What exactly are you trying to avoid? Failure? Fear of failure? Or simply doing the assignments?
Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
91–100 of 240 posts
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#92Sounds like adult ADHD.
For anxiety, I have heard sometimes magnesium deficiency can be a factor.
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#93You are not trying to avoid failure, you are giving yourself a cushion to avoid confronting the fact that you may not be as good as you think that you are. The cushion is that you didn't apply yourself to the maximum because you procrastinated and ergo it isn't you who failed, but a you who did not apply themselves. Why do we do it? Out of self preservation. Confronting the fact that the reality does not match our id…
This resonates with me.
Tips on how to apply this?
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#94There are some powerful resources on YouTube for this. Essentially what you need to do is to re-program your brain firmware. Consider the brain as a maxima-seeking engine. Evolved to: find food then stay where there's food; identify predators then move away from them and stay as far away as possible. And so on. Your brain is mostly operating on a bunch of these kinds of slope, with some signal representing a good or bad thing, and a mechanism designed to change your behavior to either maximize or minimize the signal. Procrastination occurs when you are presented with a task that elicits both positive and negative signals: you want to perform the task to receive praise, feeling of achievement, not get fired. But you also fear the task because you may not perform it perfectly, leading to criticism. Your brain is not able to effectively navigate these dual slopes and so becomes locked in a local maxima: doing nothing. It neither wants to proceed up the reward slope by performing the task, nor proceed down the avoid slope by abandoning the task altogether.
Add to this that these reward/pain mechanisms in the brain are driven by dopamine. Dopamine is interesting in that the brain synthesizes it, and only a limited amount can be stored. This leads to some time-axis effects that may not be obvious. For example if you perform a reward activity (browsing social media) while procrastinating, now you've burned up your supply of dopamine and have no juice left to perform the main task.
All the solutions are based on the same underlying idea, which is to invoke the brain's "executive functions" to override the lower level lizard brain mechanisms. Meditation for example is (imho) about invoking the brain's garbage collector, such that you train it to act more like G1GC than mark/sweep -- now you have shorter GC pauses throughout the day. CBT/DBT and the like are about training the executive system to maintain more effective control over the limbic system. Clearly Buddhists figured most of this out centuries ago.
I recommend searching for videos by Dr. Tracey Marks and "How to ADHD" then the algorithm will show you other relevant channels/videos.
Edit: forgot to also mention that since this is all run on meat, it is possible there are useful biohacks. Magnesium deficiency for example comes up, as do MCTs and MCFAs, and of course: sugar.
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#95What helps me is a bit odd. Stealing a quote from Douglas Adams
“The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”
Basically I just start without thinking about it, preferably without realizing it. If I keep giving myself a schedule (I'll start this in an hour, I'll start when the clock hits fifteen past) I'll find ways to justify it. However if I just sorta am watching a youtube video, and midway through I just start on what I need to do, the youtube video ends up background noise and I have started. For me personally keeping momentum is easier then starting so once I've begun I'll keep going.
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#96I just read the question. If you are anxious from your birth or childhood due to parents, or rejection by other children, etc., believe me, no solution exist. You will be anxious all your life. Just accept this sad fact and this sad life. You will never be relaxed nore happy. Why? Because your brain has already developed extremely strong neuronal paths and structures and patterns and overdeveloped organs involved in…
nor*
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#97I just read the question. If you are anxious from your birth or childhood due to parents, or rejection by other children, etc., believe me, no solution exist. You will be anxious all your life. Just accept this sad fact and this sad life. You will never be relaxed nore happy. Why? Because your brain has already developed extremely strong neuronal paths and structures and patterns and overdeveloped organs involved in…
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.
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#98Exercise, lifting weights, running, getting more sunlight / vitamin D, going on walks in nature.
Physiological changes brought about by the above can help anxiety, break you out of this cycle. Give it a try
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#99Listen to John Danaher (world famous BJJ coach interviewed by Lex Fridman). He talks about that the greatest fighters pick their battles very well, and they often get submitted in the gym because they intentionally put themselves in handicapped positions so that they can learn how to get out (and sometimes that doesn't work out, of course). So life situations where stakes are not high should be used to run high-risk…
> So life situations where stakes are not high should be used to run high-risk experiments so that we can learn from them.
Your comment made me realize that every failure i considering it as high stakes...
As for John Danaher, he's seems an interested character. For a while now i want to listen his conversations with Lex Fridman, and also the 3hour long conversation he did with two other martial artists.
Re: Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?
#100There's lots of great advice here and seeing a therapist seems like a good idea, however in the meantime, I read an interesting book a while back called Feel The Fear... And Do It Anyway that you might find helpful.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/653396.Feel_the_Fear_and...