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.)