My experience with anxiety⌗

I am not immune to anxiety. I grew up middle class in India. We were always taught about the ephemerality of everything around us. And that did not just include material posessions. It included the attitudes of people toward us. Including people at power.

Power is a complex thing. Power, the way I say it, does not imply politicians or bureaucrats. We all yield power over others, and others yield power over us. Most importantly, the power we have over ourselves and over our environment gives us a sense of self. Yet, as it is with childhood, the power over self is almost always overshadowed by the power others have over us. And this perception can extend into adulthood, even if it is not necessarily true in reality.

Loss of that power over self, especially when the loss is due to factors out of our hand - leads to anxiety. Suddenly nothing makes sense. You have been “coerced” into losing that apparent power over yourself. You aren’t drifting with the current in a state of zen, you are being dragged along in a stampede, desperately gasping for air.

Then suddenly the thought creeps in. “I am done for, unsalveagable.”

Desperate, you look for answers. You look for reasons. You turn to superstition. The truth is, you need something to make sense here. There has to be a root cause. If there is a root cause, there is a potential solution. If there is a potential solution, then there is a way to circumvent or brace for this situation you have been put in.

Yet, most of the time, there is no visible root cause, or a visible path forward. A visible, but unactionable root cause will give you a moment of zen, albeit eventually. That path forward, the ability to deal with your anxiety, is important. When I talk about a path forward, it is mainly the answer to this question:

What are the future negative effects of this thing that is causing me distress? How can I better prepare myself for it? Will it wreak havoc on my plans? If I try to fight this tide, am I digging my own grave?

We are almost always introduced to anxiety and our coping mechanisms to it in the most formative years of our lives. We cope with different triggers of anxiety in different ways. For example, we may shut ourselves off from society until the anxious spiral ends. In other cases, it ends with not being able to showcase who we really are. In yet some more cases, it ends with desperate, irrational action. No matter how we do it, my experience with all my coping mechanisms has been of one where I seem to have a semblance of control.

The titillating temptations⌗

I want to revisit the title of this post. “Anxiety is a titillating temptress”. I wanted to change it to something a little less scandalous, but nothing seemed to capture the poetic attraction that we have to our coping mechanisms. And why do we find ourselves unable to leave that grasp, despite the conscious knowledge of our state of mind? I believe it is that last sentence from the previous section - a semblance of control.

I want to expand on that a bit. I don’t get a sense of control just from being able to control everything, but also by not being reminded of the things I can’t. That leads to the titillating temptations. The desire to always have answers to whatever questions we have. If I can avoid asking myself the hard questions, I can avoid not having the answers to those questions, right?

And that is when the behaviors begin. On a good day, I end up running a 5k on a whim. I would kinda argue that it is still one of the better ways to cope with anxiety, as it is productive and progress (even if orthogonal to the thing causing anxiety). On a so-so day, I might be procrastinating, playing video games for hours on end, trying to atrophy my mind. On a bad day, it might end up with me desperately trying to fight off those invasive thoughts at a 90+ resting heart rate, doomscrolling to oblivion.

But why? Why do I revert to these behaviors? And how can I hack them to do my bidding? As I write this, something dawns on me - each of these behavior classes tries to answer a question in my head.

I realized that these behaviors gave me a sense of comfort - something that I would desperately need during those times of uncertainty. Of course, the comfort would then bite me later, but that explains the titillating temptations of our anxious behavior. And hey, if the problem eventually sorts itself out, why would we want to change? What we fail to see is that this behavior does not induce positive change. And if we can barely functioning, positive change seems to be an unreachable add-on to survival.

Yet, a lot of the incrementally positive change that I create is due to “tricking” myself into using anxious actions to my advantage. I usually deal with anxious thoughts as follows:

Running, working out, or doing something productive⌗

This is an answer for the question: Am I good enough to solve this problem? I find that when inspiration is unavailable in the task that I do, I seek it elsewhere. Once I am done with my distraction, I hope that I have the mental confidence to take on the task again. If I don’t, it’s okay. I made progress elsewhere. I am a better person, and I deserve this break. I can deal with this in a while.

More often than not, what the “productive” distraction does is reset my brain and help me approach the issue with a fresh pair of eyes. If not, I am usually too tired to handle the problem and I look at it the next day. In any sense, my anxiety is solved, and the shame spiral that causes most of our anxiety is also satiated, even if temporarily.

I place this at the top of my coping mechanisms because anything that is put off and handled this way is usually solved quickly. If not, I at least get the guts to ask for help.

Procrastinating and begrudgingly doing it⌗

Whenever I get a moment of epiphany during the loading screen of a game, where my mind goes “Are you sure this is a good use of your time?” - I know that I have reached a point where my coping mechanism is running out. At this time, I know I have two options - either get up and get it done, or risk procrastinating into a doomscrolling spiral. But how do I get here? I usually feel that the question that is answered here is: Is there a point to me doing it right now? Does it even matter? When the answer is no, mainly due to disillusionment of external actors, you end up wanting to do something else. You don’t have to prove anything to yourself, (or you just don’t have the strength to) so you do something to let this feeling of ennui go away. Except that you either drive it away, or it drives you to a worse place.

If you end up driving it away, it is always work that needs some rework at the end. I don’t consider that a lack of progress. Reworkable work is often better than no work.

Doomscrolling⌗

This is where I find myself repeatedly asking:“Is there a point to this?” and answering “no”. There is little that I can do at this point. The doomscroll exists only to numb the spiral.

I originally wanted to write that there is “nothing” I could do. I changed it because what I learned there is to somehow look for hope in the littlest of things. This would act as a catalyst towards getting a miniscule amount of progress done, and that would slowly, but surely, get me out of the spiral.

This is not a “last resort” thing, it is sometimes the default when nothing seems to be going our way. I ranked these in the order I have based on how easy it is to get out of them, not how easy it is to get in them. Doomscrolling was my default reaction until videogames and workouts became accessible enough for me.

Once they did, I made my doomscrolling conscious. Was I scrolling endlessly while waiting for my turn at the barbershop? That’s fine. In the metro? Maybe, as long as I knew when I needed to get down. In my bed, with a deadline looming? Yeah… time to jot down what I need to do and get at least something done. I can reward myself with a small treat once done.

A live example⌗

A very good example for these is how I actually restarted writing. For years I was in a “doomscrolling” mode, asking myself what the point was of me expressing anything. I didn’t feel I had anything to contribute, and that it was just like talking into the wind.

Then I realized I could write something. But who was going to read it? It could wait until I was a senior or a staff engineer. What was the point of a new software guy writing about work, or even his life? Wouldn’t it just be hollow?

Then I got promoted and realized I was mentoring more and more people now. At this point I needed to know that I could write. I needed to know I could mentor. And thus, this blog was (re)born. My mentoring inspired me to write, and my writing inspired me to mentor.

How I went forth fighting it⌗

I wouldn’t say I “solved” anxiety. I have just gotten better at fighting it. I realized that it was a lot easier to handle when I was doing something else that was productive. While doing it - I would try to see how I could solve this problem in front of me. And if it was the best solution - fine. If it was not, then I would have a jump-off point with actionable feedback to improve on this.

So soon, I decided to make that my default behavior. Table the thoughts, and start something productive that did not need much thinking. Halfway through it, my thoughts would trickle down, and given that most of my productive work involves some sort of physical exertion, I would probably be hopped up on endorphins while I took on the problem again with a fresh perspective. You know, win-win.

It involved a lot of work. And now that I look at it - this post probably looks like another “do something productive and your problems go away” sort of post. But at least there is one example where this process worked. It is not easy, but it is worth it in the end.

Final thoughts⌗

I realize that anxiety for a lot of us is the doomscrolling phase. The Is there a point to this? phase. And personally that was almost always triggered by external failure that affected me. Whether it was a teacher going through the moods and ruining my saturday (yes, we had school on saturday) or a girl not texting me back, the hopelessness of the lack of control would always bring the spiral.

And it can become a problem at work. It was a problem for me at work. I would rework my code a hundred times because I wanted it to be perfect. I’d spiral if I did not get the thing working soon. I’d read my design a hundred times and still have my day ruined by a comment.

Then something changed. When I began facing anxieties about the functioning of my code, I would put it through the motions and prove it worked. When I thought my design was subpar, I would rewrite and rewrite until it looked good. When I had a doubt I considered silly, I would drop a message and turn off slack notifications for the day.

It never bit me. The worst of my fears did not come true. I know I cannot assume that universally true, but something I tell all my mentees is - I know it is scary. I know sometimes you get overwhelmed. We’ve all been there. And you can talk to me about it.

If you don’t want to talk about it - that’s okay. Just read this blog.

It is me trying to mentor myself.