Okay, so for years there's been this part of my personality where any time I encounter a statistic or alleged fact, I will spend long periods of time, possibly even hours, digging through anything and everything related to the fact in question. It can wind up taking good stretches of my day and sometimes yields large amounts of information.
Thing is, I have nowhere to vent the excess information where I can reasonably get a response to it. So all of it still lingers in my head, nowhere to go, unable to be processed because all I have is a screen. It winds up resulting in mental outbursts, full-body tension, and sometimes verbal outbursts if I can find a space away from others. Either way, it's getting disruptive in my life to the point where the outbursts are definitely causing issues with concentration and I wonder if they're also causing sleep issues.
It also winds up resulting in some disturbing connections from time to time, whether due to paradigm-breaking individual facts or hearing a particularly nasty take. Let's see... soft-pitch an example of this that can actually cause issues in real-life discussions... here we go: hearing someone talk about modern progressivism and all my mind registers is the 1890s Progressive Era, specifically the more... disastrous parts. And any attempt to try breaking me out of that only solidifies the link in my mind.
Given my current location and living situation, I wouldn't have an option for walk-in therapy to discuss this even without the current pandemic. I also can't randomly do meditation during work hours (seriously, relaxing music does NOTHING to me when I hit full-body tension).
So I'm going to ask: Should I simply stop digging, or is there an approach I can actually take that will let me mitigate the worst of this? Throwing out an investigative skill seems like a tragedy, but if I must in order to save myself...
14 Jan 2021, 11:58 pm
