Do your efforts to reduce anxiety and stress ever cause secondary anxiety and stress?

[DuckRabbit]

The 2006 book 'How to Be Yourself in a World That's Different: An Asperger Syndrome Study Guide for Adolescents' by Yuko Yoshida states: "Reducing anxiety and stress, and organizing your life so as to avoid fatigue, will help prevent the triad characteristics from being manifested as weaknesses" (the triad being social interaction; communication; theory of mind or imagination - the book seems to lump these together). But have you ever found that your very efforts to "avoid fatigue" etc end up causing further anxiety and stress?

 

[Vitamin Sea]

They say:
What you resist, persists.
If you are exerting an effort to reduce stress, you may actually get more frustrated and thereby more stress builds up. Focus on positivity.

I want to share more, but I'm now in the kitchen. I will be back later.

 

[Gritches]

It's like the paradox of "trying to relax". It's impossible.

To solve a problem is to impost your will upon it. But how do you impose your will upon a problem where the harder you struggle, the tighter the knot gets?

If you want to impose your will upon the problem of needing to relax more, take it a step further: cease imposing your will. It's sort of like "not giving a damn", because if you're stressed or anxious you probably give too many damns about any given thing or things.

So, in that way, you can solve the problem/impose your will by not imposing your will upon the problem at all.

I've done a pretty fantastic job of organizing my life in such a way that it's as easy as possible; it doesn't look like a NT's life at all, and yet I'm quite happy. I owe a lot of that to not giving a damn about things I "should" give multiple damns about for reasons that work with other people's logic, but not my logic.

 

[DuckRabbit]

It's like the paradox of "trying to relax". It's impossible.

To solve a problem is to impost your will upon it. But how do you impose your will upon a problem where the harder you struggle, the tighter the knot gets?

If you want to impose your will upon the problem of needing to relax more, take it a step further: cease imposing your will. It's sort of like "not giving a damn", because if you're stressed or anxious you probably give too many damns about any given thing or things.

So, in that way, you can solve the problem/impose your will by not imposing your will upon the problem at all.

Very Zen Buddhist - imposing your will by not imposing your will; being at home with homelessness; secure in insecurity; desiring desirelessness; being fanatical about being moderate etc. This also reminds me of remedies for insomnia - "If you worry about not sleeping, you'll be even more insomniacal" cf. "I have insomnia but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it".

I've done a pretty fantastic job of organizing my life in such a way that it's as easy as possible; it doesn't look like a NT's life at all, and yet I'm quite happy. I owe a lot of that to not giving a damn about things I "should" give multiple damns about for reasons that work with other people's logic, but not my logic.

I believe you have found the key to contentment. In not allowing the mainstream to dictate your way of life, it sounds like you have managed to achieve the freedom many people dream of. Most are unwilling to give themselves the means to implement it. Tied to status concerns, many are unwilling/unable to step outside the social group. Perhaps they fear falling off the edges of society if they do so. Perhaps, with their skills, they would fall off the edges of society. To be included, they have to subscribe to the frenzied expansion valued by the modern world, they have to orient their path towards personal prestige. In contrast, AS individuals may be more adept at balancing on a precarious fulcrum, getting by with a minimum of social acceptance: midway between exclusion from society and inclusion, between intelligence and absurdity, between meeting their immediate needs and poverty, between profound loss of face and their own kind of creativity. As Thomas Moore says, "Stand firm in life, crazy, rather than retreat out of it, safe and apparently sane".

Indeed, this freer lifestyle is not necessarily safe; it has stresses and anxieties of its own. Managing the stress and anxiety that comes from balancing on a fulcrum can consume a lot of energy. It entails coming up against mainstream values, and being devalued because one's life doesn't 'look like' it 'should'. One also has to guard against the opposite excess: the frenzied individualism of those who value nothing except their own interest. The consolation though is that through this separation one develops a solid sense of self. That, I suspect, is the aim.

The most unfortunate individuals IMO are those who do not quite have the skills to belong but who cannot accept this - they cannot be true to themselves. This may result in a miserable life, suicide or a mass shooting. On the other hand, perhaps this leads to striking acts of creativity, like the creation of Facebook.

 

[Progster]

Yes, organising my day to avoid stress can be a cause of stress in itself, and to be worth my while, the stress saved must be greater than the stress created by planning round it. It's usually not possible to completely eliminate stress and it's often a case of choosing the lesser of two evils.

 

[Gracey]

In a word, yes.
It has done, in the past.

I’ve never been able to be still and meditate (what I know as meditation)
I saw meditation to be the remedy for anxiety.

12 months of attempts, failures and attaching frustration and stress to meditation, I gave up.
(It was too quiet)

I’ll stim and lose myself in music instead.

Not until someone pointed out that putting pressure on myself to remain calm was in fact adding more stress because calm was not what I was achieving, did I think ‘beggar this !’


Putting a heavy load of measures in place to try to body swerve stress and stressful situations then likely forgetting a lot of them is a great deal of work with no guarantees.

 

[Mr Allen]

I try to plan ahead for everything I do, because I kind of have a "sixth sense" that if I think some aspect of whatever I plan will go wrong, 9 times out of 10 it does.

So I tend to need a kind of "backup" plan.

 

[Progster]

So I tend to need a kind of "backup" plan.

Yes, having a backup plan does help to relieve some of the stress and anxiety.

 

[sidd851]

It's like the paradox of "trying to relax". It's impossible.

To solve a problem is to impost your will upon it. But how do you impose your will upon a problem where the harder you struggle, the tighter the knot gets?

If you want to impose your will upon the problem of needing to relax more, take it a step further: cease imposing your will. It's sort of like "not giving a damn", because if you're stressed or anxious you probably give too many damns about any given thing or things.

So, in that way, you can solve the problem/impose your will by not imposing your will upon the problem at all.

I've done a pretty fantastic job of organizing my life in such a way that it's as easy as possible; it doesn't look like a NT's life at all, and yet I'm quite happy. I owe a lot of that to not giving a damn about things I "should" give multiple damns about for reasons that work with other people's logic, but not my logic.

Experienced a very similar, physical phenomenon--- Sometimes I hear a high pitched, steady, whistling sound in my ears.
It seemed to come and go at will, persisted for hours, off and on, sometimes for days. I began a meditation practice, and was, before long, meditating for 1 1/2 to 2 hrs. a day.
One day this "whistling" began, and I applied the same "embracing" technique to it--- instead of being averse to it, I sought it out, focused on it, and, it disappeared.
As soon as I melted into it... it melted into me.
it was gone.
Works every time.
Edit: As an after-thought;
When I begin to focus on it (the whistling), it begins to diminish, as it does, I redouble my efforts in inverse proportion.
I "chase it out of existence".

 

[DuckRabbit]

Experienced a very similar, physical phenomenon--- Sometimes I hear a high pitched, steady, whistling sound in my ears.
It seemed to come and go at will, persisted for hours, off and on, sometimes for days. I began a meditation practice, and was, before long, meditating for 1 1/2 to 2 hrs. a day.
One day this "whistling" began, and I applied the same "embracing" technique to it--- instead of being averse to it, I sought it out, focused on it, and, it disappeared.
As soon as I melted into it... it melted into me.
it was gone.
Works every time.
Edit: As an after-thought;
When I begin to focus on it (the whistling), it begins to diminish, as it does, I redouble my efforts in inverse proportion.
I "chase it out of existence".

Amazing. Do you think it was tinnitus that you had?

 

[sidd851]

Amazing. Do you think it tinnitus that you had?

No. It is a high pitched "ringing", that would have been the better word. I do not believe it to be tinnitus.

 

[Lydia Z]

The song weightless by Marconi Union is said to reduce anxiety by 65%. I listen to it whenever I feel my neck tightening and heart racing. It slows your heart rate down.