Neurological challenges of working from home

Or, “Your brain on small business.” Buckle up, folks, it’s a long one! We’re talking about the exacerbation of my constant companion – crushing anxiety!

People seem to think that working from home is a permanent vacation from the world. My friends and family casually make comments about how nice it would be to ditch the commute and relax at home, giving me the impression that they don’t realize exactly what I go through each day. A solid 0% of my time 9am-9pm is spent relaxing. In fact, I haven’t been this stressed out and continually overwhelmed since I regularly took 21 science credits a semester and worked in a cancer cell lab every single day, weekends included. My head is constantly in about ten different places, and I struggle to find time for self-care in my daily schedule. Despite being at home almost all day, I’m so consumed with my work that I rarely find time to eat, shower, or perform household tasks when left to my own devices. My internal dialogue is fraught with talk of failure and wasted time. I never feel as though I’m doing enough, or doing the right thing. I have panic attacks and start searching for full time jobs on a regular basis, hankering for the security and validation that a salaried position brings. All in all.... not exactly what I would consider a calming vacation from the real world.

I woke up today feeling incredibly sick. It was a normal Wednesday, except my neck was locked up with sharp muscle pains, shooting into my eye cavities and forehead. I was nauseas every few moments, but unable to find relief with an exploratory finger as I hunched over the toilet. I dragged myself downstairs, said goodbye to my boyfriend and our dear buddy who had been visiting, and pondered what the fuck I was going to do now. In that moment, a cloud of immense anxiety flooded my world. My head was immediately filled with conflicted thoughts and feelings. Should I try to beat the deadline to write and edit articles for my online work, even though my eyes hurt too badly to see straight? Or should I get right down to a Timestamp project in the basement, tediously scraping paint off a huge vinyl print while I tried not to yak? Could I even consider briefly lying down and hopefully feeling better? What was I doing even having these thoughts right now? I needed to work! Pick the right option already! There isn’t time for this! My stomach dropped and puckered, as if a burning vice grip was grabbing it from the inside. In a moment I was halted by indecision and pre-emptive guilt, strong walled into dormancy.

This is a normal day in my life.

Though crippling anxiety is certainly nothing new in my world, this experiment in self-employment truly works well to effectively aggravate my mental disorders. Since relocating to Atlanta, there has been no shortage of anguish and struggle for my internal world. The act of leaving my best friends, my long-desired kindred spirits who I rely on for so many aspects of emotional wellness, in exchange for near-complete isolation definitely hit hard. Walking away from a well-paid job with salary and benefits after a lifetime of poverty, in favor of a largely-unpaid solo venture, also fucked me up… thoroughly. Since last August, every day has been an ongoing battle between mindfulness and utter panic.

The anxiety attack of this particular morning is nothing short of banal. There are many aspects of my current artistic business venture that I absolutely love, and which have greatly improved my depression and anxiety in some areas; unfortunately, there are also a few components that cost me dearly in the currency of mental status. Like double edged swords, the details of developing a small business carry heavy pros and cons for me.

The freedom

For someone with intense generalized anxiety and a penchant for indecision, the freedom to choose my own adventure each day is sometimes unsurmountable.

While I had plenty of stress and uncertainty in my last position, I always had the reassurance that I was doing the right thing each day simply by showing my face at the laboratory somewhere around 9am. There was a set plan each day to rise early, scramble to look acceptable, and get myself in the office door. After that, my job was largely determined by the needs of my colleagues based upon their daily research happenings. No one was ever supervising me to assign daily tasks or check up on my work; however, if I was around to answer questions and fix problems as they emerged, I was largely doing my job. I was unfulfilled and dissatisfied with my job, but I usually felt as if I was doing the right thing in that position.

These days, I have no daily schedule to lean on. There’s no sense of what I “should be doing,” unless it is working on one of my online contracting positions which are conveniently assigned due dates. The work that I consider each day for Timestamp Renegade is not so straight forward. There’s no guidance for when I should be completing a certain piece of furniture, updating the website, creating new original prints, hitting the streets to network, or writing a new blog post. There are so many tasks to be accomplished and so little time to even sit down and prioritize my schedule that my brain is overwhelmed on a near-constant basis. Further, not only are my daily activities wildly dynamic, but the entire direction of the business is still in the early stages of infancy. It’s nearly impossible to assign importance to my assorted jobs when it’s perfectly unclear which of my crafts is the most valuable at this stage.

I have endless freedom to plan each day uniquely and without spatiotemporal obligation, but am plagued by doubts with any route I choose. Without guidance during this highly-exploratory business venture development, it’s vastly difficult to feel confident with my daily workload. These many layers of uncertainty amount to a spiraling mess of competing activities in my brain, each shouting out for immediate attention and flooding my internal monologue with battling calls for action.

The many hats

When there is only one employee and a dog directing an entire universe of business activities, you’re probably going to be the one to get mad hat head. Logic warned me, but it turns out that running a one-person business is fucking hard.

What am I good at? Making shit! What am I bad at? Everything else! Unfortunately, trying to captain this little ship on my own includes tackling a lot of jobs that I absolutely do not want. Instead of getting to be a free-spirited and wonderfully inspired artist all day, I am largely a disgruntled and confused student, strapped in front of a computer screen all the time. Rather than a confident business woman, I feel more akin to a misguided college student in their first unpaid internship, minus the helpful mentor. My head is constantly spinning as I attempt to learn the basic ins and outs of managing a social media presence, effective advertising, pricing, website development, networking, distribution, and book keeping.

Even the simplest, and most centrally-necessary, of these jobs is a staggering obstacle for me; I’m being entirely honest when I say that social media is one of my biggest fears in life. For years I refused to manage my own personal profiles because I felt such extreme anxiety drawing attention to myself to a massive crowd. To this day, I’m not inclined to make friendly posts updating an invisible audience about my projects. I feel as if it’s presumptuous to think anyone even cares. I’m not programmed to develop a “consistent brand,” and I have no educated plan about marketing my wares or advertising my business. I have no clue what the characteristics of an effective website are, or how to track traffic metrics to optimize for SEO. In person, I have similar setbacks. As a textbook introvert, I’ve never perfected my self-promotion; I have no elevator speech or sales pitch, and I’m not comfortable with bragging about my abilities. I struggle to approach strangers, and have yet to pester local businesses that I would love to work with.

As I say with great forthcoming enthusiasm, I have no idea what I’m doing here. I want to create, and I’m doing my best to navigate the other 15 jobs that come along with making DIY art. My mind struggles to switch between all of these unfamiliar tasks over the course of a day, and to comprehend the skills that will lead to success in each one. I spend a great deal of time trying to educate myself on fields that I do not naturally excel in, and while the experiential knowledge is slowly seeping in and taking hold, I still can’t help but feel a bit like Lucy and her chocolates as I battle crushing self-doubt.

The self-management

Want to challenge your work ethic? Work alone from home.

It is difficult enough to focus without the direction of an authority figure, let alone in a place of comfort and recreation. If you were left alone each day to manage your own work, surrounded by everything you love the most, how would you fare? What measures would be necessary to keep yourself accountable? Many people have said that they do not work effectively from their house because there are too many enticing distractions. I can relate, at least in one regard.

Luckily for me, one of my largest anxiety outlets is working. I love every moment that I’m actively engaged in something, because it eliminates the possibility for too much rumination, which often leads to over-thinking and mental distress. As such, there’s no limit to the amount of work I will do each day. Until some force (my dog or boyfriend) literally steps in to stop me, I’m going to be on task. I won’t even remember to brush my teeth, change my underwear, eat or drink all day if I’m on a hot streak. The real problem I struggle with is forcing my brain to work as efficiently as possible on arduous tasks that are unrelated to my business goals.

As I’ve discussed before, I have a few online sources of income which serve to pay my monthly bills as I work to make my artistic venture profitable. The only issue is, my levels of passion and commitment for these money-making tasks are incomparable to how I feel about Timestamp. On a daily basis, I have to fight every urge in my body to visit my creativity cave in the basement, and instead sit my ass down in front of a computer to write and edit hundreds of HVAC articles, for instance. Do you know how hard it is to edit 160 articles about heating and cooling systems each week? Fucking miserable. Especially when your brain has those other 15 jobs to do.

I am ubiquitously lucky that I am incessantly on the lookout for things to keep me busy, but it is difficult to manage my time in the most efficient way possible with such a variety of work to be done. Switching back and forth between contracted jobs and Timestamp, for instance, is a huge waste of time and mental energy. It is ferociously difficult to exist as both a mind-numbed worker bee and a fervent artist in one day, and this is where trouble begins. Unfortunately, I find that often these extended periods of un-inspiring work significantly cripple my efficiency for the rest of the day. I find myself in a confusing headspace, where nothing is formulating organically. I feel imbalanced and riddled with panicky energy, and find myself wasting time around the house by making unnecessary cups of tea or simply staring off.

There has to be a daily strategy to scheduling my boring online work alongside Timestamp activities, or else I will become overly-anxious, stagnant in my work, and fail at accomplishing either job for the day. That’s why a typical morning for me starts off with 2-6 hours of tedious writing and editing. When I begin to go cross-eyed, my butt aches, and another cup of coffee isn’t improving my editing speed, it’s time to transition into another task instead of spinning my wheels. I have to give myself permission to move away from the torturous task, and refocus my attention on something I care about. It certainly sounds easy, but for someone with such a hard-working identity and immense self-guilt, it took a while to get to this realization. You know what I’ve accepted? Sometimes it is necessary to take a real break in order to get back on task. Loading up the dog, driving to the park, and hiking for an hour or two is the most effective way I’ve found to reset the anxiety button. Keeps my business partner happy, too.

The feedback

Or lack thereof, is terrifying.

Working in an office, you’re most likely part of some larger team or have some semblance of supervision to your work. There are clear measures to indicate the quality of your work, whether that’s via client relations, manager feedback, or statistics. Working from home in my basement, I don’t really have the resources to tell me if I’m making something worthwhile or foolishly creating garbage. Though I obviously would be crushed to hear the latter, it turns out it’s hard to feel confident in your work when you aren’t getting feedback either way. Surprisingly, searching for comments has proven to be more difficult than the internet always lead me to believe.

Thanks to my past ten years of purposely dodging internet culture, apparently I’ve developed a vast overestimation of how readily people share their (typically) unwanted opinions. Thanks to the millions of stories of random viral explosions and trolling ventures, I apparently assumed that news simply spread quickly through the internet world and there was no shortage of feedback to be gathered. Unfortunately, in this stage of Timestamp infancy, this has not been the case. With no prior experience in online marketing or branding, I have been fighting to gather followers on social media little by little. This has been a huge exercise in anxiety management from the get-go, and continues to try my degree of mindfulness each day when I post my creations to the world and only hear crickets in the background. I readily accept this over the possibility of ruthless trolling, but for an insecure worrier like me, it gives the immediate impression that my work isn’t very good. Perhaps it’s bad and nobody wants to speak up, or maybe it’s even simpler than that; my work is cliché and no one cares.

I recognize that the internet isn’t a reliable source for review, especially when no one has heard of your brand, and I crave person-to-person critique. However, that has proven to be difficult in this stage as well. Sure, I can ask my partner’s opinion when he gets home from work late at night, but I can’t help but feel as though he blindly cheerleads me through every step. Of course, I can shoot off photos to my friends and family, but I assume they mince words when they aren’t particularly blown away. With these select audiences, I also have to wonder about their relative interests in my particular tastes and knowledge of my specialized pieces.

I’d like to think that I’m designing beautiful and unique pieces and I simply haven’t found a way to reach my target audience yet, but my brain would rather support the belief that I haven’t been immediately overwhelmed by commentary because my work doesn’t even illicit enough interest to earn a blue thumbs up.

The failure

Certainly “to be continued,” this area is particularly devastating for perfectionists who look for any excuse to hate themselves.

It’s clear that everyone will inevitably experience failures in life, no matter what path they take… but my brain seems to think that I am unique, and incapable of enduring even the slightest misstep. It anticipates failure with the same weight and urgency as the apocalypse. What if I make a piece that no one wants to purchase? Are my social media posts losing fans because I look desperate and hokey? What will happen if this business never picks up and I have to go back to working an office job? The anticipation of all these perceived failures brings such immense shame and embarrassment before even becoming reality, that I’m always halfway to throwing in the towel to end my own suffering.

Thank god, I have an optimistic boyfriend. The only thing that stops me from fleeing towards higher ground when I’m feeling particularly doomed is my partner, who has a way of calming me down and bringing me back up. Between his encouragement and a whole series of self-help podcasts, I’m trying my best to accept the fact that businesses are going to be rocky in the beginning. I am going to make mistakes and I might fall on my face, but the true measure of my worth is how I learn to adapt for the future. My failures will only remain points of contrition if I don’t accept the lessons they teach and continually learn how to be better at everything I do. They are an opportunity for growth, if you choose to let the water roll off your back and interpret them as such.

Maybe this whole venture is poorly planned (likely) and doomed from the start (less likely), or maybe it will blossom into the lifelong design career that I’ve always wanted. Either way, I’ll never know unless I get out of my own way and give it my all. All I can do is remind myself that I would rather break my back to fail at something I truly care about than casually stroll in a heartless hamster wheel for the rest of my life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Anxiety is likely my biggest influencer in life, and undoubtedly my most significant hindrance to success in nearly every realm. Though it feels like it might actually kill me at times, being uncomfortable and challenging my angst is the only way to create the life I want to live. This small business venture might crash and burn within the year, but at least I’ll have stepped out of safe little box that my inner-doubts flock towards in order to pursue something better. I’m excited to see where my hard work and appetite lead me, if the mental anguish of uncertainty doesn’t kill me first.

Up next, when I can calm down enough to make the time for my blogging hat - my tools for managing mindfulness.

#workfromhome #mentalhealth #mindfullness #smallbusiness #anxietyinsmallbusiness #stressinsmallbusiness #stressworkingfromhome #anxietyworkingfromhome #anxietynewbusiness #mentalhealthsmallbusiness #smallbusinessfailures #selfmanagementandanxiety #workingfromhome #startingabusiness #overcomingfearoffaillure #learningtorunsmallbusiness #careerchange #anxietycareerchange