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> Feeling troubled by being anxious in the modern world is a "cerebral" issue. How do you know the modern world is behind your anxiety? I'm more or less with
by slibhb 6y ago
> Feeling troubled by being anxious in the modern world is a "cerebral" issue.
How do you know the modern world is behind your anxiety?
I'm more or less with the article (though I have no opinion about the supposed treatment). I think it's a mistake to think it's easy to tell that you're anxious. Anxiety is something you notice by observing yourself, it's not something you know by querying some inner state. And even if you observe anxiety in yourself, you don't have any insight as to why it's there.
You might think "the modern world should rationally make me anxious," which seems reasonable. But that's not the same thing as being anxious. I think a lot of people confuse these things. Conversely, I notice I have symptoms of anxiety that seem related (based on proximity) to things that I do not consciously think of as anxiety-causing at all.
- dkarras 6y agoI did not claim that modern world is behind my anxiety, just that, following the article's logic, feeling the physical effects of anxiety - even if the cause is not seemingly rational - is a crippling problem only because it interferes with out modern way of lives. Experiencing a "fight and flight" misfire is not, in itself, a huge issue, even if it happens a couple times every day. The problem is you can't really function in the modern society with (or by anticipating) that. That aside, I sometimes forget that everyone's experience is different. The thing I got treatment for (a modern SSRI was all it took) after wrestling with it for more than a decade was definitely easy to tell and query. And when I got an attack, people could tell. And when I was not in an attack, my cognition was 50% busy with worrying about when and in what situation I'd get my next attack.