A second job to cure my anxiety?

I’ve been in full time employment on and off since forever. I’ve taken some freelance periods here and there, but since January of 2019 I’ve been back in full-time employment and honestly it’s kind of nice to have fixed holidays, not having to worry about health insurance, actually getting money back from the tax office instead of having to make huge payments to them and the list continues. Being self employed you can certainly generate a lot more income, but unless you already have a thriving infrastructure built up, most people past their early twenties will find it hard to be able to dedicate the time.

NOTE: While this series is about my mental health and how I am trying to deal with my anxiety issues. NOTHING in here should be taken as advice or copied. If you struggle with anxiety, or with your mental health in general, go talk to a professional!

I work Monday to Friday and my day is pretty full between the hours of 6 AM & 6 PM. Of course I don’t work 12 hours straight, during that I am working, going to the gym and also have a lunch break, meaning that this 12 hour window really comes down to about 8.5 hours on average of actually being available at work. As I am working from home, it all kind of blurs together, but I kind of like that, as I really do not ever want to go back to working in an office again, which might sound contradictory to what I am going to talk about, but being in an office just makes things worse for me. Then there’s my wife who works 6 to 9 hour shifts anywhere from 6 AM to 11 PM. When she finishes anywhere past 9 PM I tend to pick her up, as she doesn’t like walking home alone when it’s dark. It’s a very safe place where we live, but I do understand it. Even I keep turning my head when I am walking on my own once it’s dark. Point is, my day is relatively full, especially when you also take my hobbies into account, like actually playing games, creating the odd piece of content on my blog or on YouTube and the occasional stream. Hobbies are of course a chunk of time I am responsible for myself, but I need an outlet of some sorts, I think most people do. People with children have it infinitely more difficult, which I can’t even comprehend.

In my case though, I found that on the weekends, where I am usually not doing too much, that my anxiety gets exponentially worse, especially when I am on my own, without anything to focus on. It’s a very weird feeling too, as I cannot get myself to do anything at that point in time. I won’t have the drive to do something as simple as bingeing Netflix or Disney+ without getting distracted by something else, which I also won’t be able to focus on. Even playing video games becomes impossible, as my brain will convince me that it won’t help and possibly make things worse. Which is not true, but at that moment I won’t be able to logically argue against that.

Second job? Anxiety? How?

What’s that all got to do with a second job? In short, being excited about something. I am a very result driven person, when I can’t see results on the horizon, it’s very difficult for me to overcome whatever type of BS anxiety I am dealing with. When I found out though, which is genuinely something I didn’t know, that in Germany, taking on a so-called “minijob”, which limits your income to 450 € for that job, 520 € from October onwards, is tax free and that’s something I can get my mind to focus on. I am greedy sure and the monetary incentive is the aforementioned result on the horizon, which of course is the driving factor, but also the time investment for it that leads to that result and it being something that leads to an actual measurable result, which again is the money. Full circle. Do I need the money, not really, but considering that no-one really knows what kind of back payments we will have to expect in the coming year, thanks to the skyrocketing gas prices, having extra disposable cash cannot hurt.

For all I know I will suffer from burnout in about three months time, I hope not, but I am also not claiming that I am making a sensible decision here. I don’t actually believe that this will “cure” my anxiety issues, but at least from where I am standing and taking my previous experiences into account, this should at least help. I should also mention that I am not doing anything related to anything else I am currently doing. No paid search consulting, no gaming, no content creation, nope- I am going manual labour on this one, something that I haven’t done since I was 21, working as a christmas temp at the Marks & Spencer Pantheon Store on Oxford Street, which was a very long time ago at this point. This time it’s at a small café doing all sorts of odd jobs, which also aligns more with my own interests; mainly coffee. It’s just on weekends however, I do have a full-time job Monday’s to Friday’s after all, but it should keep my brain away from whatever dumb stuff it’s cooking up when I am idle.

Something else that conveniently goes along with this, is that I want to keep track of how I am doing mentally. Am I doing better, worse, or is there any change at all? I have a blog and I am not utilising it nearly enough and that is something I can chronicle (t)here more regularly.

My first day is 1.5 weeks from now, until then I want to get some YouTube content sorted out and schedule things a little bit better for myself as well, so that I can be more productive when I need to be, but also to manage my idle periods better. Rather than having my brain race straight towards anxiety, I want to be able to actually relax and wind down and a tighter schedule might help on that front as well. It’s all a work in progress for sure and simply being able to take a few steps here and there into the direction of feeling overall less anxious, when there’s literally nothing to be anxious about in the first place, is truly exciting. Getting started on this feels nice, here’s hoping to keep that thought going for the next few weeks, months and years to come. I really do hope so, because the mental strain is just too taxing.