Stress

[Phoebe]

So, normal people, as normal as I can get to with words, what do you do to relieve your stresses in life? The upside of relative mental health is that I'm not doing anything bad to relieve the random stresses and anxieties of the days. Given no strange outlets in the form of "inappropriate mathematics" or "unfortunate visualizations" or "checking things" or "scrubbing off our skin in the wintry dry air", I'm not sure where to put it. I can only go to the grocery store and micromanage the cart packing so often! My house is getting dangerously clean. One solution is to get bad headaches, which isn't going to fly for me. So where do you put your stress? Exercise helps; I should focus on exercise for sure. John Tesh definitely would want that for me. Bob Ross is also helpful, I swear. It's like meditating, without any danger that you're going to scare your own brain, because Bob Ross is talking the whole time about bushes and mountains. So Exercise and Bob Ross. Probably I should practice cello more too, and pet the dog more.

[akiva]

Not being particularly mentally healthy, I don't know. Meditation works very well for me, but I can't do that all day. So I spend much of my time hashing over all the ways I suck, which doesn't really relieve stress.

[Ronster]

give yourself some time to do what you want(not what you should)

listen to what you want (not what you should)
spend a small amount of money on yourself (not on what you should)

Exercise is very good.

Play a game that is just fun, not necessarily challenging

[Phoebe]

Those are great sugestions. I was a lousy meditator before i learned self hypnosis, which takes the anxious mind out of the process.

[Kyle]

[akiva]

Have you tried drinking heavily?

[Ronster]

[Eliahad]

I bottle mine deep inside until I can't hold onto it anymore and it leaks out the sides. Which reminds me that I need to reschedule my therapy appointment because I have a gig now.

[Phoebe]

[Mike]

Nope. Sorry. I have to disqualify that one.

[Eliahad]

[Phoebe]

[Phoebe]

[Kyle]

[Phoebe]

Anxiety math, lol, that's totally what it is but I'm not sure I've ever seen it phrased exactly like that. Anxiety KenKen.

[Kyle]

No shit. This is how OCD still affects me. I had food poisoning last night and couldn't sleep for fear of vomiting. So all night my mind kept running through complex multiplication problems over and over. Then when I finally fell asleep, I kept having a recurring pattern of overlaying woven stiches that kept interrupting my dreams. So again, the drugs don't solve OCD, because if they did, then I wouldn't be I, but it makes everything manageable, except in times of great stress (like food poisoning).

[poorpete]

Anxiety is my thing. Reading the Depression thread I suddenly thought "this is how I feel?" then my heart started racing and then was like "nope, it's still anxiety"

Meditation helps because it's good for me to check in and ground myself. But then I get better and forget to do meditation or decide "meh, I'd rather spend the next hour watching Futurama repeats."

Exercise good, need to do more. Scheduling is good. Distraction is good in the short term, and can be good in the long term if one of your worries is that your anxiety will never go away.

Debating my anxiety like a friend works. When I moved to NYC, I thought I'd be overwhelmed, but rethought it as exciting. Returning to the rural life made me worried I'd be bored but rethought it as relaxing.

My wife gets anxious when she's hurt and a goal is to stop her anxiety so we can get an accurate view of her injuries. I should do that with my worries. Remove the anxiety and reassess.

Deep breathing exercises work great. Only time it didn't was when a plane I was on went through a half hour of rough turbulence. My app ended ten minutes in. But in inactivity it's great.

Yoga great. Warrior 2 lets you Invision your self as Spider-Man flinging webs, Like Skywalker moving objects, or a... warrior showing your strength. Then you get to be a tree. And a dog, a cat, and a child.

[Phoebe]

The exercise and breathing work for me - basically anything physical to disrupt the brain (and yes to the anonymous advice from an anonymous source, that probably would work too). Self-hypnosis is the closest thing to a mental intervention that works for me. Otherwise the mind will eat itself, always and every time. Meditation may work depending on how things manifest, but it's deeply counterproductive for existential anxiety, whereas petting your dog works wonders.

The main thing is learning to simply live with it, I guess. Wanting to get rid of the anxiety can be part of the problem. On the other hand, even if you stop yourself from doing counterproductive self-soothing things, being anxious is a PITA that interferes with life. Theory: there is some kind of sweet spot where being a little physically hyper due to anxiety is actually beneficial for moving the body and keeping the ol' metabolism chugging along, and being a little mentally hyper makes you a careful perfectionist at work. But then at some too-high level all of this falls off a cliff and gums up the works.

[bralbovsky]

So #1 sleep is definitely causative in terms of making exercise and eating choices useful. Somehow resets the balance and convinces your body that it's safe to let go of storage inventory. You feel safe enough to sleep; your body feels safe enough to swap emergency fat reserves for muscle or nothing.

nice talk about how perception affects reality. Need stress to grow, to strengthen, to build, otherwise we get softer and lazier.

Inconclusive results on the drinking thing. What I suspect is that making time and space for drinking (see #!) is the healthy part, and the chemistry just catalyzes it. What's really healthy is making time to be with the drinking buddies, even if you're not drinking. They haven't tested this as a control yet, as far as I can tell.

Finally, here. Talking it out, reaching out, landing in a safe space where folks grok you and share back. That's pretty reliable too.

[Kyle]

That's a good point. I think that stress is good in many situations and just needs to be recognized for what it is. Getting ready for trial is always extremely stressful- but in a good way. It's what makes sure that you've planned for every contingency and have responses for arguments that may or may not come up.

Stress becomes bad when it's simply nonproductive worrying.