A tangent on my latest Tumblr comment

[brin_bellway]

[cw: illness, discussion of anxiety, (arguably) discourse]


*This* post doesn't really do the thing, but I've seen a lot of *other* posts in this sphere of topic treat "stress" and "anxiety" as things that are problems *in themselves* as opposed to symptoms, and recommend ""treatment"" methods that do nothing to solve the underlying problem. Are a lot of people just so accustomed to pathological generalised anxiety that they've forgotten that sometimes anxiety is *for* something?

Do you know what immediately resolved almost all of my COVID anxiety? It wasn't bubble baths, or meditation, or being forgiving to myself, or any of that: it was *getting a respirator*. Dangerous situations are stressful, and making a situation much less dangerous makes it much less stressful!

Stop shooting the messenger and start fixing the danger.

Comments

[lunartulip]

Dangerous situations are stressful, but I would prefer that they not be. I don't find stress and anxiety, even when founded on real problems, to be all that helpful in making me resolve the relevant problems; they just make my life additionally worse for as long as the problems persist.

(Getting injured is bad; nonetheless I have no regrets about having hacked my [not-pain-tolerance] up to a level where the pain from injuries no longer tends to be all that unpleasant. Injuries-plus-unpleasantness-from-pain are more bad than injuries on their own, and insofar as I'm now slightly more blase about being injured, well, it's for the good reason that being injured is now less bad rather than for any bad reason.)

[brin_bellway]

I *have* encountered people who say that fear appears to be pure negative for them, but I find it very motivating.

(Meanwhile I encountered someone today saying *anger* can motivate people in a positive way, and I absolutely do not know what it would even mean for anger to be healthy in a social context with very few and *very* restrictive outlets for violent urges. If you take anger and remove the desire for violence, what's *left*? Other than, like, a chest ache, and an abstract intellectual belief that [entity] was wrong to do [thing].

Comparative emotions are hard.)

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>>nonetheless I have no regrets about having hacked my [not-pain-tolerance] up to a level where the pain from injuries no longer tends to be all that unpleasant.

But you're still *aware* of the pain, and you're still aware that pain tends to be a sign of something wrong.

Is there an analogous thing here? Can people receive internal signals that their situation is unacceptably dangerous and they need to do something about it, signals which are often accurate and which they intellectually decide to take seriously by default, without experiencing the quale of anxiety? Is there a form of anxiety that asks politely?

[lunartulip]

If you take anger and remove the desire for violence, what's *left*? Other than, like, a chest ache, and an abstract intellectual belief that [entity] was wrong to do [thing].

On those rare occasions wherein I feel angry, the general feeling is desire to make life worse for the target coupled with disregard for personal negative consequences to doing so. There's no particular desire for violence-in-particular there for me; it wasn't until somewhere in my late teenagerhood that I figured out that the people who talked about wanting to punch people who angered them were being literal and not metaphorical, because that sort of desire-for-violence was so foreign to me.

(Four relatively-recent examples (e.g. from the last decade) of me trying to make people's lives worse when angry: trying to get the anger-inducing party kicked out of his admin role on Discord (unsuccessful), trying to escalate this one school office's bad policy decision from an obscure thing-only-the-affected-students-knew-about into a campus-wide PR mess (a friend talked me out of it on the grounds that it would be tactically counterproductive), being miscellaneously snarky and oppositional towards the anger-inducing party (successful), and bouncing a rubber ball in a loud-and-obnoxious manner in the anger-inducing parties' presence (successful).)

I still broadly prefer to not get angry—the "get my values altered to specifically want to make people's lives worse" part and the "disregard for personal negative consequences" part are both Unwelcome, and even if I ever end up in a circumstance where making someone's life worse is the my-unaltered-values-maximizing thing to do (e.g. for game-theoretic revenge reasons), I'd rather do it coldly and carefully rather than in the stupid low-foresight way anger drives me to—but anger-as-I-experience-it definitely has more socially-acceptable outlets than a version of anger associated purely with a drive towards violence would.

Is there an analogous thing here? Can people receive internal signals that their situation is unacceptably dangerous and they need to do something about it, signals which are often accurate and which they intellectually decide to take seriously by default, without experiencing the quale of anxiety? Is there a form of anxiety that asks politely?

I'm not sure about a single distinctive signal which does that thing, as opposed to its being a side effect of general reasoning about my situation coupled with general pursuit-of-my-values? I don't avoid COVID-19 due to being anxious about it (since I am, for the most part, not all that anxious about it); I avoid it because I've crunched the numbers and concluded that avoiding it is the my-values-maximizing thing to do. But then, anxiety isn't that sort of distinctive signal of needing-to-do-something for me, either; anxiety, for me, is a signal that I'm feeling internally conflicted or uncertain about what to do in a given situation.

(At school, I often would feel anxious before my tests, wondering whether or not I'd really studied and otherwise prepared enough. That anxiety would always fade as soon as the tests started, even with the in-theory-hardest part in front of me, because my options were limited enough that there was no longer any question of what to do; the answer was very clearly "do the test".)

[brin_bellway]

>>anxiety, for me, is a signal that I'm feeling *internally conflicted or uncertain* about what to do in a given situation.

Wait, hang on, I've talked about the distinction here before.

...wait, hang on, I've talked about the distinction here *with you* before.

So, yeah, COVID-related anxiety is primarily an uncertainty-of-outcome anxiety. Each breath of public air tilts the odds just a little bit more against me, but I don't get to know in advance which situations are genuinely dangerous, or whether I'll make it out of the dangerous ones intact, or exactly what would happen if I *didn't* make it out intact. (Hell, I wouldn't even get to know the first one in *hindsight*: I have to go out often enough that if I *did* get sick I would never know for sure which outing it was that screwed me over.)

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>>I'm not sure about a *single distinctive signal* which does that thing, as opposed to its being a side effect of general reasoning about my situation coupled with general pursuit-of-my-values?

I'm not sure if I can disentangle fear from the process of deciding that something is best avoided: it seems like a manifestation of that decision.

I *have* occasionally seen the world through a positive lens, where things are basically okay as they are but they *could* be even better (rather than things being unacceptably bad as they are, with adequacy being a goal off in the distance). While this state is more effective than I might naively *expect*, I'm definitely slower at adding improvements to my life than at making repairs.

[contrarianarchon]

... these models of anxiety and anger seem about right to me. Though my anger does usually get stymied by needing to hand off it's goals to parts of my self with better long-range planning to even conduct coherent text conversations and those long-range planning modules are pretty good at suggesting calming down as an important first step in the plan. We'll see how that goes in the inevitable case in the long-run that someone I know socially IRL does something that actually makes me angry, which hasn't happened in, like, years probably, at least to a casual examination of my memories.

(Also wow that thing about the pain sounds nice. I have a bad time with pain for various reasons which I am having trouble picking apart effectively to write about and it'd be nice to just ... not have to worry about that? I guess though if I'm having trouble solving long-term/chronic problems even when they're actively unpleasant I wouldn't have a snowball's chance in hell if they weren't, though.)