Part of the point is that it's not something you're overcoming. If you're worried about it, but you do it anyway, you still have the ability to go about your life.
When my anxiety was super bad (before therapy and medication), there were weeks when I was too anxious to go to the grocery store and started skipping dinner because there wasn't any food in the house. I hadn't seen a dentist in 8 years because my phone anxiety was too high to make an appointment - and my social anxiety was terrified that they'd be mean to me about my teeth.
I'm doing much better now, but there are still some times that my anxiety acts as a total blocker to something I have to (or sincerely want to) do.
Yep. Anxiety is literally the flight response, an avoidance.
It's less about doing and more about actually resting your awareness on the anxiety, and on what it is you are avoiding. The actual "doing" can come later; it is hard to do anything without presence of mind.
Anxiety typically motivates some form of avoidance, as it is an attempt to keep ourselves safe. Every time we give in to anxiety and avoid a thing, it reinforces our anxious respons, so we become more and more avoidant of the thing we are anxious about over time.
The solution typically suggested is to realistically consider the actual consequences of the worst-case scenario and sit with that until it stops being overwhelming. Then we can consider what we could do to mitigate that actual realistic worst-case possibility, and then after figuring out what it would take we get to decide if we want to put in all the effort to take those precautions or if actually it's fine, we can just do the thing despite our anxiety yelling at us. And when we do the thing and nothing bad happens, our body has a chance to learn that it is actually safe after all and it doesn't need to freak out trying to protect us.
If instead we avoid the thing, that makes us more anxious in the future. And if we try to skip examining our fears and just muscle through, we'll end up associating doing the thing with feeling strung out on adrenaline, which also isn't great.
The alternative is: now that you've found this anxiety you have, you should challenge it, and work on root causing, mitigating, and resolving it.
I get super anxious about doing anything I haven't done in a while, but falling off the bike solves the fear of falling off the bike real fast. For me, at least
I just wanted to chime in to say that #1 can be a very counterproductive strategy in the long run. The most important idea I can convey about anxiety is this: if you aren’t willing to face your fears, your anxiety will probably escalate over time. (Fortunately, the inverse is true as well!)
Reasoning one’s way out of anxiety is an attempt to avoid fear. Fear asks: “what if X happens to me?” Avoidance is an attempt to short-circuit the fear: “Oh, don’t worry! X can’t happen because of Y.” This may provide quick relief, but your anxiety is just as motivated as you are. It’s only a matter of time before the anxiety undermines Y with another doubt. So next, you need to prove Z, so that Y will definitely be true, so that you don’t have to be afraid of X. At each step of the way, you’re training your brain to believe that X is truly so dangerous that you must do everything in your power to get it off your mind. This causes the fear and the anxiety to get worse, not better. This is not the path that gets you where you want to be.
Avoidance can take many forms - rationalizing is just one of them. Even very healthy behaviors can be avoidant if you’re using them to run away from your anxiety.
If you’re struggling with anxiety, I can’t recommend psychotherapy strongly enough. Preferably, from a practitioner of evidence-based treatments such as CBT. Anxiety is so treatable! It’s amazing how manageable our worst fears can seem once we’ve learned how to approach them.
HN isn't the place to ask and 14 isn't the age to do it, but that's not so unusual. Find better friends, finish school. If you go into a trip with anxiety it'll just get magnified, and anxiety about things like avoiding parents isn't worth mixing up with your mental exploration imo. Everything will be 1000x easier in 5 years and you won't have lost out.
I think I have more of an acute issue with anxiety, at the moment mostly driven by financial insecurity combined with unexpected medical expenses. Like what I really need right now is a few thousand dollars in travel expenses and for this precertification to go through, but failing that I just need to make it from one day to the next.
> It's pretty crucial to remember, though, that your current source of anxiety is probably just a red herring.
Everytime I have anxiety it's my brain focusing on one thing to avoid confronting the real problem. When I finally find the thing I am avoiding it's usually not that bad of an experience to deal with it directly. Some examples are "I should call person X to deliver news Y." Or "I need to make a big decision soon."
Exposure is a known counter to anxiety though. The comment doesn’t say “just stop being anxious”, it says “just try and then reflect on how bad it actually was”. It will be bad, but not as bad as your anxiety screamed. The first question therapists ask is “what’s the worst that can happen, in your opinion?”. Even the hypothetical answer is usually much less catastrophic that the feeling itself.
But the wrong level of exposure may lead to an escape and reinforce the problem. So don’t start with e.g. going on stage like you don’t start lifting with 100kg.
Same for unattended anxiety, it reinforces automagically without proper reflection.
It should also be noted that anxiety as a set of sensations and mood isn’t equal to inaction. The mistake people often make is equating it. “I fear so I’m not going there”. Pushing through fear is a fundamental skill. I’d say that anxiety is when you avoid fears instead of avoiding bad situations — there it is born. Exposure is about being exposed.
I’m anxious af if that matters. Just woke up today with another flush. Although it isn’t anywhere near the seemingly unexplainable levels I had two years ago, before researching it.
I've never been too socially anxious, so I wouldn't have felt this article — while inspiring — was very pertinent to me. It has a more general message though: if you feel anxious, the only route to recovery is by passing through it.
I'm currently living in a foreign country making due with limited language skills and my experiences learning to use the language in a real situation mirror this Social Skydiving experiment. You have to find the fun in failure.
>Toss aside the bath water of anxiety and you will also be tossing aside excitement, motivation, vigilance, ambition, exuberance and inspiration, to name just several of the inevitable sacrifices. Get rid of anxiety? Even if you could — and you can’t — why would you want to?
I would be extremely cautious with this train of thought. It is very dangerous, and by no means true.
This resonates with me. A mistake I often made when I was younger was to try my hardest to make the anxiety go away. I'd employ all sorts of tricks to make it happen, but they never worked. If anything, I'd feel even more anxious.
At some point I got tired of this and just decided to allow myself to be anxious. To let the feeling completely envelope me, and basically say to myself "yes, I'm anxious, and I'm going to give the presentation anyway". Something about letting it happen takes its power away.
In the context of the article, perhaps this is a way of "closing the loop" on the initial anxiety response, because you're essentially choosing to fight the external object instead of looking for some other way out.
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