Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?

You have ADHD. Your anxiety is a comorbidity. Get a specialist psychiatrist. It has to be a specialist on ADHD.

I'm sorry to hear you're struggling. I've definitely been here a handful of times.

Hope and Help for your Nerves by Claire Weekes is the single best resource I have found for for learning to cope with Anxiety long term. I come back to it any time I find myself in similar patterns to what you describe.

Self compassion is another key coping tool. Being hard on yourself when you are in this state only makes things worse.

I highly recommend finding a therapist (I prefer ACT but traditional CBT is good too) and/or finding medication that works for you. The process of finding the right medication takes time, and cannot be rushed. Often, finding a Direct Primary Care provider trained in integrative medicine and is able to take the time to work with you as you are finding medication that works for you is a smoother path than going to the first psychiatrist you find on google IMO.

Just remember that everyone struggles like this at some point in their life. It is virtually unavoidable. Try to be kind to yourself in this time as you would a good friend. With patience and the right help, you will get past it.

as in Google Assistant for depression/OCD/ADD/anxiety management. Specialized for 1-2 problems that were diagnosed by a real doctor.

The biggest problem is it needs to be quite well customized for each user.

I believe talking to anyone/anything helps a lot, and hearing feedback helps even more.

A "personal medical assistant" like that could help manage medication intake, serious episodes, moments when you feel very bad.

I have a prototype for myself, it's just a bunch of cobbled software running on a dedicated smartphone. The voice triggers and replies are prewritten based on my own self-analysis. But I know it all already, so the best part is medication reminders and letting me know what I live for.

However it needs to always be on me, and right now it uses too much custom software to just install on anything. I can't build such an app myself, but it should be possible.

I am single btw, so of course I have no one to talk to.

The therapists I tried were just public ones, so they're more interested in showing up and getting their cut out of the mandatory insurance system.

"We don't take on new clients" or "we only speak German" is a valid reply, and what's a depressed person calling for help gonna do?

Just hang up and give up or best case, call others. It's a shit system.

I gave up on it all and am trying to make/find a "system" that is truly personal, custom, free as in freedom, independent of the gargantuan public and for profit healthcare machines, which are too big to accommodate everyone, plus the disinterest in actual help is obvious in places where insurance is mandatory.

Not knocking on emergency services, surgeons, anyone fixing obvious physical problems, those people are worth it. Mostly mental healthcare, where it's easy for unscrupulous people to fudge numbers and make money for doing nothing.

It's like my hypothyroidism, took me years to get that diagnosis, it's stupid.

But of course, when you say "I'm depressed and I drink a lot', that's not the first thing anyone would think to check for. Or maybe my luck is terrible.

Either way, universal healthcare systems are just huge machines like the justice system, they work for most, but many slip through the cracks and get zero help, being left to self-medicate and self-help, which is hard when said machines gatekeep anything that can actually work.

That's how you get a huge popularity of homeopathy, religion, diets, illegal drugs, and anything desperate people can cling to and believe in.

Well, I am not sure such a thing would work for me, at least not in the long run. But like you said, it could be useful if you are alone and need a voice (even if a synthetic one) to remind you that there are reasons to keep going.

I hope you can find yourself proper counseling though, I didn't know things were so dismal in Germany (I am assuming you are in Germany based on the contents of you comment).

I just created this account to thank you for posting this comment. After reading it I got and read the book you recommended, and it has really helped me with issues I've been struggling with for years.

I had not noticed the pattern of "avoid negative feelings" -> "negative feelings increase over time", and I actually thought problems like my anxiety had gotten better just because I had found more and more elaborate ways to try to avoid feeling it. In fact, it got worse and I became more and more avoidant of things that might trigger it.

Now the anxiety is still there, it still sucks, but I feel it without flinching and carry it with me without getting lost in the stories it tells. And by doing that, I have enough space in my mind to do the things I was avoiding and be more present.

So again, thank you for writing this comment. Know that you have really helped at least one person.