Show HN: A Tool to Help You Understand Your Anxious Friends Better (anxietysimulator.com)
Hey everyone! We made a tool that shows you how someone with anxiety feels when they get messages. It's all about getting each other and being kind. If you want to help your friends or family who get anxious, this could help. Give it a look and see what you think. It's a way to be nicer to each other.
63 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadThen I played around with some other unorthodox situations and I completely confused it.
10/10
Side note: Im tired of everybody being anxious, Im an immigrant to the states and I’ve noticed that most of my friends who are anxious are born and raised there. While the opposite is far from true despite poverty, uncertainty, looming war & a future with no positive outlook for the country.
I often struggle to emphasize cause I don’t see value of overthinking/discussing every little thought that comes to our head. Im struggling more with this recently because my partner has been diagnosed with “OCD thinking “ after just 3 therapy sessions and is even considering medication.
I thought everybody overthinks, we just need to learn not to give every thought importance/attention and try to avoid triggers ie: self diagnosing.
If my rant is not suitable here, then I’ll delete my comment. I would appreciate any help however.
But then ill be deemed as insensitive etc… Ive tried to share what Ive done, like simply not allow myself google a medical condition beyond 10 minutes but ive gotten negative reactions.
Your partner probably needs more tools than that.
It's easy enough to say that she shouldn't dwell on negative thoughts, but that's hard to do in practice.
Therapy can help. Meditation can help. Quitting drinking alcohol can help. Exercise can help. Maintaining a sense of humor can help.
(1) US folks are fragile. They pathologize normal thoughts/behaviors to the point that they never actually learn to live with (or fix) them.
(2) Non-US folks are under-informed. They ignore diagnosable mental health issues to the point that they never get appropriate care for a problem that can be fixed.
It's probably a bit of both. I'm American, and its obvious to me that we are great on some dimensions compared to other countries. E.g., Asbergers-type autism is SO MUCH more understood (and addressed!) in the states. At the same time, "diagnosed with OCD thinking" is a nonsense phrase, as far as I can tell, and is probably going too far.
Therapy & medication are powerful tools; the US is learning to use them more than other places; that might be good or bad for any given person - hard to tell.
I was going to disagree with this, and then I thought "but what is generational wealth, except enough money that nobody in your family is worries about that one major sickness/accident"
And now I agree with you
My theory is different than yours, there are a lot of certainties provided for in america or even the certainty that u can make it.
So once uncertianty hits, people arent ready to cope and deal with this, people in their 20s after college aka real world.
Whereas where Im from, planning for longer than 2 years is unheard and youre giving it your all to survive in dignity .
I "own" a house but damn I'm anxious because if I lose my job I can't make mortgage payments, etc, etc, etc
at the moment it's just impossible to even have the conversation, the concept that people aren't just forever victims of their own feelings and that some or even most people need to do real hard work on themselves is straight up offensive to a lot of people.
Isn't this what people that go to therapy are doing?
Still, I agree that it doesn't exempt one for their actions. I just don't think it's always binary like that, especially for chronic conditions that can be improved but not solved.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/when-mental-health-condition-becomes-disa...
"Just stop thinking about it" is not that helpful either. Overthinking happens internally, whether it's being expressed outwardly or not. I don't think diagnosis is a trigger, rather the opposite; it's the first step to understanding your own condition and ways to cope. "It's not just me" is a powerful realization.
I truly believed this is something everyone goes through, but Im not sure now since my partner says its not.
My goal is trying to make her realize the absurdity of this anxiety and not that she shouldn’t have it all. Maybe even laugh at ourself in the process. But i honestly think “just stop thinking “ helps, you do that by staying busy, meditation hobbies etc..
“We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them” Khalil Gebran.
Is something that I try to remember that helps me
Intrusive thoughts and anxiety are a massive burden in my everyday life. Sometimes the thoughts just can't be tamed or sated and they start wreaking havoc on everything around me.
Time is usually the best solution... "this will pass". But sometimes the thoughts push time to an unmanageable scale.
My wife tries to empathize. She too thinks everyone has these worries or anxieties... and I don't disagree. The 'disorder' is that mine occur so frequently, with such intensity and without relent... to the point my ability to 'function normally' is severely compromised.
We all go through it, sure, but some of us can never just stop going through it.
Imagine you have a leaky roof. You have to deal with it whenever it rains, but it's still manageable enough that you haven't climbed up there to repair it yet.
My roof has a 10' hole, and I live under a waterfall in a tropical rainforest. But it's OK, because the nearby volcano helps keep me warm and dry....
Does it make you anxious?
In that case, it’s a feature!
Yes.
> I would appreciate any help however.
Wait a day and try the website again.
Until very recently when I started realizing the mental and physical toll of it, I would completely panic over any sort of planning for the future (even things as inconsequential as hearing other people talking about buying tickets for a concert) because it'd remind me of the instability of my position.
In contrast the people born here, while certainly having concerns about their future, tend to feel comfortable enough in knowing that they have some basic level of stability around them.
After realizing the toll it was taking on me, I've had to work on recognizing the signs of another round of panic and get better at gaslighting myself to be more apathetic of whatever might happen and reminding myself that ultimately, my sanity is more important than immigration and with my education and skills I can probably do fine in most other countries with similar standards of living.
Westerners generally have a reasonable understanding of anxiety as a psychological problem and are comfortable talking about it as such and seeking treatment for it. In developing and middle-income countries, depression and anxiety more often present as physical symptoms like digestive problems, pain, fatigue and muscle weakness. These patients will typically meet the standard diagnostic criteria for depression or anxiety if they're asked, but that's not how they conceptualise their problem.
A raft of other things that would be diagnosed in the west as obvious psychiatric disorders are, in less psychologically-aware places and times, simply chalked up as personal problems or personality differences.
I can certainly think of older members of my family who have "trouble with their nerves", a "bad stomach" that only flares up at times of acute stress or "funny turns" that look very much like panic attacks. I can think of an eccentric aunt who lived alone and obsessively collected teapots and never quite got the hang of small talk or eye contact. I can think of many men who came back from the war with a violent temper and a crippling fear of loud noises. A lack of diagnosis does not necessarily reflect a lack of pathology.
It's certainly plausible that some western countries (and America in particular) might over-pathologise normal distress as psychiatric disorder, but it's clear that many people in less-developed countries often face avoidable suffering due to a lack of diagnosis and treatment, particularly people suffering from the most severe disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/advances-in-psychiat...
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0...
Btw, The sample messages animation may look cool, but forcing the focus to them makes the UI annoying on mobile. I was trying to read the site's header and the page kept scrolling to each automated message there.
10/10, I have to say that this is very accurate. Bot perfectly simulated what happens to me when someone types "hey" into chat. Me too bot, me too.
It just has no place in asynchronous communication other than patterns like the "Hi -- I'm working on..." example from that link.
I criticize machines a lot for overfitting, but I'll especially criticize machines being taught by people who are overfit. Hard to create general machines without understanding why things are and the rabbit holes that exist everywhere around us.