantoms. Or, if it turns out that I can’t reconcile this particular job with actualism, then I can find another one. I’m not too attached to the higher income I’m getting, if anything there are concerns of appearing a failure to friends and family if I lost this job. But all in all, my higher goal is to be perpetually happy and harmless. Since uncertainty is always going to be part of life that means I will eventually have to make the choice in some actual situation to be happy and harmless despite uncertainty. When that moment comes it will be a moment just like this one, so I might as well make that choice here and now. (link)
It’s possible that it is your particular job which has more problems than you are willing to solve, but generally similar problems will appear in any other job as long as you hold the worrier close to your bosom. As feeling ‘safe’ is a ‘good’ feeling, not a felicitous one, you might inquire what this ‘safety’ consists of apart from income reliability. Does ‘safety’ include that people like you, that you belong, that you are praised for certain qualities, that you are able to present a certain image …
You can explore all the possible arguments which ‘you’, the worrier, could present in order to stay in existence. Sometimes exaggeration helps to recognize the absurd ridiculousness of spending one’s most precious asset – time – pleasing ‘me’, the worrier.
Cheers Vineeto