So to my recollection, I have always had this problem however this year it has only gotten worse.
It probably came to light last summer when I was doing my internship. It was alright for the first 2 months as everything was new to me however the tasks started getting repetitive and less challenging so I started feeling very useless. I would constantly ask my manager and others around me for other work but they wouldn't give me anything else (understandably I was an intern) but I couldn't help taking it all so personally. Anyways, I got through the other 3 months with dread and just feeling stupid and demotivated, and by the end of summer I felt like a waste of space, going into my final year of university with the worst mental health. The thing was I was commuting 5 days a week to this internship for 3 hours (to and from), I'd wake up at 5am in the morning to go to the gym and straight after go to the office and only reach home by around 7pm. It was exhausting so by the time I got home I had 0 energy to do anything else for myself that would make me feel 'challenged' in any way. It was probably the gym that helped me get through each week. So once that summer internship was over I thought that was the end of those horrible feelings.
I started my final year of university and within the first 2 weeks we had to choose our thesis topic. Me worried that I would get bored, I opt for a finance topic (which is not something I have a lot of knowledge on), so I knew it would be a challenge and wanted to do something rewarding to make me feel better after a summer of feeling like a failure. The first few weeks of research into the field were okay but then I started feeling very overwhelmed with the amount of information in articles and trying to make sense of them. Long story short it took me 3 months to find my research question. 3 months of waking up with stress and crying of frustration. All because I wanted to choose something challenging to feed my ego with the accomplishment that I would feel once I get through this. Don't get me wrong, finance is definitely a field that I find interesting and want to build my knowledge on but its a lot of absorb in a short period of time and do proper analysis work on, on top of final university assignments and exams. Anyways, I'm getting through it now, very slowly and still have my panic attacks when I cant make sense of things but I have started writing it the last few days so it feels like I'm finally getting somewhere.
My problem is I feel a lot of times in life I'm either in situations that are 'boring' and provide 0 feeling of accomplishment/ challenge i.e. my summer internship or when some uni assignments seem so easy that I find it really hard to have the motivation to do them because there is no accomplishment feeling of completing it. Then other times I purposely put myself in challenging situations such as my thesis topic and then I can barely cope with the amount of stress and feel very depressed and suicidal about life. I'm coming near the end of my uni experience and I worry about my future job and life. Because its not like I will constantly be doing different tasks or stimulating tasks. Nor can i put myself under really stressful situations again due to taking on a challenge that is probably too over my head. I am going to go into finance for starters because its the only business-related field that I have found to still provide 'challenging work'. I will probably try do additional courses after work also to try keep me feeling accomplished. But I'm not sure if my obsession with feeling accomplished is normal? I don't do it for anyone, in fact I do it for myself otherwise I feel like I have no purpose. Any advice or opinions would be greatly appreciated!
It probably came to light last summer when I was doing my internship. It was alright for the first 2 months as everything was new to me however the tasks started getting repetitive and less challenging so I started feeling very useless. I would constantly ask my manager and others around me for other work but they wouldn't give me anything else (understandably I was an intern) but I couldn't help taking it all so personally. Anyways, I got through the other 3 months with dread and just feeling stupid and demotivated, and by the end of summer I felt like a waste of space, going into my final year of university with the worst mental health. The thing was I was commuting 5 days a week to this internship for 3 hours (to and from), I'd wake up at 5am in the morning to go to the gym and straight after go to the office and only reach home by around 7pm. It was exhausting so by the time I got home I had 0 energy to do anything else for myself that would make me feel 'challenged' in any way. It was probably the gym that helped me get through each week. So once that summer internship was over I thought that was the end of those horrible feelings.
I started my final year of university and within the first 2 weeks we had to choose our thesis topic. Me worried that I would get bored, I opt for a finance topic (which is not something I have a lot of knowledge on), so I knew it would be a challenge and wanted to do something rewarding to make me feel better after a summer of feeling like a failure. The first few weeks of research into the field were okay but then I started feeling very overwhelmed with the amount of information in articles and trying to make sense of them. Long story short it took me 3 months to find my research question. 3 months of waking up with stress and crying of frustration. All because I wanted to choose something challenging to feed my ego with the accomplishment that I would feel once I get through this. Don't get me wrong, finance is definitely a field that I find interesting and want to build my knowledge on but its a lot of absorb in a short period of time and do proper analysis work on, on top of final university assignments and exams. Anyways, I'm getting through it now, very slowly and still have my panic attacks when I cant make sense of things but I have started writing it the last few days so it feels like I'm finally getting somewhere.
My problem is I feel a lot of times in life I'm either in situations that are 'boring' and provide 0 feeling of accomplishment/ challenge i.e. my summer internship or when some uni assignments seem so easy that I find it really hard to have the motivation to do them because there is no accomplishment feeling of completing it. Then other times I purposely put myself in challenging situations such as my thesis topic and then I can barely cope with the amount of stress and feel very depressed and suicidal about life. I'm coming near the end of my uni experience and I worry about my future job and life. Because its not like I will constantly be doing different tasks or stimulating tasks. Nor can i put myself under really stressful situations again due to taking on a challenge that is probably too over my head. I am going to go into finance for starters because its the only business-related field that I have found to still provide 'challenging work'. I will probably try do additional courses after work also to try keep me feeling accomplished. But I'm not sure if my obsession with feeling accomplished is normal? I don't do it for anyone, in fact I do it for myself otherwise I feel like I have no purpose. Any advice or opinions would be greatly appreciated!
