Reminded me of a passage from Sapiens on Buddah.

"...Gautama Buddah found that there was a way to exit this vicious circle.

If, when the mind experiences something pleasant or unpleasant, it simply understand things as they are, then there is no suffering.

If you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you do not suffer from it. There can actually be richness in the sadness.

If you experience joy without craving that the joy linger and intensify, you continue to feel joy without losing your peace of mind.”

Sapiens is an apt book to quote for this.

There is also a chapter on brain chemicals:

"Some air-conditioning systems are set at twenty-five degrees Celsius. Others are set at twenty degrees. Human happiness conditioning systems also differ from person to person. On a scale from one to ten, some people are born with a cheerful biochemical system that allows their mood to swing between levels six and ten, stabilising with time at eight. Such a person is quite happy even if she lives in an alienating big city, loses all her money in a stock-exchange crash and is diagnosed with diabetes. Other people are cursed with a gloomy biochemistry that swings between three and seven and stabilises at five. Such an unhappy person remains depressed even if she enjoys the support of a tight-knit community, wins millions in the lottery and is as healthy as an Olympic athlete. Indeed, even if our gloomy friend wins $50,000,000 in the morning, discovers the cure for both AIDS and cancer by noon, makes peace between Israelis and Palestinians that afternoon, and then in the evening reunites with her long-lost child who disappeared years ago – she would still be incapable of experiencing anything beyond level seven happiness. Her brain is simply not built for exhilaration, come what may." https://erenow.net/common/sapiensbriefhistory/102.php

Is this the link to the actual book text, or a summary? Thanks.

I wonder if that is why we like music. We can experience emotions without worrying that they are permanent or need to be resolved.

If there's something sacred to me it's music (or harmony). It's weird because it's not as foundational as smell or vision but it revives my soul like nothing else. That's the closest substitute to drug I know of.

I have no idea why our emotions are so tangled with it and how comes it can untie knots in our minds like this.

> it revives my soul like nothing else.

Beautifully said.

I have numerous sayings about music, for example I used to do 20 mile runs every Saturday and Sunday and 10 miles every weekday. No David goggins but people always ask question, I tend to tell them I don’t run, I listen to music and the miles run themselves.

And I used to tell people that the music allows me to feel every single cell in my body and the music makes them happy. And truthfully I think there is something to that down to the quantum level, where the music causes your atoms to vibrate putting them in higher states of energy.

I don't subscribe to quantum / soul connection but I guess the abstract relationships between notes and rhythm tickles the brain very very deep.

I rely on music for emotional regulation. Not only does it help push me towards moods/states i want, like focus, energy, calm, etc - but it helps me manage moods i don't want. If i'm feeling sad, embracing the sadness with music can be enriching in a unique way. Almost like "having a good cry", but far easier to achieve, and with application for almost all moods and circumstances.

Music really is the center of my life, even though i don't play it. .. though i do dabble, and am currently learning Piano, so /shrug.

I dabbled and everybody should dabble, smoothly just for the thrill of hearing notes in time.

I wish I had a piano, weighted keys are so sweet. Another fun thing is large congas.. the depth of the sound is surprising.

> The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.

Schopenhauer, the father of philosophical pessimism, would agree with you: he thought of music as one of the few pure respites from the suffering of the world.

That’s exactly why the Pythagoreans were obsessed with music!

An arcane text which I highly recommend for those curious is The Manual of Harmonics by Nichomacus the Pythagorean. It’s a series of ancient lectures which dives into why the Pythagoreans were obsessed with how numerical the musical scales are.

Did pythagoreans have notions of chromatic scales ? I worry that without it you're losing a huge emotional space. I'll look your book at once.

He speaks profusely about tetrachords. I believe his best examination of the chromatic scale is in chapter 12.

I have a version translated and commentated upon by Flora R. Levin which provides exquisite anthropological background of how the ancient Greeks thought of music and provides context for what amounts to as lectures given by Nichomachus.

You said that perfectly. From beginning to end, it's amazingly spot on.

This touched a chord. For me it's a combination of both music and dance.

It's amazing to feel emotions I'd normally not want to express in everyday life and just let them flow out. Rage, jealousy, lust. The music is such a great trigger to tap into these primal feelings, and then expressing them through movement just feels incredible. It feels real and amazingly cathartic, but the transience of the experience leaves no consequences.

I guess that's why there's the saying dance like nobody's watching. Because for many people, that expression of feeling strips us down and leaves our feelings exposed and vulnerable .

This is along the lines of how I've come to think of music; music is a temporary emotional stimulant.

This resonates with me. A mistake I often made when I was younger was to try my hardest to make the anxiety go away. I'd employ all sorts of tricks to make it happen, but they never worked. If anything, I'd feel even more anxious.

At some point I got tired of this and just decided to allow myself to be anxious. To let the feeling completely envelope me, and basically say to myself "yes, I'm anxious, and I'm going to give the presentation anyway". Something about letting it happen takes its power away.

In the context of the article, perhaps this is a way of "closing the loop" on the initial anxiety response, because you're essentially choosing to fight the external object instead of looking for some other way out.

I’m too ignorant to know the origins of some of these ideas but this reminds me of a segment from a podcast with Joscha Bach. I’ve posted it here before, apologies for that, but i just like the way he describes it.

https://youtu.be/8mixT5_U0hk

This is profound and exactly what Jiddu Krishnamurti often talks about. When you do put a word to that emotion i.e., sad, angry, happy etc., you no longer suffer it. What's left is just the joy of life.

Great quote, thank you for sharing.

I had a friend who rather enjoyed being sad. He would purposely watch sad movies just to experience the tear jerker moments.

He was otherwise a generally happy person.

> I just realized that there was nothing I could really do about anxiety or the physical symptoms that came along with it. I decided to mostly try to quit noticing and thinking about it. And that really helped.

I think this is mission accomplished from your mindfulness practice, you realized that you're not really doing anything and that anxiety just appears, you accepted it and it felt better.

I had work related anxiety for awhile, and then one day I realized I could co-op that energy to go faster, by body and mind eventually decided they didn't like that mind hack and the anxiety subsided.

There are some problems with that type of approach - there are some things that won't vanish, if you stop thinking about them.

There is a big difference between having anxiety about something and the thing itself. Your anxiety can go away without the thing you are worrying about going away or not. So it doesn't matter whether or not something goes away, you can still lessen your anxiety about it.

There are major differences between attempting to forcefully stop thinking about something, and accepting that you're thinking about something and then able to move on to something else.

In the first case, you're working against your brain, and getting it to behave is more likely to require some kind of violence and cause some sort of damage.

The other way, where you accept and then can move on, is more like moving with your brain.

Instead of trying to stop the river, you redirect it.

One can either become the anxiety (you're wrapped up in it), or be conscious of it's presence as an observer (more like a third party observer).

Personally, I prefer the latter.

It won't vanish.

Acceptance just makes it hurt much less.

I have an extremely similar arc with regard to stress and anxiety. I've found exercise helped, but purely because it made my body better able to manage the physical symptoms. In talking things out with my therapist I eventually came to the conclusion that ignoring problems can actually be a very effective solution, despite what everyone tells you.

"Meditation helps with just about anything. Therapy helps you with figuring out why the hell you don't meditate"

I've realized a lot of the same things. My understanding now is that it is the physical feelings themselves that are the stress. Managing stress is about learning to identify it and then learning how to best take care of it (which you can only do when you are first aware of the stress and the toll it is having on you.)

> I’ve concluded that the best advice is to learn not to worry about things

If you can do something about it, go do it. No need to worry, act.

If you can’t ... well it’s out of your hands anyway, why worry about it.

Recent mentions of mindfulness have made it obsolete as it is something that akkktually does not work and it should not be advised as something that works(for everyone).

Well, the reason here is that I tried mindfulness(because I was probably extremelly stressed out from what was going on around me at that time) and it was not working and here is why(from REAL expert): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/do-the-right-thing/2...

Even though, some of the things mentioned in THIS article(by Emma Pattee) are written with right words, it should be mentioned, that Emma Pattee has not presented them as a medical expert on anxiety, but as a writer, so anything that is written in article should be taken as a (wishful) literature - not medical help.

It is best advice to not to worry about things - and the main thing here is that for everyone there is different path on how to achieve that... though, it is quite impossible task for really stressed out human, where even normal social reactions can be interpreted as hostile, that will add more cycles to stress and postpone getting out of worries.

Mindfulness has been removed from its traditional context, and some fundamental concepts and practices have been abandoned along the way. This has severely weakened most western mindfulness practices.

https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/mindf...

Mindfulness based interventions outperform most of the mental health interventions we have for anxiety / stress-- across a variety of relatively high quality trials.

Nothing works for everyone.

I think mindfulness here is meant as a synonym for a particular type of meditation. This article is broadly correct from my perspective—we should approach meditation with some caution, because it is not a well-defined self-therapy modality. It's quite possible, with the wrong practice instruction, to end up hurting yourself, or just getting nowhere.

Meditation—and even just mindfulness meditation—is a domain of practice as broad as "exercise."

If you are interested in engaging with this type of practice, I recommend working with a qualified teacher in a spiritual tradition. These practitioners will have extensive training (at least decades) and will be drawing from a few thousand years of careful study of the effects of meditation (as found in Buddhist and Yogic/Hindu documents and oral traditions).

For working on emotional issues without dedicating years to practice, therapeutic modalities developed in the West are faster, more reliable, and safer.

I started to get stressed out when my sister got cancer. I had headaches, back pain, panic attacks, developed agoraphobia and so on - all the spectrum of mental issues. I tried to approach all of them with weeding them out one by one(and did not look on all of that as a whole picture), so I tried medications, that were meant to cure my insomnia, then headaches(some of them made it even worse), got brain scanned etc. and could not understand the reason and why nothing worked. I just could not calm down, because thoughts that were occupying my mind in background could not just go pooh and vanish. More or less ALL of those symptoms(in most severe states) now are gone and I am now almost back to normal ~1 year later after my sister died. Because now I can afford not to think about her state - now I am able to achieve mindfulness about that situation, that now has gone, and I can occupy my mind with other thoughts, but it has become possible only because now it is too late to worry.

So, it is perfectly correct, that author of this article is talking about mindfulness in regards with imaginary threats and that is very useless for me, as that type of threats actually does not make me stressed out, but inability to save close relative from death I can't perceive as imaginary threat, but it is (pardon my french) sh!t advice to suggest mindfulness in extreme cases(that require most help on anxieties), for example - for someone who would be freaking out over someone close who has died in car accident. The first step would be getting away from that place and not sing kumbaya on that spot.

Knowing that humans have evolved as most violent primates(with everyday aggression amongst themselves), I don't think that meditation is that good, compared to inability to release frustration and anger - from my experience I got a break after I had to deal with situations that required violent solution, so I realized, that for me it had better therapeutical effect and more properly wired to my brains, than "coping" with stress and staying alive and healthy by inability to do anything and trying to meditate.

They're not talking about anxiety that makes sense here. You being scared of your sister dying makes sense. They're talking about irrational anxiety, like having a panic attack, because your stomach feels slightly funny, or because you slept weird, etc. Those irrational anxieties are often times hard to pinpoint to an actual cause. Like your sitting at home on a sunday and suddenly have a panic attack, without any immediate cause or threat.

It applies to both. Being scared of one's sister dying has a definite cause you can pinpoint to, but that still doesn't explain the racing heart, or stomach sickness, or anything else. There's no "tiger in the bushes" reason why your body needs to dump a whole bunch of adrenaline in you right now.

Learning that you can calm your body down separately from wanting to think about the actual issue at hand is a good lesson.

> I recommend working with a qualified teacher in a spiritual tradition. These practitioners will have extensive training (at least decades) and will be drawing from a few thousand years of careful study of the effects of meditation (as found in Buddhist and Yogic/Hindu documents and oral traditions).

How many teachers actually have this, and how can one know that the one you’ve chosen is one of them?

I loved loopz's answer, but it's also important to grapple with the fact that you can never truly know whether a teacher is good. The path is always a risk. It's best to learn as much as you can and assess for yourself as you go.

In any event, the common wisdom is "you'll know." Or to put it plainly, do you like the person and feel like they have something to teach you?

I like the term "spiritual friend," because it's easy to understand the dynamic by analogy. How do you know one of your friends is truly your friend?

As for how many there are: I don't know. I live in the Bay Area, where the concentration of practitioners is perhaps highest in the US, and I'm aware of maybe a handful of teachers I would consider consider studying with. I'm aware of many more I would not.

I like the term "dangerous friend": https://www.shambhala.com/dangerous-friend-466.html

You will notice you have lots to learn and experience that gives you something. No teacher is forever, except life itself perhaps.

It has more to do with the "student".

You're hired!

You may find it productive to speak with your therapist about EMDR approach. It has shown to work with trauma, ptsd, anxiety.

Same story here, and when the physical symptoms get bad enough to induce fear (am I having a heart attack, is this constant pain in my stomach a bigger medical issue, etc.) you just also accept it because you can’t change it. “It’s probably not a heart attack, but if it is... oh well, worrying about it won’t help”

Last year my heart's AV nerves progressively stopped working, causing my ventricles to slow and decouple from my sinus node. Before figuring that out, I was getting panic attacks from relatively benign technical disagreements with coworkers. It was very much a visceral fight-or-flight response. A few days before I ended up in the hospital, I tried playing a level of Tomb Raider and 5 minutes in I had a notable feeling of dread from it, like I was going to vomit and lose consciousness. Good times!

Can you elaborate on your hearts AV nerves? I don't really get it, but I sometimes wonder if my vagus nerve is damaged and your situation has some familiarity to me.

Sure. There was inflammation on my heart around those nerves, causing them to cease working. There are three nerves there, that propagate the impulse from your atriums to your ventricles in a controlled manner. When those nerves don't work, some of the impulse still indirectly makes it to the ventricles through the muscle tissue, but it's significantly delayed. So the ventricles beat, but at a significantly slower rate. It seemed to go 2:1 then 3:1, and even 4:1 at times.

I had to get a pacemaker to solve the immediate issue of my heart not beating normally. With the inflammation taken care of a few months later, my nerves eventually started working again and my heart beats normally enough. They aren't 100%, but they're probably good enough that the pacemaker isn't necessary anymore.

It works even for physical pain. The way I see it, wanting the pain (or the anxiety) to go a away creates tension, which adds to the existing issue. You then want the tension and original pain to go away, so add on more tension… and it gets worse and worse. Not only does tension itself lead to pain in the long run, but if you tense around a painful place, you also immediately make it more painful.

By accepting the original issue, you are left with it only, and not all the added tension, which is much more bearable.

Microdose mushrooms. Seems silly but you can break your thought patterns by disconnecting your brain from well trodden paths.

I think Michael Pollan is onto something

This makes me curious, can you elaborate a bit please? How exactly would it work on anxiety? Does taking stuff produce a temporary relief or does it change the structure of your brain for a longer period? There is definitely things we still don't know about this, and it seems promising.

It's an active area of research, plenty of anecdotal evidence has been posted on the net.

Psychedelics can open up your senses to new experiences and methods of thinking. Over time this MAY help with troublesome thought patterns, which is prevalent in the depression/anxiety cycle.

There are therapies involving this if you dig around, or if you're brave you can experiment on yourself. Don't dive in too deep to start off :)

That's why you need to do yoga. Relaxing the body is so important and Meditation, without yoga, can be harmful. Simple, long holding, hatha yoga, beginning with deep part by part body relaxation and pranayama prepares you for meditation and allows you to handle the energies that can be released during mediation.

So much stress is held in the body. Western productization of more eastern traditional practices unfortunately often seems to divide them up into small consumable pieces and deliver them stripped of an awareness of both their larger context, their interactions and the importance of how you need to do some together. It also seems to teach people advanced techniques as if they were nothing, which can be extremely dangerous.

I meant to make this comment on that story about a woman who had committed suicide after a mediation retreat. Yoga is required if you're going to do mediation. Unfortunately, much of the yoga practiced in the west is nothing more than sort of an aerobic mindset, like pilates or calisthenics. Even when teachers stick to traditional sequences and focus on breath, they seem to miss the point of how important relaxation and only going to your limit is.

I was lucky that i had a fantastic teacher from India when i started yoga in Sydney 20 years ago. The difference an excellent teacher makes is amazing.

I watch videos on Gaia and see teachers doing advanced locks and hand positions, combined with meditative practices... These things can be extremely dangerous because you're unlocking and accessing all sorts of energies you're not used to. Doing advanced stuff before you're ready, or doing any stuff without a solid grounding in hatha yoga to allow your body to handle it, is toxic and unhealthy. In the productization of the yoga and meditation industry in the west people have forgot to focus on the basics, and have forgotten the advanced knowledge that allows you to do advanced techniques safely. Practices have been divided up, stripped of awareness of how to do them safely, and delivered in little consumable pieces. It's fucking dangerous, but everyone's out there practicing yoga and meditation like it's calisthenics or pilates or a warm up for rugby, and even the teachers who aren't mostly don't have the awareness or knowledge of the energies they're accessing to do it safely, or to do it with the most benefit.

This probably came across as saying yoga will cure your anxiety. I'm not saying that, just that if you do mediation, you also need yoga. But doing yoga well will probably make your anxiety better... Maybe an actual psych therapist can help unravel any beliefs and stories you have that you're reacting to but aren't actually true, or maybe if your fear has a rational basis (ie, you are actually in danger or at risk in some way, and the things you fear keep happening and you keep getting hurt) then you can adopt some practical strategies to create better boundaries for yourself so you feel safer and are safer.

People commit suicide for all sorts of reasons. Just because one woman attended a meditation retreat before committing suicide doesn't prove it was the cause. Is there a statistically significant increase in the suicide rate following meditation retreats?

> People commit suicide for all sorts of reasons.

That's sadly true. Sorry for you if you've faced a suicide of someone close. I definitely think some people can practice some forms of safe types of meditation safely without ill effects, even if they don't have any awareness of the dangers. While some types of meditation are dangerous (it's hard to say if that's most or all types because I don't know what everyone else is practicing) and I think you need yoga for all but the safest and shortest ones, I think if you don't try any additional techniques beyond a very simple, and short duration meditation, you might be OK, even without doing it yoga. it's definitely possible but I wouldn't recommend it just to be on the safe side to cover all the cases.

just as an example like you think something so simple is just focusing on the feeling of your breath at the tip of your nose you thing is going to be safe for you. But if you do that long enough or if you combine that with another type of breath or another type of sound the effects can be really really extraordinarily powerful and you can begin to open up your body to all sorts of things and draw all sorts of energy and information into yourself. So you need to be careful and you need to know what you're doing and keep it short and I think yoga helps you both handle the changes that can go on as well as it encodes a sort of relaxed mindset where you don't want to go beyond your limits so you not going to try to push some technique, you know, out of frustration because you think you don't get it and if you push it you might injure something. just like with a physical sport like if you push things in this mental you or energetic space you can definitely injure things as well.

Having said all that , i definitely think the same technique can affect different people to different degrees.

> Just because one woman attended a meditation retreat before committing suicide doesn't prove it was the cause. Is there a statistically significant increase in the suicide rate following meditation retreats?

No no no I wasn't saying that. Sorry for you that you felt that way about it, but the meaning I was trying to get across was reflecting my own reaction to that article.

When I read that article I had quite a reaction to it, and what I've said above is only a summary or one aspect of that.

To try to help you out with seeing my view of the reaction I had to that article, I'll just try to recall that here.

I read that article and was sort of deeply moved by it. I was skeptical that the meditation was her problem at first, but the more I read the article, and recalled my own knowledge of these things, and also read how retreat practitioners noted these symptoms in many people, I started to form an idea that I intended to post on that discussion but posted a sort of summary above. The idea is based around the reality of "kundalini sickness" (which in any case I see as just one aspect or symptom of what can go wrong) and the sort of mania that can attach itself to uncareful practice of kundalini related techniques, other techniques, things related to opening chakras, and other things.

There's a lot of detail that's probably too much to post here, and in any case I'm not inclined to right now, plus I'm allowing some ideas and clarity to form for myself, I guess, about a lot of this stuff...but basically, after reading that article, I concluded it was likely that unsafe practice of these techniques could overwhelm people with energetic bandwidth and information, as well as overwhelm their nervous system. One of the symptoms of such energetic overwhelming is the mania I believe was described in the article as one of her symptoms (staying up for days, not eating), and one of the symptoms of the information overloading is psychosis as I believe was also described in the article as one of her symptoms.

I'm not trying to say for sure that this caused her illness that contributed to her suicide decision, but it definitely contributed in my view.

Aside from the causal question of suicide (which, to be strict, has to be someone's decision, so their decision is the ultimate cause, but of course there can be all sorts of reasons and factors that they choose to contribute to their decision), I'm sure that practicing these techniques in the sort of careless and unaware way that I describe above, that I'm pretty sure is common in the West (and actually probably pretty common everywhere in the world in this age), is extremely fucking dangerous, as I've said, and also a direct cause of a lot of pathologies and illnesses (at least mental illnesses) that people report after meditation retreats. I really think it's that simple: that careless application of these techniques can lead to bad outcomes, really bad outcomes, sadly, for people. And I think that's a direct result of how the west has productized it, rather than keeping it in touch with its roots and all the knowledge and wisdom and safety that surrounded it.

To be totally clear I'm not saying that "caused" her suicide, and I'm not even sure it contributed in her case to her suicide decision, but I'm totally sure that it contributed to the cluster of symptoms she presented (mania, psychosis) around the same time.

Thanks for your time to read this and I'm sorry for you that you got me wrong the first time. Hope you have a good day. I do have a lot more to say about these topics but it's probably not appropriate for this board, and I definitely don't feel like chatting more about it now. If you want to know more about this or are interested in this stuff, I reckon you join a yoga class, and then maybe you could search for kundalini sickness, just as an example of the sorts of things that can go wrong, but I wouldn't recommend trying this stuff, without yoga! :) :P xx

> if you do mediation, you also need yoga Not sure Gautama Buddha did yoga? Don't get me wrong, i am not against yoga, but wondering if great saints who never did yoga also attained greater heights including moksha..

Haha, i don't know right now. but from the point of view that yoga is a systematiztion of techniques that is useful for connecting to energy, correcting the flow of and balancing the energy in the body, and opening the channels in the body to allow it to handle higher bandwidth of different sorts of energies safely, I suppose that perhaps these great saints already knew how to do that on some level even if they weren't following sort of formal practices. Of course that's just a theory we'd have to look back into the past to make sure.

another perspective is maybe they discovered or were taught techniques even more advanced than what's commonly know as yoga. Maybe that helped them somehow attain their heights as you said.

From another point of view I think there's an idea that yoga is probably for the common people, you know, everyone. Maybe there's some exceptional people whose bodies are already highly tuned somehow and they sort of don't need to do that...could be possible. But that would probably be rare like Olympic level athlete rare. And maybe some of those great saints weren't even human. So maybe techniques for the everyperson human form don't apply to them.

Harder to speculate about those things than it is to know that yoga is good for me from experience, and have a theory for why correct yoga would be good for most others as well, especially meditators.

Aside from what i already said, biomedically the long holding, and the precise poses, sooth and calm the parasympathetic nervous system, which helps correctly regulate many other systems, and help massage and promoting flow in the lymphatic system, i think. Even leaving aside the energy perspectives, relaxedly holding poses for a handful of breaths, is a great tune up for your body.

>there's some exceptional people whose bodies are already highly tuned somehow and they sort of don't need to do that...could be possible

ya, I too have read about that..

To the best of my knowledge, the only physical yoga he recommended was sitting cross-legged, and even that was likely just because he was teaching forest medicants (among others) who could not rely on having a chair.

Yoga is only very recently regarded as mostly physical exercise. Of the 8 limbs of yoga only one is Asana (postures)

If you read Patanjali (the foundational text) there is very little or no mention at all of posture.

Meditation without yoga may be problematic, but is there any problem with practicing yoga without meditating, in your opinion?

Yeah I think that's probably really safe, but you'll probably be missing out a little bit. Just 5 minutes or less of quietly sitting, eyes closed, and letting any thoughts, feelings, and sense impressions (sounds, feeling of weight of body on the floor, weight of the clothes on the body, feeling of breeze, etc), just come and go, and gently bringing your focus back to your breath (sound of your breath, or feeling of breath at your nostrils), at the end of a yoga session is good I think. You might find it helps quiet your mind and bring you back to the moment after the session, as well as sort of balance you and really sort of settle in that relaxed state to become part of you and your experience at that moment. Just that much, and no more is good I think. Mind will wander. Gently bring it back to the breath. Notice quiet at the end of in-breath or end of out-breath. If you want something to think or say to yourself, you could consider, as you are aware of the thoughts, feelings and sense impressions passing by, "These are my thoughts, they are mine, but they are not me. These are my feelings, they are mine, but they are not me. These are my impressions, they are mine, but they are not me. I am not my thoughts. I am not my feelings. I am not my impressions. I am. I am. I am what watches." and repeat :)

Have you checked out the book "When Panic Attacks" by Dr David Burns? It's a book that's helped a few friends of mine with severe social anxiety. It's CBT, but you may benefit from a book more tailored towards anxiety, as opposed to more generalised negative thoughts.

>I’ve concluded that the best advice is to learn not to worry about things

Any tips with doing this? The thoughts I try to avoid end up in my dreams even if I try my best to distract myself during the day

I don’t really have any advice, but what I can say is it’s not really about distracting myself or avoiding thoughts, it’s more like changing how I think about things. For example, when I get some random aches and pains, it worries me a little. But in the past I would fixate on things, try to treat them, see a doctor etc. After a certain amount of grappling with my own mortality, I kind of realized that sometimes my body will just hurt, and there’s nothing I can do about it, and so I have to sort of say, “ok, I have this pain, that’s fine,” and then just move on to whatever else I need to do. Although sometimes it may mean the opposite, accepting that I can’t just power through. “I’m just not going to be able to do all the things I wish I could do today, I need to rest instead. That’s fine.”

It’s still hard for me. But I think the biggest difference is that I have shifted my focus more towards the things that are here and now, and that I can actually control, and focusing attention on those things naturally means spending less time thinking about things that are far away or beyond my control. (Ie, applying attention elsewhere is not the same as distraction.)

Not super coherent, but I hope some part of that is helpful.

I read Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

Written around 2000, it is surprising how many of his verses are relevant today. These are translations of the original, so have picked up some contemporary interpretation.

"If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment."

"The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."

"You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength."

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/31010

All this stuff really ignores some real advice that really works.

Anxiety comes from a lack of competence, confidence, or self-awareness. Lack any or all (and we all lack them to some extent) and you’re more nervous.

Get experience talking, presenting, comfort with how you look and sound, practice humor, gauge if you can maintain an audience. These are all practicable things. You can work on them.

I think meditation or mindfulness or any therapy tends to be good for realizing the importance of this, and perhaps some peripheral issues, but would never beat the cause of anxiety because the anxiety is rational. If someone asked me to fly a plane I’d be anxious - and that’s a good response, at a normal level, it means I’d have more cortisol and norepinephrine to react quicker and pay attention. But it’s not great for social things because it makes you shaky, so people see it as more of a fault than a good thing.

A lot of people today want to subscribe to “believe and you can” or “it’s all in your mind” type mantras but to me it’s really backwards to something like, “it’s ok that you can’t, accept it, and with hard work you can.”

> Anxiety comes from a lack of competence, confidence, or self-awareness.

This is oversimplified, anxiety isn’t just about social situations. My anxiety is none of these but comes from an overwhelming awareness of my own mortality.

I don’t feel like I’m going to die today or tomorrow, but the knowledge that I will die one day and wipe out all memory of me as I am now is permanently terrifying to me. I really believe that almost everyone else has some part of their brain to suppress this fact, that I am missing.

find out who the real "me" is, and that fear will no longer hold

Is your point that there is no such thing as "me"? Because I've tried meditating on that thought and it hasn't really helped. I think, therefore I am after all.

You can't meditate on that thought. Keep the search :)

I appreciate that you’re trying to help, but I’ve been searching for a long time and it only makes me feel worse.

Look into Ramana Maharishi

It doesn't have to be rational. I get anxious doing the most trivial things that people do thousands of times every day: talking on the phone, going the supermarket, even sending emails. It is awful and seems to get worse (and less reasonable) the older I get.

Some of the most accomplished stand-up comics still struggle with anxiety. So being comfortable with presenting, humor, and maintaining an audience isn't necessarily sufficient.

I say try facing those issues. Your thinking mind is trying to process and make sense of those anxious issues. Example, if you were in an IED explosion in Iraq...it’s okay to think about it. It’s okay to process it. It’s okay to understand that it happened. But it’s also okay to understand that was a one-time thing and your body reacted the way it did to protect yourself from that one-time event. You may have lost some friends from that bad event, and you may have even been damaged from it. But that trauma is OVER. It’s time to heal through acceptance, talking about it verbally, and saying goodbye to those emotions.

This works well, as long as not you’re not still in Iraq at risk of getting hit with IEDs.

This oversimplifies things a little. Many things can trigger your brain to react in a similar fashion than during a traumatic experience. You can also be aware that the experience is not the same or unrelated, but you'll still get a panic attack. Most likely because the actual anxiety or panic is not caused by your thinking brain.

That's exactly what the source said.

That’s a good observation, and I think the insight is that you still think these thoughts during the day, but you avoid fixating / worrying.

Like, if you are worried about an upcoming job interview, it’s natural that you’ll think about the interview during the day. However, those thoughts will appear and disappear. You are not trying to distract yourself and avoid the thoughts, you are just learning to avoid fixation/obsession/suffering.

Don't think about MONKEYS.

Did that help?

You start to think about MONKEYS, even though told not to.

So you have to do the opposite:

Embrace thoughts and feelings, then let them go, or be (Let It Be).

With meditation you can focus on breathing and not thinking. With physical exercise you bring refreshment to your system.

Watch your inputs and outputs! You'll have no time left for anxiety.

One solution is to make it so you don’t need to worry about things. Keeping a maintained calendar, to-do list, or simply dumping responsibility for some things (e.g. selling a car) can help.

you're not supposed to repress your thoughts, just change your relationship with them, like john nash at the end of a beautiful mind.

This is the reason I don’t like this whole “everyone should do therapy” movement and also the “mindfulness/meditation” movement.

It creates this hyper-awareness which creates more problems by making everyone over-analyze each other and overly-sensitive to things.

This over-sensitivity is such a negative for US culture. If you think long enough about things you can find everything triggering in some way.

Interesting. I've been reaching a similar conclusion recently.

Buddhism. Psilocybin.

I really wouldn't blindly recommend Psilocybin to people. I got the idea of trying to fix my health anxiety with it from HN about a year ago. Took half a dose, had a pretty good time for around 2 hours and then the worst panic-attack meltdown of my entire life. I started sweating all over, dripping sweat from my head, being 100% sure that I'm going to die - in the end ambulance fixed me up with an IV.

My anxiety disorder only got worse since then. Every time I see an ambulance I still get flashbacks and instant anxiety.

The drug isn’t gonna fix you by itself. It facilitates a state where you can fix your brain. I’m sorry you had a bad experience. Perhaps it is worth trying again in the company of a guide or others. It’s also worth preparing for your trip by determining what kinds of things you want to try and accomplish while you’re on it.

Psilocybin is a powerful tool but it seems counter to the adage of "set and setting" to use it when beset by anxiety. As a prophylactic for it is of course a different story.

Try Cissus, it blocks cortisol (the stress hormone).

Did you try medication?

For relaxation, see: post nut clarity

go back to reddit

Sorry if discussing normal human bodily function is offensive to your religion/beliefs. The brain releases oxytocin and dopamine, which induces relaxation and reduces anxiety.