nishac

While differentiating between "good" and "bad" images may seem like an idea that has potential to work, I think it may be pointless to device obvious ways to use placebo effects on the brain. I think training yourself to think critically reduces the chance of your brain falling for poorly-designed tricks.

The biggest takeaway from the article for me was simply the fact that anxiety drastically changes your reality. That is both motivation to find ways to curtail the anxiety even if it hasn't scientifically proven to be "curable" and reason to believe that the anxious brain is not "defective" but has simply been made to focus on the wrong set of thoughts. Here are some ways I dealt with it:

1. I changed my area of research (I am a grad student). 2. I got out of a bad relationship.

I said the above to point out the fact that the anxiety may have such blatantly obvious causes for some people. It really helps to sit down and identify each scenario that makes you anxious and try to understand what you can change about your life (no matter how overwhelmingly drastic the change is) to react more calmly in each of these situations. For example, I had terrible (and still have but more mildly) anxiety in moving vehicles and my heart races and ugly panic grips me, when the vehicle accelerates. I never stopped to think what was causing it because my hypersensitive brain refused to think deeply during travel time and even after because simulating travel was enough to trigger it.

I made myself believe that making said dramatic changes in my life would reduce the impact of the motion-stimulated anxiety. I figured that when panic struck me on the bus, I would tell myself that if I could transform my life or at least try my hardest to, I could get over this meaningless panic.

That's how I manage each situation that causes anxiety: by rationalizing as best as I can, by identifying the root causes of my panic and by attacking those root causes with logic. I think this requires strength and unfortunately, I could find no easier way to make myself feel better. For example, talking to a therapist or transferring the anxiety to/hoping for support from people I loved turned out to be much less effective.

Then again, anxiety is very common so panicking at the panic is the first such scenario that must be rationalized away. We do a lot of hard things in everyday life for the purposes of leading a fuller life. Until such a time as a reliable map of the brain is drawn and effective, scientific, non-intrusive ways to change our perception emerge (which may not happen in our lifetimes), establishing a camaraderie with the stubborn brain, through patient rationalization, may be all we have.

This is just my opinion and I really hope it helps someone like me.

I absolutely agree. Being "PC compliant" is more about staying informed of what is considered, that moment, to be proper language. As much as I would like to not offend anyone, I find such extreme scrutiny of language to be unnecessary and quite honestly, arbitrary. If one generally does not encounter the "liberal elite" and say, one is not a native speaker of a language, they can easily be misconstrued as being racist/sexist or as possessing any other undesirable traits.

Having grown up in a society where sexism/racism/casteism is extremely blatant (in urban India), I sometimes find it hard to comprehend the utility of labelling people harshly for what might be innocuous comments. I almost feel those energies must be spent in condemning the "real" racists/sexists, many of whom are still allowed to scream whatever offensive nonsense they please (I have seen many growing up). How do people feel genuine outrage over harmless comments? Are we allowed to ever call out on hypersensitivity?

Also, as a vegan, sometimes I do feel genuinely sad when I see lots of meat being eaten and relished. I feel like giving my friends an explanation or at least attempt to convince them to cut down on the meat-eating but I also realize it can be highly offensive and have never voiced my opinion.

I agree. I would suggest making simple demos on IPython notebooks.