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The Importance of Anxiety

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Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#41

Post by TeMPOraL »

slang800 wrote: post #8
flycaliguy wrote: post #4

Can 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.

This is the way I feel about energy issues and on-going automation (I love machines, I hate that people have to slave their lives off to survive, I want that post-scarcity utopia, but I'm afraid we don't make it through the transition period, that civilization will collapse).

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#42

Post by TeMPOraL »

rl3 wrote: post #22
TeMPOraL wrote: post #2

All 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…

One time when discussing existential theories with a friend, I asked him which he was partial to, and he replied: "Such things are beyond my scope." As much as I enjoy thinking about existential matters, I suppose there's a certain solace to be had in ignoring them entirely.

Interesting. I can't get myself to fully accept this attitude, though searching for ways to cope with the existential part of my anxiety I basically learned not to think about those problems much.

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#43

Post by TeMPOraL »

petercooper wrote: post #5
TeMPOraL wrote: post #2

All 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.

> CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you seem to explain. YMMV.

That is CBT with a therapist, or self-applied CBT? I've been meaning to go through "Feeling Good" book, it seems to be widely regarded as an effective way to apply CBT to yourself.

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#44

Post by rmxt »

rhino369 wrote: post #27
flycaliguy wrote: post #4

Can 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?

1) Talk to a doctor. 2) Who cares if your emails are in some NSA server. They already are on some server that you don't control, gmail, work, etc. What is the practical difference? The numbers of approved wiretaps is really low. You have a much greater chance of being spied on, legally with a warrant, by traditional police. Or, worse really, getting sued and then having lawyers crawl up your ass in discovery.

This is not a very helpful response. Just because your anxieties are not triggered by the knowledge of what the NSA does, does not make it right to minimize the worries of others with vague (i.e. not backed up with hard evidence) and dismissive attempts at corollaries [1]. There are massive practical differences between the NSA/government holding my emails/email data without my knowledge and Gmail's black box that your average person takes it to be. The most important being: if Google decides to wrong me in any way pertaining to my data, I have legal recourse against them with the government acting as mediator in a civil case, and secondly, Google is pressured to act within the confines of law with what they do with my data -- they can't discriminate against me if I'm searching for or sending emails about taboo topics. Should the government be holding email data, and should action be taken on that information (parallel construction issues aside), how do I go about finding recourse against the government? The judiciary has shown little inclination that they will hear these sorts of cases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#45

Post by markovbling »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #37
markovbling wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

300mg of Theanine every morning 30min before breakfast very good for anxiety and strong productivity side effects when taken with caffeine ;)

Nice one ;). I guess I might try switching from black to green.

Caffeine + Theanine together have a synergistic effect - I do 150mg caffeine pill + 300mg theanine pill as soon as I wake up - can't recommend highly enough :)

http://jn.nutrition.org/content/138/8/1572S.full

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#46

Post by petercooper »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #43
petercooper wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you seem to explain. YMMV. That is CBT with a therapist, or self-applied CBT? I've been meaning to go through "Feeling Good" book, it seems to be widely regarded as an effective way to apply CBT to yourself.

First with a therapist but then self-applied. I think I needed an external "benchmark" to calibrate against and gain some structure from first.

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#47

Post by TeMPOraL »

petercooper wrote: post #46
TeMPOraL wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CBT almost entirely resolved my baseline 'mental' anxiety of the nature you seem to explain. YMMV. That is CBT with a therapist, or self-applied CBT? I've been meaning to go through "Feeling Good" book, it seems to be widely regarded as an effective way to apply CBT to yourself.

First with a therapist but then self-applied. I think I needed an external "benchmark" to calibrate against and gain some structure from first.

Thanks. I hope I'll find some non-stupidly-expensive CBT therapist at some point. Did you use any resources for self-applied CBT, or were just basing on the things you learned on therapy?

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#49

Post by club7g1 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #2

All 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…

Usually, if you have two options and you're debating which is right or wrong, both options are right and you're just trying to figure out which is more right. Often it doesn't matter. There are probably many better options that you haven't considered. Most of the time, it's best just to pick one, you can observe what happens (the negative impacts are far less dramatic than anxiety would have you believe) and adjust. Sometimes the right option is merely to make a choice. The choice doesn't have to be final, it just has to allow you to make progress.

As a child, I stopped worrying about religion when I heard and adapted a Buddhist belief; no matter how much we ask is there a God, we will never know. And this doesn't matter. We accept that there might or might not be. We choose to live the life that we consider correct. That may not be the same life for everyone, but their choice is neither correct or incorrect.

Re: The Importance of Anxiety

#50

Post by petercooper »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #47
petercooper wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First with a therapist but then self-applied. I think I needed an external "benchmark" to calibrate against and gain some structure from first.

Thanks. I hope I'll find some non-stupidly-expensive CBT therapist at some point. Did you use any resources for self-applied CBT, or were just basing on the things you learned on therapy?

The latter. It was more having some mental artillery to use than a particularly formal process.
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