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 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.
In my case, one day I had a huge panic attack. Woke up the next day a complete nervous wreck. Looked through yellow pages for therapist. Decided to give it a few day to see if
the intense daily anxiety would get a little bit better. It didn't.
A couple of weeks later I found a therapist. Great--He will
help me. Well, I was seeing him two times a week for months. I paid
his fees through what was left of my student loans. Months
went by. I cried, and cried. We talked about my childhood.
I went to a Behaviorist--followed his instructions--still nothing. Finally was referred to a Psychatrist--who didn't
seem to have a clue to what was wrong with me. Finally, on my last referal I found a Psychiatrist who at least acted like he knew what was going on. Yes, he did prescribe
a addictive drug, after trying most of the non addictive drugs. In my case, Klonopin is the only drug that seemed to
alleviate my misery, but it was not enough; I still needed to self medicate. More importantly, this Psychiatrist reassured me that the crazy thoughts I was having was
nothing to worry about. It was the way he told me--I could
see in his face that he has heard my symptomology before, and
I was not going crazy. That was priceless!
I can say anxiety ruined the life I was preparing for, but my anxiety symptoms eventually got better over the years. I look back on the Therapy and I sometimes think it did more damage than good? I really was honest in Therapy, and so
wanted it to work, but I got nothing out of it in the slightest?
I don't have any advise because every patient is
different. I can offer this, if you go on an addicive drug keep the level of medication low. You might be suprised just how long you will live? You don't
want to work that liver to the brink of failure. It's ironic, that my biggest fear when I had my breakdown was The
fear of Death. I just couldn't come to terms with it. I literally felt I only had a few years/months left--while I was beyond healthy at that point in my life. I wouldn't wish the way I was feeling on my worst enemy. I felt like I was in Hell. It does get better with time. I'm glad I didn't commit suicide.
Thank you for the honest story. I've also been there. The huge panic attack is how my anxiety issues started. I lived for years with the cosntant fear of death, that I'm going to be damned and that the whole world will collapse.
At some point it went away. Maybe by itself, maybe thanks to SSRIs, but the fear, while still lurkinng deep in me, is hardly noticeable anymore. What's left is just random anxiety and an aversion for long-term planning. I just can't do it. I spent years thinking my life is about to end, and as a result I made myself unable to think many years forward. A coping strategy that is hindering me now.
And I agree. This state was Hell. Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy as well.
So I'll second what a lot of people are saying here with CBT and mindfulness. No experience with medication so I won't comment on that.
I'm surprised nobody mentioned this: exercise.
Seriously, instead of compulsively checking HN, go for a run or even a walk somewhere in nature. It'll get rid of that excess adrenaline that prevents you from relaxing. If you've got a legitimate hard decision to make, freeing up your mind a bit (rather than focussing on tech news or sci-fi) is the best way to come up with a decent solution to things.
The running shoes I got a year and a half ago were pretty expensive, but they have been one of my most useful purchases to date. I go running 2-3 times a week - when I'm feeling down, when I need to make a hard decision, when I'm about to go on a date - and it might not always be a 100% panacea but it makes things a whole damn lot easier.
Since I'm past my edit window - I sincerely thank you all for your great and helpful responses.
In a way, I guess I've heard most of them already. Part of me wished there was an easier way than diet + exercise + meditation + therapy + wait, wait and wait. Some magic pill, or maybe a powerful quote that could instantly short-circuit my anxiety loop. Having your brain second-guessing every other thought doesn't help in developing and keeping habits.
I've tried SSRI - they did help reduce the baseline, so panic attacks are mostly things of the past, and I have little bit more willpower (at the cost of the usual side effects I won't name).
I've tried diet and exercise before and didn't notice significant improvement in anxiety levels or cognitive abilities - but then again I was optimizing for weight loss, not for well-being, so maybe I should just try a different diet.
I'm having hard time getting myself to trust any other therapy than CBT and the only CBT practitioner in my town that I know about is a private, expensive doctor. I guess I have to get back to "Feeling Good" and try to self-CBT until I save up some money.
"You have probably come across "mad" people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that's not much different from what you and all other
"normal" people do, except that you don't do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn't
necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or "mental movies." Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person's own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease.
The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by "watching the thinker," which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence."
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.
I can relate 100% to what the comment above here said. I plan to go see a therapist or similar when I have time to try to sort things out, but I'm so anxious I can't even really bother to figure out where I need to go / who to talk to.
I've used beta blockers in the past for things like speeches, and they are quite miraculous in my opinion. I'd like to get another subscription. In any case, they definitely do not help for longer-term problems in the sense that I will have anxiety for the days / weeks building up to things.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Check out Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). I found a therapist who treats GAD and Panic Disorder using an ACT based therapy model and it has changed my life.
For a good introduction you can get The Happiness Trap by Dr. Russ Harris. Still, if you find your anxiety is interfering in your ability to live a productive and meaningful life I highly recommend finding a good therapist at http://contextualscience.org/civicrm/profile?gid=17&reset=1&....
I struggle with anxiety on a daily basis as well. I don't have any solutions, but one thing that has helped a lot is taking time out of my day to just be, with nothing hanging over my head and nothing to do. It's remarkable how the mind manages to work things out for itself when given enough space and time.
You may also find the chaper on fear in the book The Issue at Hand to be helpful. I know I did.
A while ago I switched to drinking plain old green tea instead of tea/coffee. Great stuff, feel clearer-headed, more relaxed, more energetic, and more productive. All of the good effects of tea/coffee, but without the unnecessary caffeine highs, lows and tweakiness.
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 :)
Magnesium is worth checking out as well, even if you're eating a proper diet (nutrient bioavailability can be affected by a lot of things).
There's been quite a bit of research and interest in the role of magnesium in anxiety, depression and several other common medical conditions.
I take it along with a benzodiazepine and the difference now after supplementing mag. is very noticeable (sleep quality, functionality, anxiety) compared to the benzo alone, though in my specific case some level of mag. deficiency is quite possible, which could explain the change.
Make sure to get a form of magnesium that is actually bioavailable though. The oxide is apparently near useless as a supplement despite being very common, while chelated forms like magnesium glycinate are supposed to be much more bioavailable, and that form in particular doesn't seem to cause digestive problems like some other forms do (the citrate is actually marketed as a laxative if I'm not mistaken).
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.
>All cool and great, but can you now give me something to shut that feeling off?
Yes. This is what therapy is. It's a professional teaching you tools to deal with anxiety. Find a style (Cognitive Behavior, Humanistic, Psychodynamic, etc) that makes sense to you and then find a therapist who practices it and give them a call. Say everything you said here and see what they say. If you like it, go in for a session or two and see how it feels. Repeat until it feels right.
It's work. Very hard, very difficult, very nervewracking, all-consuming work. But it is so worth it. The anxiety still exists, but it doesn't have power over you. You recognize it for what it is (another data point your subconscious is giving you) and move on. I feel more like me than I ever have before and I'm in control.
You can also medicate - you'll want a psychiatrist for that (psychiatrist is a psychologist who is licensed to prescribe you meds). But that never worked for me, it just buried the anxiety under other strange feelings but never made it go away and usually made it worse cause I knew I wasn't fixing the problem.
When 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.
It 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.
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..
The article describes how anxiety helped an individual navigate through a social situation... but who's to say allowing anxiety to control your behavior is better then having calm rational judgement dictate your actions?
In the past where people would declare formal duels in response to some verbal insult, anxiety was a relevant response to save your life. But in this day and age where people have much more to gain and very little to lose when being assertive and fearless in social situations, anxiety has become an excessive and prehistoric response that is largely irrelevant to the times and culture we live in.
Here's an example relevant to most men. Why aren't we talking to that hot super model at the bar? What do we have to lose? Nothing. What do we have to gain? Everything. The logic is inescapable but why are we still scared? Because in the past hitting on a super hot model meant dealing with her alpha male partner who could kill you in a duel. The emotions we feel are evolutionary relics from prehistoric times that were designed to keep us safe. These emotions are now largely irrelevant because murder and combat in our society is both frowned upon and considered a crime.
Let's extol the virtues of fear and hate, while we're at it.
Yes, it's normal to get anxious sometime, just as it's normal to get angry sometimes. Someone who never, ever gets angry could be suspected of bottling up their feelings (but we can't be sure). Our emotions aren't under direct voluntary control, so if we find ourselves getting angry, or anxious, or fearful, we must aim not to freak out, or criticize ourselves for it, or become anxious about our anger, angry about our anxiety, fearful of our fear, or any other such downward spiral. Emotions are normal; they are ok.
However, doing what a negative emotion says to do usually doesn't work out as well as doing something else, in my experience. While we can certainly find evolutionary justifications for the things we feel compelled to do under the influence of these emotions, that doesn't mean they are helpful. Fear tells us to flee, to avoid, to destroy, or to deny. I've read that highly successful people who seem fearless do feel fear but just aren't as bothered by it. I think this says the exact opposite of the OP's message, which in this analogy would be The Importance of Fear: It Tells Us When to Run Away. The hard part about fear is acknowledging it and not running away. That is called courage.
Similarly, anger. When you are fighting with your wife (or co-founder), they may say something that you take personally and it hurts your feelings. You are outraged. You strike back, and a fight breaks out. Ok, that's fine, that's normal. But one of you, at some point, has to ignore the anger voice that tells you to defend yourself at all costs, and to attack your enemy's weaknesses. Yes, your partner has become your enemy, thanks to anger.
Anxious drivers don't drive better than non-anxious drivers. I may have moments of anxiety when I drive, such as if I notice a car about to merge into me and I swerve. Perhaps the anxiety plays a physiological role in helping me respond. However, it takes many seconds for the feeling to subside, during which time the anxiety is not helping me, it is hurting me. It also seems naive to identify the feeling of anxiety with the biochemistry of responding to an urgent situation. We could just as well say anxiety is a psychological state which is a harmful byproduct of the physiology.
Another analogy: Anxiety is like dirt, or the clutter in your house. You'll find bits of dirt on the subway platform. Some people's houses are awash in clutter. We often seek to get rid of it, but it's not evil. It's not important, either, in the sense of functional utility. Sure, you can construct arguments about how it's ultimately necessary -- an Earth without dirt, for example, sounds rather sterile; does it have no trees? Where does the oxygen come from? -- but if there is anything unhealthy about your attitude towards dirt, I don't think emphasizing the importance of dirt in your daily life is likely to help.
I like the way you described this. You see, I'm pretty much in control of my anger. I almost never get into prolonged fights, because I'm good at taking control over my anger and short-circuiting the arguments. Usually the other person just relieves the accumulated pressure for another minute, then calms down, stops defending themselves and we go on with a productive conversation.
But on the other hand, I'm completely overwhelmed by anxiety. When it starts, it often doesn't subside for another hour and drops my capacity to 10%. I wish I could ignore it the way I ignore my anger.
For the others in the thread looking for a solution to their distracting background anxiety, I'll add my datum that regular exercise (in my case, swimming) has helped immensely. It's something I only picked up well into adulthood.
The article talks most about moral anxiety because it is targeted toward philosophy students, but I've been looking for a while for insight into survival anxiety.
Growing up male, I was always morally anxious about the possibility that I would harm someone else accidentally or (when I was considering joining the military) through violence or (when I became sexually active) through misinterpreted signs of lucid enthusiastic consent. A thing that I've never fully been able to grapple with is anxiety around the possibility of being assaulted or having violence done to me and I feel like this makes me fail at properly empathizing with many of the women I'm friends with. Does anyone know of anything I could read or watch besides Gavin, Captain Awkward, or MVC? I feel like I just don't get it and, well, feel anxious about that.
I'd replace anxiety with introspection in this article and it sounds a lot better. I wouldn't necessarily consider anxiety to be a virtue; for many, it's a crippling affliction.
The examples in the article are really more about an introspective approach to life. About really considering our actions and the behaviour of the people around us. Anxiety as a disorder is more about being too introspective, rather than being introspective in itself.
Evolutionary psychology tells us anxiety is necessary for the survival of the species. This is obviously the case in social interactions as they can change our status/value in the social hierarchy which increases or decreases our chances of survival.
Like jobu said - humanity has a baseline of anxiety.
What about when our anxiety is severely deviant?
Meditation and Eckhart Tolle changed my life. Unfortunately, I still need to use medication sometimes when I get attacks.
There's so much I'd like to type out about not being the contents of our mind, Libet and free will, meditation, etc. It's only taken me 20 years to understand and I always feel like I want to tell everyone since I figured all of this out two years ago. But you can do it yourself. Buddhism, Tolle, meditation. Meditation got me to CBT. CBT brought me to Buddhism which brought me to Tolle.
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).
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.
Aka the importance of mentally being a headless chicken. You're not being "introspective" or otherwise "deep" when anxious. You're just applying a blanket negative bias to all of your observations, and then looking around mostly to confirm the bias. Anxiety is crippling, full stop.
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.