Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wruza | Hacker News Reader

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You want to train the rational part of your brain to disregard the anxiety signals coming from your amygdla; and over time, the amygdla's messages will become less and less intense

Can that really be more effective than/without digging to the cause? My personal experience with downward arrow is that on success, it doesn't reduce anxiety by itself, but it adds lots of courage and knowledge to intentionally face situations where it comes up and to go through aware. If you don't know what's wrong... hmm I'm not a therapist to figure it out. Do you really feel it less, or do you accept it like a tinnitus? (I mean the latter is a solution but personally I'd rather not feel it).

You will not be making good decisions while anxious, and other careers will not be less stressful

Mostly agreed. Because (from CBT perspective) while it's nice to take a break and relax, the crucial reflection info disappears. It's sort of a pointless pause and the issues will find you anyway.

I suppose I would say that you should be aware of what triggers your anxiety, for sure, for the reasons you state. But once you're aware, limit the amount of further analysis you do. I think the law of diminishing returns will kick in pretty quick. Other methods (ACT) will prove much more fruitful once you have a basic awareness. ACT is like building muscle: the more you do the more effective it gets it gets. Analysis is the opposite :-)

Perhaps I over-stated the case in my GP post. I didn't mean to imply that you should be ignorant of the reasons; but they are definitely far less important than the biological/neurological processes that are taking place. At least such is my experience, and such (I believe) the research says.

> Do you really feel it less, or do you accept it like a tinnitus?

Acceptance, over time, causes you to feel it less. Seeing it as something horrible and evil that you must get rid of will cause a vicious spiral, and end up making you more anxious.

Ah I see now, it seems to be closer to my experience then, than I thought. Find the source and go torture it rather than beating around the bush.

tinnitus

Yeah I learned that sort of hard way :) But it was true. I should draw parallels but that begs more questions which probably aren't worth asking by the same principle. So much of it only gets clear in retrospect.

You and your sibling commenter made me realize something new about it, thanks!

Something that helped with my anxiety is changing the way I think about my physical and mental issues where even if I have some underlying conditions causing anxiety, it should not define how I feel about it because I am in the control of how I feel. Even if you have tinnitus, and it causes you great discomfort, you must convince yourself that tinnitus does not define how you feel about it, that it does not cause continous issues, and that worrying and digging on the causes of it can actually make it worse because our brains are stupid sometimes.

It does help, but you must push through it. Your body will give you signals that its not ok, but you must try to ignore it, and then you may actually feel better, even if your underlying causes did not change.

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