[eslaught]

Recently I was introduced to the distinction between anxiety and dread. Anxiety is, essentially, a form of fear. You fear a worst-case consequence that isn't actually that likely. If you put up with your anxiety and just go and do the thing (on average) you'll do just fine, or at least ok-ish. Over time your body learns that the anxious activity is ok and the anxiety is reduced.

Dread is different. Dread is the expectation of a bad situation. It's not a worst-case scenario, it's a typical scenario. If what you are experiencing is dread, then pushing yourself into that situation will confirm to your body that, yup, it really is as bad as you thought, and will amplify the dread rather than diminish it.

A classic example is that certain forms of neurodivergence create sensory overload in typical "social" environments. This is likely to result in dread rather than anxiety. Your body is literally telling you that this situation is problematic, and repeat exposure isn't going to improve anything.

In our modern culture the language of anxiety is widespread but the language of dread much less so, and I think that's unfortunate because a lot of advice centers around "just get over it", which works only if what you're experiencing is anxiety. Personally, learning about this gave me permission to do "social" activities on my own terms and stop worrying about what other people think "social" means; turns out the social anxiety I had was relatively minimal and what I was experiencing was mostly the dread from environments where social activities often occur.

[xlii]

TIL!

I always joked that there’s nothing to fear about travel over plane. Nothing will fall, nothing will crash. The true horror is spending X hours without movement and a 2 day back pain afterwards.

Seems that I rarely experience anxiety but I do experience dread more often.

What you’re describing is my own self-developed strategy to deal with various stuff. Need to research dread topic more.

[weinzierl]

"Personally, learning about this gave me permission to do "social" activities on my own terms and stop worrying about what other people think "social" means;"

So much this.

To have your own terms is always OK. If you think about it, what people think "social" means is not even fixed. It certainly changes with your age and your environment but even the consensus in a society about it changes.

When I grew up it meant being in a deafening loud environment so much full smoke that you could barely breathe. Hated it, but only when I moved to the big city and started university I understood that I am not the only one. Nowadays the smoke is mostly gone and at least it has become accepted to wear hearing protection.

[amelius]

I think in many cases there is a negative reinforcing aspect to anxiety that needs to be addressed. For example, anxiety can trigger certain physical symptoms like sweating excessively, tension leading to e.g. reduced loudness and loss of voice, clumsiness. This can spiral down and eventually the anxiety can be almost entirely about those physical aspects.

This is just a different way of looking at it. What you do by addressing what you call dread is basically putting a halt to this feedback loop.

(disclaimer: IANAMD)

[lukaslalinsky]

I was stuttering for my entire life, still dealing with it at 42. Kids in basic school gave me all kinds of abuse due to my speech. So I obviously developed social anxiety. The nastiest part about stuttering is, the more anxious you are, the more you stutter. I was given a lot of advice to just go to kids and talk. It only reinforced the anxiety and confirmed that if I really want to say something, it's impossible to say it. The only realistic solution came much later in life, when I realized I just can't give a fuck about whether people understand me. People who are interested will ask me again. People who are not, will just go away. That attitude lessened the problem, but didn't get rid of it completely. But it also requires me to give up on many things.

[iambateman]

Any books or research to draw this out? It sounds somewhat relevant to my experience and I’d like to learn more.

[shayway]

Thank you for passing this on. I've been circling the concept but haven't ever heard it pinned down. One often comes with the other so it's difficult to separate the two, but at the same time the strategies needed to overcome / deal with them are very distinct.

[uniqueusername7]

This makes some amount of sense to me, but what if you dread approaching people? how would you resolve this with still wanting to approach people/form relationships?

[eslaught]

I'd try to find ways to stack everything else in your favor as much as possible. If X is difficult, you try to optimize Y, Z, etc. so that at least you're not coping with multiple adverse environmental factors at the same time.

For me personally, the best-case scenario seems to be intentionally scheduled, one-on-one interactions in "clean" environments (i.e., quiet, unscented, no smoke/incense, dressed casually for maximum comfort, etc.). The next best would be some sort of group setting with structured, intentional sharing (i.e., not just doing something together but explicitly organized for the purpose of sharing). It can be a bit hit or miss to find these, so it can take some iteration to figure out what actually works.

Otherwise, "escalating" (i.e., inviting someone into a deeper/more meaningful interaction) is a skill you can practice, but if you're dealing with the rest of it at the same time, you're basically playing with a handicap. So incrementalize your goals as much as possible, practice in small, regular intervals with sufficient breaks for recovery, and don't compare yourself to anyone else, no matter how tempting that might be.

Hope that helps, and feel free to contact me on Keybase (in profile) or email (run the Perl script on my website) if you want help brainstorming.

Disclaimer: not a therapist.

[anton-c]

This is enlightening as someone with severe... well anxiety and dread, I suppose. Thank you sincerely.

[goopypoop]

Does the sore head dread beat the sobriety anxiety?

[tootie]

Introversion has nothing to do with anxiety or dread. They are orthogonal concepts.

[bluefirebrand]

You're not entirely wrong, but I don't think they are entirely orthogonal either.

There is almost certainly a significant overlap between introversion and social anxiety/dread, even if they aren't 1:1 related

If nothing else, many people with a lot of social anxiety will claim they are simply introverts in order to cover for their anxiety

[9rx]

The fear of reaching the point of social exhaustion, as introverts quickly do, is the anxiety.

[tootie]

Not really. Not for me at least. Do you feel anxiety over physical exhaustion?

[9rx]

I would be in better shape if I didn't!

Although I will posit that physical exhaustion is typically more manageable, so that helps. There are certainly exceptions, but by and large in our modern, sedentary world, physical exertion can easily be limited to controlled environments where one is able to stop when they reach the point of exhaustion. It is unlikely that stepping outside means that you will have to outrun a lion, unable to pause else become lunch. Chances are these days you will only ever reach exhaustion if you purposefully push yourself to (e.g. hitting the gym). But if I have reason to worry that I am going to find myself in a situation where I cannot meaningfully rest when I reach my physical breaking point, absolutely the anxiety will be running hot.

Whereas social interaction can be harder to control. For example, reaching your social limit in the middle of the workday does not usually, for all practical purposes, enable you to remove yourself from the situation. You are expected to keep going until the end of the business day, no matter how you are feeling on the inside. Us techies might have enough individual work to slink away to, perhaps, but for many jobs there is no such luxury. Or you might come up against a Chatty Cathy who will continue pushing to keep the social engagement going even after you try to back away. There aren't all that many HN-esq situations in the real world where you can just magically pop in when you want to engage and then disappear as fast as you came. And where you might find something approximate, you are apt to find it much too limiting to be an exclusive social outlet.

[noman-land]

There's definitely a "get over it" for dread and it's called stoicism (not an expert). Sometimes you have to do things whether you like it or not just to survive and "getting over it" will prevent you from dying.

[ball_of_lint]

Even if this was true for neurotypicals (which it isn't) it wouldn't be true for neurodivergent folk.

Can you hold a conversation next to a lawnmower? A jackhammer? A jet engine? At some point there's literally too much noise for you to communicate verbally anymore. That point is different for different people.

[CharlesW]

> Even if this was true for neurotypicals (which it isn't) it wouldn't be true for neurodivergent folk.

Interesting take, are you neurodivergent? "Masking" is basically a "get over it" approach that the parent talks about. It is exhausting, to the point that neurodivergent people wil preemptively bail out of situations if they don't feel up for it. Tools associated with stocism can be helpful for neurodivergent people when they're used to support their needs rather than diminish them, in my experience.

[fsckboy]

let's say you are very afraid of heights. let's also say that your toddler climbed out a window and is now playing on the edge of the roof. you're just going to watch, or worse, hide your eyes?

you replied to a comment that cited "survival", so to argue against it you need to also cite surviving, or not surviving in the case you bring up.

[ball_of_lint]

Eslaught didn't mention survival, so Noman-land's rebuttal doesn't cover all cases of dread. I'm more trying to help him understand than directly refute his misdirected point. The feeling of dread isn't about how you react to it, but rather that the typical outcome is negative.

I actually have pretty bad height vertigo. I can suppress it but it takes almost all my attention. In your hypothetical I expect I would suppress it and grab the child. This vertigo is anxiety, not dread; the outcome is almost always neutral or positive, not negative.

A scenario that might induce dread is being forced to jump off a 30ft ledge. Even if you know how to fall well there's still significant risk of injury, and either way it's going to hurt. Learning to fall better might help, but the more important thing is to _avoid that situation in the first place_.

[crooked-v]

Trying to just "get over it" with the neurodivergence example noticed is the kind of thing likely to result in a panic attack or other uncontrollable expression of emotion. It's not something you can change just by wanting it hard enough.

[mock-possum]

Thanks, I’m cured

[hhh]

come on man telling someone with autism to learn stoicism and just got care