The overachiever trap

Jul 23, 2022

The gift that fate bestows on you has already been marked with a secret price.

My boyfriend and I are both on summer vacation recently, but our situation is completely opposite.

Although he slept for half of the day, he could pick up the computer to write code when he woke up, and he could switch seamlessly between swiping leetcode to watch tutorials and watching the anchor and playing games. And I have no plans and nothing to do, and anxiety consumes most of my energy, and it interacts with the inability to concentrate on anything, creating a cycle of internal friction .

Seeing him write code, I fell into a new round of anxiety, and felt that he "rolled" me, but he defended that writing code was no different from watching a drama in his opinion, it was just a way to kill time.

He and I were typical two types of students in middle school.

He is the poor student who is holding back in the eyes of the teacher, and I am the top student who everyone loves. What determines our test-taking level is our ability to focus. I can quickly enter a state of flow in all aspects of learning (listening, writing, reviewing, exams), and I can hardly imagine what it is like to study without concentration, because the teachers are good enough, and completing those tasks step by step is enough to guarantee my grades ; But he never listens to classes, even exams require an hour of warm-up time, and from time to time the lyrics will circulate in his mind to influence his thoughts.

Maybe fate is fair , once we get out of the test-oriented education system, our roles are reversed. Getting admitted to 985 brought me more trouble and loss. Although he only went to the ordinary one, and he did not score 90 in the TOEFL four times in English, but now he has also received a postgraduate offer in the computer field of the top 100 universities in qs (we don't care about the qs ranking, just in the language use it as a quantitative standard in the environment). What plays a key role in this is our attitude towards learning. I regard learning as a painful process that requires extreme concentration, and often turn over textbooks out of test-taking needs; and he is used to being a poor student, and regards learning as one of the objects of the game, and learning can become his living state. In the future path of life, it is not how smart we can go that determines how far we can go. On the contrary, self-learning ability and perseverance account for a larger proportion.

"My anxiety right now is unique to top students, because top students are prone to a crisis of meaning ," he said.

I have long followed the rule of meaning first, but before I know it, this inertia has disappeared, which is dangerous for me to follow it. Regarding the issue of meaning, I have written several articles since the year before last, initially expressing confusion on Douban Film Review, and then posting two public accounts, "I seem to have lost the sense of meaning in life" and "Life isn't elsewhere." . I try to find solutions to the crisis of meaning, to create, to live, to love, but as long as the new order is not constructed, I am in a state of suspension.

Therefore , I summarize the top student trap as being driven forward by the inertia of meaning first. Once the meaning system collapses for various reasons, behavior and value standards cannot be coherent, and it will fall into a complete collapse and cannot extricate itself. As for where the meaning comes from, it is first necessary to distinguish the top students from ordinary quizzers. Although external standards and others' evaluations affect their view of meaning to a certain extent, they internalize and revise many standards to develop own value system. Specifically, the problem-solvers may be anxious if they don’t do the test for a moment, but the point of anxiety of the top students may not be in learning, but in other aspects of self-improvement, but they do feel very guilty if they don’t do meaningful things for a moment. .

I don't know if my summary is suspicious, at least it is applicable to me.

Stopping reading and the pain it brings serves as an example of how I fell into the overachiever trap.

For me as a high school student, reading is not only an escape from real life, but I also enjoy the flow of reading fictional works. At that time, I believed that "everything is inferior, only reading is the best"; Mirror, I think reading is the most meaningful thing. It can be said that focus and meaning are linked. In the early years, I would always hit the wall in a frenzy because of the interruption of my homework. But after entering the university, due to pressure from various aspects, that state of mind has long since disappeared. Even if I have a lot of time like this holiday, I can't read books. Originally watching movies was my last focus, but now as long as there is no ddl push, it's hard for me to concentrate on anything.

At one point I suspected that the loss of interest in everything, the inability to focus, and the lack of mobility were signs of depression, and I didn't know why. Could it be that this is some kind of family curse that I went down the path of my dad?

Not being able to focus on what I thought was meaningful left me self-hatred and miserable.

My mental state is no better than spring. I no longer cry sometimes all day like when I was locked at home, my mood is very stable. But when I can't focus on a small thing, I know there's a big problem. Google says it's called anhedonia. It's pointless to go to a free online depression diagnosis, because I can't be willing to take medicine, and I don't have the money to seek psychological counseling, but I don't have enough strength to save myself. This also led me to rely too much on my boyfriend some time ago and fall into anxious attachment. I was paranoid that the independent life I started at nyc would pull me out of this situation, but I can't tell if it would overwhelm me.

I wanted to blame this anxiety on the turbulent and uncontrollable situation, but recently life has become calm and stable, which is probably my own problem. I worry about things that haven't happened yet, but I don't even have a good time right now.

At the end of the article, you always have to come up with a solution to the problem.

To rule out my boyfriend's suggestion of "removing meaning" first was as offensive to me as saying "God is dead" to a Catholic . He doesn't have a concentration problem because he doesn't need to focus on doing things. But I'm used to plan things ahead step by step like Sheldon from TBBT, and I don't like unplanned things, or plans with strong fluidity. This can also explain my anxiety about waiting. Even the interval between ordering and waiting for the delivery person to come to the door is very short. disturbed.

Since meaning is a subjective and changeable concept, getting out of the cycle of internal friction starts with redefining meaning , which I have been trying to do. I think it's more important to reconcile with the moment when nothing meaningful is being done . Excessive pursuit of meaning can also create a sense of emptiness, and striving to give meaning to everything that is being done can develop into obsession.

The above is only an ideal situation. As an honor student, I still want to say that all this is too difficult. I couldn't control my growing anxiety , which seriously affected my normal thinking; I knew what I needed to do in order to achieve my goals, but there was uncertainty ahead that I didn't have the courage to face (the goal here is running , there are only two paths in front of me: transcoding and finding a full-award doctor, both of which are beyond my comfort zone, and I can’t make up my mind to start from scratch).