Category: Effective Rethinking

On Getting Easily Flustered

I have been doing much better. But there’s are curious symptoms I wanted to write about, to inform the interested and to garner opinions about what might be going on.

Let’s begin with “doing much better”.

My anxiety symptoms are mostly in remission. They do hit me once a week or so, seemingly out of the blue: suddenly, I feel afraid, but with no obvious cause and no obvious object-of-fear. It seems that, roughly weekly, my brain pointlessly fills with cortisol, a fear hormone. That’s no fun; but, as I say, it happens infrequently.

“Sue”, as I call my suicidal ideations, pops up much more regularly than fear does. It’s still the case that, pretty much every time I see a bus, I’ll think, “I could jump in front of that”. I’ll look at my daily pills – especially the Nortriptyline, which is fatal in overdose – and the thought of taking them all will just show up in my head. However, I’ve worked hard to just let Sue be there, reminding myself: “It’s just an intrusive thought; it’s coming from a malfunctioning part of your mind; it doesn’t reflect the overall values that you as a complete person have. Let it be there.”

(An aside. I was trying to explain to a philosopher friend what it’s like to have thoughts which, in a sense, don’t correspond to who you really are. What the heck can that even mean? I still don’t have a good answer to that question, but I did think of an analogy that helped us move forward in the conversation. An intrusive thought is like having a song stuck in your head. Someone mentions Abba’s “Dancing Queen” and, damn it, the song starts playing in your mind. Worse, now you can’t get rid of it, except maybe by choosing a different “ear worm”. Trust me that “Dancing Queen” emphatically does not reflect my aesthetic values, yet it can intrude in my mind!)

My symptoms are mild enough that I’ve been able to increase my workload at Western. I had been at 50%, for a couple of years at least. Well, and I was at 0% in the Spring of 2024, while in the hospital. Starting this month, however, I have increased both my research load and my service duties, rising to a total of 65%. The plan, if I continue to improve, is to increase to 85% in April and then 100% on July 1st, 2025. It’s a somewhat scary prospect, I’ll grant you, but I think it’s the right approach. I am fear-cited.

In short, as I’ve been telling people, it’s not that I’m “fixed”. Nonetheless, I am coping much better with my chronic symptoms, and I plan to continue on my “upwards spiral”. There are caveats, however. And this takes me to the topic of today’s post.

First, I have developed some nervous ticks. The toes on my left foot curl in and out much of the time. I also find myself picking at my fingernails compulsively. Most embarrassing of all, whenever I do anything that requires even a mite of concentration – climbing the stairs, taking the phone out from my pocket, starting a challenging sentence in this blog post – my tongue protrudes. Poor Anita says that it looks like I’m constantly sticking my tongue out at people! I try to restrain these behaviours, but to no avail. That’s one caveat.

A second caveat to my ongoing recovery is that I now get very flustered by tiny incidents. The other day, for instance, I couldn’t delete an “invisible table” from a Word document. The program said that there was a table present – but I didn’t see anything, and no method of deleting material seemed to remove the phantom. Objectively speaking, this was a small thing. Yet it drove me into an absolute tizzy, and I needed to call Anita over to help calm me down. She helped me, but I was already in a state, and it took a long time to return to normal. (Eventually we opted for saving the problematic section of the paper as a txt document, and then copying it back into the Word file. In fact, this was even my idea. But I was shaking with ill-humour by the time we got there.) Another instance. Down in Uruguay, I needed to use an adapter to plug in my computer. The adapter I had with me kept falling out of the electrical socket. Another miniscule problem. Yet, here again, I had an outsized reaction. I felt confused, stumped, incompetent, frustrated.

 The phenomenon of over-reacting reminds me of what used to happen years ago with respect to anger. As a young man, I didn’t like feeling angry. It was a scary emotion. In my experience as a child, anger had been a hallmark of a chaotic, dangerous situation. As a result, I wouldn’t let myself get angry at big things: back then, I’d sublimate the feeling, withdrawing and going temporarily quiet, say, instead of yelling. My anger had to get manifested eventually, however, and I think it did so in the following way: I would get tremendously mad in the face of tiny problems; I’d absolutely fume because a bus was a few minutes late, for instance.

My thought, taking anger as my analogy, is that my negative symptoms haven’t simply vanished. Instead, they’ve recently found other outlets. Rather than getting released through frequent episodes of fear and despair, my longstanding demons are nowadays showing up (in an outsized way) in response to miniature frustrations. They are also showing up as nervous ticks.

I have another potential hypothesis. My diagnosis is Bipolar Type II, after all, and that includes hypomania as a central symptom. The latter famously manifests itself as tons of energy and creativity, as impulsive buying, as risky behavior. Less famously, it sometimes shows up as free-floating irritability. Realizing this, my alternative conjecture is that I’m actually experiencing hypomania again, after many years experiencing unipolar depression.  

My question for my mental health team will be: “Now that I’ve recognized these symptoms, how should I respond?” After all, nervous habits and petty frustration are mere irritants when compared to what I had been experiencing. Maybe, if what I am going through really are “escape valves”, I should just let them do their job. Put otherwise, maybe these are actually coping mechanisms – features, rather than bugs. And what if what’s going on is hypomania? Once upon a time, it was my friend: my most productive times as an academic have been when I’m hypomanic. So, there too, maybe the right attitude is acceptance.

Thoughts, dear readers?

Learning to Live with Suicidal Ideations

In my last post, I posed the question what’s “well enough” to leave the hospital. I said that a necessary condition was getting over my suicidal ideations. I wrote: “Until I can stand on a bridge without being aware of the opportunity it affords for suicide, I don’t think I’m ready.”

Yet, here I am at home, still having suicidal thoughts. What happened?

It turns out the medical team at the hospital were focused on a different question, namely, how much can they help? They concluded two weeks ago that I had benefited as much from hospital care as I was going to. In particular, they reasoned that medication adjustments were unlikely to take away the suicidal ideations altogether.

Now, the psychiatrist who broke this news to me asked what at first seemed a deeply puzzling question, viz., why was I so disturbed by suicidal thoughts? To me, that sounded like the question why I find pain distressing: both are things which are per se unpleasant. Surely, I thought, he must never have experienced a “suicide affordance” if he can ask why they are so unwelcome. Our conversation continued, however, and it emerged that there are thousands of people who have chronic suicidal ideations but who have learned to mentally distance themselves from those thoughts. Said the team, I’d have to learn to live with them as well, not letting them bother me so much. (How very Buddhist…)

My dear friend Gustavo noted that this is somewhat like game theorist John Nash, who famously suffered from schizophrenia his entire adult life. Nash wasn’t helped by medications. Instead, as he put it, he gradually began to intellectually reject the delusional lines of thinking. His voices didn’t go away; rather, he somehow managed to consciously resist them.

In the two weeks since I left hospital, I’ve been working on creating the requisite distance. My current technique has three steps. First, I identify the suicidal thought. I’ve given it the name ‘Sue’ for suicide. Second, I note that Sue is an intrusive thought, which comes to me unbidden and from a malfunctioning part of my brain. Third, I stress to myself that Sue fits ill with my overall values. Sue, in short, isn’t me.

It isn’t easy living with Sue, but maybe I can manage it.

On Trying Hard to Be Positive

A very difficult thing about depression is that you’d think one could just choose to overcome it. You’d think one could just decide to look on the bright side; decide to be positive. And what to make of a depressive with an otherwise good head on their shoulders? If it were like that, the depressed person would simply not be trying hard enough. They can’t really be putting their best effort forward.

But choosing to not be depressed is comparable to choosing not to hear voices in schizophrenia. It’s comparable to choosing not to be paranoid.

To give another analogy that I’ve used before, the negative perspective in Bipolar is like a visual illusion. In the Muller-Lyer illusion, e.g., two sticks of equal length look different because each is bordered by “fins” that point in opposite directions. The one with fins pointed outward looks shorter. One can know this fact, but no amount of “corrective thinking” can get the visual system to see things as they objectively are.  In the same way, when one is depressed, the world just looks gray and sad even when part of the person knows that it isn’t that way.

This can be hard for the sufferer themselves. They may beat up on themselves for not feeling grateful for the good things in life. I do this all the time: I get angry at myself, feel guilty, when I’m not enjoying an objectively fortunate event.

I do “gratitude meditations” to force myself to recognize the positive. I have positive self-talk affirmations that I use. “I have done difficult things in the past”. “Keep hope alive”. “Growth is sometimes bumpy”. “Good is good enough”. “You help others”. “You are loved”. So I tell myself. But the truth is, there’s something fishy about the whole production: it assumes that the mind is under its own voluntary control to an extent that, sadly, it really is not.

That’s why stuff like rTMS, electroconvulsive therapy and medications have an essential role to play in the treatment of depression. And it’s why, when I try to remain hopeful, the hope is largely other-oriented, i.e., that others will find a new treatment to help me. Believing in oneself is a good thing, but it can only take one so far.

Bipolar Recovery at a Conference

I am at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities this week in Toronto. It’s a massive conference, often 10,000 people. And it’s the first big such event I’ve attended since COVID… and since my electroconvulsive therapy.

Yesterday was the first day, and it was fun – I met up with dozens of old friends and met some new folks – but it was challenging. I found it hard to follow the philosophy talks because of a lack of focus/concentration, and hard to motivate excitement in the topics because of a lack of energy. I found myself not remembering people, which is new for me post-ETC. (A young woman, who had just done an excellent presentation, came up to say hello, telling me that I had taught her in a graduate seminar. It’s not just that I didn’t know her name; it’s that she might as well have been a stranger.)

Talk of post-ECT troubles brings me to a vicious cycle that I’ve been experiencing lately. It is showing up in my teaching too. I have difficulty with focus/concentration, energy and memory and these make me feel fear, and shame, that I can no longer do the job of a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. The fear/shame worsens my concentration and memory, and further saps my energy. And the cycle continues.

Here is what I have been telling myself in response, and what I kept saying to myself yesterday during the conference. There is hope that the troubles continue to improve over the years as I put the shock therapy further in the rear view mirror. This would reduce the performance anxiety by objectively doing better as time passes, by continuing to force myself to practice. (E.g., forcing myself to attend additional conferences.) That’s the one hand. The other hand is that I can simply demand less from myself, or different. Being a good professor is good enough while, meanwhile, I excel at other things. Even more drastically, maybe I can accept that I’ll hereafter perform badly by prior standards but that no one will die as a result. I would still be a good person.

Anyway, the conference continues until Thursday night. Today there is a panel that I helped to organize that is squarely in my research area. We’ll see how things shape up.

A Thought Experiment

During my Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy sessions we performed a thought experiment which provided a lot of insight into how my mind works. I suspect others will find the exercise interesting two.

Consider a first scenario. I am coming out of a meeting in which I’ve received negative feedback on some research in progress. My interlocutors have basically suggested that I need to start from scratch. As I am walking back to the office, my friend and colleague X approaches in the opposite direction. I greet X and begin to complain about the bad news; but they explain that they don’t have time to talk now, and rush off.

Here were my thoughts, bodily sensations and feelings in response to the first scenario. I thought: “I need people to console me. This person must not really care about me after all, because if they did, they would stop. I thought they were friends, but they’ve disappointed me.” I sensed tension in my shoulders and forehead. And I felt mild anger but especially sadness and disappointment.

I invite you to place yourself in a similar scenario, though replacing “negative feedback on research” with the relevant negative comments you might get in your job from your team. What thoughts come immediately to mind? What happens in your body? What emotions arise?

Consider now, as we did in the MBCT group, a second scenario. Once again, I am leaving a meeting. This time, however, I have been praised about the high calibre of my teaching and my amazing research productivity. I start walking back to my office and see X coming down the hall. I begin to share the good news with my old friend; but, as in the first scenario, X explains that they are in a hurry and they rush off.

This time I thought: “Though it would have been nice for them to congratulate me, it’s no big deal. Even good friends get overly busy sometime. I can share this news with others instead. Besides, I actually have enough positive going on already.” No bodily tension this time. And my feelings are happiness and excitement.

One really central lesson of this thought experiment is that when I’m vulnerable, I need attention. Moreover, once I’m down, I see everything through “grey-coloured glasses”. And I personalize the negative once I’m already down: anything others do which is negative is about me.

What would you think, sense and feel emotionally in the second scenario?

Problematic “Core Beliefs”

I. Core Beliefs in CBT

CBT works with the notion of “core beliefs” which underlie depression and anxiety. The patient in therapy is to identify their damaging core beliefs, consider where they came from, then scrutinize carefully the evidence with respect to them. Ultimately, the aim is to replace the problematic core beliefs not with “positive” ones but with more balanced, realistic ones. So, the person in therapy also takes into consideration what supported the core beliefs, and what functions they played.

The identifying process begins with a taxonomy of malign core beliefs. There are internal ones, about oneself. There are also external ones, about one’s worldly situation. The internal ones are further sub-categorized in terms of beliefs that the patient is unloveable, helpless or worthless; while the external ones are further sub-categorized into deep and abiding beliefs about other people, about the present world, and about the future.

Internal: Unloveable; Worthless; Helpless

External: Other people; the Present; the Future

II. Some of Rob’s Core Beliefs

The above taxonomy is a good departure point for identifying my own troubling core beliefs.

Starting with the Internal, none of the ones listed in CBT’s “unloveable” sub-category apply. Though I didn’t always feel that way, I now know that I am very loved. What applies very much to me are the two other sub-categories. Regarding helplessness, I believe deeply that I am vulnerable, weak, needy, and trapped by my own defective brain. Relatedly, and turning to worthlessness, I believe deeply that I am broken/crazy.

Turning to External Core Beliefs, the “other people” sub-category isn’t problematic in one respect. I value others. I largely trust them. But good people are vulnerable too, and that limits how much trust you can put in them. As for the world and the future, despite the presence of good people who love me, the world and the future are dangerous, unsafe, uncontrollable, and unfair.

Putting these internal and external core beliefs together, I believe that I am vulnerable, weak, broken/crazy and facing a dangerous unfair world. As I like to put it metaphorically, I am soft and getting softer; and the world is hard and getting harder. Eventually, it’s bound to crush me. Therein may lie the main basis of my anxiety and depression.

III. Sources of Rob’s Core Beliefs

Having taxonomized the core beliefs people tend to have and identified some of my own, the next steps in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are: to ask where the beliefs came from, i.e., the experiences that led to them; to consider their functions (so to arrive ultimately at a more balanced assessment of the core beliefs); and to examine at the same time counterevidence against one’s internal and external core beliefs. A next step after these, the subject of a later post, is trying out new core beliefs which are more realistic. (Again, not “more positive”: CBT isn’t about the power of positive thinking.)

So, what are the sources of my inner and external core beliefs? I’ll approach this biographically. As a small child, I had a violent, highly critical father. He was always telling me that I was helpless and worthless and also showing me that I was, because I couldn’t defend myself. What’s more, my father was very successful and popular, regardless of his abusive behaviors toward his wife and children. This taught me that the world was unfair. (My dad, today in his nineties, is thankfully, a very, very different man now, and I have a strong loving relationship with him.) I was also picked on at school and abused by a predatory pack of older boys. Again, the bad kids seemed to be the popular, successful ones. This too reinforced that the world is dangerous/unfair (external) and that I am the vulnerable/weak one (internal).

My teen years were better. In fact, I now suspect that my first hypomanic episodes were showing up then. I changed from withdrawn to outgoing, academically mediocre to a star student, sad-sack to life of the party. But in my early 20s, my first wife Hamila fell ill with brain cancer. She died after five years of intensive treatments – three surgeries, radiation and many, many rounds of chemotherapy. What could signal more forcefully that the world is dangerous and unfair? And that I can’t control it?

The main source of the worthlessness belief of being broken/crazy is biographically much more recent. It was reinforced in my fifties as my Bipolar got worse. Once you’re 50, there’s also the constant awareness of aging. In my specific case, there were diabetes and high cholesterol diagnoses, which I took as evidence of both my aging body breaking down and of unfair genetics.

IV. The Positive Functions of the Core Beliefs

The final step is to consider the pros and cons of the core beliefs, and the objective evidence with respect to them. It would take too long to do all that in one post, so I’ll end with reflections on how my mostly malign core beliefs have had some positive impacts.

What have been some of the functions of my core belief that I am soft and the world is hard? How did it benefit me? What did it protect me from? Well, those beliefs kept me from taking inappropriate risks. They caused me to always have back up plans and made me attend carefully and constantly to the potential consequences of my actions. They made me try to be prepared for disappointments. Maybe most importantly, believing that the world is dangerous, uncontrollable, and unfair, meant that I do not postpone joy, because joy can disappear tomorrow.

Coming soon: Evidence against these core beliefs and some more balance, new, core beliefs that might replace the above.

Good News, Bad News in ECT

Yesterday was a good news, bad news day. Today, Tuesday, is mostly a good news day

Yesterday’s good news: I didn’t faint on the way to the hospital. Unlike Friday. And they went ahead with the procedure. Unlike Friday. Good news too is how mild the side effects were yesterday. A weird headache. And cognitive exhaustion, especially when it came to screens. (I was better talking on the phone with the light dimmed than Zooming. The latter was very demanding.) The sore muscles were there again but much less pronounced, maybe because they only “jolted” me once yesterday. Continuing with the more “physical” side-effects, and how bearable they are, I was even able to do a 4 km run early this afternoon, only about 24 hours after the treatment.

Yesterday’s bad news: once in the treatment room, and under anesthetic, my pulse again dropped to around 30 beats per minute. They had to give me a drug to speed up my heart. Because this is a mite worrisome, they plan to move my treatments temporarily to the full-service hospital down the road from the Psychiatric one, in case anything goes wrong. There will be “crash carts” there and all the rest. More cautious, but already an unwelcome disruption. Worse, they need to get me scheduled in there, and I don’t know how long that will take: Victoria, the new venue, only takes four patients at a time, and it might be full. In addition, each patient at the main hospital does only two treatments per week as opposed to three where I am now, at Parkwood. That converts 6.5 weeks to 10 weeks.

All of this threatens to extend my treatment regime in terms of when I’ll finish, such that it may bump up against my Summer fishing trips. And looking ahead to those was all that kept me going for a while there in the Winter.

Today’s good news. Yesterday I was very anxious because of the changes to the schedule and the uncertainty. These treatments are the most frightening thing I’ve ever faced in many years, and I just want to get on with it. It’s frustrating to get stuck part way. However, yesterday was anomalous emotionally. In general, I am much less frightened of the procedure, having experienced it on two occasions now. More importantly, as my daughter Saima observed already last week, I am less frightened in general. Everyone is commenting on both my improved countenance and the tenor of my voice; my own first-person impression too is that the ECT is helping with the anxiety and depression symptoms after only three of my scheduled 20 “jolts”. My psychiatrist thinks that could very well be – the technique is that powerful, when it works – and if the treatment is helping already, that bodes really well for the effectiveness of the whole course.

From Thought Records to Core Beliefs

A thought record is a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy technique. It’s akin to chain analysis in DBT and to the ABCD tool that I’ve blogged about here before. All three psychotherapeutic techniques are about recognizing when your mood has taken a bad turn – e.g., fear or grief strike, seemingly out of nowhere – and then trying to identify the non-obvious patterns, so as to break out of them.

As I’ll explain, thought records are valuable in and of themselves, but they can also provide deeper insight into the core beliefs that lie at the heart of depression.

The elements of a thought record are:

i) a description of the situation you were in when the bad emotional turn occurred

ii) the resulting mood and its intensity

iii) the thoughts and perceptions going on just when the mood episode took hold, i.e., what was going through your mind in an automatic way just then

iv) an account of any cognitive distortions in the chain of thought that led to the mood.

Here are two examples from recent days.

Situation: I was having lunch with Anita at a sushi restaurant, sipping miso soup. I glanced at the calendar on my phone. Resulting mood: fear (50% intensity) and sadness (20% intensity). Automatic thoughts: “I have nothing planned for Monday. To avoid my symptoms taking hold, I need to keep busy and stay distracted. In the past, empty days have been bad. Monday will be a bad day”. Cognitive distortions: “fortune telling”, i.e., making unjustified predictions about the future; “negative filter”, i.e., overemphasizing the dark side of a situation; “thinking with feelings”, here, letting my fears and sadness drive my beliefs about Monday.

Situation: I was talking with my sister-in-law at her house around noon on a Sunday. I’d had a bad sleep the night before and was simply telling her about that. Resulting mood: fear (50% intensity), sadness (70% intensity), hopelessness (30% intensity). Automatic thoughts: “I remember being better before. I may never get back there. In fact, I may continue to get worse. I couldn’t stand that. Other people don’t have to deal with these symptoms. Why can’t someone fix me?”. Cognitive distortions: again, all of “fortune telling”, “negative filter” and “thinking with feelings”, along with “all or nothing” thinking and “blaming others”.

As I say, keeping thought records can be helpful when trying to find and combat what CBT calls core beliefs which underlie mental illness. Depression, e.g., tends to go along with core beliefs of helplessness and worthlessness. What do the pattern of my automatic thoughts and my recurrent cognitive distortions mean about my self-view, my view of the world, and of those around me? Looking at just the two examples above, I can detect the core beliefs that I am broken, that I can’t withstand my symptoms, and that other people aren’t like that. Put otherwise, that I am weak, vulnerable, defective, crazy.

Overturning such core beliefs is even harder than overcoming the recurring cognitive distortions. For one thing, the beliefs aren’t obviously mistaken. Consider mine. There simply are things I can’t do anymore because of my worsening bipolar disorder; the symptoms do feel terrible and frequently overwhelm me; and, though we all suffer, most people don’t experience anhedonia, near agoraphobia and suicidal-level despondency. It won’t do to just deny these things. The therapeutic dialectical strategy, instead, is to grant the partial truths behind the depressive core beliefs, but to challenge them by looking for a more balanced view. Thus, though some things are harder for me now, there are many challenging tasks that I can definitely still do (e.g., I can blog about psychotherapy.) And in the past I’ve recovered abilities which I lost temporarily, and that may well happen again. Or again, though the symptoms are awful, I have made it through them before, I have tools and people to help me, and even these last six months I’ve had good days. Finally, the more balanced view is that many people have mental illnesses, so that I’m far from alone.

More on Radical Acceptance

This week’s homework is to identify four things which I need to radically accept and think through them.

Two were to be really hard and especially important to me. Which to select was obvious in my case since I have been obsessing over these twin sources of depression for months/years: i) that I and others are aging; ii) that I and others are going to die. Two were to be less important but still hard to accept. There are lots to pick from, but I chose: iii) that Winter is coming; iv) that we may all require a booster shot for COVID.

Next step: interpretations and opinions surrounding the four which I identified. Checking the facts, the last one is really a “maybe”, something that it’s too early to fret over. There’s really no need to radically accept a “maybe such-and-such” of that kind. In contrast, (i)-(iii) are undeniable. However, I recognized in doing the homework that how I interpret them isn’t a given. Starting with Winter, I interpret it as bleak, long, dark, claustrophobic. As for (i), I interpret what’s to be accepted as this terrible thing aging; that is, as this horrible loss of youth. Finally, I interpret the reality such that the finitude of life takes away its day-to-day value.

Re-evaluating, now. Winter used to have its pleasures. It wasn’t merely something to be escaped when possible. True, last year it was pretty awful. But it wasn’t always so. Walking in the snow. Christmas and New Years. Reading by the fire. Skiing (I hope I can return to that this year). I can and should re-emphasize those. In the past, maturing has brought new things to my life. Yes, I’ve lost a few things I miss dreadfully, e.g., activities with the girls when they were little and very attached to their dad. But many new pleasures emerged, such as fly-casting lessons. That’s likely to occur again. Closing with (ii), which is apt — death is the end — as I try to remember: that a novel comes to a close isn’t a good reason for not reading it.

Re-evaluation softens the blow of the three things I need to accept. But there’s still bitterness to each. The last step in this homework is to run through some techniques for accepting:

  • observe that you are resisting
  •  review the advantages of accepting (e.g., experiencing a sense of relief from ending an exhausting struggle, leaving constant rumination behind, working with what you’ve got, avoiding what the Buddha called “the second dart of painful feeling”)
  • make a choice to accept instead of resisting
  • attend to bodily sensations when thinking about what needs to be accepted
  • attend to the grief that comes with accepting and don’t fight it, since that only increases suffering
  • reinforce, using a mantra, that life is worth living even accepting these things.

Rethinking Perfectionism

I am finally back to doing homework assignments in DBT. That’s because I am joining a virtual group out of University of Toronto, and will furthermore have a new local “coach”, Rachel S.

Today’s exercise is on effective rethinking of my perfectionism.

Now, as I keep telling everyone, there’s a sense in which I don’t aim for “perfection”. I know that humans are fallible. I therefore know that I am. Really, though this is mere quibbling. It’s “just semantics”, in the pejorative sense, to deny that I’m a perfectionist, because I certainly do demand far too much of myself. I have a superhero complex. I need to succeed to the highest degree possible (and, ideally, I should do it without any benefit to myself; it should be all about self-sacrifice).

For this round, I decided to focus on what I expect of myself at work. Relatedly, on where I criticize myself, when I don’t achieve the standards which I set for myself as an academic.

As an instructor, I demand of myself the best possible lectures: clear, orderly, precisely as detailed and accurate as students at the given level require and can handle. I expect to mentor students to the ideal degree – as many hours as I can manage, for instance, yet without discouraging them with too much advice.

I demand of myself, but not others, letter-perfect writing in all domains. In reference letters and other evaluations, in journal articles, in reports to committees. Every piece of prose must have all that’s required, nothing extraneous, and with everything in its place. In terms of form, there cannot be even tiny typos, nor inaptly placed punctuation.

Work must be completed not just on time, but well enough ahead of schedule that there’s no risk of being late.

In all domains, I must evaluate as thoroughly and accurately as a person can manage. To do otherwise is unjust.

Next step in the homework: the prima facie benefits of demanding so much of myself, followed by a “rethinking”.

From others’ perspective, there’s the benefit of student satisfaction with respect to my lecturing and mentoring. There’s impressing colleagues. And fairness to those being assessed. As for myself, there are the (seeming) advantages of  avoiding public failure, confidence in my performance, plus pride in the results.

Then again, are those beliefs really true, and are my reasons for wanting such things good reasons? My students definitely don’t need the level of preparation I put in – lecture notes with perfect punctuation, each heading numbered and in bold. Yes, I seriously do that… and who is helped by doing so? Ironically, students may prefer less formal preparation – over-preparation makes lectures boring. Also, students might well learn important life lessons from observing my human imperfections and my acceptance of them. “Professors are just people too. Mistakes are okay”. Continuing with other-directed alleged benefits, it’s not actually unfair to those being evaluated if I am merely doing an excellent job. Finally, even if the beliefs about the benefits were true, why do I want these things? In fact, I’m too worried about seeking approval, too focused on needing external validation. Self-esteem should come from “excellent”, it shouldn’t require “the very best you can do”; and it can come from inside, not merely from respect and admiration from those who I respect and admire. And, of course, I’d do well to rein in my compulsion for order and correctness.

What are benefits of accepting “excellent” or even “good enough”? That I don’t drain myself, so that I have time and energy left over for other valuable things. More time for leisure, my four Fs: fiction, fishing, fitness, family. More time for mental health exercises like this one, which in their turn can make me a better person to be around – as husband, father, friend, co-worker – being as a result less anxious, less stressed, less depressed.

The last element in todays homework, having catalogued the problematic beliefs and challenged them, is to consider specific actions which would move me away from demanding so much of myself. One action would be reminding myself of the above costs. Another, maybe too challenging for now, would be exposure, purposeful exposure, to “sub-standard” performance: letting misspellings go (using ‘eg’ instead of ‘e.g.’, heaven help me!), failing to put foreign words in italics, not proof-reading emails, Facebook posts, and… this blog entry.