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I originally glossed over your comment pretty quickly, but the more I think about it, the more I realize this is true in practice for me as well. I know what it feels like to feel joy or sadness, but for me anxiety is more often a collection of things I observe about myself than something I feel. This is partly because my anxiety is so often coupled with depression, and partly because anxiety pushes your brain into a fight/freeze/flee trichotomy, and the "freeze" and "flee" responses can feel pretty emotionally blank when the fear is distant or ill-defined (like a deadline or social rejection as opposed to a grizzly bear.) Again depending on the fight/freeze/flee response, my anxiety can manifest as stiffness in my body, requiring special concentration to force myself to do normal things, or it can manifest as a jitteriness, like when you drive a car with a lot more power than you're used to and every time you touch the accelerator it surges forward in an alarming way. It can be accompanied by elevated body temperature, even sweating. The way I differentiate the paralyzing kind of anxiety from depression is that depression paralyzes with lack of energy and an inability to believe that anything you do will come out well. Anxiety paralyzes with stiffness and a blank mind that is too twitchy to make plans. Paralysis is the flight/freeze response to anxiety, but it also has a fight response, where I single-mindedly execute the next thing to do. I can get a lot of things done this way, and sometimes this is the only thing that snaps me out of procrastination, but sometimes the "clear next step" I'm unthinkingly executing is not the right thing. And when it becomes unclear what the next thing is, I'm back to being paralyzed. Likewise, in social situations, anxiety can make me talk a lot (for me) and become much more open and engaging, and it can be a great thing to get me over the hump to knowing someone well, but more often it just makes my mind blank and makes me so slow to say the things I want to say that the moment passes. From the point of view of my social anxiety, I guess that's a win, preventing me from engaging more than superficially. |