Hi, hope this doesn't come off as too crazy, but I want to see if I am in complete left field here or if anyone else has gone through intense irrational anxiety. When I first started flying, I used to get a bit nervous just before my checkrides as I'm sure most pilots do. Now at an airline, I am approaching upgrade to Captain, and am really suffering from anxiety over everything from simple line checks to sim training. My self confidence drops about a month before sim and I go into the training pretty well convinced that it will be the last ride before I completely lose the plot and I end up selling used cars or something! The 3 days of sim work consist of me doing everything I can to stay calm on my downtime (yoga, meditation, breathing) while my racing mind continuously feeds me crazy thoughts where I envision all sorts of horrible failure scenarios usually ending up with me having to go home and explain to the family how Dad will be doing something different now for a job! The only time I finally calm down is when I actually have my hands on the controls. Visualization of a positive outcome does help somewhat, but only temporarily.
This has been a growing problem for the past 4 years or so, and has progressed from simple sim jitters to the point where I get public-speaking type anxiety at times during simple routine matters--for a while I would get really uncomfortable when making PA's, and then that anxiety suddenly disappeared--only to be replaced by an intense discomfort when having to brief the FA's, similar to what one might feel when faced with a monumental task of public speaking!
Somehow, despite all of this, my flying performance is fine and the "recommend for upgrade" box gets ticked off every 6 months after my rides, so I realize I am becoming my own worst enemy. You would likely never know I was feeling this way if you flew with me. Despite all of the self-help reading, journaling, yoga and other (non-medicinal) attempts to self-correct these frustrating thought patterns, it still seems to come up every 6 months, and is so bad it really makes me wonder if I can tolerate this level of stress for the rest of my career. I intend to get some professional assistance with this so that I can become an effective Captain, but am a bit wary of going outside aviation circles with it right now. I would really like to hear other opinions if anyone else has gone through this and please share how you are dealing with it.