A few months ago, it came to my attention that, for many people, helplessness is a central cause of anxiety, such that a good way to reduce their anxiety is to reduce their sense of helplessness.
This is deeply bizarre to me. For my part, I tend to find helplessness actively comforting, and situations of helplessness to be among those where I have the least anxiety. If there’s a situation whose outcome I’m unable to affect, then I can just relax and let it resolve itself, rather than worrying about exactly what actions to take and how they’ll affect the outcome.
(For example: asking for things from people who I’m not accustomed to asking for things from is often a high-anxiety activity for me; but waiting for a response after asking, when there’s nothing more for me to do, is low-anxiety.)
I’m now kind of curious how many other people have the arrangement I have rather than the apparently-default helplessness-increases-anxiety one. And also how the apparently-default one works, because my model of its internals is currently pretty weak.
I’ve thought about this too, and I think the way it works for me is that *uncertainty* increases anxiety. Helplessness decreases uncertainty about *what to do next* but increases uncertainty about *the outcome*: which of these effects is bigger depends on the situation.
Waiting for a response to a difficult email is worse than writing it, because if I haven’t sent the email yet I *know* there’s been no response and I at least theoretically have ways I can tweak the phrasing and such to make them more likely to respond well, but if I’ve sent it the response *might* arrive at any time and *might* be bad, and I have no further methods of weighting the probabilities in my favour.
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#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what
Brinens and Things 