>I did something similar and loved it but a friend pointed out That he will fall over with an anxiety attack in such a situation.

I might, too, but I frankly might do the same to an even more extreme degree for a particularly challenging real-time 1-on-1 interview question from someone staring at me.

All things considered, I think I'd prefer being left alone in a room where I don't feel them over my shoulder while constantly wondering what they might be thinking with each passing second. I can take a few minutes to relax a little, look over the code, and try to figure it out.

I don't understand why this would give someone anxiety attack - it would suck if the interviewer sat next to me and watched my every keystroke, it wasn't that in my case. He just set me up and left to do his job. I was on my own, until I finished and called him over to show the bugfix.

I have anxiety issues when an interviewer asks me some obscure syntax option for grep command or some b-tree stuff that I learned in college decade ago (and never used in real life).

I don't understand why that grep stuff would give you anxiety. It is a dumb trivia question, just say you don't know.

But I don't understand because I am not you. Different things give different people anxiety. Anxiety isn't something you reason your way into or out of.

> I don't understand why this would give someone anxiety attack

What can you do to understand why this happens?