Ask HN: How to break anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle?

It seems as though the problem is primarily fear and/or aversion. The mind is kind of like a cavern of echoes, and you can choose to add power to, or dampen, the echoes. Are you able to think of something that will bring up a wholesome feeling, like kindness toward an animal, or a baby, or gratitude toward a mentor? If so, you can use it to dampen the fear pattern.

When the fear pattern arises again, realize as quickly as possible that it has come back. Stop it, i.e., do not walk down a road in imagination related to the fears, imagining painful outcomes or whatever. In other words, gently stop the thought and drop it. Relax tension in the body, especially in the head. Smile. And bring up the wholesome feeling, however is appropriate for you. This dampens the fear echo. Each time you do these steps, you are taking energy away from this habit of your brain. Every time you do it correctly, you're taking a step toward not being bothered by this concern.

This technique will work, but please just try it and try to do it diligently, giving it provisional belief. In the meantime, try to do your assignments, watching for your fear to decrease.

* This message pre-censored by HN, allegedly to preserve curiosity.

Accept that you can fail and being failable is part of being human and part of who you are.

Realize that if you fail, your life is not going to end.

Internalize that even after you fail, you are not worth less than what you think you are if you succeeded.

The way you describe your problem makes me think that you might need the assistance of a therapist to overcome it.

It may help to go out and do something else that you enjoy, to stop thinking about all this. That would give you some perspective on things and you can get back to your work with a fresh mind.

Also sometimes when you procrastinate it's an indication that what you're doing is not really what you want to do, so you might want to consider doing something else that you can be passionate about (not saying that's easy and you talk about assignments, so you probably don't want to drop your degree out of the blue).

The best solution to getting past the anxiety/fear-avoidance cycle is to take small, manageable actions while accepting the feelings that go along with those actions.

Start with the smallest steps possible. Maybe that means opening the assignment and saving it to your computer. Then put it down and walk away. Come back in a little while and take another small step, such as reading over the assignment or making an outline of what you need to do to get it done. Often once you've done something you will often start to feel a lot different than if you've done nothing.

Keep track of how you're feeling. It's okay to feel more anxiety at first because you're doing something instead of nothing. Those feelings tend to subside over time as you take action, but the point is not to reduce your anxiety, the point is that you are making a commitment to do something in your life, to live your life, rather than to remain paralyzed in fear. Your goal is not to get rid of the anxiety but to live the kind of life you want to live.

This is the model for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. A great book on this is "Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life."

    Start with the smallest steps possible. Maybe 
    that means opening the assignment and saving 
    it to your computer.

One thing that has helped me for these situations short term is to find a buddy who is will to sit with you and keep on you task.

Long term, I found success in changing my association to the stressor. For over twenty years,I used to feel dread and panic anytime I had to write more than two paragraphs. Last year, I decided I would write one page a week about anything. It was for ME this time. After two months, I completely changed my relationship to writing through this process. I also got a lot better at writing.

You sound a bit like me. A trick that helps me overcome these situations is to imagine that the worst thing that could happen, in your case, to fail, has already happened. Then I pause and try to see how this affects me. I imagine people pointing towards me, laughing at me, whispering to each other "he failed", then I start to realize, this is not so bad. A failure is just a failure and other people's feelings towards me in this moment really doesn't matter to me.

This helps me to silence the critics in me and to just get on with it.

You are not trying to avoid failure, you are giving yourself a cushion to avoid confronting the fact that you may not be as good as you think that you are.

The cushion is that you didn't apply yourself to the maximum because you procrastinated and ergo it isn't you who failed, but a you who did not apply themselves.

Why do we do it? Out of self preservation. Confronting the fact that the reality does not match our idealized self is a very difficult process as it leaves us vulnerable and exposed. We feel that our lack of skills will be exposed and everyone will see that we are failures.

In reality, there is only one self, you that is choosing not to do what you have to because you are trying to protect a fragile ego.

I don't mean to sound harsh, all humans do it in one way or the other.

But eventually reality catches up to us and forces us to confront our situation. In the expectation you will do as you always did. However, if you condition the future on taking failure as an indicator for growth rather than an indicator of danger, you will be able to overcome the situation.

Take what you fear the most and tame it by actively trying, and instead of thinking you will fail, think and accept that it is an indicator of all the new things you will learn.

NB: Speaking from experience.

PS. Radical acceptance is a powerful tool in getting out of these situations.

Look into Cognitive Distortions - those are the self conversation lies we tell ourselves, as we "play ourselves". Cognitive distortions take the form of exaggerations of the unknown future, reading others' minds (which is impossible) and then taking a negative thought attributed to others as truth. Cognitive distortions are in general are a nasty little asshole inside your head constantly being negative.

I suggest you look into Dr. David Burns, the father of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and the first person to seriously document and address this negative self conversation vicious cycle, and how to defeat it.

Maybe not the most popular person, but I think Jordan Peterson has some really nice lectures and talks about this subject in YouTube. Also about fear.

Insickness in this thread also pointed this out: start with the smallest step.

And when it comes to fear: become braver. What helped me a lot was to accept fear.

There are more direct approaches, but, recognize those thoughts as bubbling up from lower levels of brain function, that they are not who you are nor are they your destiny nor are you required to act upon them, leave them be, and do what you need to be doing, with your attention on the doing. If you engage with the thoughts (by trying to change them or suppress them or argue with them), you simply strengthen the associated neurology. If you respond to the thoughts with avoidance, you strengthen that associated neurology.

This was a slow process, but:

1. Regular written self-reflection, i.e., keeping a journal and

2. Re-framing "failures" as learning experiences; forgive yourself

helped me a lot.

The written part was important to me because it forced me to revisit my previous thoughts and reevaluate them in light of what had happened since last time I wrote.

(2) also helped me do things with the mind-set that "failure" wasn't actually failure. The goal was to try and learn from it.

I didn't get around to doing this until after school, but I wish I had. In your situation, I'd try to get myself to do the assignment with a quick pass early on leaving notes for things I wasn't sure about. Take a break, then revisit and revise. Afterwards, write in your journal what worked well and what didn't. Write about what you want to try next time differently if some things come to mind.

Hope you find a solution that works for you. E-mail is in my profile if you want to talk more about what's worked for me.

What you want to do is try to get past the emotional part of it. I find laughing helps. You want a kind of telling stories around the campfire attitude about it.

For example, I once spend 2 weeks trying to decide on a startup name, for a startup that barely even exists anymore. It's funny now, and I think about that when I'm trying to pick names for things now. But in those 2 weeks it was not funny! I felt terribly guilty during that time.

Try to take it / treat it lightly. Joke about it. I know that's hard to do when you're in the middle of it though.

Keep in mind the point is to actually do the thing. Maybe my way doesn't work as well for and you find something else. I think it's worthwhile to experiment with different ideas here.

I’m exactly the same, turned my 3 year degree into a 5 year slog because I’d get too anxious to do assignments or even exams. Took me a long time (decades) to learn about anxiety and it’s impacts, so you’re doing well to be aware of it earlier.

Therapy & mindfulness has been a huge help for me. It’s helped me be more aware of how I’m feeling, and to take steps when I’m feeling anxious. For example, I’ve got a regular reminder in my Phone to check in with how I’m feeling, to actively think about what I’m avoiding, and to consider what it is I’m afraid of that’s causing me to avoid. If I’m feeling anxious or avoidant, then I do something to help, like try to ”explore” why I’m feeling that way, and to do some mindful breathing / grounding exercises.

You’ve done really well to ask here for advice, being vulnerable and open is a huge first step. I’d recommend seeing a professional therapist or counsellor if you can, especially while you’re studying - your education institution should have some people who can help.

If you keep that up eventually your head will dry up and fall off. Stop that.

Note, I have a bias as I had anxiety through ADHD.

That being said both Anxiety and ADHD have the same exact dopamine problem which means that analogues of dopamine and serotonin treat anxiety if it's cause is genetic in nature.

I do not know if the poster has a genetic version of anxiety, however if they do here is what I take for my ADHD that works for anxiety:

L-theanine ashwagandha(its what is in Maca!) L-dopa

and my further twist is to take a tablespoon if raw Cacao powder in mornings as it has two ingredients caffiene and anandamide.

Anandamine is what interacts with CBD receptors, i.e. if you want to get around the TCH in CBD oil this is the way to do it as anandamine obviously is not tested for i the THC tests and there are no addictions associated with anandamine.

Caution, it does not solve the emotional past obstacle you have set up for yourself. to solve that part you have to drastically change your life from consuming to doing in the form of making and creating and communicating. And yes, it is in fact a lot of work. But, I can tell if you make the honest effort towards this life-change you will be rewarded with the amazing stuff you can do once that life-change take hold. IMHO

For me, starting anything is the most tough part, but once I start something I will work on it, I am good. What I do is to turn on the music and make myself start. For some tasks, I usually get engrossed so much that I don't hear the music or lyrics at all. Other times, I force myself to do something with the beat of the music. ( I listen to all kinds of music, for some reason lo-fi playlists won't work for starting my work, I listen to some pop or rap or rock)

I highly recommend reading Daring Greatly by Brene Brown (after completing your assignments). The book covers this topic among others.

walks in nature helps

I’ve struggled with this as well and only doing things that interest me helped. Over time those things were profitable enough; took a long time to find.

good luck and hang in there

Listen to John Danaher (world famous BJJ coach interviewed by Lex Fridman).

He talks about that the greatest fighters pick their battles very well, and they often get submitted in the gym because they intentionally put themselves in handicapped positions so that they can learn how to get out (and sometimes that doesn't work out, of course). So life situations where stakes are not high should be used to run high-risk experiments so that we can learn from them. He takes about risk taking a lot, and how confidence building is important for high performers. First, you learn how to recover from bad situations. You train this a lot. Then you need to learn and experience that even if you make a mistake you're good enough to recover from it. If you know that you can recover from your mistakes you're suddenly free to take large risks. As an extension: if you're new to a field and you're looking to acquire skills then learn how to recover from bad situations first, so that you can then keep exploring without the fear of getting into bad situations.

Get some exercise and then immediately (while still sweating) sit back down at your desk and try to start. For some reason, that was a very effective way to start my homework assignments (the hardest part) in grad school.

This is not a simple "do this", except to say you need to see a doctor. You are not alone! Many suffer with anxiety for their whole life. What helps is therapy to learn to train your brain that many are anxious too and that you are normal. The ones who don't have chronic anxiety are people you can learn from. When you figure it out you'll have superpowers that most would kill for.

You may choose medication to help you with that initial training, you may have a completely different diagnosis.

No one here should diagnose you, because a doctor wouldn't diagnose over the internet.

A helpful book: "Brain Lock" by Jeffrey Schwartz. It's about OCD but in my experience all these things are connected.

In my opinion, this never goes away and you can only learn coping strategies. I never had this issue with classwork though, but checking my email/dealing with DevOps problems/filing taxes.

For me, I can see when I'm getting into that cycle (e.g. haven't checked my email in a few days) and one way to break it is to use medication. I don't like benzos, but I'm sure they work. Instead, I take a full dose of Benadryl and that can sometimes help me get rid of the anxiety long enough to get through the initial part.

Drinking alcohol works too, but obviously only works when you're at home. Shouting or high intensity dancing to loud music can help.

Basically, just knock yourself out of it just enough to actually start doing the work. Once you start, you'll realize it wasn't so bad.

Just picture Michael Burry having to read this emails in The Big Short during the most stressful scenes.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to help address the underlying causes of anxiety. It is very similar to another suggestion in the thread about breaking the problem down in to small manageable steps, with a cognitive framework to

* be present, in the moment

* be mindful, of your anxiety, of your surroundings, of your self

* take action based on the above.

Maybe also take a ADHD diagnosis from somewhere like adhdonline.com. It takes an hour or so, longer if you're very introspective about the answers, and then you'll know if there are medical options to help you with this as well.

A lot of good advice here which you can try to implement, but at the the end of the day if this is affecting your day to day life then this is a mental health issue.

I would recommend therapy. They'll give you some similar advice as this thread, and also help you implement it, help keep you accountable, and help find if there's a further underlying cause.