The Pressure Cooker Syndrome by Steon Carvalho

I remember during my school days, one of the favorite questions my relatives used to ask was “When is your exam and how much did you score in the previous?”. But after that, it would be followed with a comparison remark of how my siblings scored more or I outperformed them. All these were just meant to be harmless questions but an invisible sculptor was shaping my thoughts.

The urge to do better, be the best was born. That is the earliest incident I remember when I used to feel the pressure to excel. In school, I was not someone who had lots of friends. Me excelling in academics and sports was the only way I could create an identity for myself. The sole motivation behind excelling in things was to create an identity for me. Till the point, I did not achieve anything I was an invisible ghost. I would practice sports for hours so that I could get better at it, although I did enjoy it, the specific goal was to improve myself.

Recently I was involved in a project where my team members were more experienced than me and they knew their way around. This put a lot of pressure on me since I also wanted to do well. Pressure is a good thing till a point it fuels you and does not consume you. I keep having panicking moments because of the extra pressure that I feel. Recovering from it can take 2-3 hrs. Finding myself in situations when I am not able to produce results as per the expectation set for myself or where I have too many tasks at hand or when people around me are performing better than me, can cause a strong emotional reaction. It is not just painful but paralyzing. It can take hours to get back on my feet. This causes a lot of delays and takes away my personal time.

Me panicking over things makes me worry about my future. I see that my mom is exactly like this. I feel that maybe my inability to handle pressure is a hereditary factor. Maybe I am one of those people whose natural ability to handle overwhelming emotions is poor. My failure to handle pressure makes me a little worried about the future. I might have to deal with this for my entire life. In the future, I will have more responsibilities than now. I am ambitious but I feel that if I am regularly finding myself in overwhelming situations then there is no point pursuing ambition. Rather I would want to keep doing mundane and simple things, rather than do things that cause me to lose my sanity. I lose out on good moments in day-today-day life because of it.

The easier way out is to not take up challenging things which I am tempted to do. Every time I keep promising myself this is the last time I am doing something like this. But then when I look back and compare myself today to myself two years ago I am realizing that tremendous growth has happened because I set unrealistic expectations. Maybe it’s not that bad at all. I just need some self-awareness when things start to go south. I feel that I worry too much about random things. Although things seem manageable it is the curse of an overthinking mind to panic. I am worrying too much about the future. I need to focus on the task at hand. I remember a couple of years back, the thought of giving a presentation itself would trigger mental chaos 5-6 days before the actual event. But then today it is not the case. This lessens my worries that my ability to handle pressure will one day improve. I do want to keep challenging myself. I do want to keep surrounding myself with individuals better than me. I remember when I used to travel by train to college, sometimes it would be too crowded and I would get crushed from all sides. I used to close my eyes, hold on to the handle firmly, and starting counting. And finally, at one station everyone would get down and the rest of the journey would be breezy. I am quite hopeful that very soon am I am approaching that station.