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Ask HN: How can I stop worrying and start living?

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51–60 of 83 posts

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop worrying and start living?

#51

therapy is the thing that will help you. Also medication can help. Taking anxiety medication felt like turning off a switch that controlled an alarm siren in my brain. Some people are opposed to medication, and to them I say: grow up. Talk to a doctor.

The cure to my anxiety is not having a shit boss out to fuck you over or a coworker get under your skin and sabotage you

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop worrying and start living?

#53
1. It is impossible to keep up with everything.

2. Probably, but you can only work with what you've got.

3. Work on being comfortable in your own mind, and make a home that reflects your mind, then you will be comfortable in your own body. In that state, your existence is self-explanatory.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop worrying and start living?

#58
post #46
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until they don't.

The pharmacopeia is vast.

An Edisonian (try everything, like Edison did when searching for the perfect incandescent light bulb filament) approach to self-medication seems to be an expensive, dangerous, time-consuming and low-yield approach to addressing problems that may, in fact, transcend the physical body.

The only plus I see is your corpse becoming impervious to decomposition, providing a post-life career as the Amazing Mummy Man in traveling freak shows. And as the fellow cleaning up after the elephants in the circus said, hey, at least you’re in show business.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop worrying and start living?

#59
post #7

Drugs work.

Just be very careful with this stuff and make sure to talk to a psychiatrist that knows what they are doing. I've seen a few people get prescribed benzodiazepines for anxiety related issues from general practitioners who didn't know what they were doing and the results were vastly worse than if nothing had been done. A tolerance can very quickly be built in which this class of drugs become vastly less effective and the withdrawals in particular were especially brutal. A public case of this was seen recently with Jordan Peterson lately and it shows just how serious this matter is (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ktjZhih3LQ for an example of how serious the health consequences are).

Whatever you do just make sure you are informed, psychoactive drugs are a serious matter.

Re: Ask HN: How can I stop worrying and start living?

#60
post #3

I'd recommend trying daily meditation for a couple weeks, see if it helps you. Otherwise check in with your doctor, you could have anxiety. It's normal to have these feelings every now and then. It's not normal to feel like that all the time.

I'd put a caveat on this. If you already suffer from panic attacks, have schizophrenia or have suffered psychosis, meditation may _not_ be for you.
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