Anxiety

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Community for individuals with anxiety for exchange and helping each other.

This is a non-judgemental community and everyone is welcome as long as you apply to the TOS and follow basic etiquette.

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Keep in mind that this does not equal an exchange with a medical/mental health professional.

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Remyschnitzel

I realized a gamechanger after 27 years of suffering -- when anxious, I can literally just tell myself to act stoic or unconcerned, and simply by outwardly doing that, it quells the bad feelings a bit (self.anxiety)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by _number8_ to c/anxiety

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i have an appt i'm nervous about and then i was thinking about these passages I read:

But it seems to me that emotion and its expression are almost the same thing. Let us take your cat: now suppose we shave her tail, so that it cannot shall I say perscopate or bristle; suppose we attach a board to her back, so that it cannot arch; suppose we then exhibit a displeasing sight – a sportive dog, for instance. Now, she cannot express her emotions fully: Quaere: will she feel them fully? She will feel them, to be sure, since we have suppressed only the grossest manifestations; but will she feel them fully? Is not the arch, the bottle-brush, an integral part and not merely a potent reinforcement – though it is that too?

...and you have no doubt taken notice of the impassive faces of the captured men? It is always so, I believe? And does it not seem to you that this suppression, this denial of the outward signs, and as I believe reinforcers if not actually ingredients of the distress – does it not seem to you that this stoical appearance of indifference in fact diminishes the pain?

this is insane i cannot believe it worked so well. like, almost instantly i felt the vibrations go down

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I once heard that the part of you that knows you are afraid is not afraid itself. This might be why your trick or others like reciting the Benne Gesserit litany against fear can actually work.