13 ms·

Anxiety: Nothing to Do but Embrace the Dread

69 points by wikiburner 13y ago

aantix 13y ago
From my own explorations, I've come to the conclusion that my anxious mind was a product from my parents. My dad is a fly off the handle, every small thing is a disaster. My mother is a chronic worrier. It wasn't until I moved to CA where I had a chance to remove myself from it did it start to make sense. Our emotional responses are learned and engrained from our earliest years. I see it in my parents when I go to visit but now that I'm aware of it I try to stay calm and grounded.
- wisty 13y ago
  Actually, there's a lot to do with genetics and brain chemistry. Whether or not your fight-or-flight reaction (your amygdalae) kicks in has a lot to do with nature. Nurture is also important - meditation can help you regulate it.
- nobohobo 13y ago
  It's like I wrote this. 3,000 miles disciplines even the craziest parents.
gohrt 13y ago
Or you can get high: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hallucinogens-could-ease-existential-terror http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hallucinoge... I've found that the best way to handle anxiety to stop talking about it all the time, and just fill your mind with living. When HN gets in a spate of depression/anxiety discussions, it drags my mental health down. It's almost enough to get me in support of the concept of Trigger Warnings.
- tomsthumb 13y ago
  > I've found that the best way to handle anxiety to stop talking about it all the time, and just fill your mind with living. Sometimes the solution to your problem is to un-ask the question.
- hosh 13y ago
  "When HN gets in a spate of depression/anxiety discussions, it drags my mental health down." Psychedelic experiences and meditation are closely interrelated. Filling your mind with one thing instead of the other is a temporary solution. It's another form of avoidance. Anxiety arises from an underlying emotional issue that someone is avoiding. In the psychedelic and meditative states, it is entirely possible to feel oneness and love for all that is. That's fine. For insight meditators, this is a peak experience that is itself transitory. We'd call this the first "flowering". There is still much work to reach the "fruit". Think about it. You're given the gift of unity consciousness, of love and light. But, the tendency after that is then select only some of the experience as good, and to reject the rest as bad. The gift of the bliss and love is to teach you what it is like to be unconditionally accepting of all that is. And unconditionally accepting includes the experiences of anxiety, depression, misery ... It's only when you accept the experiencing that you can become a complete person. So HN gets in a spate of depression and anxiety discussion. "It drags my mental health down." The practice at this point is to disassociate the apparent cause and effect and focus on what you are experiencing at the moment. "I feel that my focus is breaking apart." "I feel my mood going down." And you go deeper, observing the sensations that make that up: where exactly, in your body, are you feeling it? What color is it? What texture? What temperature? Any sounds, smell, or taste? Then you note it and let it go, go back to focus on living and breathing. Over time, you gain the ability to mindfully observe anxiety or any other sensation as they pass through your awareness, yet you are not moved. It is in this way, the mystics would call "finding your center". It no longer matters that HN gets in a spate of depression and anxiety discussions. You are OK with that.
  - antinitro 13y ago
    This is an incredibly well written reply; it sums up the basics of mindfulness in a very short space. Have you written any more on the subject?
    - hosh 13y ago
      Huh, thanks. Much of the language and frame I use comes from Daniel Ingram's "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha". You can check that out if you want more. If you've got some meditative experience, that has some good stuff. If you're coming in from entheogens, that is a great book to read after a couple breakthrough experiences. One note though: Ingram is considered controversial by a number of people for some reason. As for my own stuff, I have written a cheatsheet at some point: http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sheet-on-mindfulness-meditation/answer/Ho-Sheng-Hsiao http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sh... ... though I will be updating it soon from the things I've been learning from practicing pranayama and yoga.
tunesmith 13y ago
I tend to think that anxiety is neither emotion nor reason. Rather, it's an indication that one or both of them is not being engaged in properly.
- hosh 13y ago
  Anxiety is an emotion. It's an experience. It isn't reason, though one might come up with any number of reasons, rationalizations, and justifications to attempt to describe the experience.
softbuilder 13y ago
Personal history for anyone suffering from serious anxiety: Anxiety destroyed my 20s. It kept me home-bound. I rarely went out and would have attacks at the grocery store all of the time. Early on I hoped that things would come to a head and that I would eventually be immune to it, and stronger for it. But that never happened. I was afraid to seek help because I assumed they'd put me on meds that would dull my thinking. Looking back, that probably would have been fine. At every turn anxiety held me back. A stupider but freer me would have been welcome. After a lot of self-analysis and experimentation I discovered that about 70% of the problem was the Pepsi I was slugging down every day. For my body, sugar and caffeine together are like crack. I switched to diet and dropped about half of my daily anxiety in a few months. I eventually cut the caffeine out altogether. Daily anxiety almost entirely dropped, with occasional spikes for stressful situations. A friend told me to look into choline. I'm not a supplements guy, but it turns out eggs have plenty so I started eating eggs every morning. I also started running which has had a huge impact on my mood. After a while I rarely had anxiety. In fact most of the anxiety was from worrying that I was going to have an anxiety attack. I'm not cured - I don't like certain situations and those can still bring out an attack. The good news is that it's now at a point where I can fight back and "be brave", which I always though would fix it but never did. That actually works most of the time now. That was just impossible in the past. I used to think that caffeine was making me smarter. It was definitely giving me bursts of ideas, but ultimately it didn't give me anything I wasn't going to have already. I was abusing a drug, not thoughtfully taking a medication. I basically had to become enraged at how my life was going in order to do something about it. The bottom line is to never stop trying to solve it. Try the meds, exercise, diet, meditation, electroshock, whatever. Try everything until you figure it out.
- jsonne 13y ago
  This has been very much so my experience. I've had anxiety problems for about a year now. (I'm 23). I cut out caffeine and quit smoking. Working out and taking vitamin supplements have helped a ton too. More importantly though you're right. I was in a really bad place and it finally pissed me off enough to do something about it.
- Torgo 13y ago
  The only thing on that list that I have not tried is the electroshock :-(
wdewind 13y ago
Yikes. >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.
- javajosh 13y ago
  I'd upvote this comment more if I could. I've recently suffered from acute anxiety, and it was not pleasant. But I figured out what was causing it, changed my diet and exercise patterns, and it's not happening anymore. The rest of the good things in that list remain in place. That said, the author is probably not intentionally misleading his audience; his personal experience points to the connection between those good attributes and anxiety, and he assumes that if you lose one you lose them all. It's an honest mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.
robg 13y ago
If anyone is looking to build technologies to help quantify, then diagnose and treat anxiety, stress, and depression, we're hiring at Neumitra. I'm a neuroscientist by training and a severe family history of mental illness led me down this path. hello@neumitra.com
swayvil 13y ago
For me, meditation beats anxiety. I meditate every day, more or less. I can skip a couple of days of meditation but then anxiety starts rising. Soon it's sitting on me 24-7. I get more and more upset and I start thinking crazy thoughts. So I meditate and the anxiety goes away. I do samatha and vipassana.
ChrisAntaki 13y ago
Feel the fear, and do it anyways.
- Skywing 13y ago
  Unfortunately, during a panic attack, that may not seem like an option at the time. And, if you force yourself to do whatever it is you're trying to do at the moment, a panic attack could result in fainting or something, which may not be desirable. Anxiety, and "the fear", are both normal, but an attack is something hard to describe and triggers the flight response usually, for me.
  - hosh 13y ago
    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.
- dodgrile 13y ago
  Guessing you've never experienced an anxiety-type disorder. Imagine feeling like the breath is being pushed from your body, like you're about to lose control of your mental faculties, but not having anything physical you can fight back against. Doesn't matter where you are, at home, at work, playing with your kids. That's pretty much what it's like.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
senorcastro 13y ago
Anxiety is a naturally occurring process that has been essential to human survival. Some individuals have managed to place a completely different judgement on anxiety and we call those people thrill seekers while other individuals feel paralyzed with fear. Where one sees dread the other sees a potential for a state of euphoria. Conquering anxiety is not at all to do with removing it but with managing our perception of the experience. Embracing anxiety is not so much with accepting dread but to understand this naturally occurring system of defense and ultimately desensitizing ourselves to the dread associated with the experience.
- Skywing 13y ago
  Perhaps. Although, that is easier said than done.
  - hosh 13y ago
    Meditate. Breath. No one said this was easy.
kevinold 13y ago
This book has not only helped me with back, neck, and shoulder pain but anxiety too. http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-ebook/dp/B000SEHJOI/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1373942557&sr=1-2&keywords=divided+minds http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-ebook/dp/B000SEHJOI/r... Turns out simple breathing exercises can lower most of my anxiety. http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercises.html http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercis...
matdrewin 13y ago
I wasn't a normally anxious person before but 2 distinct traumatic events that happened in the last 2 years has now made me super anxious. The weird thing about anxiety is that it's like both sides of your brain are fighting for control of your body.
dschiptsov 13y ago
In some sense anxiety is an inability to one region of the brain to tame activities of the other(s). There could be a whole set of possible causation, but the idea is quite simple - a brain is a muscle, so it could be "changed" via exercises. This is the reason why meditation works is a grossly oversimplified, naive wording. So, yes, the way of out of chronic anxiety and anxiety disorders in general is not in medication or running away, but in contrary, go toward it and getting to know it by knowing oneself. This is how people survive on the war - by conquering extreme fear and anxiety.
benjaminwootton 13y ago
There's a fantastic book that may help with anxiety: Claire Weekes - Self Help For Your Nerves. It teaches you how it's just a physiological response that feeds off itself. Understanding this can help you to break the cycle.
oyvindeh 13y ago
I've found it helpful to learn not to fuel thought trains. ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)[1] is helpful for that: It's basically about developing an understanding that thoughts and feelings are not real, and that they are not dangerous. A thought is the voice in your head, feelings are sensations in the body. Nothing more. It also has techniques that makes it easier to detect them. By the way: Gut flora may play a role in anxiety[2], at least for some. It seems to play a role in many different mental, as well as physical, illnesses. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/dp/1590305841/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373970942&sr=8-1&keywords=happiness+trap http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/d... [2] http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx

69 points by wikiburner 13y ago

From my own explorations, I've come to the conclusion that my anxious mind was a product from my parents. My dad is a fly off the handle, every small thing is a disaster. My mother is a chronic worrier. It wasn't until I moved to CA where I had a chance to remove myself from it did it start to make sense. Our emotional responses are learned and engrained from our earliest years. I see it in my parents when I go to visit but now that I'm aware of it I try to stay calm and grounded.

wisty 13y ago
Actually, there's a lot to do with genetics and brain chemistry. Whether or not your fight-or-flight reaction (your amygdalae) kicks in has a lot to do with nature. Nurture is also important - meditation can help you regulate it.
nobohobo 13y ago
It's like I wrote this. 3,000 miles disciplines even the craziest parents.

gohrt 13y ago

Or you can get high: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hallucinogens-could-ease-existential-terror http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hallucinoge... I've found that the best way to handle anxiety to stop talking about it all the time, and just fill your mind with living. When HN gets in a spate of depression/anxiety discussions, it drags my mental health down. It's almost enough to get me in support of the concept of Trigger Warnings.

tomsthumb 13y ago
> I've found that the best way to handle anxiety to stop talking about it all the time, and just fill your mind with living. Sometimes the solution to your problem is to un-ask the question.
hosh 13y ago
"When HN gets in a spate of depression/anxiety discussions, it drags my mental health down." Psychedelic experiences and meditation are closely interrelated. Filling your mind with one thing instead of the other is a temporary solution. It's another form of avoidance. Anxiety arises from an underlying emotional issue that someone is avoiding. In the psychedelic and meditative states, it is entirely possible to feel oneness and love for all that is. That's fine. For insight meditators, this is a peak experience that is itself transitory. We'd call this the first "flowering". There is still much work to reach the "fruit". Think about it. You're given the gift of unity consciousness, of love and light. But, the tendency after that is then select only some of the experience as good, and to reject the rest as bad. The gift of the bliss and love is to teach you what it is like to be unconditionally accepting of all that is. And unconditionally accepting includes the experiences of anxiety, depression, misery ... It's only when you accept the experiencing that you can become a complete person. So HN gets in a spate of depression and anxiety discussion. "It drags my mental health down." The practice at this point is to disassociate the apparent cause and effect and focus on what you are experiencing at the moment. "I feel that my focus is breaking apart." "I feel my mood going down." And you go deeper, observing the sensations that make that up: where exactly, in your body, are you feeling it? What color is it? What texture? What temperature? Any sounds, smell, or taste? Then you note it and let it go, go back to focus on living and breathing. Over time, you gain the ability to mindfully observe anxiety or any other sensation as they pass through your awareness, yet you are not moved. It is in this way, the mystics would call "finding your center". It no longer matters that HN gets in a spate of depression and anxiety discussions. You are OK with that.
- antinitro 13y ago
  This is an incredibly well written reply; it sums up the basics of mindfulness in a very short space. Have you written any more on the subject?
  - hosh 13y ago
    Huh, thanks. Much of the language and frame I use comes from Daniel Ingram's "Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha". You can check that out if you want more. If you've got some meditative experience, that has some good stuff. If you're coming in from entheogens, that is a great book to read after a couple breakthrough experiences. One note though: Ingram is considered controversial by a number of people for some reason. As for my own stuff, I have written a cheatsheet at some point: http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sheet-on-mindfulness-meditation/answer/Ho-Sheng-Hsiao http://www.quora.com/Meditation/Whats-a-nice-little-cheat-sh... ... though I will be updating it soon from the things I've been learning from practicing pranayama and yoga.

tunesmith 13y ago

I tend to think that anxiety is neither emotion nor reason. Rather, it's an indication that one or both of them is not being engaged in properly.

hosh 13y ago
Anxiety is an emotion. It's an experience. It isn't reason, though one might come up with any number of reasons, rationalizations, and justifications to attempt to describe the experience.

softbuilder 13y ago

Personal history for anyone suffering from serious anxiety: Anxiety destroyed my 20s. It kept me home-bound. I rarely went out and would have attacks at the grocery store all of the time. Early on I hoped that things would come to a head and that I would eventually be immune to it, and stronger for it. But that never happened. I was afraid to seek help because I assumed they'd put me on meds that would dull my thinking. Looking back, that probably would have been fine. At every turn anxiety held me back. A stupider but freer me would have been welcome. After a lot of self-analysis and experimentation I discovered that about 70% of the problem was the Pepsi I was slugging down every day. For my body, sugar and caffeine together are like crack. I switched to diet and dropped about half of my daily anxiety in a few months. I eventually cut the caffeine out altogether. Daily anxiety almost entirely dropped, with occasional spikes for stressful situations. A friend told me to look into choline. I'm not a supplements guy, but it turns out eggs have plenty so I started eating eggs every morning. I also started running which has had a huge impact on my mood. After a while I rarely had anxiety. In fact most of the anxiety was from worrying that I was going to have an anxiety attack. I'm not cured - I don't like certain situations and those can still bring out an attack. The good news is that it's now at a point where I can fight back and "be brave", which I always though would fix it but never did. That actually works most of the time now. That was just impossible in the past. I used to think that caffeine was making me smarter. It was definitely giving me bursts of ideas, but ultimately it didn't give me anything I wasn't going to have already. I was abusing a drug, not thoughtfully taking a medication. I basically had to become enraged at how my life was going in order to do something about it. The bottom line is to never stop trying to solve it. Try the meds, exercise, diet, meditation, electroshock, whatever. Try everything until you figure it out.

jsonne 13y ago
This has been very much so my experience. I've had anxiety problems for about a year now. (I'm 23). I cut out caffeine and quit smoking. Working out and taking vitamin supplements have helped a ton too. More importantly though you're right. I was in a really bad place and it finally pissed me off enough to do something about it.
Torgo 13y ago
The only thing on that list that I have not tried is the electroshock :-(

wdewind 13y ago

Yikes. >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.

javajosh 13y ago
I'd upvote this comment more if I could. I've recently suffered from acute anxiety, and it was not pleasant. But I figured out what was causing it, changed my diet and exercise patterns, and it's not happening anymore. The rest of the good things in that list remain in place. That said, the author is probably not intentionally misleading his audience; his personal experience points to the connection between those good attributes and anxiety, and he assumes that if you lose one you lose them all. It's an honest mistake, but a mistake nonetheless.

robg 13y ago

If anyone is looking to build technologies to help quantify, then diagnose and treat anxiety, stress, and depression, we're hiring at Neumitra. I'm a neuroscientist by training and a severe family history of mental illness led me down this path. hello@neumitra.com

swayvil 13y ago

For me, meditation beats anxiety. I meditate every day, more or less. I can skip a couple of days of meditation but then anxiety starts rising. Soon it's sitting on me 24-7. I get more and more upset and I start thinking crazy thoughts. So I meditate and the anxiety goes away. I do samatha and vipassana.

ChrisAntaki 13y ago

Feel the fear, and do it anyways.

Skywing 13y ago
Unfortunately, during a panic attack, that may not seem like an option at the time. And, if you force yourself to do whatever it is you're trying to do at the moment, a panic attack could result in fainting or something, which may not be desirable. Anxiety, and "the fear", are both normal, but an attack is something hard to describe and triggers the flight response usually, for me.
- hosh 13y ago
  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.
dodgrile 13y ago
Guessing you've never experienced an anxiety-type disorder. Imagine feeling like the breath is being pushed from your body, like you're about to lose control of your mental faculties, but not having anything physical you can fight back against. Doesn't matter where you are, at home, at work, playing with your kids. That's pretty much what it's like.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

senorcastro 13y ago

Anxiety is a naturally occurring process that has been essential to human survival. Some individuals have managed to place a completely different judgement on anxiety and we call those people thrill seekers while other individuals feel paralyzed with fear. Where one sees dread the other sees a potential for a state of euphoria. Conquering anxiety is not at all to do with removing it but with managing our perception of the experience. Embracing anxiety is not so much with accepting dread but to understand this naturally occurring system of defense and ultimately desensitizing ourselves to the dread associated with the experience.

Skywing 13y ago
Perhaps. Although, that is easier said than done.
- hosh 13y ago
  Meditate. Breath. No one said this was easy.

kevinold 13y ago

This book has not only helped me with back, neck, and shoulder pain but anxiety too. http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-ebook/dp/B000SEHJOI/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1373942557&sr=1-2&keywords=divided+minds http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-ebook/dp/B000SEHJOI/r... Turns out simple breathing exercises can lower most of my anxiety. http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercises.html http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/ART00521/three-breathing-exercis...

matdrewin 13y ago

I wasn't a normally anxious person before but 2 distinct traumatic events that happened in the last 2 years has now made me super anxious. The weird thing about anxiety is that it's like both sides of your brain are fighting for control of your body.

dschiptsov 13y ago

In some sense anxiety is an inability to one region of the brain to tame activities of the other(s). There could be a whole set of possible causation, but the idea is quite simple - a brain is a muscle, so it could be "changed" via exercises. This is the reason why meditation works is a grossly oversimplified, naive wording. So, yes, the way of out of chronic anxiety and anxiety disorders in general is not in medication or running away, but in contrary, go toward it and getting to know it by knowing oneself. This is how people survive on the war - by conquering extreme fear and anxiety.

benjaminwootton 13y ago

There's a fantastic book that may help with anxiety: Claire Weekes - Self Help For Your Nerves. It teaches you how it's just a physiological response that feeds off itself. Understanding this can help you to break the cycle.

oyvindeh 13y ago

I've found it helpful to learn not to fuel thought trains. ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy)[1] is helpful for that: It's basically about developing an understanding that thoughts and feelings are not real, and that they are not dangerous. A thought is the voice in your head, feelings are sensations in the body. Nothing more. It also has techniques that makes it easier to detect them. By the way: Gut flora may play a role in anxiety[2], at least for some. It seems to play a role in many different mental, as well as physical, illnesses. [1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/dp/1590305841/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373970942&sr=8-1&keywords=happiness+trap http://www.amazon.com/The-Happiness-Trap-Struggling-Living/d... [2] http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx http://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/09/gut-feeling.aspx