Stress, It’s Going To Kill Me.

Yesterday, I clocked in 12 hours at work. I arrived at 8 in the morning, the first to be in the office and left at 8pm, the last to leave the office. When I got home, I badly wanted to sleep – my whole body was tired but my mind kept working. In my head were the emails that I have to answer or the itineraries that I have to do for the next day. At 2 in the morning, still sleepless, I started crying. Yes, I cried because I couldn’t sleep. At some point in-between my sobs, I managed to finally fall asleep but then my dreams were still about work. I can still remember the last dream that I had, I was at my desk at work trying to log into my PC but I kept typing the wrong password. I woke up in the middle of that dream and I saw my hands typing mid-air on an imaginary keyboard. I sh*t you not! It was already 6am and I couldn’t get back to sleep so I got up, turned off my alarm clock which was set for 0645 (my normal waking hour), took a shower and went to work. I again arrived at 8am this morning – the first to be at work and left at 7pm. I now have a bad headache and my left eye keeps twitching, I need to shut this laptop soon.

The whole point of that rant is to tell you that I am stressed and there’s noone else to blame but myself. I have the choice to go home early, it’s not like my company is making me stay back but because of my perfectionist self – I wanted to pull a 12-hour shift to finish everything as I don’t feel comfortable when I’ve got some pending jobs to do. Seriously now, I need to learn how to de-stress myself, to turn off that work mode. I am not doing all these things to get a promotion or to make people aware that I’m working, it’s just me – the perfectionist me who wants to do it.

I have a notebook at work where I write down all the things that I need to do everyday and it irritates the hell out of me if I have not ticked it all off by the end of the day. I receive about a hundred emails per day from my clients and suppliers and I need to clear it all out before I leave the office because I just feel like my life is going to turn upside down when I’ve got an unread email in my inbox. I have a folder where I keep all the bookings that I’ve done which are not yet finalized and I just can’t fight the urge to keep following up with our suppliers to close that damn sale even if the travel date is not until 7 months from now. I don’t have the patience to deal with incompetent people at work, my blood pressure soars when I encounter such people (which actually gave me a very bad ache on my nape tonight). Lastly, I also don’t have much patience when the person that I’m talking to does not listen to what the f*ck I’m saying which results to him/her not understanding me. This is mainly because I think that time is so precious, every single second counts for me and I don’t want to waste any of it. I want to be in control of my time, I want to be in control of everything. If someone/something is delaying my work, I get jittery plainly because I feel like I cannot control them and I cannot control the result of what I want to do if someone/something is hindering it.

Yes, this is what I feel most of the time when someone is wasting my time.

It’s not only at work, I feel the same outside of work. If a person is walking slowly in front of me, I curse under my breath making sure that that person will hear me and I’ll pretend that I’m actually talking to someone on the phone (I usually have my earphones on) as I walk past them. I don’t want to elaborate on the things that I do outside of work as I’m afraid you’d think that I’m evil. (I’m nice, really I am!) Anyway, the whole point of this is I think I am seriously sick. This can’t be normal what I’m going through. I researched about stress and I came across this:

Obsessive–compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), also called anankastic personality disorder, is a personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of preoccupation with orderliness, perfectionism, mental and interpersonal control and a need for or power over one’s environment, at the expense of flexibility, openness, and efficiency. It causes major suffering and stress, especially in areas of personal relationships. Compulsives may find it hard to relax, always feeling that time is running out for their activities and that more effort is in need to achieve their goals. They may plan their activities down to the minute —a manifestation of the compulsive tendency to keep control over his environment and to dislike unpredictable things as things he can’t control. OCPD occurs in about 1% of the general population. It is seen in 3–10% of psychiatric outpatients.

Yes, I have that. The boyfriend used to tease me about having it and it’s only now that I learned what it actually is. I mean I know what it is but I just figured out now that I probably actually have it. That description right there sounds like my epitaph for when this stress kills me finally. I need something, an intervention of some sort. I need to de-stress myself, I don’t want this to kill me. The question is how? How do I detach myself from all of it? How do I turn my mind off from thinking about work when I’m already out of the office? How do I deal with this obsessive compulsive personality disorder of mine? I’m actually more afraid of going crazy rather than it killing me. I seriously need help.

HELP!