Dear Hey Its Jess:

You shared on this thread that you made “life altering mistakes” in your past. As a result, you have “an overwhelming need to succeed and make up for lost time”. When you got sick and wasn’t able to do the things you did before, you started hating yourself and thought about killing yourself. You wrote: “my happiness is directly proportional to the amount of things that I get done in a day” and you wrote: “if I waste time or slack off, I go to bed feeling like a sore loser.. and that depressing feeling stays with me for some days”.

This is my understanding: before or as a result of those mistakes you made, you formed a core belief that you are “a sore loser”. The feelings included in this core belief is anger toward yourself and the motivation to punish yourself, going as far as the punishment of death.

What followed is the following: you made a pact with yourself, something like this: I will let myself live IF I am very productive every day. If I am very productive- I will let myself live. If I am not- death is an appropriate punishment.

The threat of death cannot serve as an effective motivator long term. It will stimulate a person to activity when tired, this fear. But over time, the person gets tired being afraid, the anxiety is tiring. And part of the person rebels against such (self) aggression.

Better go back to those “life altering mistakes” and look at them more, from a different angle or angles, explore what happened. If you would like share about those.

anita