Tag: anxiety

people pleasers, please read

cricketcat9:

As a former people-pleaser, I think it’s an xcellent article:

https://lonerwolf.com/people-pleasing/  a small excerpt here:

16 Habits of People-Pleasing Personality Types

At some point or another, we have all struggled with people-pleasing. After all, as social creatures, we are prone to peer pressure and the desire to fit in. But there is a big difference between the desire for acceptance and people-pleasing. People-pleasing is not just a once-in-a-while foible: it’s a daily struggle.

Here are 16 common habits:

  • You struggle to say “no”
  • You find it hard to be assertive and voice your opinions
  • You’re hyper-vigilant about perceived rejection from others (always on the lookout)
  • You’re an emotophobe (you fear negative emotions)
  • You’re excessively altruistic/philanthropic
  • You often suffer at the expense of doing a favor for others
  • You have a weak sense of self and poor interpersonal boundaries
  • You become emotionally dependent/co-dependent when in relationships/friendships
  • You’re addicted to approval from others
  • You have a neurotic desire to be liked no matter what
  • You feel shattered for days or weeks when someone criticises you
  • You have low self-worth
  • You act based on what “other people think” of you
  • You always put yourself in other’s shoes, but you rarely show compassion towards yourself
  • You blindly believe in other people’s “goodness” even if they are clearly abusive towards you
  • You fear losing control of yourself because you repress so much

It’s also said that people-pleasing can form a bridge to other conditions such as borderline personality disorder and social anxiety disorder.

ralfmaximus:

littlethingwithfeathers:

iesika:

cryptideridan:

kyleehenke:

how did my ancestors survive the brutal unforgiving wilderness when I get anxiety sweats from going to Target

to be fair im sure your ancestors would have the exact same reaction going to a Target

In the brutal unforgiving wilderness false positives cost nothing and false negatives are expensive. You’re better off being afraid of something that can’t hurt you than not afraid of something that can hurt you.

In a world where we mostly aren’t in danger, day to day, as long as we don’t play in traffic or jump off something, that’s no longer quite as adaptive.

We got our anxiety from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who were scared enough to survive, and pass on those genes! 

It helps me sometimes to think about that at night, when I can’t sleep because my heart is pounding over something like “what if my usually reliable alarm clock doesn’t work in the morning for some reason and I’m late for work and lose my job and everyone hates me.” There’s nothing wrong with me, I just have a lot of extra, unused run-from-tigers juice that my grandparents left me.

“Unused run-from-tigers juice.”

I love that.

Our brains have been running Hunter/Gatherer 1.0 for 60,000 years without a software upgrade.

When’s the patch due? I could really use less run-from-tigers and more grow-plants-successfully.

aichu-chu-chu:

howilearnedtocope:

dsudis:

eupheme-butterfly:

icecream-eaterrr:

I just heard this woman say “you procrastinate because you are afraid of rejection. It’s a defense mechanism, you are trying to protect yourself without even trying.” and I think I just realized what was wrong with me.

Yep, this is a very, very common reason for procrastinating.  It’s also why procrastination, even though it’s often associated with laziness, is a fairly common trait in a lot of people with anxiety and perfectionism issues.

This idea – You’re not lazy, you’re protecting yourself – hit me really hard while reading, of all things, Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are, which turns out to be as much about how brains work and how relationships work as how orgasms work.

In an early part of the book she talks about Fight/Flight/Freeze responses to threats–the example she uses is being attacked by a lion. You fight, if you think you can defeat the lion; you run away, if you think you can escape the lion; and when you think there’s nothing you can do, when you feel the lion’s jaws closing on your neck, you freeze, because dying will hurt less that way. You just stop and go numb and wait for it to be over, because that is the last way to protect any scrap of yourself.

Later in the book, she talks about the brain process that motivates you to pursue incentives, describing it as a little monitor that gauges your progress toward a goal versus the effort you’re expending. If it feels like too little progress is being made you get frustrated, get angry, and, eventually, you… despair. You stop trying.

You go numb and wait for it to be over, because that’s the only way left to protect yourself.

So it occurred to me that these are basically the same thing–when facing a difficult task, where failure feels like a Threat, you can get frustrated and fight it out–INCREASE DOING THE THING until you get where you’re going. Or you can flee–try to solve the problem some other way than straight on, changing your goal, changing your approach, whatever. Fight or flight.

But both of those only apply when you think the problem is solvable, right? If the problem isn’t solvable, then you freeze. You despair. 

And if you’re one of those Smart Kids (Smart Girls, especially) who was praised for being smart so that all tasks in the world came to be divided between Ooh This Is Easy and I DON’T KNOW IF I CAN DO THAT AND IF I FUCK UP I WILL DIE, then… it’s pretty easy to see how you lose the frustration/anger stage of working toward a goal, because your brain goes straight to freeze/despair every time. Things are easy and routine or they are straight up impossible.

So, you know, any time you manage to pull yourself up and give that lion a smack on the nose, or go stumbling away from it instead of just falling down like a fainting goat as soon as you spot it on the horizon, give yourself a gold star from me. Because this is some deeply wired survival-brain stuff. Even if logically you know that that term paper is not a lion, it really is like that sometimes.

Yes! We actually had a perfectionism group in treatment and one of the things they taught us was how perfectionism can actually lead to avoiding stuff & doing less. It’s definitely important to understand this.

One long term strategy I’ve heard is to promise yourself you’ll only work for a smallish period of time (at a date before it’s last min of course). Do you work for that time, and then you congratulate yourself for what you accomplished even if it’s not as much as you wanted, and then no matter what you actually stop. Your brain realizes that doing work can actually be a manageable experience & it starts breaking the association between doing work and stress/sadness/guilt etc. *Lowering* your standards & working before it gets super bad can help with this

I do this all the time and it is the most frustrating thing in my life. Combine 1) problem I do not feel I have the authority to solve easily (especially dealing with older men) with 2) moving target for success or unclear parameters, and 3) other, less fraught things to do at the same time and I will ALWAYS procrastinate like crazy and wait until the problem is on fire and giving me high blood pressure and insomnia and dehydration from stress. Over and over again and it makes me absolutely insane. Every time I lower my standards it works, and I am good enough at managing relationships + being hard to pin down on specifics + willing to work insane hours for a few days/weeks to make up for the procrastination, but it sucks. This advice is worth trying.

Why “doing something relaxing” does not help your anxiety

kipplekipple:

systlin:

tatianathevampireslayer:

lovelyplot:

merrybitchmas91:

A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.

This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.  

THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.

You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind. 

People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.

In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture. 

Therefore, I present to you: 

THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS

–Go on a walk

–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.

–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching

–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind

–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift 

–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:

–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.

–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see. 

–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in. 

–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.) 

–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety. 

–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel. 

–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless. 

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:

–List the capitals of all the U.S. states

–List the capitals of all the European countries

–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors. 

–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.

–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.  

Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself.  I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too. 

(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)

This would’ve been great an hour ago

If your anxiety includes rapid heartbeat for no reason then it may help to exercise! It helps for me because I’m focused on whatever moves I’m doing and breathing, and it gives my heart rate a reason to be that high so that I can start the slow cooking down process and (hopefully) bring that heart rate down with it. Look up a quick cardio workout on YouTube or something and just do it in your room!

This is so, SO true. 

All ‘doing something relaxing’ ever did for me was give my brain MORE free time to FREAK THE FUCK OUT. 

Drawing and making stuff does occupy my mind so I mean YMMV