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Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

nature.com

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Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#191

Post by SentinelLdnma »

judiisis wrote: post #112

how to get over this and get over tendency to avoid? Please someone help I am struggling and procrastinating and destroying my life

Wish I could give you an npm package for that, but best I can do is a process: [0] keep a log / journal [1] make a change [2] observe the result [3] iterate

[0] is to raise awareness and detect cause and effect. Keep it minimalist. I once went overboard with a whole spreadsheet. Plain text turned out better. What to track? Inputs (food, media, activities) and outputs (physical and psychological state). [1] Try eating better, exercise, changing media exposure, time outside. If you go down the supplement rabbit hole, start with simple things like magnesium. Attach new, better habits to your existing routine. [2] Watch out for delayed reactions. For instance, what I ate 48 hours ago has significance. [3] while(true)

Random bonus: if there is something that negatively affects you, seek out its polar positive opposite. I'm very easy bothered by sounds. Leaf blowers shall die. But this also means sounds have a strong positive leverage on my mental state: https://youtu.be/gKdFbdrk-58

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#192

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

johnchristopher wrote: post #169
jh00ker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This book by David Burns [1] taught me that ACTION comes first, AND THEN motivation arrives. If you lay there and wait to be motivated, it will never happen. Specifically: 1. Action 2. Results 3. Motivation 4. Repeat! Anti-pattern: 1. Motivation 2. Action 3. Results 4. Does not work When I notice myself using self-talk like "ugh, I just don't feel like it" I thing of A-R-M and it helps. 1: https://amzn.to/3shnZlg

> Anti-pattern: > > 1. Motivation > 2. Action > 3. Results > 4. Does not work Action and discipline (the habit of doing the same action) beat motivation everytime. And yet you will find people on HN that will fight to death that motivation is enough or that motivation is the moving force of discipline. Up to redefining words if needed. I think it's because of the warped guilt trip of the saying "you didn't do it/achi…

I think a big part of the difficulty here is that "motivation" is a very broad term, and people often mix up different aspects of it (both intentionally and unintentionally). It pretty much covers the "full stack" of goal-oriented behavior: everything from the neurological factors that balance action vs. inaction generally to the most abstract meta-goals toward which actions are ultimately directed. When people say they "lack motivation", the experience they're describing might involve any mixture of deficiency in the biological foundations of attention and behavior, lack of identifiable goals, or lack of belief/understanding in the connections between actions and goals. An aphorism like "discipline beats motivation" can't possibly come close to engaging that full spectrum, so even if there's value in the underlying idea, there will probably always be people who feel that someone saying it is misunderstanding or ignoring their difficulties.

Furthermore, I think what people are sometimes confronting when they discuss motivation is personal belief in markedly different goals than society promotes. In such cases they're not really expressing a lack of motivation generally, but rather frustration with a disconnect between the goals they actually believe in and the goals that they've been told to pursue (typically with according extrinsic reward/punishment). Telling such people that they just need to develop discipline is probably about as useful as telling atheists that they just need to go to church.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#193

Post by jancsika »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #183
elwell wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> realizing failure is not life threatening That doesn't hold true when it comes to riding a motorcycle though. Maybe the fear is warranted.

"Fear is the mind killer". Focus spent worrying about the potential consequences of failure is focus not spent on avoiding failure altogether.

> "Fear is the mind killer".

I wonder if anyone has ever done a cross-check of the "fearlessness" lit authors for signs of toxoplasmosis.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#194

Post by [deleted] »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #45

If you suffer from serious anxiety, I highly recommend you work on any health issues you have. Low blood sugar in particular is known to promote anxiety by increasing the amount of adrenaline in your system. I used to suffer a lot of anxiety. Getting physically healthier helped mitigate that enormously. Proviso: n=1, "anecdata" and the usual dismissals that random internet strangers desperately try to apply as if I s…

[deleted]

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#195

Post by rcbdev »

dboreham wrote: post #142

My understanding of this is illuminated by (stay with me here...) blockchains. Most blockchains use a kind of time-traveling/holographic data structure where a given tree root can be used to lookup state values in a big trie, for some block in the past. Different root, potentially different value for the state you're interested in. The brain seems to be operating a similar data structure where the answer to your quer…

I doubt this is what they meant by "disrupting healthcare with blockchain"

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#196

Post by OkayPhysicist »

jancsika wrote: post #193
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Fear is the mind killer". Focus spent worrying about the potential consequences of failure is focus not spent on avoiding failure altogether.

> "Fear is the mind killer". I wonder if anyone has ever done a cross-check of the "fearlessness" lit authors for signs of toxoplasmosis.

It's a Dune quote.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#197

Post by Aeolun »

jplusequalt wrote: post #152
Aeolun wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can sort of see how you get there? “I know you are afraid of walking through a crowd of people, but think of how many people do that every day. Think of all those times when you were 15 when you did it without any problem.” E.g. your problem isn’t real, it’s all in your mind. Which of course it is, that’s kind of the point :)

From the outside, it's easy to dismiss an anxious individuals fears as nothing more than thoughts in their head that are (sometimes, but not always) completely removed from reality. But from the perspective of the anxious person whose sympathetic nervous system is causing elevated heart rates, shaky sweaty hands and feet, heart palpitations and chest pain, pressure headaches, and brain fog, the problem may seem a tad…

Yeah, sorry. My comment was meant to agree, but illustrate that to people without anxiety (or disinclined to trust the medical establishment) CBT might come across as little different from “it’s all in your head”.

I suffer from the same, and after CBT, it’s actually kind of worse to hear “it isn’t real, so don’t worry”, because I know it (on the balance of probability) isn’t real, but somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#198

Post by Aeglaecia »

hunkiry wrote: post #159
121789 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No not really. Gaslighting has an intent to deceive someone to pull them away from reality. CBT starts with the assumption by both people that the patient is away from reality and gives them tools to bring them closer. Gaslighting is like trying to convince a healthy person they’re fat (and giving them an eating disorder in the process) while CBT is like giving a fat person practices to manage appetite.

I believe OP is trying to suggest that if you're well adjusted to the current world, you're the one who is deluded. And therefore, any method to change your perspective is forcing a delusion. Gas lighting. The fat person in your metaphor is actually fit, surrounded by unhealthy skinny people who have been convinced they are fit.

spot on sir

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#199

Post by solarmist »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #99
Obscurity4340 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've weirdly noticed a type of analagous mechanism in relation to anxiety where I castastrophize or engage in worst-outcome thinking and when things inevitably turn out ok, the relief from the incongruity has a somewhat "euphoric" and calming effect. I feel like it might be somewhat maladaptive and "addictive"

Definitely sounds like not a good thing, even though it ties in with pithy sayings like "expect the worst but hope for the best" or "Don't get your hopes up and you'll never be disappointed".

Yeah that advice is the worst if you actually live it.

Prepare for the worst (as in planning), but never take it to heart or you’ll drown.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#200

Post by solarmist »

lolinder wrote: post #144
voisin wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” - Mark Twain

This was first attributed to Mark Twain in a Singapore newspaper 13 years after his death, so was probably not actually said by him. It looks like it's just one of those things people say: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/04/never-happened/

Good quote none the less and from what I know of Mark Twain, he wouldn’t have minded being attributed that.
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