At the airport

France, lunch time

I didn't sleep very much last night. It is almost always like this when I know that the next day I have to travel. I love traveling, I love airports, planes and trains, but I get incredibly stressed when I know that I have to be in a certain place at certain time. This is because I have the strong tendency to be late. Basically, to be on time, at night I don't sleep since I stress about not waking up, or be late and missing the plane/train or both. The result is that I get to the airport or the train station very very much in advance than my flight or train. Like today.

I stress a lot about silly things. Things that there is no way I can control and plus, considering my active imagination, I worry about things that may happen in the future, but that probably have only a 0.1% probability of happening.

The other day for example. I woke up with a rash on both my legs and on one arm. I had these red spots everywhere. Of course, I panicked. Of course, I imagined the worst. Of course, while I was biking to the Uni, after I called the doctor for an appointment, I was already thinking of having some weird rare disease that it would make me dying in the next months.

I know, it is sick. Especially, since I spent almost 2 hours totally worried about things that at the end of course didn't happen. What happened was that I had an allergic reaction to something, probably to a pre-chopped coconut that I ate the evening before (and it tasted weirdly) and everything came back to normality within that day.

But of course, in my head, I figured myself already dead. I thought to have some auto-immune deadly disease and that could explain the red spots, the other rash on one of my leg, the fact that lately I feel really tired. Nothing like this in reality. The red spots were allergic, the other rash started I have no idea how and it seems not going away because of stress (I think doctors love to say that something is due to stress when they have no idea what the real cause could be) and being tired is simply due to the fact that in the last month I didn't sleep enough and I worried a lot. How simple is this?

The thing is, I was not like this. But things were so difficult and so stressful during my PhD that I became extremely pessimistic and a control freak. I now try to control as much as I can to avoid that something bad could happen. Of course in the meantime I get incredibly stressed, since there are many more things that I can't control or predict than the ones I can control or predict. Rationally I know all this is ridiculous, practically, I can't stop it.

And after talking about this with people who had a similar troublesome experience with their PhDs, I see that it is really difficult to get ride of the stress, the pressure and the insecurity linked to the PhD time. Obviously, the fact that after the PhD it doesn't get any easier to find a job, doesn't really help.....

I know it is worthed what I am doing as a job, because it is not only a job, but a passion and I love it....but sometimes I wonder how much it costs me in terms of health and simpler happiness.