What increases anxiety?
Here’s some things that tend to increase anxiety. Spending a lot of time on your phone or other devices (probably no surprise there). Spending a lot of time on the Internet, regardless of the topic or reason, or which device it happens to be on. Spending a lot of time on the news. Spending a lot of time watching shows or videos. Spending a lot of time indoors. Spending a lot of time alone. And spending a lot of time with unpredictable or unreliable people.
I’d like to explain a little bit of why each of these increase anxiety. By the way, I’m Heather with Autism Chrysalis.
The connection with anxiety is not because any of these are inherently bad things, and they can be good in appropriate doses. I think the trouble is not in what they are, but in what they prevent. When you’re spending a lot of time on these things, you’re not engaging in the types of things that our brain evolved to find soothing and calming, that naturally counteract the inevitable negatives in life.
For example, time in nature gives our nervous systems signals of safety and calm and predictability. Studies have found that the three most soothing sounds to the human brain are: wind rustling through tree leaves or grass, moving water (like streams or ocean waves), and bird song. We don’t get very much of these by default indoors.
The connection with anxiety is not because any of these are inherently bad things, […] trouble is not in what they are, but in what they prevent.
Unpredictable and unreliable people aren’t necessarily bad people, I’m not necessarily talking about a relationship that’s abusive or toxic (although it could be, depending on the situation), but when you don’t know what to expect from someone at any given time, when a small comment could be just fine or could lead to a major outburst, when asking for something that you need could be accepted or could be become a huge issue, when you don’t know whether they’re going to show up as planned, or whether you’re going to go out of your way to prepare for something you’ve planned to do together for nothing, when you’re essentially put in the position of trying to manage the other person’s emotions or reactions or time, because they don’t have the skills to do so, but you don’t actually know what’s going to set them off, and what sets them off is inconsistent, or whether they’re going to show up, or be there for you when you need it.
That can create or increase anxiety because you genuinely don’t know what to expect and have no way to tell. Because the normal kind of learning what another person is like, and what they need, and how they tend to react to things, doesn’t work with this kind of person.
On the other hand, time with predictable, healthy people can be incredibly healing and soothing when you have a positive and mutually supportive relationship with this person.
If you go in the other direction and spend a large amount of time alone, and I don’t mean in the healthy, restorative alone time, but when it turns into isolating, the brain becomes its own echo chamber of the same thoughts going around and around, without any external feedback to challenge the untrue thoughts, or the fears that are blown out of proportion, and without any way to get more positive experiences of the world. So isolation tends to reinforce and intensify anxiety.
And a lot of alone time makes it harder to want to engage with people when it could be a positive experience. Because people do take energy, and the anxious brain doesn’t have much energy for things that it’s already associating with previous bad experiences. But sometimes that energy is worth it, and positive connections with healthy people, even in small doses, can feel really good and reduce anxiety.
Being in the physical world
Also, time doing physical things, not on screens, but I mean making things, being creative, doing useful things with your hands, with things that are 3-D and exist in the world. They interact with your brain and your body in ways that humans have always interacted with our physical environment. Not on a 2-D screen, where you can see objects and people, but you can’t touch or feel or smell or taste them, or see their shadows move and the perspective change as you move around them in a real, physical space. The way our brains were designed to interpret incoming data from real things.
Getting news from the people in your community as you go about the course of your day and your life contains a mixture of positive and negative events, whereas reported news tends to be a long list of just the bad things.
And the events reported in your local community tend to matter more to you personally. They have a personal effect on your life or the lives of the people that you know. Whereas news about the broader world sometimes will have an immediate or a trickle down effect to you personally, but that’s always going to be a small minority of the number of news events that you’re exposed to.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap of watching other people live, watching other people deal with problems (fictional or nonfiction), watching other worlds, rather than spending the energy to get up and do things yourself.
So your brain thinks that there’s a ton of things to fear and watch out for, but only a very small amount of them are going to directly affect you in the way that your brain is thinking that it’s going to affect you, based upon millions of years of evolution of only getting info about the things that are likely to have an immediate, personal impact.
Watching shows or videos takes so much less energy than getting up and physically doing things, that it’s so easy to fall into the trap of watching other people live, watching other people deal with problems (fictional or nonfiction), watching other worlds, rather than spending the energy to get up and do things yourself, or to deal with the hard things in your own life.
And there’s a lot less risk in watching other people do stuff, than in trying something out and potentially making a mess of it. But when you don’t try, you don’t have to deal with the emotions that come up when it doesn’t turn out the that way you want it to, or to work through the uncomfortable period of building skills, or of trial and error, which are all a part of a healthy, well rounded emotional life, and contribute towards mental health.
So getting some amount of these things is fine, it’s even good, but they tend to be self-reinforcing, which is to say that when you get some of it, you tend to want more. And then you’re spending a lot of time with that, probably more than you intend. And then you don’t have as much time with the positive, healthy things that can provide balance, and counteract the tendency towards anxiety that these tend to create. That’s what I mean when I say that the problem isn’t in what they are, but in what they prevent.
If you’ve been noticing that you’re dealing with a lot of anxiety, and are Autistic or AuDHD, and the standard advice on anxiety doesn’t seem to do much for you, or not enough, and you’d like some strategies and tools that actually do work for anxiety for the Autistic and AuDHD brain, I invite you to check out my short course on how to reduce anxiety for Autistics.
