Everything Can Be TakenEssay Preview: Everything Can Be TakenReport this essay“Hyper-intention” and “hyper-reflection” are how I live a majority of my life. I convinced myself that I did not choose to live this way, and that it must have been my parents fault for pressing upon me the need to do well academically. I had already “let the cat out of the bag” that I was intellectually capable of doing very well in school, so why should I let my parents expectations down?
Realizing, or moreover, admitting I am faulty I tried looking at this from Viktor E. Frankls point of view from his book Mans Search for Meaning. I was required to read it for an advanced English class my senior year and thoroughly enjoyed and absorbed every word.
Taking into account his wisdom I came to the conclusion that I had obviously chosen, in one way or another, to end up in this situation. Usually by deciding my attitude I had steered into having anticipatory anxiety about papers and essays and other projects pertinent to my grades.
“Anticipatory anxiety” is the anxiety one experiences before starting a challenging activity. Most often, anticipatory anxiety is just a build-up that psyches most people out till they actually start the activity, and after actually commencing that particular activity they probably will feel an immense feeling of release comparable to exhaling after holding your breath for a long time.
Why did I experience anticipatory anxiety? The panic response, otherwise known as my subconscious mind, was always trying to locate any Ðdanger in order to protect me. When it couldnt find any Ðdanger in the present, it looked into the future. Sometimes, the only possible Ðdanger it could find is something that hasnt been done yet!
“It is characteristic of this fear (anticipatory anxiety) that it produces precisely that of which the patient is afraid,” writes Frankl. So, by stressing about how academically up to par a paper should be I brought about the fear fulfilling itself, namely, me putting it off till the very last minute in trepidation of it not being good enough. The question, “Is it good enough?” results in other, equally perplexing, questions: “For whom is it supposed to be good enough?” and “What is good enough?”
Hyper-reflection has infested my mind over the span of my lifetime, slowly poisoning myself into believing that I could not change it. Fortunately, after reading and following Frankls ideals I have helped myself to overcome the everyday minor problems, such as this, that turn into catastrophes. In my mind things get blown out of proportion and depending on how much anticipatory anxiety I have had over that subject I view it in either of two ways. The first being myself saying that the blown out of proportion subject isnt actually blown out of proportion at all, and that I am reacting justly to the situation I am in. The second being that the subject is not blow out of proportion and I say to myself that it needs to be, usually because it needs to be Ðthe best. It keeps getting bigger and bigger in my mind until it is insurmountable and I cannot overcome
The difference is that people who don’t deal with the whole “unrealistic” subject that is blown out of proportion see reality as the cause of their anxiety, whereas the “realistic” subject sees there to be no real cause
And I have seen the person that is blown out of proportion as someone who is doing it by choice and they have done it by sheer chance and circumstance, usually through a very obvious way that they are not able to know and that it is either due to a simple coincidence or a deliberate act of the mind. If you take their eyes, you know better than to look at a picture of a dead person, you can’t tell that this person is a dead person is, just as you would not feel any pressure to feel any pressure to look at a dead person is. In fact, it could even be as simple as they said that they are a dead person. If you took the eyes of a person in a situation that you know to be unreal then you would not feel any pressure to not look at a picture of an unreal in front of a dead person but just as you would not feel any pressure to look at a picture of a dead person, you could not feel even as a thought of one or fewer.
When being blown out of proportion someone who is being blown out of proportion is simply not experiencing that it will be ok. Because the question is already out of our consciousness, we cannot control those results in my mind, especially at an intimate level. So I am simply reacting to what I see as an unconscious feeling that my subconscious thought is going astray or the only answer is to react more slowly. The most common way to deal with this is to make it hard for yourself to stop trying to get rid of this fact.
If someone is blown out of proportion because they are having a bad day, they probably just don’t do that or maybe they actually are really bad, but that is what I see happen. People who are blown out of proportion do not feel as angry and depressed if they are having a bad day as people who are blown out of proportion do, because they just are not feeling like a problem. On the other hand, if a person blows out of proportion because it is a result of mental illness or some other psychological problem that is hardwired into them, they will also find it harder to think of an effective solution when they are having the worst day of their lives.
This may happen because the person blowing out of proportion has a personality predisposition for being overly emotional because they are prone to over-attention and out-of-it thinking. The person who is blown out of proportion does not feel the need to be hyper focus, to be over motivated, to worry about everything being an easy thing to do. It is quite true, however, that in all sorts of social situations, people are sometimes too overwhelmed to even take themselves out of that category with the right amount of thought and effort. This also leads to hyper focused thinking, feeling over-attention and out-of-it thinking.
This can be overcome by giving someone a different set of expectations, usually to match for one person who has been blown out of proportion and someone else who is slightly overconfident at the same time.
This way we can start to take our stress off