
The Importance of Anxiety - Nowyouknow
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-anxiety-is-the-secret-of-feeling-good/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AeonMagazineEssays+%28Aeon+Magazine+Essays%29
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TeMPOraL
All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling
off? I would be, like, million times happier (and financially stable) if I
didn't feel constant anxiety towards things ranging from existential questions
to work to relationships, anxiety that reduces me to someone who needs to read
HN at work and watch sci-fi shows in huge batches just to stay sane. I'll side
with Kant here, anxiety is a feeling that keeps you from 'having your
capacities under your control'.

I've been struggling with that for over six years now. Big part of the problem
is that anxiety is the very way for your mind to answer the question "is this
right or wrong"? It's hard to think your way out of things if your brain fires
up "it's still wrong!" alarm randomly.

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petercooper
CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you
seem to explain. YMMV.

For the less controllable situational physical "fight or flight" anxiety,
however, I've found low dosage beta blockers work very well. Apparently a lot
of musicians and surgeons use them for similar purposes, but you'd need to
have the mental anxiety sorted out first, I suspect.

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TeMPOraL
> _CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you
> seem to explain. YMMV._

That is CBT with a therapist, or self-applied CBT? I've been meaning to go
through "Feeling Good" book, it seems to be widely regarded as an effective
way to apply CBT to yourself.

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petercooper
First with a therapist but then self-applied. I think I needed an external
"benchmark" to calibrate against and gain some structure from first.

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TeMPOraL
Thanks. I hope I'll find some non-stupidly-expensive CBT therapist at some
point. Did you use any resources for self-applied CBT, or were just basing on
the things you learned on therapy?

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petercooper
The latter. It was more having some mental artillery to use than a
particularly formal process.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for sharing!

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throwaway567894
When I feel bad for a while (a few weeks maybe) I often turn to meditation.
When I do, I invariably notice that there's a weird background process in my
head that ambushes me with things I feel ashamed about on an almost
predictable schedule. I'll be sitting there counting to 10 over and over,
starting over at 1 if I notice I've become interrupted, then "Hey remember
that time you got so drunk at a party that you threw up on your friend's
living room?"

I've started thinking of it as like my consciousness is a circular saw blade
and there's this one bent-sideways tooth, like once a revolution it catches on
something horrible in my past and drags it out and makes me look at it. It
helps a little to recognize it, to be like, "oh yeah, this is the 10-minute
self-shaming, right on schedule." But it doesn't help as much as, you know,
that not happening.

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jobu
It recently occurred to me that humans probably have a baseline level of
anxiety, and this causes us to find things to worry about (no matter how
trivial).

Over the past several years I've had growing issues with anxiety, and I had
found myself fretting about a passing conversation with someone that doesn't
know me and likely will never see again. It wasn't even like the conversation
went that badly, so why was I replaying it and worrying about it? Logically it
made no sense, but it keeps happening over little things like this. The only
way I can explain it is that life has been going well and I haven't had any
significant things to worry about for a while. Now my brain seems to be
working overtime to find hidden dangers.

~~~
aantix
Interesting, I have similar experiences.

If I'm not preoccupied with something creative, then my mind seems to want to
focus on potential problems with my personal life. And I will ruminate until
something potentially dangerous is found..

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crimsonalucard
The article describes how anxiety helped an individual navigate through a
social situation... but who's to say allowing anxiety to control your behavior
is better then having calm rational judgement dictate your actions?

In the past where people would declare formal duels in response to some verbal
insult, anxiety was a relevant response to save your life. But in this day and
age where people have much more to gain and very little to lose when being
assertive and fearless in social situations, anxiety has become an excessive
and prehistoric response that is largely irrelevant to the times and culture
we live in.

Here's an example relevant to most men. Why aren't we talking to that hot
super model at the bar? What do we have to lose? Nothing. What do we have to
gain? Everything. The logic is inescapable but why are we still scared?
Because in the past hitting on a super hot model meant dealing with her alpha
male partner who could kill you in a duel. The emotions we feel are
evolutionary relics from prehistoric times that were designed to keep us safe.
These emotions are now largely irrelevant because murder and combat in our
society is both frowned upon and considered a crime.

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dgreensp
Let's extol the virtues of fear and hate, while we're at it.

Yes, it's normal to get anxious sometime, just as it's normal to get angry
sometimes. Someone who never, _ever_ gets angry could be suspected of bottling
up their feelings (but we can't be sure). Our emotions aren't under direct
voluntary control, so if we find ourselves getting angry, or anxious, or
fearful, we must aim not to freak out, or criticize ourselves for it, or
become anxious about our anger, angry about our anxiety, fearful of our fear,
or any other such downward spiral. Emotions are normal; they are ok.

However, doing what a negative emotion says to do usually doesn't work out as
well as doing something else, in my experience. While we can certainly find
evolutionary justifications for the things we feel compelled to do under the
influence of these emotions, that doesn't mean they are helpful. Fear tells us
to flee, to avoid, to destroy, or to deny. I've read that highly successful
people who seem fearless do feel fear but just aren't as bothered by it. I
think this says the exact opposite of the OP's message, which in this analogy
would be The Importance of Fear: It Tells Us When to Run Away. The hard part
about fear is acknowledging it and not running away. That is called courage.

Similarly, anger. When you are fighting with your wife (or co-founder), they
may say something that you take personally and it hurts your feelings. You are
outraged. You strike back, and a fight breaks out. Ok, that's fine, that's
normal. But one of you, at some point, has to ignore the anger voice that
tells you to defend yourself at all costs, and to attack your enemy's
weaknesses. Yes, your partner has become your enemy, thanks to anger.

Anxious drivers don't drive better than non-anxious drivers. I may have
moments of anxiety when I drive, such as if I notice a car about to merge into
me and I swerve. Perhaps the anxiety plays a physiological role in helping me
respond. However, it takes many seconds for the feeling to subside, during
which time the anxiety is not helping me, it is hurting me. It also seems
naive to identify the _feeling_ of anxiety with the biochemistry of responding
to an urgent situation. We could just as well say anxiety is a psychological
state which is a harmful byproduct of the physiology.

~~~
dgreensp
Another analogy: Anxiety is like dirt, or the clutter in your house. You'll
find bits of dirt on the subway platform. Some people's houses are awash in
clutter. We often seek to get rid of it, but it's not evil. It's not
important, either, in the sense of functional utility. Sure, you can construct
arguments about how it's ultimately necessary -- an Earth without dirt, for
example, sounds rather sterile; does it have no trees? Where does the oxygen
come from? -- but if there is anything unhealthy about your attitude towards
dirt, I don't think emphasizing the importance of dirt in your daily life is
likely to help.

Mainly, we're stuck with it.

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AceJohnny2
For the others in the thread looking for a solution to their distracting
background anxiety, I'll add my datum that regular exercise (in my case,
swimming) has helped immensely. It's something I only picked up well into
adulthood.

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afarrell
The article talks most about moral anxiety because it is targeted toward
philosophy students, but I've been looking for a while for insight into
survival anxiety.

Growing up male, I was always morally anxious about the possibility that I
would harm someone else accidentally or (when I was considering joining the
military) through violence or (when I became sexually active) through
misinterpreted signs of lucid enthusiastic consent. A thing that I've never
fully been able to grapple with is anxiety around the possibility of being
assaulted or having violence done to me and I feel like this makes me fail at
properly empathizing with many of the women I'm friends with. Does anyone know
of anything I could read or watch besides Gavin, Captain Awkward, or MVC? I
feel like I just don't get it and, well, feel anxious about that.

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adwf
I'd replace anxiety with introspection in this article and it sounds a lot
better. I wouldn't necessarily consider anxiety to be a virtue; for many, it's
a crippling affliction.

The examples in the article are really more about an introspective approach to
life. About really considering our actions and the behaviour of the people
around us. Anxiety as a disorder is more about being _too_ introspective,
rather than being introspective in itself.

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grokkable
Evolutionary psychology tells us anxiety is necessary for the survival of the
species. This is obviously the case in social interactions as they can change
our status/value in the social hierarchy which increases or decreases our
chances of survival.

Like jobu said - humanity has a baseline of anxiety.

What about when our anxiety is severely deviant?

Meditation and Eckhart Tolle changed my life. Unfortunately, I still need to
use medication sometimes when I get attacks.

There's so much I'd like to type out about not being the contents of our mind,
Libet and free will, meditation, etc. It's only taken me 20 years to
understand and I always feel like I want to tell everyone since I figured all
of this out two years ago. But you can do it yourself. Buddhism, Tolle,
meditation. Meditation got me to CBT. CBT brought me to Buddhism which brought
me to Tolle.

vis a vis prostoalex's post - Tolle's right.

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flycaliguy
Can somebody do me a favour and help me shake the anxiety I've been feeling
since the Snowden leaks? Has anybody else found themselves stressed out by the
implications of a technological surveillance state being constructed right in
front of us?

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slang800
I find myself stressed out about that, but I don't think it's an irrational
anxiety or one that can be simply shaken off. Rather, it's something that we
have to deal with directly and fix before we can feel safe.

~~~
TeMPOraL
This is the way I feel about energy issues and on-going automation (I love
machines, I hate that people have to slave their lives off to survive, I want
that post-scarcity utopia, but I'm afraid we don't make it through the
transition period, that civilization will collapse).

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thewarrior
Try taking Ashwagandha.

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partition
Aka the importance of mentally being a headless chicken. You're not being
"introspective" or otherwise "deep" when anxious. You're just applying a
blanket negative bias to all of your observations, and then looking around
mostly to confirm the bias. Anxiety is crippling, full stop.

