The Importance of Anxiety
aeon.co
The Importance of Anxiety
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Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#2All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling off? I would be, like, million times happier (and financially stable) if I didn't feel constant anxiety towards things ranging from existential questions to work to relationships, anxiety that reduces me to someone who needs to read HN at work and watch sci-fi shows in huge batches just to stay sane. I'll side with Kant here, anxiety is a feeling that keeps you from 'having your capacities under your control'.
I've been struggling with that for over six years now. Big part of the problem is that anxiety is the very way for your mind to answer the question "is this right or wrong"? It's hard to think your way out of things if your brain fires up "it's still wrong!" alarm randomly.
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#3All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling off? I would be, like, million times happier (and financially stable) if I didn't feel constant anxiety towards things ranging from existential questions to work to relationships, anxiety that reduces me to someone who needs to read HN at work and watch sci-fi shows in huge batches just to stay sane. I'll side with Kant here, anxiety is a feel…
> can you now give me something to shut that feeling off?
There is effective medication. Benzodiazepines get sometimes bad press but I've found them very useful to occasionally deal with anxiety.
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#4Can somebody do me a favour and help me shake the anxiety I've been feeling since the Snowden leaks? Has anybody else found themselves stressed out by the implications of a technological surveillance state being constructed right in front of us?
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#5All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling off? I would be, like, million times happier (and financially stable) if I didn't feel constant anxiety towards things ranging from existential questions to work to relationships, anxiety that reduces me to someone who needs to read HN at work and watch sci-fi shows in huge batches just to stay sane. I'll side with Kant here, anxiety is a feel…
CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you seem to explain. YMMV.
For the less controllable situational physical "fight or flight" anxiety, however, I've found low dosage beta blockers work very well. Apparently a lot of musicians and surgeons use them for similar purposes, but you'd need to have the mental anxiety sorted out first, I suspect.
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#6It recently occurred to me that humans probably have a baseline level of anxiety, and this causes us to find things to worry about (no matter how trivial).
Over the past several years I've had growing issues with anxiety, and I had found myself fretting about a passing conversation with someone that doesn't know me and likely will never see again. It wasn't even like the conversation went that badly, so why was I replaying it and worrying about it? Logically it made no sense, but it keeps happening over little things like this. The only way I can explain it is that life has been going well and I haven't had any significant things to worry about for a while. Now my brain seems to be working overtime to find hidden dangers.
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#7All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling off? I would be, like, million times happier (and financially stable) if I didn't feel constant anxiety towards things ranging from existential questions to work to relationships, anxiety that reduces me to someone who needs to read HN at work and watch sci-fi shows in huge batches just to stay sane. I'll side with Kant here, anxiety is a feel…
> can you now give me something to shut that feeling off? There is effective medication. Benzodiazepines get sometimes bad press but I've found them very useful to occasionally deal with anxiety.
There are less addictive anxiolytics out there that won't kill you upon cessation. Opinion is shifting towards doling a few of them out to stop severe panic attacks and using other methods for treating anxiety.
Go to a psychiatrist and they'll tell you the best things for anxiety and mental health are: Exercise + a proper diet + sleep habits, reasonable to no alcohol/drug use, meditation, therapy and medication as last resort.
Try those first five things before popping pills, there are steps you can follow to make that feeling manageable and eventually extinguish the anxiety loop.
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#8Can somebody do me a favour and help me shake the anxiety I've been feeling since the Snowden leaks? Has anybody else found themselves stressed out by the implications of a technological surveillance state being constructed right in front of us?
I find myself stressed out about that, but I don't think it's an irrational anxiety or one that can be simply shaken off. Rather, it's something that we have to deal with directly and fix before we can feel safe.
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#9It recently occurred to me that humans probably have a baseline level of anxiety, and this causes us to find things to worry about (no matter how trivial). Over the past several years I've had growing issues with anxiety, and I had found myself fretting about a passing conversation with someone that doesn't know me and likely will never see again. It wasn't even like the conversation went that badly, so why was I rep…
Interesting, I have similar experiences.
If I'm not preoccupied with something creative, then my mind seems to want to focus on potential problems with my personal life. And I will ruminate until something potentially dangerous is found..
Re: The Importance of Anxiety
#10When I feel bad for a while (a few weeks maybe) I often turn to meditation. When I do, I invariably notice that there's a weird background process in my head that ambushes me with things I feel ashamed about on an almost predictable schedule. I'll be sitting there counting to 10 over and over, starting over at 1 if I notice I've become interrupted, then "Hey remember that time you got so drunk at a party that you threw up on your friend's living room?"
I've started thinking of it as like my consciousness is a circular saw blade and there's this one bent-sideways tooth, like once a revolution it catches on something horrible in my past and drags it out and makes me look at it. It helps a little to recognize it, to be like, "oh yeah, this is the 10-minute self-shaming, right on schedule." But it doesn't help as much as, you know, that not happening.