Are you Obsessed?!?!?!????!!!?????!!?

Are you Obsessed!?!?!!??!!??

Part of solving a problem is recognizing you have one in the first place.

My problem is obsession.

I can get obsessed with anything. Exercising, cleaning the house, organizing, the kid's homework- the list goes on and on. I can overwork myself straight into bed for three days nursing a bad back, wrist or tension headache.

Don’t believe me? Talk to my staff or family.

I was helping my son study for a test one time. It was not enough for me to know that he knew the answers to the study questions…no we had to Google the areas he was not confident in to get more information. He was into it for about an hour – after that he kept saying ‘I got this mom’. Yes he made an A on the test but do you think he ever asked me to help him study again?

My obsessive personality benefited me in school. We didn’t have the World Wide Web like we do now (thank God or my family would have had to commit me) but I loved the library. I would spend hours there researching whatever we were studying. When it was time for the test I was almost sick of the material....but I knew it cold.


However there is a line….and I need to learn to not cross it.


So now I have built in limits. Time is the number one limit. One hour. That is it. I write for one hour, clean for one hour, exercise for one hour then take a break. I can go back to whatever task I was doing but I must take a break.

Yes at work I do go longer than one hour….but not more than two. I take a break every day at 10am to eat a snack and take a breather. Just for 10 minutes but it is amazing how ingesting some calories and water can clear my head and give me the strength to go two hours more.

I will be honest -sometimes I don’t want to take a break at 10am.

Sometimes my staff has to get on me a little bit. Sometimes they have to get onto me a lot. Sometimes I am not even hungry. Sometimes it is irritating – I am in a groove I don’t want to stop.

Then I realize I am not in a groove – I am obsessing. Part of realizing you have a problem is recognizing it. Well I have to go now – I have been writing for an hour – time to take a break.