<i>> Action mode focuses on surviving a danger right now. This is the fight or flight mechanism that our brain when it is in an adverse situation. The response is driven by the sympathetic nervous system. It drives up your heart rate, raises blood pressure, dilates your pupil among other things.</i><p>It also affects the way we think, and make decisions.<p>When we are in "action mode," our thinking becomes fairly "binary," and extreme (eg. "Good|Bad", "Fight|Flight", "Hate|Love").<p>It also focuses on short-term results, and is biased towards <i>assured</i> results, as opposed to "possible" ones.<p>That's why I find I need to back away from the computer, when I find myself in a stressball. I make bad decisions.<p>Managers, politicians, and demagogues of all stripes, have used this for centuries, to get people to support their agendas.
1. Establish good sleep habits. Sleep is how the body recovers from stress.<p>2. Exercise daily. Movement is how the body puts the stress hormones to work.<p>3. Eat well. The gut-brain connection drives how we feel as we digest.
I highly recommend the book 'Dare to Stop Anxiety and Panic Attacks' (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dare-Anxiety-Stop-Panic-Attacks/dp/0956596258" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Dare-Anxiety-Stop-Panic-Attacks/dp/09...</a>).<p>It emphasizes accepting and allowing feelings of anxiety instead of actively resisting them, breaking the cycle in which worry about worsening anxiety only leads to its intensification.
The most important thing I’ve learned about anxiety in the past year is that the conscious/cognitive part of your brain is not effective at calming down the stress response. I recommend this book to anyone who struggles with anxiety: <a href="https://amzn.to/3B3muZ9" rel="nofollow">https://amzn.to/3B3muZ9</a>
> Talking to people is an underrated technique to stop worrying<p>For me this is really true. I'm more of an introvert, and I don't usually reach out to others very often. It can be in the form of talk therapy in a formal setting with an actual psychologist. It can also just be catching up with a friend, or chatting with a neighbor about something totally unrelated. Anything that can get me outside of my own mind helps. Looking for opportunities to help or become involved in someone else's life is really helpful.
This is close, but misses a major issue: self honesty in one's self conversation. Address that, and the <i>majority</i> of one's stress and anxiety evaporate. The majority of one's stress and anxiety is in the form of negative forecasting unknown future events - essentially fantasizing failure. Address that, and a personal revolution takes place, with the simple but not easy task of self honesty.
I would suggest add lateral eye movements.<p>souce: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z25f6qy361Y&ab_channel=MEDspiration">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z25f6qy361Y&ab_channel=MEDsp...</a>
There are two parts to this. One is avoiding or preventing stress, which is the primary focus of this article.<p>The other is getting rid of stress when you already have it.<p>Personally, I find that leaning into the "fight or flight" response by going for a run or a workout as soon as possible and as intensely as possible works almost every time.
This article can be summed up as "try feeling better". I think this one is more accurate<p><a href="https://clickhole.com/might-as-well-give-it-a-shot-6-things-you-can-try-to-reduce-anxiety-that-wont-work/" rel="nofollow">https://clickhole.com/might-as-well-give-it-a-shot-6-things-...</a>
I would rate this post highly. It’s clearly written, pragmatic, accessible, and seemed useful so I’d recommend reading it.<p>Lately I find myself asking, is the article “better” than what AI could produce?<p>In this case, the article intuitively seems a grade above similar GPT 3.5 output.<p>But why so? Is it just my opinion it’s better?<p>How should “better” be defined? Readability, persuasion, effectiveness as a call to action? Truthfulness seems like it’s own can of worms.<p>Are there any objective measures of AI vs human output quality to date? Which human? Yikes a new can of worms…<p>Subjectively, it sometimes seems like the more I read known AI content the more I get a feel for its style. Oops - forgot we’re dealing with a master style chameleon. I think it’s more likely this perception is wrong and it’s easy to overestimate one’s ability to discern generated content.<p>Apologies for the tangent. I hope it doesn’t detract too much from the more important point that the post is good and I’ve found some of the techniques very helpful.
I'm sure the current epidemic of stress and anxiety has nothing to do with wage deterioration, inflation, layoffs and looming recession, millions of deaths during a global pandemic, or regional conflicts that could lead to war between nuclear-armed adversaries. Or the general meaningless and despair of 21st century life.<p>People who experience stress and anxiety from financial or health issues should probably just journal more, go for a run, and avoid social media.
There is something we don't yet understand about eye movement and stress/anxiety. Moving your eyes between two points or just sideways back and forth seems to work for many people.
Based on what I hear this seems to be even incorporated in a clinical setting for treating PTSD etc.
I've found the single best measure of my stress and anxiety levels (as at their worst, my subjective perception can't be trusted) is HRV during sleep.<p>My Garmin watch tracks it, and when I actively try to manage stress and anxiety during the day, it goes from red (for weeks) to immediately recovering into the green that night.<p>I like a good dataset and the correlation with my stress (backed up by papers on causation) is at least a really strong thing for me.<p>If I try something new, I can measure the impact on my HRV very clearly.<p>When I feel I'm burning out, my HRV over the previous few weeks tells the tale.
I think reducing working hour would put everything else in place.
We spend most of hour waking time worrying about a job and how to get ready for that job.
It's difficult to trust a source that fights fire with fire. If stress and anxiety is handled by beating it, where does the entropy leave the system?
Breathing is key. It's one of the easiest ways to facing your current situation and also distracting yourself every moment or so while you breathe. Exhaling along with mental visualization of purging the mind has the effect of releasing stress. Ofcourse, this needs practice, but that's not too hard with the amount of stressful situations we face everyday.
Surprised this wasn't posted, as it mirrors most of the findings (closed vs open mind; how to optimize creative/unstressed thought, methodologies for maximizing output), John Cleese's talk on Creativity:
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g</a>
Frankly exercise doensn't help, although Stress helps me exercise harder.<p>I saw a comment about being honest with ones' self.<p>The best thing for me?<p>Gin. Lots of it.<p>And then lots of dancing around the flat to whatever music I have on shuffle.
Related anecdata + a study I found useful. After an auto accident I used to stress out when driving. I would recognize that I was stressing out and try to clamp down on it... which worked quite poorly and made me more stressed. Things got to a points I would hear a crash in my head every time I switched lanes causing even more panic and stress. Things changed after I watched <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/heidi_hanna_the_cure_for_stress" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/heidi_hanna_the_cure_for_stress</a> . Instead of trying to clamp down I recognized that stressing out is making me more aware to keep me safe and leaned into it. That coupled with some structured breathing helped a lot in just a few weeks and a year later I got back into driving is fun mode.<p>Recent Huberman study showed that structured breath work has measurable positive effects - <a href="https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(22)00474-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-37...</a> . See more discussion on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480039" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34480039</a><p><pre><code> While all four groups showed significant daily improvement in positive affect and reduction in state anxiety and negative affect, there were significant differences between mindfulness meditation and breathwork in positive affect
Specifically, the cyclic sighing group showed more increase in positive affect toward the end of the study in a way that was significantly different than that for those randomized to mindfulness meditation, who had the least increase in positive affect
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Instructions for cyclic sighing:<p><pre><code> First step - inhale slowly until the lungs are expanded.
Second step - inhale again once more to maximally fill the lungs.
Third step - slowly and fully exhale until lungs are empty.
Repeat this pattern of breathing for 5 min. Ideally, both inhales are performed via nose and the exhale would be performed via mouth, but, if preferred, the breathing activity can be performed entirely through the nose. It is normal for the second inhale to be briefer than the first.
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I am extremely excited that there is a follow up study being planned/worked on. One criticism I would give to the methodology is that instructions for cyclic sighing are by far the simplest compared to mindfulness meditation, box breathing, and cyclic hyperventilation with retention. As such it is possible that this method performed the best because it was simplest to follow.