Reply to Specific midlife crisis issue: playing "what if" with your life?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I have journaling and find this particular advice very pollyanna usually - but it might help in your case: Start keeping a gratitude journal.

A trick my therapist taught me that I've found VERY helpful - for a different kind of thought pattern I found upsetting: When your brain starts doing this "ooh, look at that house, her husband is so handsome, you've never won a writing award" nonsense - acknowledge the thought, and then tell your brain, "Hey, thanks brain. Very helpful right now. Appreciate it, jerk."

It's a way to acknowledge that your thoughts are your thoughts but they aren't "real" - you don't have to give these dumb, harmful thoughts SO much real estate. Just be like, yes, I am having these thoughts. And I have lots of other thoughts, too! Brains are thought-producing machines and they don't always do it in a way that is maximally helpful.

Also remember - yeah, you don't have to be happy all the time. Sometimes you can be jealous, upset, petty, whatever. And that's part of being human.

To the extent that your feelings here are revealing wants or goals you didn't realize you had - can you work toward those goals? Do you actually want these things? To the extent they're not - yeah, acknowledge them, focus on what you're actually happy about and grateful for, and move on.[/quote]

OP here and this is helpful, thank you. I too hate journaling! My therapist had me start journaling last year and I feel like it's made it worse, like it gives me an outlet for thinking about these things and what I'd like is to cut short these thought processes because they are so unproductive. I like the idea of just talking to my brain like "ok, thanks for weighing in." Like an annoying friend who points out unhelpful things you can't do anything about.[/quote]

I am PP - and yes, exactly! I have a super fun fear of driving over bridges, and I use that trick with myself now when I have to go over a bridge. Does it cure me of the fear? No! Heck no. But it gives me something to do and sort of takes a bit of the SERIOUSNESS out of the picture.

Maybe instead of a gratitude journal you can start a btchy unhelpful thoughts journal. Just for you, as a place to vent or whatever. Like take the pressure off of yourself to be happy and perfect all the time. Sometimes you want to be a little mean and sorry for yourself! Why is that so bad? Just make sure no one ever sees it![/quote]

OP again. This made me laugh. Truthfully I don't feel sorry for myself! My life is great in so many ways. It's more like I'll go out to dinner with a friend who is a doctor and he'll talk about how much he loves his job, and I'll come home and find myself thinking, "huh I wonder what would have happened if I'd put all the time and energy and effort Bill put into becoming a doctor to the same, if I'd have that kind of job satisfaction." This is a weird and ridiculous thought because I literally never had ANY interest in becoming a doctor, it is 100% not the job for me, and also, my job is actually pretty good. But it's just this weird trick my brain plays on me that results in me up at midnight wondering if maybe I didn't try hard enough at life or something, even though I'm comparing myself to I don't really even envy. I mean -- med school, internship, residency, fellowship, long hours, plus you know, all that icky body stuff. I don't want that! So why on earth am I suddenly oddly wistful that it's not something I did? It's so weird, and as someone who has never really experienced much envy or jealousy as an adult, I don't know what to do with it.

That's why I'm suddenly getting why people do weird things at midlife. I think your brain plays these weird tricks on you and tries to convince you that what you have isn't good enough and people get frantic. But I have an amazing family, a great partner, a nice house, a solid career, nothing I want or am going to throw away. Instead I'm just having this isolated yucky feelings of like, I don't know, missed opportunity or something? I know it must be common because there is so much ink spilled on midlife issues, but I'm almost embarrassed to be going through it myself. I guess I thought I'd avoid it because my life is mostly pretty great save for a few bumps in the road that could happen to anyone.

I just had a birthday, can you tell  :D [/quote]

Go over to the health section and read how unhappy many doctors are. Maybe Bill says he loves his job so much because it pains him to think how long he trained for this for insurance companies to make work so hard.

Think of how many billions of people there are in the world. How many don't become doctors or tech moguls or world leaders? Answer - most of them.

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