Brin (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
brin_bellway) wrote2021-02-18 07:26 pm
brin_bellway) wrote2021-02-18 07:26 pm
Entry tags:
A tangent on my latest Tumblr comment
[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.
*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.
no subject
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.)
---
>>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.