Ask HN: How to stop worrying and start enjoying?

For a period of a few months a couple years back, I was extremely worried about my house being broken into while I was asleep. Eventually it got bad enough to effect be seriously effecting my sleep. I would stay up late worried about it until I basically couldn't stay up anymore.

One of the things that helped me the most was sitting down and thinking, if I was going to break into someone's house, would I choose this one?

There ended up being a lot of reasons not to break into my house. We always kept our front and rear porch lights on. We had houses extremely close by on both sides, so the chances of being seen are much higher than if you broke into one of the houses at the edge of our little neighborhood. We had two larger dogs that would definitely bark if anyone unfamiliar so much as walked by. There were much larger and nicer houses nearby to break into instead.

This thought experiment didn't put the irrational part of my brain to rest immediately, but it did help considerably with the anxiety. Eventually my anxiety went away entirely - I think it was being caused by the fact that I was out of work at the time and facing a lot of stress trying to find a job. It just happened to manifest as an irrational fear of break ins.

Anyways, I recommend anyone suffering from excessive anxiety talk to a professional about it. However, it can take a long time to get an appointment depending on where you live, so I would recommend my strategy as an interim measure while you wait.

For what it's worth, I've also had a phobia of spiders my entire life and have recently been applying a similar technique to fix it. Watching videos of spiders on the internet, especially videos of people handling spiders, has decreased the anxiety I experience around them significantly. I can even kill them by myself now, instead of freezing up and asking my wife to do it. I hope to keep working on it until I feel comfortable enough to either not kill them and just let them be, or to transport them outside.

I'm currently reading this book - Waking Up - A guide to spirituality without religion. It tackles being present and in the moment. This might help - anecdotally it's helping me.

Certain level of paranoia can actually be beneficial in some lines of work.

Bobby Fischer suffered from severe paranoia and constantly feared being poisoned among other unlikely things. But that flaw was also a great source of strength when he played chess.

Andrew Grove, co-founder of Intel, wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid survive". An example of how some level of paranoia can help you as a CEO.

I think the secret is: balance. Surely bad things can happen: we can choke like eating, or hit by space debris and die but winning the lottery is probably more likely.

I came to say this. Write down the things you worry about as honestly you can. The end result is that your worries become more tangible and easier to judge.

It sounds like you may be suffering from OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). One of the more common symptoms is excessive worrying about seemingly trivial things, to the point of becoming obsessed with ways in which they could go wrong, often coupled with excessive checking and avoiding certain situations.

With OCD you can often intellectually identify things as real/fake, but another part of your mind takes over and overrides those and triggers worrying even when it's unwarranted.

I would strongly recommend consulting with a psychiatrist to get a diagnosis, and advice on how to proceed. I've gone through a couple of pretty bad episodes with this, and have been helped immensely by a combination of CBT (cognitive-behavioural therapy) and prescribed medication. Of course everyone's situation is different; but it's definitely worth seeking professional help.