Losing weight when you’re stressed out and not eating well is pretty normal, but it’s always a good idea to get a checkup and screen for stuff once a year. I had pretty severe anxiety for years (affecting what I ate, touched, how often I felt OK leaving the house) and I can’t tell you how many health scares for things that were nothing. Even things that had the potential to be extremely scary (needing biopsies) wound up being nothing.

What finally worked for me was getting on the right medication (for me that was an SNRI instead of an SSRI); it wasn’t like it cured me overnight, but it did gradually make it so that the coping mechanisms people recommend actually started doing something for me. So if that’s something you’re open to I really highly recommend it, or trying a new medication/class of medication if it was unsuccessful for you before.

And therapy was also a game changer for me! Don’t be afraid to switch therapists if you just don’t click with them, especially as someone with anxiety you should have someone you feel comfortable opening up to.

If something is seriously wrong, then knowing what it is will give you and your doctor the best chance to fix it. And if it's something simple, all the better. You're under stress and struggles, that's an obvious reason for weight loss. (Or weight gain in some other people like me who stress-eat.) On the day, remember not to eat if you're supposed to be fasting, but drink enough water to be well hydrated, so they can fill the vials they need for the tests. In the meantime, don't go looking online. Everything's cancer on the internet.

There is no scenario where delaying treatment improves outcomes. If you know you can at least intervene

I'd rather know if something was physically wrong than be stuck not knowing. As of now, you don't know if it's something physical or just your stupid anxiety monster wreaking havoc. That said, don't be surprised when your labs aren't perfect. Persistent stress and not eating well throws off several of the usual blood tests. And tell your doc you don't want to see the results before they review them and tell you what they see. Info with no context is the worst.

When it is confirmed, biiiig congrats!

How did it go?

Good managers are rare and even rarer is a good manager that meshes with you. I had a great manager once, many people hated him. If you did something stupid he would directly say "that was stupid". But if you were struggling with something he would be next to you also struggling. There were several times he was next to me on Saturday at 6pm while I was paid overtime and he was exempt, while I was trying to fix something and he was typing notes of what was tried. I should also say the notes had 2 purposes, first we had a reference if something similar occurred later, second he regularly took those notes to his manager and higher to show evidence of the hard work I did. I had other managers who tried to sugar coat everything and would just send you a task and tell you to do it.

Out of curiosity, the meeting should of happened, was it good or bad news?

Good shit, and good luck.

Most of this isn't going to help you right now, but this may be an important moment for something in the near future.

Earlier in my career (also IT) I had a couple very similar employment scares. My employer at the time was famous for firing people at the drop of a hat. Worse, while some firings were justified, many were bullshit reasons that no one should be fired for. I remember specifically driving to work one day in during a declared snow emergency (state wide system telling you you should not drive unless someone needs to go to a hospital or other high emergency) which my employer would not honor. It was dangerous driving, and my employer was an extreme stickler for punctuality. If you were 2 minutes late after 7am, you'd get a sit down from your manager by lunch. Here I was scared that I was going to lose my job for being less than 5 minutes late while driving in unsafe conditions to work I shouldn't even be driving to because if I didn't I might lose my job for a stupid reason or no reason at all.

It hit me like a lightning bolt in that moment: I could be fired for bad actions on my part or even good actions on my part. I had zero control or influence over being fired. Instead of having any influence over keeping my job, it was a pure arbitrary whim of my employer. Nothing I could do would change the events that were going to occur in the next hour when I pulled into the office and went inside to my desk. If they were going to fire me, they'd already decided and I'd be gone. If they weren't, it was just going to be a normal day. I was panicking like there was something I could do, when indeed there was nothing to be done.

I slowed the car down to safer driving speeds in that bad weather. I drove in, parked, and walked to my desk like any other day. It turns out that lots of people were out or late that day because of the weather. Some of my coworkers even lived significantly closer than I did, but chose the safe path of not coming in. I put myself at risk for a shitty employer because I was terrified what would happen in the immediate days following without an income. I needed to fix that.

The fix is money. If at some point I would be fired and if I had a savings, I would have the breathing room to know I could take care of next months bills and buy time to find a job. At that time outside of retirement savings and paying bills, each pay period would have me be spending nearly every left over cent I had. The next pay period I would do the same. I needed to change that.

I went to war on my expenses. For a three month I lived like a monk. I canceled every subscription except internet and mobile phone. I only ate out once the entire month and that was because it was the birthday celebration for a family member. I bought the cheapest staple groceries (oats, dried beans, bulk rice, potatoes, canned vegetables, and the cheapest cuts of pork and chicken) and cooked everything myself. I didn't drive anywhere I didn't absolutely have to. I read books and got movies from the public library. I watched OTA TV instead of streaming or cable/satellite. I bought virtually nothing. I sold personal belongings I didn't truly need. I did all of this to build a savings. It sucked to live like this for those months, but I had burned into my memory that most recent day of terror I felt driving into work on that snow day in a long line of prior days just like that. I never wanted to feel that. I saved about 1 months worth of slimmed down expenses that would keep the roof over my head and my belly full.

This meager savings was armor against anxiety! When the next event happened where I thought my employer may fire me, I wasn't worried. I wasn't anxious. I was calm knowing that I could handle it and would have an entire month where I could focus on finding something else if I needed to. In the months ahead I would get some raises or bonus and would put that into the savings too. Over the next 2 years I had built up a 6 savings month buffer.

I didn't know it at the time, but this was the turning point for my career. I discovered by accident a path to success. That buffer savings meant I wasn't worried about my job anymore. I wasn't worried about today, which let me start looking at tomorrow. I had the ability to take professional risks. Not all the risks I took paid off, but way more than I expected did and it launched my career to places (and pay) I never would have ever dreamed of. I can talk more about these risks I took if you're interested.

So most of this doesn't help you with where you are in this exact moment except this part:

Nothing I could do would change the events that were going to occur in the next hour when I pulled into the office and went inside to my desk.

There is nothing you can do to change what is ahead for you tomorrow. No amount of worry will influence the events. The die is already cast. If you're going to be fired, you're already fired you just don't know it yet. If you're not, its just going to be another day at the office. Be at peace in this moment, but also commit this anxiety to memory. Perhaps write it down like its a journal entry. Try to capture all of what you're feeling right now in words and put them on a page. This is going to be an artifact you can use later if you ever need to remember what now feels like. This also flattens the anxiety from an enormous amorphous idea of feelings down to something contained on a piece of paper with borders and boundaries. Limits by edges that cannot be crossed. Do all of that, and then decide if you ever want to feel this way again and what you would need to personally sacrifice (in the short term) to not have to (in the long term). Would it be worth it to you to live like a monk for a few months to have the armor of comfort surrounding yourself?

Is this a one off or a common thing or have you not been there long enough to know? Like I had one job where every quarter we had a meeting to go over division success(we made x dollars, we launched x product etc). Then about every 6 months we had a smaller meeting where we went over successes of group success(solved this problem this fast, saved x money by doing y etc) . Then weekly we had a team meeting where we were supposed to have some success(report is written and will be out for review by eod, successfully ran this test and got good results etc).

These were regular and never anything bad but like it could seem bad because on weekly meetings manager would be like "next week there is a mandatory meeting with all of his manager team, please be sure to attend". If you didn't know the cadence of these meetings I could see them causing anxiety. Then again I wasn't a fan of that manager anyways...

Get your resume together, and start applying. Even if it's not layoffs now, they will come eventually. I too am in IT and I too have gone through layoffs. 3 in the last 4 years. Always be applying.

good luck

Good luck

I take CBD oil in such scenarios. It washes the tension away

Meetings without agendas sent ahead of time are the worst. If it’s not a layoff, it’s just dumb. Don’t they want you prepared for the meeting?

Go out and help someone else.

It will get your mind off your problems.

I can define the nature of the topological matrix we are not IN but rather ARE, but I don’t know a damn dinky how to shake a person’s hand right. Do I go in for the hug on the first interview?

modern society sucks for that reason; all of these unnecessary and often arbitrary rules about what is "normal" in society more often than not make absolutely no sense, and you're not to blame for this. it's well known that autistic people struggle with "normal" human interactions for this precise reason.

Just don’t show your genitals, ask to see their genitals

Them's the deal breakers right there.

I'm trying to find my place in the AI-driven world as a writer, and I know I can kick any AI's butt in a thumb-waggling contest, it's just a matter of putting myself out there like that. Thank you.

You've got this! You are already on the right path. Your only job is to listen to the universe and not fight it! And I'm speaking as someone who ALWAYS thinks they should fight the universe and is always wrong about that.