Need some psychology advice
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I’ve sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven’t received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just “no” but “no and I don’t want to date you any more”. This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there’s certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.
I’ve found a CBT* technique useful for overcoming that sort of anxiety (it’s called catastrophising). I write down the situation and my prediction in a spreadsheet. An example would be: Situation—at work, I emailed [girl]; she hasn’t emailed back yet. Prediction—She is going to break up with me.
Then when you receive an email back, you write down the outcome in a third column, e.g. received email back—we are meeting up tonight.
Looking back over the spreadsheet, you can see how accurate your predictions have been. I expect they tend to be too negative.
*CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a strong evidence base.
ETA: I hope that explanation is clear—I’m in a bit of a rush right now! I really wanted to explain it though, as it’s had an extremely positive impact on my anxiety levels.
For similar advice, I highly recommend the Feeling Good Handbook for both anxiety and depression.
It has lots of written exercises primarily aimed at contradicting irrational thoughts.
I″v had success with Introducing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: A Practical Guide
Thanks for this advice.
One reason I’ve been reluctant in the past to try CBT is that it seems to be predicated on an assumption that I find implausible. The assumption is that, if you actually conform your beliefs to the available evidence, you will no longer feel depressed, or as depressed as you are currently feeling. For example, CBT applied to body dysmorphic disorder proceeds by challenging the beliefs that patients have about their own attractiveness. But what if you are, as you believe, truly unattractive (as most men seem to be)? And what if lack of physical attractiveness has a major impact on most aspects of your life (as seems to be the case for both men and women)? As far as I can see, in these cases CBT would be ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst, since the beliefs underlying your negative feelings would in fact be true, and supported by the available evidence.
Assuming both of those are true, CBT isn’t be about denying that. The next step would be to ask “why is that bad?” and “exactly how bad is it?” Eventually, if you do it in a precise structured manner, you’ll find some irrational thoughts hidden away somewhere (for example, “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” may be one irrational thought, which is easily countered by pointing out that lots of unattractive people are married).
The act of writing it down and following a structured approach is also really important. Even if you know a thought is irrational, it helps to write down all of the reasons it’s irrational. I don’t know why, but the act of writing it down seems to be important even for things you already “know” in order to believe them on a gut level and actually start to feel better.
All of this is described in the Feeling Good Handbook, which you should be able to find a free pdf of if you can’t afford it.
I don’t want to sound overly negative, but why assume that an honest answer to those questions will make you feel better, rather than worse? People who are deceived about themselves typically suffer from illusory superiority, overestimating their positive qualities. So why think that a therapy that proceeds by correcting these false perceptions will make people feel better about themselves?
The example you mention about romantic love is quite telling. Unattractive people have a much harder time finding romantic partners . And the partners they do find tend themselves to be unattractive. (The issue of physical attractiveness is of course just one example. There are many other cognitions underlying depression and anxiety which may also be rooted in solid evidence.)
Thanks, I have a pdf of that book, which I intend to read partly on the basis of your recommendation (even though I don’t suffer from depression).
I think it’s not that an honest answer will make you feel better. It’s that a detailed honest answer is more likely to help you find tools for improving your situation, while a generic honest answer will make you feel bad and very little else. It’s really just general steps for solving any problem.
Much harder doesn’t mean impossible! How much harder is it? How many people that look [a certain way] have partners and how many don’t? Where did the ones that do have partners find their partner? Maybe you could look there. What other personality traits did they develop that helped them succeed at dating while looking [that way]? Maybe you could work on those!
This statement really requires data. Unattractive to whom? Probably not to them.
It’s not an assumption; four weeks of bibliotherapy in the form of reading Feeling Good and doing the exercises has been shown in experiments to be superior to a placebo book for treating depression (75% of patients no longer qualified for DSM criteria of major depressive disorder afterwards), and the improvements were sustained at 3-month and 3-year followup.
Of course, you could then argue that the book doesn’t actually make you evaluate your situation honestly and is just mindless positive thinking, but I don’t think that’d be a fair assessment of the book.
Sure, but my example was “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll never find romantic love” not ” “if I’m physically unattractive I’ll have a much harder time finding romantic love.”
Yes, typically. Not always.
If you’re suffering from illusory superiority, are you likely to be pursuing CBT to counter depression?
Almost everyone suffers from illusory superiority. If CBT doesn’t work for people in this category, that is in itself a strong argument against CBT.
It seems like you are saying that depressed people suffer from illusory superiority—overoptimism—in respect to the foci of their depression.
This doesn’t seem right.
Sometimes depressed people think they’re too smart for everything and everyone and that’s why they’re depressed. And because they’re too smart to ever be happy, then there’s nothing out there that can help them. Brains get pretty warped sometimes. =[
But wouldn’t bursting their bubble on this matter then help them in the medium and long runs?
Yes, definitely! But if they’re smart, then they’re really good at arguing, which means they’re really good at explaining why you’re wrong. So it’s really really hard. =[
If I want to believe that I’m beautiful when I’m not beautiful, then I won’t put myself in situation that might challenge my belief about my own beauty. This creates psychological stress.
People don’t suffer because they have nothing but they suffer because they want something that they don’t get.
It’s not really about having an honest answer and thereby feeling better as it is about having tools or steps you can take to improve your situation rather than being preoccupied with how bad it is or flinching away from it as a possibility.
This is true! But that doesn’t mean it is impossible to find romantic partners. Similarly, what is attractive to most people is not necessarily attractive to everyone. And there are a lot of humans in the world! So what’s unattractive to most people might be attractive to several thousand people—which is a lot of potential romantic partners. The other convenient thing is these groups are much better indexed by Google than they used to be a few decades ago. So the thing you can do is Google! And date online, etc.
So yes, it is harder. And it’s frustrating when one group of people has something easier than you do. But easier for them doesn’t mean impossible for you. That’s kind of the idea of CBT. There are things you can do!
This review of the Feeling Good Handbook, which I just found, makes essentially the same point:
That’s not quite how it works. Sometimes rational people get depressed and they can tell that their thinking is distorted and un-distorting it doesn’t make them feel better. They just feel bad. Meanwhile, some depressed people contribute to their depression through cognitive distortions, such as all-or-nothing thinking and catastrophizing that PECOS-9 pointed out, and CBT can help (though not necessarily cure) that subset of people.
Feeling bad about a problem is only useful if it helps motivate you to do something about it. If you can’t completely fix a problem, then once you’ve done everything you can about it, feeling bad becomes useless and you shouldn’t feel bad anymore.
This is true, but not always helpful. People aren’t necessarily at liberty to decide whether to feel bad or not.
Pain is extremely valuable as a motivator to address problems with our bodies, but when we’re unable to address those problems, we can’t simply decide to stop feeling pain, no matter how unhelpful the pain might be.
I should have phrased that differently. What I want to say is: once you’ve done everything you can about a problem, and you still feel bad, then feeling bad becomes your new problem. It becomes the new thing to work on! Which is how depression manifests itself sometimes. Which is why you should seek treatment for depression!
I was addressing the review’s claim because it sounds like it’s saying that feeling bad about something is a rational response to reality for some people. For some people, the only response to reality is to be depressed.
Does that address your comment?
Yes, but then, the acknowledgment that feeling bad despite it not being useful is your problem doesn’t always make the problem easy to solve.
Can you decide to fall asleep? I can’t. I can’t do it consioucsly but I still fall asleep every night. I just lie in bed and sooner or later my brain decides to switch to sleeping mode.
Switching pain off is similar. Human’s are quite capable of switching it off. At the same time few people can just do it because they want the pain to stop. Hypnosis allow people to switch off pain signals from their body completely.
If a human mind understands on a deep level that feeling the pain has no use, than it stops.
I’ve heard claims to this effect, but the results of the research I’ve found along those lines are rather less impressive. Bad Science has a short section on it, the gist of which is that most of the claims which are bandied about with respect to hypnotism are exaggerations of the findings of actual research, in which people have demonstrated an ability to tolerate levels of pain which we normally avoid subjecting people to in ordinary medical procedures, but which are not, in fact, greater than people have already been found able to tolerate without hypnotism.
Some people are better at dealing with pain than others, and it’s an ability that can be improved with practice, but if it were possible for humans in general to block out the experience of pain entirely through hypnotism, the military would probably be utilizing that in the training of commandos to resist torture. The influence of the First Earth Battalion is such that this is the sort of prospect the military is very receptive to.
I’m not claiming that formal hypnosis is the only way that people can switch off pain perception. People can tolerate a lot if they have no other choice.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-560534/The-hypnotist-snubbed-anaesthetic-sent-trance-painful-bone-cutting-surgery.html would be an example of a hypnotherapist who went for a 83 minute operation without anesthetic and said that he felt no pain as the doctors chiselled out a walnut- sized chunk of bone from his wrist.
I grant that the guy isn’t an average patient but had years of training in going into trance. The example still shows that the human mind is in principle capable of disassocing such pains.
I think you have a misconception about how torture works. It’s not about inflicting a maximum of pain in the shortest amount of time.
A soldier that went through good military training shouldn’t break after 5 minutes of maximum pain. The soldier is taught to make up plausible lies to his torturers.
The US used waterboarding to torture. Waterboarding has the advantage of not only inflicting pain but also triggering a feeling of being drowed. Even if the victim would be able to deal with the pain they still feel the reflex of wanting to avoid drowning.
There are many human drives besides the desire to avoid pain that a torturer can use to coerce his victim. Teaching soldiers to buy time by telling the tortures lies seems to be the best strategy for the military.
There nothing inherently New Agey about hypnosis. Mid 20st-century The US made hypnosis for medicial purposes by people without a medical degree illegal. Midwives were allowed to give their patients pain killers but weren’t allowed to use hypnosis to reduce pain. Hypnosis would have a different standing today when it wouldn’t have been effectively prosecuted.
The Daily Mail is a tabloid, I’d take its reports with a hearty dose of salt.
The military does have courses in enduring torture, beyond simply making up plausible lies, as part of commando training, but it doesn’t entail hypnosis.
Not everything that spun out of the New Earth Battalion’s influences is “inherently new-agey.” Some of it is grounded thoroughly in hard science, and works quite well for its intended purposes. The influence of the New Earth Battalion has brought about a lot of investigation into outside-the-box, non-mainstream methods and technology for warfare, including but not limited to a lot of stuff that isn’t well supported by evidence.
For most people who don’t want to show off there little reason to use hypnosis without also using other anesthetica at the same time. Especially if you have to get past an ethic board. I wouldn’t expect many scientific papers to exist that investigate the issue.
Self-induced hypnosis for bilateral ankle arthroscopy would be one case report with describes a patient who got 3 orthopedic intervention without conventional anaesthetic.
Most trials that do exist use hypnosis in addition to other anesthetica and find that as a result you need less anesthetica. A meta-analysis says about them: Meta-analysis of 18 studies revealed a moderate to large hypnoanalgesic effect, supporting the efficacy of hypnotic techniques for pain management.
I don’t want to argue that making up plausible lies is the only feature of those courses but as far as I understand it’s a crucial part of them. The soldier is trained to reach a state where he can tell those lies. He’s not trained to simply shut off.
I’m not sure that the kind of pain reduction that I think is possible through hypnosis would be of high use for training soldiers to resist torture in a cost effective way.
On the flipside, those who ask to use self hypnosis in lieu of anesthesia will tend to be those who want to show off. A news article like the one in the Daily Mail (which has a well established history of not investigating its reports thoroughly, particularly in the areas of health and science, to ensure that they’re actually true) is tremendously good business for a hypnotherapist. If the reality were that it hurt like a motherfucker, but he was able to tough it out, if he could arrange to get an article like the above into print it would still be much to his benefit.
I wouldn’t be surprised if hypnotic techniques can mitigate pain; it’s a mental coping mechanism. You can also get quite good at dealing with physical pain simply by practice. It may be possible for a person to block out the experience of pain entirely through the use of mental techniques, some mental techniques do have very significant effect, but the degree of evidence I’ve found available isn’t enough to disabuse my skepticism. If I were a hypnotherapist who wanted to convince people that my abilities were much more profound than they really were, I would start looking for ways I could trick people into giving a favorable report. If I were a hypnotherapist who really did have abilities which were that profound, I would want to prove it in as high profile and fireproof a manner as I could manage.
Training in self hypnotic techniques was one of the initiatives that came out of the New Earth Battalion; many of the techniques investigated (such as the ability to kill animals by staring at them for extended periods) were not realistically practical for military applications even if they had turned out to work. But it does not seem that soldiers capable of entirely blocking out pain ever materialized.
It’s difficult to know what another person really feels when you don’t trust them to tell you. I know quite a few people who allowed needles to get sticked into their hands and didn’t feel any pain because of hypnosis.
You assume that it’s a good business strategy for a hypotherapist to try to convince skeptics. In reality, there are many people who aren’t skeptics out there. For a hypnotherapist it’s much more effective to focus on winning those people as customers.
A lot of skeptics also have low hypnothic suggestibility in the first place with doesn’t make them the best clients for a hypnotherapist.
You also shouldn’t underrate the difficulty of finding a doctor that’s willing to operate a patient without real anesthetics. A hypnotherapist who wants to demonstrate profound hypnotic power has a much easier time doing stage hypnosis. If you want an example of stage hypnosis producing such an effect, take a look at http://youtu.be/oC9J6O6soHA?t=11m35s .
I assume it’s a good business strategy for a hypnotherapist to try to convince many customers. Getting in a tabloid with high circulation is a good start, getting on television is better.
You don’t need to wait for occasions where you need surgery, having an ability to render yourself impervious to pain is begging for “Okay, prove it” challenges.
For pain beyond the ability of ordinary people to tolerate which won’t produce lasting injury, I’d go for challenges involving capsaicin or an Active Denial System.
Finding skeptics willing to challenge your ability to do this under rigorous conditions would be a good way to get publicity, and if you’re willing to place bets on it, a lot of money.
I think you overrate the effect of being on TV. I was involved with a few Quantified Self TV productions in Germany and in general they didn’t brought more than a few new people to the QS meetups. Personal referrals do much more than mainstream media.
I also know a hypnotherapist who was on TV in a session where he cured a women of a phobia of taking pictures. It was nice for him but it didn’t bring him hundreds of new clients.
Capsaicin sounds nice in principle. The problem is that most people don’t know what a specific amount of capsaicin would do to a person. What kind of dose would you propose? Both that the dose isn’t so high to deal real damage but at the same time that skeptics are convinced that the dose is high enough?
Do you really think that a skeptic would be willing to bet a lot of money on this? It’s not like you are demonstrating telekinesis.
Well, it takes a hell of a lot more capsaicin to do lasting damage to someone than it does to cause fairly intolerable pain. If I wanted to demonstrate that I was impervious to pain, I would probably get some Sixteen Million Reserve, and dissolve it in front of an audience at, say, a 1:10 solution. Then I’d split that into two vessels, and dilute one of them a further ten times, and have a panel of other people willing to take the challenge insert swabs into that, and stick them up their noses. Let the audience see what it does to them. Then do the same myself, with the ten times more concentrated solution. Let them see that regardless of what inflammation occurs, I show no signs of pain.
I’d sooner use the Active Denial System though. Once you’ve subjected yourself to a dose of capsaicin, there’s pretty much nothing you can do but bear it, regardless of how stoic you may or may not be. But an Active Denial System will send people running in seconds. If I could stand blithely in front of one while a whole crowd of people was dropping everything to get away, that would be a pretty compelling demonstration.
Shop around for one who will. I’d look up someone high profile like James Randi and ask “do you believe I could do this? Are you willing to bet I can’t?” If you can get enough skeptics admitting they do believe you can do it, it’s good publicity to capitalize on.
I think it would be likely that inflammation would also be reduced.
Basically you would do it because you aren’t confident that you could eliminate the pain. I don’t think that someone who would go into an experiment like this would have that concern.
On the other hand it would make it hard to recruit the people in the audience who are supposed to test the diluted version if they will feel intolerable pain for half an hour. It would also make it hard to get ethics approval if you want to get published.
As far as the Active Denial System goes, it’s expensive equipment. That means it will be hard to test the conditions of the experiment before you run the actual experiment. I have never heared of the technology before. This means you would have to explain it. That explanation adds complexity to the whole story that’s not good for PR purposes. I also wouldn’t want to do a public promotion of the Active Denial System.
I don’t think that the experiment fulfills Randi’s criteria’s of paranormal phenomena. Randi also doesn’t take challenges anymore from people who aren’t noteworthy to begin with.
Before betting decent money I would guess that a skeptic would read the literature and papers like “A systematic meta-review of hypnosis as an empirically supported treatment for pain by Russell MF Hawkins” which conclude:
A study like that might not be enough to convince a skeptic that you can do major surgery under hypnosis. When looking at something like your capsaicin example or the Active Denial System I’m not sure that you can convience people that those produce enough pain to make a profound impression that would warrent decent bets and PR.
I would go up on stage and stick a capsaicin swab up my nose, outside the hypothetical where I have the ability to eliminate pain through self hypnosis. I don’t think it would be that hard to find other people who’d do it. It’ll be the same sort of demographic who eats food that’s spicy enough that you get your picture up on a wall of fame if you finish it.
Getting published isn’t really a concern at all. I wouldn’t care about whether I was getting into research journals, just whether I was convincing as much of the population as I could of what I was capable of.
You don’t need to explain anything beyond “this thing shoots beams that hurt like hell.” Get a big enough crowd, and there are always going to be a few tough guys or suckers for punishment who’ll volunteer to subject themselves to it. The important thing is not that the crowd knows how it works, but that they get a sense of how much it hurts.
Considering nobody has yet managed to stand for over five seconds in the beam of an Active Denial System, I think it would be sufficient to make a profound impression on anyone who witnesses a demonstration.
He used to until relatively recently. If I wanted his stamp of approval these days, I’d work my way up from lower profile figures until I reached a point where he would have to either test me or openly admit that he didn’t doubt my ability.
This seems to be predicated on the assumption that none of the things that cause you distress will be things that are actually just as bad as you think they are.
A person might only value attractiveness instrumentally as a means of attaining love, and over-weight its instrumental value for such, but what about a person who believes that they’ll never be able to attain some major life goal due to reasons that actually preclude attainment of that life goal?
Then they’d probably find a different irrational thought somewhere, such as “Nothing else is worth anything if I don’t achieve this goal.”
Why is that?
CBT may work better than placebo (although the state of the research on this is controversial, see section four here,) but that doesn’t mean that people suffering distress from some life circumstance always, or even usually, are evaluating those circumstances irrationally. Placebo therapy is pretty effective, a great deal of the effectiveness of CBT is likely due to the same qualities which make placebo therapy useful.
Having engaged in CBT, I felt that it was a worthwhile experience, but the benefits in my case had far more to do with being able to discuss the matters I was concerned with openly and in depth with another person, because I’m better at resolving problems when I feel accountable to someone other than only myself, rather than addressing particular irrationalities in my outlook (to the extent that my tendency to be less able to resolve problems without being accountable to other people is an irrationality, it’s not one that CBT has been able to address.)
Yes. Face the loss. What is the cost? We worry that if X, then Y, and fret all day over the uncertainty of X, instead of facing the loss of Y as a done deal, and knowing that we’ll survive and life won’t be so horrible.
Maybe they got married when they were younger, and more attractive. :rolleyes:
I guess you’re thinking of “I am ugly, therefore I’ll weep”, but another possibility is “I am ugly, therefore I’ll get a cool haircut, buy nice clothes, start working out, etc., and hopefully no longer be ugly”. One of them is actually useful.
CBT is good for the times when our negative beliefs aren’t supported by the available evidence.
E.g. yesterday my boss gave me some negative feedback. She also told me she thought I was an overall good worker, and that if I weren’t she would have fired me already. I selectively paid more attention to the negative feedback, so my internal reaction was “Aaagh she thinks I’m a bad worker” even though she specifically said the opposite.
So it took conscious effort on my part to maintain a realistic view: “She thinks there are problems, but we talked about how I’m going to change, and I’m overall a good worker.” CBT training is helpful to me in staying realistic.
A recent study in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that CBT was no better than psychoanalysis. On the plausible assumption that psychoanalysis doesn’t work (better than a placebo), it follows that CBT doesn’t work either.
For discussion, see this post by Scott Alexander (Yvain).
Please edit the above to read “by Scott Alexander”—the blog doesn’t carry his name for patient privacy reasons.
Sorry about that. I have edited the comment.
Also, from Scott’s post:
Do you still believe that “CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) has a strong evidence base”?
I’m less confident of that now, but it’s still a great deal better than nothing (and I think it’s probably better than psychoanalysis at teaching coping skills for this sort of anxiety).
I also think that the technique I suggested can improve the accuracy of your predictions, which is a good thing independently of whether it improves anxiety or not.
Thanks! I knew “CBT” would be the answer but I needed a zoom in on a particular technique. I’ll try the action / expectation / outcome spreadsheet.
You probably already know this, but if your problems are big, you should try a therapist instead of self-help based on an advice from internet. (Although the advice given on this part of internet is usually better than average.)
Doing something is better than doing nothing. Unless you use it as an excuse for not doing more. (As in: “Nothing can fix my problems. What, CBT? No thanks, I tried one exercise based on an advice from internet, and it did not fix my problem. What, visiting a CBT therapist? I am telling you, I already tried an advice from internet, and it did not work.”)
This reminds me that the first time I saw the Yes Minister quote “we must do something; this is something; therefore, we must do this” (out of context, in a signature on Usenet) I thought it was supposed to be surreal humour like “a hamburger is better than nothing; nothing is better than eternal happiness; therefore, a hamburger is better than eternal happiness”. I didn’t notice that that quote had a non-patently-inane reading until years later.
I’m considering therapy. My pattern up to now has been more like read some advice, think “oh that would never work”, continue to have problem, mope and complain. Baby steps.
If you try advice that was independently rated as good, and it doesn’t have any beneficial effects, do a full write-up and I’ll give you fifty USD.
I agree that a therapist is better. I actually got the technique I discuss above from a therapist, rather than a book or internet site, but therapy is expensive, and doing exercises by oneself is better than nothing.
“Oh no, what if X happens, what’ll I do? I might lose Y!”
I find that asking and answering a couple different question helps.
“What’ll I do if I lose Y?” Not gnashing your teeth over losing Y, but actually answering the question. “If I lose Y I will …”
″What’s my best strategy here?”
One claim in some depression book—catastrophizing is at bottom a worry that you won’t be able to handle the loss. It’s a boogeyman in the closet, and you’re too scared to open the closet and check, so live in fear, night after night, that the boogeyman will jump out and get you.
Open the closet and look. The boogeyman is there or he is not. Do you think he won’t come out and kill you just because you refused to look to see if he was there? Buck up and look. What you’ll likely find is that the boogeyman really isn’t so fearsome, and your fear of the boogeyman is more crippling than anything he might do to you.
Either you’ll spend from here to eternity with this fantastic girl, or you won’t. Likely not. Someday you’ll lose her. You’ll weep and moan and move on to some other girl in a few weeks. Or maybe you’ll dump her. You’ll look back on your time together fondly, perhaps guiltily, when you’re with someone else. Or perhaps 5 years from now you’ll be struggling to remember her name.
Closet opened. Boogeyman faced. Situation handled.
Now, you look at your options in a game theoretic sense.
She’s on the verge of dumping you, or not. You can fret about, or blithely go on as if nothing is wrong. Fretting makes either situation worse. Dominated strategy. Do not do.
You can handle it if she dumps you. Trying to read the tea leaves for the impending dump only makes you look and feel insecure. Do not. She’ll eventually let you know if she wants to dump you. Until then, you’re seeing a fantastic girl. Make hay while the sun is shining.
I’m a worrier. I’m trying to get over it. Part of it seems like fear is a response to uncertainty. Remove the uncertainty. Face the issue, pick a strategy, and move on.
Fallacy of grey. The “you won’t” possibility includes them breaking up tomorrow, them breaking up next year, or either of them dying in thirty years, among others.
Let Day N be the breakup day.
I don’t see the analysis changing. For all N, not fretting over it is the dominating strategy, and he’ll move on and get over it.
You’re forgetting that his actions can themselves affect the value of N. (On the other hand, I agree with your conclusions.)
I didn’t phrase it in the best way, but I wasn’t forgetting that behavior can affect the value of N. That was one of the points.
Have you dated before?
It sounds like these contact points are natural accumulation points for your anxiety—not so much that you’re specially anxious about them.
That said, what sorts of things are you requesting? I’d recommend a shift to make suggestions, or invitations where a ‘no’ answer can very clearly (even to you) be accompanied by ‘It’s sweet of you to offer, though’ rather than ‘GTFO’. If requesting something comes up so often that you’ve noticed the pattern, and they cause an aversion, perhaps you should avoid making so many requests per se?
I have dated before, but not much. The most significant relationship I’ve had, I sort of begged her to go out with me (to be fair to myself, I was pretty convincing), moved to another city to be with her, and was “contracting” as a job which really meant sitting around websurfing all day. There was no structure in my life and I couldn’t hold things together, and after a few months she decided to break up with me and move 1000+ miles to go back to school. This was a formative experience for me and I’m sure it’s related to my current anxieties.
Omigosh, that sounds awful. I’m sorry you had to go through that. Internet hugs!
You’ve already recognized the pattern. Now, when you send her an email, before anxiety kicks in, plan out a realistic anxiety schedule. You tell yourself, “I am sending this now, and I recognize that she might not respond tonight. Or tomorrow. But she usually replies within three days. If she hasn’t written back in four days I’ll be justified in feeling anxious.” Precommit so you’re not constantly thinking, “It’s been 7 hours. That probably means it’s anxiety time, right?”
I think that CBT techniques could be helpful. They tend to be about reasoning things out on paper in a structured manner.
You could work on realistically assessing how likely the feared result is, and on assuring yourself that, even if it happened, you could cope with it.
I’m resisting the urge just post a one line comment saying #humblebrags by posting the comment anyway and giving some advice :)
Below Joshua mentioned studying PUA and I agree. One method that works for me that I learned from PUA is to try to convince yourself that you don’t care if she breaks up with you. Tell yourself “she’s just a girl” or “there’s plenty of fish in the sea” or whatever motivates you. I also combine this with a “just fuck it” attitude. If I find myself worrying about something like this, I’ll say either in my head or out loud “fuck it. If she doesn’t want to respond I don’t care. I’m going to go play video games/exercise/whatever.” (The “just fuck it” attitude only seems to work specifically with social interactions, in my experience. If I have reservations about other things, typically it’s for a good reason)
Typical mind fallacy applies here—what works for me might not work for you or might have negative side effects, but you don’t really know until you try.
So I think a variant of this approach is useful and a variant of this approach is really harmful. If you say “fuck it, she’s not important,” you’ll be conditioning yourself not to care about her or even actively resent her for “making” you anxious. That way lies a lot of badness.
Nevertheless, I do think it’s handy to come to terms with the idea that if she decides to break up with you, then it’s not the worst thing in the world. It’s an admittedly sucky but manageable state of affairs. You will be a finite amount sadder than you were when you were single! And although you have some influence on her decisions, you have no control over them. So think “I have done everything in my control in this situation. Now I will go play video games/exercise/whatever.” This is a more detailed, more accurate, healthier variant of “fuck it, she’s just a girl.”
Fantastic girls are important! But they’re not your whole life! But they are also not unimportant! There’s a large range in between those two!
I agree with a nitpick: you may condition yourself to not care about her. You may also condition yourself to not care about whether or not she responds even if you do still care about her. More accurately, you’re conditioning yourself to care less about these things, which may or may not result in not caring at all. And to be fair, part of the problem is that you (the hypothetical you) care too much about whether or not she responds/want to break up with you/whatever and maybe you care too much about her specifically.
I basically want to push back on the idea that saying “fuck it, she’s just a girl” is harmful. It might not be, depending. Not that I necessarily think you’re saying that, but it’s easy to see how someone might interpret you that way.
Yeah, I think we’re on the same page. Our general sentiment of “I will remind myself that the situation is not as awful as my anxiety is making me feel” is the same.
Right! Depending on what you mean by that, it might not be harmful at all. But I think there’s value in being really precise and unambiguous about which things to care less about, because otherwise you might accidentally stop caring about some pretty important things, thoughts being cache-able and all.
Yeah, there’s a trade-off though. Simple slogans seem to be much more effective, especially slogans with curse words. At least for my brain.
Yep, that old trade-off. Making it perpetually difficult to make posters. =]
I just worry that you’ll say “fuck it, she’s just a girl!” initially meaning “she’s just one girl and not my whole life” but your brain will randomly decide to cache it verbatim and suddenly, two months later, you’ll find yourself thinking “fuck it, she’s just a girl!” in a different anxiety-inducing situation and interpreting it as “girls don’t matter.” Which is instrumentally bad, morality and things aside.
Which is actually a decent theory of (some of) the PUA movement, for certain values of “girls don’t matter.”
I agree with certain values of “girls don’t matter” and strongly disagree with others, and the same goes for the various aspects of the PUA movement, which is a huuuge topic and pretty irrelevant to the OP sooo I think this is my cue to tap out.
Nice talking to you! =]
You as well :)
Weirdly I’ve been noticing myself having some of these “wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world” thoughts spontaneously.
That’s good! Because it wouldn’t be. =]
Uhh. Is the anxiety bad enough that you’re sometimes tempted to dump her first just to not have to deal with it anymore?
Definitely not. Nothing since we started going out has remotely compared to how hard it was to ask her out the first time, anyway.
Woots! That’s good calibration right there! I think you’re going to be fine. =]
Also, I don’t know what types of requests you were talking about, but if they’re about making plans, a nice trick is to sometimes say “Can you please let me know by [day, time]?” That’s not weird or clingy because everyone understands (or at least they should) that people are busy and need to know stuff to plan out their schedules. So you have some control over the time window in which you feel anxious. If she doesn’t respond in that window, then assume no (like the pocket veto!) and do something else!
A simple way to put that anxiety to use would be whenever you feel that anxiety, to do 10 pushups. Becoming more fit makes you more attractive, so it’s not irrational to start doing more sport to increase your chances with woman.
Channel the anxiety into some useful activity.
It seems that you lack some personal experience in regards to relationships, am I correct? I know some here are going to hate me but I would give you pick-up related advice: what you need is not an easy fix but more experience in relationships. The way to get there is not easy: try to interact with as many people/women as possible, consider dance classes, etc… Competence breeds confidence(Mystery).
I wish you the best with this relationship.
From personal experience the best advice is to date a lot and get hurt a lot and build up a thick enough skin to where you don’t care anymore about the rejections.
Worrying about the rejection will only make rejection more likely.
Act as if you are a confident person, then other people think you are confident, and you’ll become more confident. While of course actually trying to do things to actually become more capable too, since that improves your confidence as well.
The other ideas here also are good techniques too, but what I found is that when I had been burned enough to stop caring about rejection was when I suddenly became successful at dating. The main thing that had changed was not worrying about it.
How has this aquired negative points? This is the single best piece of advice in the whole woebegone thread.
I have observed that votes within this thread have a weak correlation with advice quality. (Although it is likely my perceptions are drastically over-weighing the few really stark examples of vote insanity like this one.)
Hmm, I expect it got negative points because Kenoubi is already dating someone and he’s happy dating them. Dating other girls right now might be counterproductive. Other techniques for worrying less would be more useful ATM. However, if this relationship doesn’t work out dating a lot might be good advice!
Yeah, I was gonna say pretty much exactly this. It may be the advice the most likely to lead to general dating success over the long term, but it really doesn’t help me deal with my situation right now. (Though I certainly didn’t downvote it.)
If It seemed like I meant he should ditch her and move on, I apologize.
My main point was basically “what would future me say to past me when I felt that way?” And that most definitely is “Don’t worry, it’ll work out.” Because that’s the best advice of all.
It’ll either work out positively in which case you’ll have a good relationship, or it’ll work out negatively in which case you’ll have some good memories and some hard lessons learned for next time. And if you can think of those let downs as one more layer of thicker skin to help you not worry about them, you’ll be better off.
I know it doesn’t seem that way now, but there really is nothing to worry about.
Not an advice, just wanted to mention that if you are so worried offline, so to speak, some of it is bound to eventually leak through into the together time, and few people like it when the other person comes across as desperate or clingy. Also note that in most cases people get dumped in person, or sometimes over the phone, not by email/text/facebook status update, so the most dangerous time is probably the first few minutes after you meet up. Hope none of that happens to you.
If he was anxious and likely to experience a self-fulfilling-prophecy-failure before, he’s probably twice as anxious now...
Yes, the possibility of coming off as clingy is exactly why I haven’t discussed this directly with her in person yet.
I suspect that a smart guy like you can figure out ways to communicate regarding this issue in ways that don’t come off as clingy. The fact that you are worried about the possibility of “clingy” is some evidence that you aren’t at unusual risk of coming off that way (unless there are additional facts in your personal history that suggest otherwise).
In short, something that you come up with after actually spending time (> 5 min) thinking about it is likely to be worth the effort of communicating.
Yes, that feeling is called abandonment. I suggest you keep an eye out for whether you devalue and/or idealize people too. If both those are the cases, you may have some personality quirks that are thought to cluster. In that case, mention that to your preferred expert and you can take it from there.
Study Pickup Artistry. The cold-blooded rational approach presented there will quell your anxieties.
The advice is good in general, but how exactly will it help in this specific case? For example, how reliably does reading “cold-blooded rational” texts reduce anxiety? It could easily have the opposite effect. Like: “Oh, to be successful with girls you have to be like this, and I can’t imagine myself being like that… so I guess I have no chance.” There; anxiety doubled. Now not only does one fear about rejection, but also that without developing the proper (possibly unsympathetic) personality, even the short-term successes are ultimately doomed.
Also, I wouldn’t call all pickup materials “rational”. There is a market out there, and there are people trying to make money by selling books. The books don’t sell better by being more rational, but they can sell better by exaggerating claims, or adding new speculations only to be more interesting.
Even if some recommended method works, it does not mean the explanation behind it is correct. Maybe it’s just a placebo effect. Thinking that one knows the seduction method increases one’s confidence, and confidence makes one attractive, ceteris paribus. Even if the method itself is neutral, or even slightly harmful.
It would be probably more useful to recommend a specific material. (For example I would recommend “The Blueprint Decoded”, but I wouldn’t call it rational.)
I really love the Blueprint Decoded. I was not expecting to hear him reference Bertrand Russel, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Eckhart Tolle, etc in a video about PUA.
Well, some of it isn’t rational, but most of it is essentially a primer on cognitive biases in disguise.
Do you want advice about whether or not your concerns are rational, or advice on how to overcome these concerns?
And by evidence-based advice, do you want studies? Because I think the specific case may be, well, too specific for evidence-based advice to be useful. Unless your anxiety is more generalized, at least.
I thought I made it clear in my post that I don’t think my concerns are rational, but if they are I would like to take whatever steps are available to mitigate them, and not feel so crappy about it either way.
I feel similar anxiety in some other situations, but not very many of them. I find it a bit hard to believe that this problem is so incredibly specific that there is no useful reference class from which to derive advice.
Is this the first relationship in which you’ve had these anxieties? (I assume from the post you’ve had previous relationships)
An alternative born from my own experience—that is, anecdotal evidence—is that if I think the other person isn’t that interested, I am probably right. (The last relationship in which I felt that way, the girl in question got pissed at me when I cut it off after I decided she wasn’t that interested. About a year later, she apologized, and admitted that she wasn’t; she was actually still involved with somebody else, and had started seeing him again about the time I started getting those impressions. The tip-off was that communication which had been pretty much continual started lapsing; I’d get one response for every two or three texts or e-mails sent, and shortly after that she started delaying continually/cancelling every date.) I put off breaking it off for nearly a month, assuming I was being irrational and importing anxieties from my last relationship, which followed a similar pattern culminating in my catching her in a lie and the whole thing imploding rather dramatically.
So my suspicion is that you’re not being irrational, you’re simply responding to evidence you’re not comfortable calling as such.
I strongly advise against taking this advice in this particular instance. It constitutes some insight (“beware denial”) and was a lesson that OrphanWilde needed at the time. However the overwhelmingly strong indication of Kenoubi’s words (and also the correlated symptom “best two weeks of my life”) is that Kenoubi is experiencing the oh so common effects of social anxiety and nerves that often comes when relatively little experience with dating. He doesn’t need to be taking irrational fears more seriously.
I didn’t offer any particular advice there, only suggested his fears may be rational; but it’s an important caveat that merely because a belief is rational doesn’t make that belief correct, which I suppose I should have been more clear about.
It sounds to me like the real basis of his concern may be the fact that he’s making unreciprocated requests. I have no in-depth knowledge of the situation, so I’m merely hazarding a guess here, but if he’s the one arranging all the dates (or whatever), an alleviation of his fears would require her to take a more active role in the relationship. Which may require having a serious discussion admitting his anxieties and the reasons for them. An arrangement where she has to plan every other date, or whatever, might suffice.
I’ve experienced a one way relationship before (see http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/gtv/need_some_psychology_advice/8j5k) and I really don’t think that’s what’s going on here. I think she has a perfectly reasonable and appropriate level of interest and involvement concordant with someone she’s been dating for two weeks, and I have an unreasonable and inappropriate level due, once again, to my brain chemistry and/or personal history. Calling things off right now would be a terrible idea because 1) I really have no reason to think it won’t work and 2) I’m going to have to deal with this getting-too-involved-too-soon thing in ANY relationship, so I really need to learn to manage it.
Yeah, a lot of this is about arranging dates. I was actually thinking about proposing regularly scheduled dates, because it seems like it would stress her out a bit to be responsible for them, just like it does me; ironically the main reason I haven’t mentioned this to her yet is that it itself is sort of a big scary request.
Just a note: Different people have different dates. Probably the worst (but usually the first that comes into mind) kind is the “awkward silence in a romantic restaurant” kind of date. This works best in Hollywood movies, and perhaps for experienced seducers who don’t feel any anxiety and can easily manage social situations. (For them, this is good signalling, but that’s precisely because it is costly. And I don’t speak about the costs of the dinner here.)
As an alternative, I would recommend a “doing something fun together” kind of a date. Something that (you can pretend) you would do alone and have fun doing it, too, but today you altruistically decided to offer her an opportunity to join you and have fun too. (Feel the difference? You are not begging, you are offering.) Do a short internet research: is there any gallery exhibition, or music concert, or public lecture, or whatever interesting in your town the next week? (Or simply ask other people what interesting activity would they recommend you the next week. You don’t have to explain why you need it. Maybe there is an information service you can call for exactly this info.) Choose something that interests you, so you will be relaxed, and later you can talk about it. She may also feel less pressure on this kind of a date.
(Beware of other-optimization, et cetera. If romantic dinners work for you, just continue doing what works. Although trying something new in addition probably would not hurt.)
A friend suggested exactly this before I asked her out. But, uh, I almost never go to galleries or lectures, or concerts unless I really really like the band, and I don’t particularly want to change that.
I’m starting to think there may be other activities (video games at home? hikes? board games unfortunately don’t really work as an “I’m going to be doing this anyway, join me if you feel like it” thing) that will work for me, though.
Doesn’t she share your interests?
It depends on the girl. Does she play video games herself? Does she like hiking?
So I asked her about having scheduled dates last night. I didn’t even really mean to, I just blurted it out starting from an abstract discussion of which days of the week tend to make more sense. We still need to figure out the actual days, but she likes the concept.
This doesn’t actually solve the issue (there are things other than dates I could need/want to request) but it sure does decrease the frequency a lot.
Maybe I can just try not to request things over email or text message? It seems pretty avoidable when I can call or wait until the next time we see each other. There may still be unusual circumstances that would justify it, of course.
Yes. That’s a good idea. It’s best to talk in person where you can see the bodylanguage of the other person and can see their emotional response to your request.
If you feel anxiety about your request and your girlfriend is empathic, she can help you when she sees you being anxious.
Aha, I guessed right! Mainly because planning things is hard for most people. =]
This seems like open thread material to me tbh imo.
I forgot that open threads existed, but I really didn’t think this was below the bar for discussion… although its score has been fluctuating between 0 and −1, so maybe.
How about requesting her to pre-commit to not breaking up with you in response to a text or e-mail, and to not delay her response because she is considering breaking up with you.
No, no, no. Do not do this. It is bad advice!
First, asking for ANY precommitment not to break up over X is going to be a “major relationship step” and unless you are very experienced with relationships it is not something you ask for during the first two weeks, because there’s a decent chance it’ll harm or end the relationship.
Second, it’s a stupid precommitment to agree to! There’s all SORTS of good reasons to break up with someone who texts you, since the content can be basically anything.
Third, any breakup can be blamed on texts / emails, so it’s a big red flag that you’re going to be a serious creep if you ever do break up with them.
Phrased more specifically, in a stable, long-term relationship, and done by someone who is fairly experienced negotiating boundaries, this CAN be useful, but none of those qualifiers seem to apply here!
I wasn’t saying to commit to not breaking over the content of a text message, but to commit to not breaking up over the medium of texting.
Even in a two week old relationship, I think it’s reasonable to say something like, “Hey, I enjoy hanging out with you, and it seems you feel the same. If you change your mind though, please don’t tell me over text or e-mail, just give me a call.”