101–110 of 240 posts
Unwinding Anxiety by psychiatrist and neuroscientist Dr. Jud Brewer MD PhD — Dr. Brewer’s other successes include designed leading programs (highest success rate) for both quitting smoking and weight management. These programs succeed by making explicit the emotional landscapes driving counterproductive habits. The book unwinding anxiety does the same for anxiety.
The best solution to getting past the anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle is to take small, manageable actions while accepting the feelings that go along with those actions. Start with the smallest steps possible. Maybe that means opening the assignment and saving it to your computer. Then put it down and walk away. Come back in a little while and take another small step, such as reading over the assignment or making an out…
For me the issue was external factors. Don't ignore your social and romantic needs, don't try to do more than it is required of you to impress. Don't define yourself purely through your academic abilities, as annoying as that might be. Do the bare minimum, but do it, and do it now. Try to collaborate with others, it will help you understand you are on the same level as them and you don't need to turn every lab report…
I think a big size of my mental problems are the lack of social and romantic satisfaction. I have social anxiety but i love people. I love going to parties, having interesting conversations, flirting etc. To the extent that some people wondered why i choose to study computer science :P (my second choice is sociology and political science, which i want to study someday).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think there's evidence for this for anxiety, but I think this is true for dysthymia (persistent depression), however this isn't necessarily what OP has, although to me it does kind of sound more like dysthymia than anxiety. Generalised or specific anxiety disorders can be treated much more effectively than depression, persistent or otherwise. If it is persistent depression, you are right. I have dysthymia, an…
I absolutely don't buy into either of these views. As a person in long term recovery from alcohol and drug addiction, and someone that has been to thousands of support meetings, and known many many people that have recovered from horrible circumstances, my advice is, ignore these two posts. It just is not true.
What has this got to do with anything? Dysthymia isn't an addiction or "horrible circumstances". It isn't even particularly severe, it's just moderately meh all the time. Most people don't seek treatment because they assume it's just part of their personality: "I'm just a negative person" or "I just don't like making friends" etc.
You don't have a clue what you are talking about. Studies that say that dysthymia remission is 50% define remission as "receiving 'Tools to handle life'". It's about coping, not about treatment.
One who has dysthymia may never have long term responses like a person without it, there is no reason to expect it, and we have very little idea how to treat it long term. The best we can do is improve the person's response to dysthymic feelings.
Just because you recovered from alcoholism doesn't immediately translate to dysthymia. They call it "permanent depression" for a reason.
Short Term: Get everything out of your head and into a document or text file. All the things you have to do, all the things you want to do, all your ideas, all the things you're worried about. Stick it into something you can come back too later once you've solved your immediate problems. Then and this is most important, create a reminder or alarm or calendar notification that will remind you to look at that file after the deadline on your assignments is up and you're not so stressed.
You need to clear your mind to focus on your assignments BUT subconsciously your brain won't truly let you concentrate on them until it's sure that you won't forget/ignore them all, that's the point of the reminder.
Medium Term: You've got to take that file you wrote with everything you need to do and get it into tools with a schedule that'll help you manage it.
* Put birthdays and mothers/fathers day, important dates into a calendar like Google Calendar with reminders that give you enough time to address them.
* Put simple weekly drudgery tasks like chores into a todo system like Microsoft ToDo
* Put everything that needs thinking about into a note taking system like roamresearch.com, a task like "Do assignment X" is useless, you need to be able to write down ideas about how to tackle it not just that you have to do it.
Finally, set aside time every day to organise and prioritise what's in your system. The first thing I do every day is check what I need to do in terms of chores and more importantly prioritise what I need to work on, on a given day.
Side Note: Your system will evolve over time, you may throw away and build new ones, that's fine and necessary.
Long Term: "Know Thyself" - Figure out how many hours a day of focused work you can do, don't be surprised if this number is lower than you expect, 4 hours per day of focused hard mental work is the maximum for a lot of people. The better you know yourself, the easier it becomes to prioritise and do work. You'll set yourself more realistic tasks and goals, it'll be less stressful.
Figure out what time of day you work best, what schedule suits you best. The more you understand yourself, what you like, what you dislike the easier your entire life will become.
Beyond that, understand your motivations, your strengths and weaknesses, look at failure if it comes as helpful instruction in learning those things.
On the short term, it might help understanding what’s going on: your brain’s more animal part is trying to protect you from a perceived danger. That’s actually a good thing, most of the time.
Ways to overcome it: they depend a lot on your personality. Ask people who know you about this. In my case, what works is splitting the task into minimal steps.
For example:
1. Sit down in front of the computer
2. Turn off wifi (avoid distractions)
3. Open text editor
4. Write Essay Title
5. Write Abstract
6. Write Index
…
This works for me because my animal might see Write Essay as a tiger about to eat me, but Write Title is fine. Instinct can be stupid like that sometimes lol.
When you have more time, the book Atomic Habits coul also help you, but that’s more long term.
It's aimed at helping graduate students overcome procrastination, but it's actually useful for just about anyone. It's chock full of very practical tips, and Pychyl's main point is that procrastination is not a time management problem, but a problem with managing negative emotions.
So it sounds like it would be right up your alley.
EMDR is traditionally used to treat PTSD. You play back memories in your brain with distracting bilateral stimulation and exercises that help reduce anxiety and panic. Over several sets the sympathetic response is dramatically reduced or eliminated.
Even if the underlying issue isn’t a “trauma” with a capital T, chronic anxiety has trauma-like qualities that still seem to respond to EMDR (at least in my experience).