Enervation

Perhaps one of the most dangerously cyclical negatives of my recent unemployment is the enervation that comes hand-in-hand.

I’m usually a pretty active person. I enjoy work and working hard. I like spending hours every week cooking and experimenting in the kitchen, and to devote as much energy as possible to exercise and staying fit. I like being busy and to have a full agenda that keeps me rushing between activities. I’m more productive than ever in my writing and my reading, my personal projects and my hobbies, when I’m already so busy that I have to reference my schedule every time that someone asks for even a cup of tea.

It often seems like I live in a positive feedback circuit with my moods and energy levels. When I expend energy to accomplish a task, I look to future tasks more eager and willing to continue expending more and more energy. Practically, this results in me working as a higher-functioning creature when I have more that needs to be done. As I feed the cycle, I want to continue feeding more and more, resulting in periods of extremely high industriousness.

A feeds to B which feeds to A which feeds to B which... [Credit: Wikipedia]

Unfortunately, the positive feedback circuit runs both ways. In the absence of energy expenditures, I feed the cycle a cocktail of anxiety and indolence. The circuit loops back onto itself just like above, producing more of the cocktail that feeds future iterations of said cycle. Each trip through the circuit leaves me feeling more nervous and a great deal less productive.

For some reason, the pathways in my brain for mood management work the same whether I’m feeding positivity or negativity. I’ve been unemployed for nearly two full months now, the longest I’ve gone without some way to pay the bills since I was in high school. I look at my bills and debts and feel the anxiety rising like bile in my throat and struggle to calm down.

Further, in the absence of a feeling of ‘positive productivity’, indolence sets in and I find my inertia reaching nearly zero. I no longer feel capable of doing or accomplishing anything at all. My hobbies begin to slip away, my desire to spend time cooking and exercising slowly fades to nothing. I want to do everything but feel incapable and impotent, powerless in the face of the looming future ahead of me.

The whole circuit has left me feeling completely enervated, like an empty cicada shell. My life force has drained away and I’m just the remainder, the pieces left behind. I feel drained of confidence and enthusiasm, incapable of succeeding at anything that I want to try.

But thankfully, there is a way to shut down the cycle. More on this in the next entry.