Hey everyone! We made a tool that shows you how someone with anxiety feels when they get messages. It's all about getting each other and being kind. If you want to help your friends or family who get anxious, this could help. Give it a look and see what you think. It's a way to be nicer to each other.
Yeah I think it is people being overfit. They understand that "hi" and "hello" are words that begin a conversation but don't understand their purpose. On the phone it can be to verify the other person can hear you or is there. In person it is like a wake word to grab attention before you start saying what you really want to say because if you jump straight in someone isn't going to shift their attention instantaneously.
It just has no place in asynchronous communication other than patterns like the "Hi -- I'm working on..." example from that link.
I criticize machines a lot for overfitting, but I'll especially criticize machines being taught by people who are overfit. Hard to create general machines without understanding why things are and the rabbit holes that exist everywhere around us.
No problem. I will just try again later. I am having this bookmarked.
Thanks for making this anyway. A friend of mine suffers from anxiety and I want to get to know his perspective better.
Might want to at least try to mitigate the prompt injection and definitely make sure none of the openai tools are enabled: https://i.imgur.com/DQCHMup.png
It's pretty good. I'm going to try some things in the future. If I have anxiety about something I'm going to talk it through with this and see if I can positive self talk the situation
Side note: Im tired of everybody being anxious, Im an immigrant to the states and I’ve noticed that most of my friends who are anxious are born and raised there. While the opposite is far from true despite poverty, uncertainty, looming war & a future with no positive outlook for the country.
I often struggle to emphasize cause I don’t see value of overthinking/discussing every little thought that comes to our head. Im struggling more with this recently because my partner has been diagnosed with “OCD thinking “ after just 3 therapy sessions and is even considering medication.
I thought everybody overthinks, we just need to learn not to give every thought importance/attention and try to avoid triggers ie: self diagnosing.
If my rant is not suitable here, then I’ll delete my comment. I would appreciate any help however.
Nah this is totally a thing. There's generally two theories I've heard:
(1) US folks are fragile. They pathologize normal thoughts/behaviors to the point that they never actually learn to live with (or fix) them.
(2) Non-US folks are under-informed. They ignore diagnosable mental health issues to the point that they never get appropriate care for a problem that can be fixed.
It's probably a bit of both. I'm American, and its obvious to me that we are great on some dimensions compared to other countries. E.g., Asbergers-type autism is SO MUCH more understood (and addressed!) in the states. At the same time, "diagnosed with OCD thinking" is a nonsense phrase, as far as I can tell, and is probably going too far.
Therapy & medication are powerful tools; the US is learning to use them more than other places; that might be good or bad for any given person - hard to tell.
(3) America is money-first at the expense of everything else, including the well-being of our own people. Pharmaceutical companies systematically encourage sickness in order to farm us for money.
The subtext of American capitalism is that anyone not born into generational wealth is one major illness or accident away from abject poverty and ultimately death. I’m willing to bet this type of constant background stress leads to general anxiety for a significant number of people. I wonder if anyone has ever done a study on this.
> The subtext of American capitalism is that anyone not born into generational wealth is one major illness or accident away from abject poverty and ultimately death
I was going to disagree with this, and then I thought "but what is generational wealth, except enough money that nobody in your family is worries about that one major sickness/accident"
Anxiety is definitely not always rational; you can feel anxious without being able to identify a good cause. But knowing (or being told) you "shoudln't" be feeling anxious doesn't really make the anxiety go away. So now you're anxious AND feeling guilty about it. Not a healthy combination.
"Just stop thinking about it" is not that helpful either. Overthinking happens internally, whether it's being expressed outwardly or not. I don't think diagnosis is a trigger, rather the opposite; it's the first step to understanding your own condition and ways to cope. "It's not just me" is a powerful realization.
My worry is that this diagnosis will make the person feel that this is an insurmountable problem or something that is permanent rather than a phase that will pass.
I truly believed this is something everyone goes through, but Im not sure now since my partner says its not.
My goal is trying to make her realize the absurdity of this anxiety and not that she shouldn’t have it all. Maybe even laugh at ourself in the process. But i honestly think “just stop thinking “ helps, you do that by staying busy, meditation hobbies etc..
“We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them” Khalil Gebran.
Some people can't 'just stop thinking' though. Or meditation is only a breather; not a 'reset' back into 'normal' thought patterns.
Intrusive thoughts and anxiety are a massive burden in my everyday life. Sometimes the thoughts just can't be tamed or sated and they start wreaking havoc on everything around me.
Time is usually the best solution... "this will pass". But sometimes the thoughts push time to an unmanageable scale.
My wife tries to empathize. She too thinks everyone has these worries or anxieties... and I don't disagree. The 'disorder' is that mine occur so frequently, with such intensity and without relent... to the point my ability to 'function normally' is severely compromised.
We all go through it, sure, but some of us can never just stop going through it.
Imagine you have a leaky roof. You have to deal with it whenever it rains, but it's still manageable enough that you haven't climbed up there to repair it yet.
My roof has a 10' hole, and I live under a waterfall in a tropical rainforest. But it's OK, because the nearby volcano helps keep me warm and dry....
Most mental health problems manifest differently in different cultural contexts.
Westerners generally have a reasonable understanding of anxiety as a psychological problem and are comfortable talking about it as such and seeking treatment for it. In developing and middle-income countries, depression and anxiety more often present as physical symptoms like digestive problems, pain, fatigue and muscle weakness. These patients will typically meet the standard diagnostic criteria for depression or anxiety if they're asked, but that's not how they conceptualise their problem.
A raft of other things that would be diagnosed in the west as obvious psychiatric disorders are, in less psychologically-aware places and times, simply chalked up as personal problems or personality differences.
I can certainly think of older members of my family who have "trouble with their nerves", a "bad stomach" that only flares up at times of acute stress or "funny turns" that look very much like panic attacks. I can think of an eccentric aunt who lived alone and obsessively collected teapots and never quite got the hang of small talk or eye contact. I can think of many men who came back from the war with a violent temper and a crippling fear of loud noises. A lack of diagnosis does not necessarily reflect a lack of pathology.
It's certainly plausible that some western countries (and America in particular) might over-pathologise normal distress as psychiatric disorder, but it's clear that many people in less-developed countries often face avoidable suffering due to a lack of diagnosis and treatment, particularly people suffering from the most severe disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
i think western society is just currently in its "massive overcorrection from decades of ignorance/stigma about mental health issues" phase, it'll probably balance itself out over time, or at least i hope it will.
at the moment it's just impossible to even have the conversation, the concept that people aren't just forever victims of their own feelings and that some or even most people need to do real hard work on themselves is straight up offensive to a lot of people.
well that's the idea, but i've known many people who go to "therapy" and really all they're doing is paying for validation. i've known many more people who don't go to therapy and have never made any effort to work on themselves at all, and just expect the world to grant them some kind of protected status and absolve them of any responsibility for their own actions.
Regarding the latter group, are you talking about mental illnesses self-diagnosis or something like that? Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. I'm especially confused about "some kind of protected status".
either one, for example saying things like "it's not my fault i showed up an hour late to work again, i have anxiety" as if it just means that you aren't responsible for your actions and it isn't a problem you need to solve
Hmm. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Certain mental health conditions are recognised as disabilities in the UK, and the people affected are entitled to support at work [1].
Still, I agree that it doesn't exempt one for their actions. I just don't think it's always binary like that, especially for chronic conditions that can be improved but not solved.
i'm not saying that flexibility and support for those suffering is a bad thing by any means, i'm just saying that there's a massive difference between "i have anxiety, deal with it" and "sorry i struggle with [thing] because of anxiety, but i'm working on it and support in the form of x would help me achieve y in the meantime"
I've seen the opposite. Also as an immigrant to the states, I've seen so much more anxiety from fellow immigrants than those raised here. There's so much fragility in having and maintaining immigrant status - particularly from countries with long wait times for permanent residency, that it seems hard not to be anxious.
Until very recently when I started realizing the mental and physical toll of it, I would completely panic over any sort of planning for the future (even things as inconsequential as hearing other people talking about buying tickets for a concert) because it'd remind me of the instability of my position.
In contrast the people born here, while certainly having concerns about their future, tend to feel comfortable enough in knowing that they have some basic level of stability around them.
After realizing the toll it was taking on me, I've had to work on recognizing the signs of another round of panic and get better at gaslighting myself to be more apathetic of whatever might happen and reminding myself that ultimately, my sanity is more important than immigration and with my education and skills I can probably do fine in most other countries with similar standards of living.
Basically, my heart wants to tell her, labeling this as a condition and overthinking about being an overthinker will make it worse. Just stay busy and it will work out.
But then ill be deemed as insensitive etc… Ive tried to share what Ive done, like simply not allow myself google a medical condition beyond 10 minutes but ive gotten negative reactions.
Something else you can do is to not add to your partner's anxiety. Be understanding of her flaws and failures, just as you would like her to be understanding of yours.
I was surprised when the bar wasn’t already full with my “Hi” opening. There’s probably little that makes me more anxious than the perspective of time-consuming handshake protocols with people you don’t really want to hear cause they needy or demanding. Most of the times you see my single-checkmark is because there’s `HELLO` with no subject.
I think I pushed the simulator too far with my "hello" message and it crashed.
Btw, The sample messages animation may look cool, but forcing the focus to them makes the UI annoying on mobile. I was trying to read the site's header and the page kept scrolling to each automated message there.
yeah, my wife is very anxious and it was very difficult for me to understand her, especially in the beginning, when I didn't take anxiety very seriously.
Very nice. I made it anxious by talking about weekend plans then how I was going to a show with all my closest friends. Then I begged the bot to join us. The anxiety went away but I made it worse again by begging. This is spot on.
I talked about my cute cat which made it happy and then I asked it to take care of my cat tomorrow. That triggered an anxious response which kind of makes sense but I wonder if a more accurate response would have been not replying at all. Or agreeing to the direct request
That is a good point. I think anxiety can take many different forms one being lying and just saying yes to something, creating excuses, or not responding. It would be cool to simulate all the different potential responses.
10/10, I have to say that this is very accurate. Bot perfectly simulated what happens to me when someone types "hey" into chat. Me too bot, me too.