I’m starting to maybe figure out why I’ve had such difficulties with both relaxing and working in the recent years.
It feels that, large parts of the time, my mind is constantly looking for an escape, though I’m not entirely sure what exactly it is trying to escape from. But it wants to get away from the current situation, whatever the current situation happens to be. To become so engrossed in something that it forgets about everything else.
Unfortunately, this often leads to the opposite result. My mind wants that engrossment right now, and if it can’t get it, it will flinch away from whatever I’m doing and into whatever provides an immediate reward. Facebook, forums, IRC, whatever gives that quick dopamine burst. That means that I have difficulty getting into books, TV shows, computer games: if they don’t grab me right away, I’ll start growing restless and be unable to focus on them. Even more so with studies or work, which usually require an even longer “warm-up” period before one gets into flow.
Worse, I’m often sufficiently aware of that discomfort that my awareness of it prevents the engrossment. I go loopy: I get uncomfortable about the fact that I’m uncomfortable, and then if I have to work or study, my focus is on “how do I get rid of this feeling” rather than on “what should I do next in this project”. And then my mind keeps flinching away from the project, to anything that would provide a distraction, on to Facebook, to IRC, to whatever. And I start feeling worse and worse.
Some time back, I started experimenting with teaching myself not to have any goals. That is, instead of having a bunch of stuff I try to accomplish in some given time period, simply be okay with doing absolutely nothing for all day (or all week, or all year...), until a natural motivation to do something develops. This seems to help. So does mindfulness, as well as ensuring that my basic needs have been met: enough sleep and food and having some nice real-life social interaction every few days.
I recognize this in myself and it’s been difficult to understand, much less get under control. The single biggest insight I’ve had about this flinching-away behavior (at least the way it arises in my own mind) is that it’s most often a dissociative coping mechanism. Something intuitively clicked into place when I read Pete Walker’s description of the “freeze type”. From The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD:
Many freeze types unconsciously believe that people and danger are synonymous, and that safety lies in solitude. Outside of fantasy, many give up entirely on the possibility of love. The freeze response, also known as the camouflage response, often triggers the individual into hiding, isolating and eschewing human contact as much as possible. This type can be so frozen in retreat mode that it seems as if their starter button is stuck in the “off” position. It is usually the most profoundly abandoned child—“the lost child”—who is forced to “choose” and habituate to the freeze response (the most primitive of the 4Fs). Unable to successfully employ fight, flight or fawn responses, the freeze type’s defenses develop around classical dissociation, which allows him to disconnect from experiencing his abandonment pain, and protects him from risky social interactions—any of which might trigger feelings of being reabandoned. Freeze types often present as ADD; they seek refuge and comfort in prolonged bouts of sleep, daydreaming, wishing and right brain-dominant activities like TV, computer and video games. They master the art of changing the internal channel whenever inner experience becomes uncomfortable. When they are especially traumatized or triggered, they may exhibit a schizoid-like detachment from ordinary reality.
Of course like with any other psychological condition there’s a wide spectrum: some people had wonderful childhoods full of safe attachment and always had somebody to model healthy processing of emotions for them, some people were utterly abandoned as children, and many more had something between those extremes. The key understanding I’ve gained from Pete Walker’s writing is that simply being left alone with upsetting inner experience too often as a child can lead to development of “freeze type” defenses, even in the absence of any overtly abusive treatment.
I suspect that using a combination of TV shows, games and web browsing as emotional analgesics (at various levels of awareness) is very common now in wealthy countries. This is one of the reasons I would like to see more discussion of emotional issues on Less Wrong.
I suspect that using a combination of TV shows, games and web browsing as emotional analgesics (at various levels of awareness) is very common now in wealthy countries. This is one of the reasons I would like to see more discussion of emotional issues on Less Wrong.
I would also like to see more such discussion, but, as with rationality, more from the viewpoint of rising above base level average than of recovering only to that level.
Although on further thought, maybe that sort of discussion would have to happen somewhere other than LessWrong. Who can do for it the equivalent of Eliezer’s writings here? Is there anywhere it is currently being done?
ETA: Brienne, and here might be answers to those questions.
Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving by Pete Walker focuses on the understanding that wounds from active abuse make up the outer layers of a psychological structure, the core of which is an experience of abandonment caused by passive neglect. He writes about self-image, food issues, codependency, fear of intimacy and generally about the long but freeing process of recovering.
As with physical abuse, effective work on the wounds of verbal and emotional abuse can sometimes open the door to de-minimizing the awful impact of emotional neglect. I sometimes feel the most for my clients who were “only” neglected, because without the hard core evidence – the remembering and de-minimizing of the impact of abuse – they find it extremely difficult to connect their non-existent self-esteem, their frequent flashbacks, and their recurring reenactments of impoverished relationships, to their childhood emotional abandonment. I repeatedly regret that I did not know what I know now about this kind of neglect when I wrote my book and over-focused on the role of abuse in childhood trauma.
The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller focuses more on the excuses and cultural ideology behind poor parenting. She grew up in an abusive household in 1920s-’30s Germany.
Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings. And the fountainhead of all contempt, all discrimination, is the more or less conscious, uncontrolled, and secret exercise of power over the child by the adult, which is tolerated by society (except in the case of murder or serious bodily harm). What adults do to their child’s spirit is entirely their own affair. For a child is regarded as the parents’ property, in the same way that the citizens of a totalitarian state are the property of its government. Until we become sensitized to the child’s suffering, this wielding of power by adults will continue to be a normal aspect of the human condition, for no one takes seriously what is regarded as trivial, since the victims are “only children.” But in twenty years’ time these children will be adults who will pay it all back to their own children. They may then fight vigorously against cruelty “in the world”—and yet they will carry within themselves an experience of cruelty to which they have no access and which remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood.
Healing The Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw is about toxic shame and the variety of ways it takes root in our minds. Feedback loops between addictive behavior and self-hatred, subtle indoctrination about sexuality being “dirty”, religious messages about sin, and even being compelled to eat when you’re not hungry:
Generally speaking, most of our vital spontaneous instinctual life gets shamed. Children are shamed for being too rambunctious, for wanting things and for laughing too loud. Much dysfunctional shame occurs at the dinner table. Children are forced to eat when they are not hungry. Sometimes children are forced to eat what they do not find appetizing. Being exiled at the dinner table until the plate is cleaned is not unusual in modern family life. The public humiliation of sitting at the dinner table all alone, often with siblings jeering, is a painful kind of exposure.
Now that is quite some text to read. Thank you very much. My request was aimed at more general books though this is still useful.
You seem very knowledgeable on this specific topic. Am I right in assuming you are knowledgeable about emotional issues more generally? Would you be willing to write a post about these topics?
It’s only been about 6 months since I started consciously focusing my attention on the subtle effects of abandonment trauma. Although I’ve done a fair amount of reading and reflecting on the topic I’m not at the point yet where I can confidently give guidance to others. Maybe in the next 3-4 months I’ll write up a post for the discussion section here on LW.
What’s frustrating is that signs of compulsive, codependent and narcissistic behavior are everywhere, with clear connections to methods of coping developed in childhood, but the number of people who pay attention to these connections is still small enough that discussion is sparse and the sort of research findings you’d like to look up remain unavailable. The most convincing research result I’ve been able to find is this paper on parental verbal abuse and white matter, where it was found that parental verbal abuse significantly reduces fractional anisotropy in the brain’s white matter.
Interesting, thanks. I had a pretty happy childhood in general, but I was a pretty lonely kid for large parts of the time, and I’ve certainly experienced a feeling of being abandoned or left alone several times since that. And although my memories are fuzzy, it’s possible that the current symptoms would have started originally developing after one particularly traumatic relationship/breakup when I was around 19. Also, meaningful social interaction with people seems to be the most reliable way of making these feelings go away for a while. Also, I tend to react really strongly and positively to any fiction that portrays strong, warm relationships between people.
This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.
I have noticed that my mind has a “default mode” which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.
I have recently been experimenting with taking “days off” of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.
But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:
Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be “good uses of my time” are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.
I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.
If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I’m going to want to find that answer.
It’s hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.
The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I’ve been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.
The other thing I’ve been doing for a few days is writing a “plan” of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn’t about to say “No, I can’t hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn’t include you”. So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.
I like this idea. It’s difficult to implement; I have enough computers, but my attempt at enforcing their roles hasn’t worked so well.
I’ve had better success with weaker, outdated hardware: anything without wireless internet access, for starters. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s weaker and outdated means it tends to break, and repairs become more difficult due to lack of official support. Then they sort of disappear whenever things get moved due to being least used, and I’m back to having to put willpower against the most modern bells and whistles in my possession.
Generally speaking, the less powerful the internet capabilities, the better. Perhaps a good idea of the optimal amount of data to use would help pick a service plan that disincentivizes wasteful internet use? Or maybe even dialup, if one can get by without streaming video and high-speed downloads.
Another possibility is office space without internet access. Bonus points if there’s a way to make getting there easier than leaving (without going overboard, of course).
Or, a strictly monitored or even public internet connection for work, where anything that is not clearly work-related is visible (hopefully, to someone whose opinion/reaction would incentivize staying on task).
If possible, not even having a personal internet connection, and using public locations (Starbucks? Libraries?) when internet is necessary might be another strategy. If work requires internet access, but not necessarily active, one could make lists of the things that need downloading, and the things that do not, and plan around internet availability (this worked pretty well for me in parts of high school, but your mileage may vary).
These solutions all have something in common: I can’t really implement any of them right now, without doing some scary things on the other end of a maze constructed from Ugh Fields, anxiety, and less psychological obstacles. So my suggesting them is based on a tenuous analysis of past experience.
I have not been able to get rid of internet addiction by blocking or slowing it. Conversely I’ve had (less than ideal) success with over saturation. I don’t think it’s a thing I’ll get rid of soon, aimless browsing is to much of a quick fix. Lately I’ve been working on making productivity a quicker fix. Getting a little excited everytime I complete something small, doing a dance when its something bigger, etc.
I think there is some underlying reason for browsing as a default state, maybe conditioning. Should it then be possible to train oneself having a different default state?
Just turning off your network interface for the duration of a work session (maybe do timed Pomodoro bursts) will guard against the mindless reflex of tabbing over to the browser. Then you get the opportunity to actually make a mindful decision about whether to go out of work phase and off browsing or not. If you get legit stuff to search that isn’t completely blocking the offline work, write it down on a piece of scratch paper to look up later.
Tricks like this tend to stop working though. You’ll probably just go into mindlessly bringing up the network interface instead in the long term, but even months or weeks of having a working technique are better than not having one.
Maybe you could team up with an Ita who works with the Reticulum and become an Avout who is forbidden from it.
Yeah, I tried this for a while, along with putting Chrome in increasingly obscure places on my hard drive. After these failed, I came upon the flash drive idea, which has the feature that it involves physical activity and therefore can’t be done mindlessly. If you need to, you can throw it across the room.
I don’t mind having web browsing as a default state but what I’ve done succesfully in the past is have alarms throughout the day to remind me to exercise, leave the house, do chores, etc.
I used to live someplace close to a church with a bell tower that rang the time every fifteen minutes. I no longer live there, but I have considered writing a program to do the same thing—I recall it being useful for productivity, and for escaping default-mode (which has a terrible sense of time).
I’ve experienced similar feelings, and find some exercises from “The Now Habit” to help.
There’s an exercise he calls the focusing exercise which involves taking five mintues to get in flow state before starting, which helps, and also found the advice to reframe “How soon can I finish” to “When can I start?” to help as well.
It sounds pretty familiar to me. My version seems to be background anxiety, and it can help to check my breathing and let my abdomen expand when I’m inhaling.
I’m starting to maybe figure out why I’ve had such difficulties with both relaxing and working in the recent years.
It feels that, large parts of the time, my mind is constantly looking for an escape, though I’m not entirely sure what exactly it is trying to escape from. But it wants to get away from the current situation, whatever the current situation happens to be. To become so engrossed in something that it forgets about everything else.
Unfortunately, this often leads to the opposite result. My mind wants that engrossment right now, and if it can’t get it, it will flinch away from whatever I’m doing and into whatever provides an immediate reward. Facebook, forums, IRC, whatever gives that quick dopamine burst. That means that I have difficulty getting into books, TV shows, computer games: if they don’t grab me right away, I’ll start growing restless and be unable to focus on them. Even more so with studies or work, which usually require an even longer “warm-up” period before one gets into flow.
Worse, I’m often sufficiently aware of that discomfort that my awareness of it prevents the engrossment. I go loopy: I get uncomfortable about the fact that I’m uncomfortable, and then if I have to work or study, my focus is on “how do I get rid of this feeling” rather than on “what should I do next in this project”. And then my mind keeps flinching away from the project, to anything that would provide a distraction, on to Facebook, to IRC, to whatever. And I start feeling worse and worse.
Some time back, I started experimenting with teaching myself not to have any goals. That is, instead of having a bunch of stuff I try to accomplish in some given time period, simply be okay with doing absolutely nothing for all day (or all week, or all year...), until a natural motivation to do something develops. This seems to help. So does mindfulness, as well as ensuring that my basic needs have been met: enough sleep and food and having some nice real-life social interaction every few days.
Anybody else recognize this?
I recognize this in myself and it’s been difficult to understand, much less get under control. The single biggest insight I’ve had about this flinching-away behavior (at least the way it arises in my own mind) is that it’s most often a dissociative coping mechanism. Something intuitively clicked into place when I read Pete Walker’s description of the “freeze type”. From The 4Fs: A Trauma Typology in Complex PTSD:
Of course like with any other psychological condition there’s a wide spectrum: some people had wonderful childhoods full of safe attachment and always had somebody to model healthy processing of emotions for them, some people were utterly abandoned as children, and many more had something between those extremes. The key understanding I’ve gained from Pete Walker’s writing is that simply being left alone with upsetting inner experience too often as a child can lead to development of “freeze type” defenses, even in the absence of any overtly abusive treatment.
I suspect that using a combination of TV shows, games and web browsing as emotional analgesics (at various levels of awareness) is very common now in wealthy countries. This is one of the reasons I would like to see more discussion of emotional issues on Less Wrong.
I would also like to see more such discussion, but, as with rationality, more from the viewpoint of rising above base level average than of recovering only to that level.
Although on further thought, maybe that sort of discussion would have to happen somewhere other than LessWrong. Who can do for it the equivalent of Eliezer’s writings here? Is there anywhere it is currently being done?
ETA: Brienne, and here might be answers to those questions.
If people on LW put half the effort in emotional issues they put in rational topics we’d be a whole lot further. Thank you for this quote very much.
Any insight explosion books I should read?
Complex PTSD: From Surviving To Thriving by Pete Walker focuses on the understanding that wounds from active abuse make up the outer layers of a psychological structure, the core of which is an experience of abandonment caused by passive neglect. He writes about self-image, food issues, codependency, fear of intimacy and generally about the long but freeing process of recovering.
The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller focuses more on the excuses and cultural ideology behind poor parenting. She grew up in an abusive household in 1920s-’30s Germany.
Healing The Shame That Binds You by John Bradshaw is about toxic shame and the variety of ways it takes root in our minds. Feedback loops between addictive behavior and self-hatred, subtle indoctrination about sexuality being “dirty”, religious messages about sin, and even being compelled to eat when you’re not hungry:
Now that is quite some text to read. Thank you very much. My request was aimed at more general books though this is still useful.
You seem very knowledgeable on this specific topic. Am I right in assuming you are knowledgeable about emotional issues more generally? Would you be willing to write a post about these topics?
It’s only been about 6 months since I started consciously focusing my attention on the subtle effects of abandonment trauma. Although I’ve done a fair amount of reading and reflecting on the topic I’m not at the point yet where I can confidently give guidance to others. Maybe in the next 3-4 months I’ll write up a post for the discussion section here on LW.
What’s frustrating is that signs of compulsive, codependent and narcissistic behavior are everywhere, with clear connections to methods of coping developed in childhood, but the number of people who pay attention to these connections is still small enough that discussion is sparse and the sort of research findings you’d like to look up remain unavailable. The most convincing research result I’ve been able to find is this paper on parental verbal abuse and white matter, where it was found that parental verbal abuse significantly reduces fractional anisotropy in the brain’s white matter.
Please do. This seems like an important part of “winning” to some people, and it is related to thinking, therefore it absolutely belongs here.
Interesting, thanks. I had a pretty happy childhood in general, but I was a pretty lonely kid for large parts of the time, and I’ve certainly experienced a feeling of being abandoned or left alone several times since that. And although my memories are fuzzy, it’s possible that the current symptoms would have started originally developing after one particularly traumatic relationship/breakup when I was around 19. Also, meaningful social interaction with people seems to be the most reliable way of making these feelings go away for a while. Also, I tend to react really strongly and positively to any fiction that portrays strong, warm relationships between people.
Most intriguing.
This is kind of funny because I came to this open thread to ask something very similar.
I have noticed that my mind has a “default mode” which is to aimlessly browse the internet. If I am engaged in some other activity, no matter how much I am enjoying it, a part of my brain will have the strong desire to go into default mode. Once I am in default mode, it takes active exertion to break away do anything else, no matter how bored or miserable I become. As you can imagine, this is a massive source of wasted time, and I have always wished that I could stop this tendency. This has been the case more or less ever since I got my first laptop when I was thirteen.
I have recently been experimenting with taking “days off” of the internet. These days are awesome. The day just fills up with free time, and I feel much calmer and content. I wish I could be free of the internet and do this indefinitely.
But there are obvious problems, a few of which are:
Most of the stuff that I wish I was doing instead of aimlessly surfing the internet involves the computer and oftentimes the internet. A few of the things that would be “good uses of my time” are reading, making digital art, producing electronic music, or coding. Three out of four of those things rely on the computer, and of those three, they oftentimes in some capacity rely on the internet.
I am inevitably going to be required to use the internet for school and work. Most likely in my graphic design and computer science classes next year I will have to be able to use the internet on my laptop during class.
If I have an important question that I could find the answer to on Google, I’m going to want to find that answer.
It’s hard to find an eloquent solution to this problem. If I come up with a plan for avoiding internet use that is too loose, it will end up getting more and more flexible until it falls apart completely. If the plan is too strict, then I inevitably will not be able to follow it and will abandon it. If the plan is too intricate and complicated, then I will not be able to make myself follow it either.
The best idea I have come up with so far is to delete all the browsers from my laptop and put a copy of Chrome on a flash drive. I would never copy this instance of Chrome onto a hard drive, instead I would just run it from the flash drive every time I wanted to use it. This way, every time I wanted to use the internet, I would have to go find the flash drive. I could also give the flash drive to someone else for a while if I felt like a moment of weakness was coming on. I’ve been using this for exactly one day and it seems to be working pretty well so far.
The other thing I’ve been doing for a few days is writing a “plan” of the next day before I go to bed, then sticking to the plan. If something happens to interrupt my plan, then I will draft a new plan as soon as possible. For example, my friend called me up today inviting me over. I wasn’t about to say “No, I can’t hang out, I have planned out my day and it didn’t include you”. So when I got back, I wrote a new one. Most of these plans involve limiting internet use to some degree, so this also seems promising. I might also do something where I keep track of how many days in a row I followed the plan and try not to break the chain.
I’ve found that having a two computers, one for work and one for play, has helped immensely.
I like this idea. It’s difficult to implement; I have enough computers, but my attempt at enforcing their roles hasn’t worked so well.
I’ve had better success with weaker, outdated hardware: anything without wireless internet access, for starters. Unfortunately, the fact that it’s weaker and outdated means it tends to break, and repairs become more difficult due to lack of official support. Then they sort of disappear whenever things get moved due to being least used, and I’m back to having to put willpower against the most modern bells and whistles in my possession.
Generally speaking, the less powerful the internet capabilities, the better. Perhaps a good idea of the optimal amount of data to use would help pick a service plan that disincentivizes wasteful internet use? Or maybe even dialup, if one can get by without streaming video and high-speed downloads.
Another possibility is office space without internet access. Bonus points if there’s a way to make getting there easier than leaving (without going overboard, of course).
Or, a strictly monitored or even public internet connection for work, where anything that is not clearly work-related is visible (hopefully, to someone whose opinion/reaction would incentivize staying on task).
If possible, not even having a personal internet connection, and using public locations (Starbucks? Libraries?) when internet is necessary might be another strategy. If work requires internet access, but not necessarily active, one could make lists of the things that need downloading, and the things that do not, and plan around internet availability (this worked pretty well for me in parts of high school, but your mileage may vary).
These solutions all have something in common: I can’t really implement any of them right now, without doing some scary things on the other end of a maze constructed from Ugh Fields, anxiety, and less psychological obstacles. So my suggesting them is based on a tenuous analysis of past experience.
I have not been able to get rid of internet addiction by blocking or slowing it. Conversely I’ve had (less than ideal) success with over saturation. I don’t think it’s a thing I’ll get rid of soon, aimless browsing is to much of a quick fix. Lately I’ve been working on making productivity a quicker fix. Getting a little excited everytime I complete something small, doing a dance when its something bigger, etc.
I think there is some underlying reason for browsing as a default state, maybe conditioning. Should it then be possible to train oneself having a different default state?
Just turning off your network interface for the duration of a work session (maybe do timed Pomodoro bursts) will guard against the mindless reflex of tabbing over to the browser. Then you get the opportunity to actually make a mindful decision about whether to go out of work phase and off browsing or not. If you get legit stuff to search that isn’t completely blocking the offline work, write it down on a piece of scratch paper to look up later.
Tricks like this tend to stop working though. You’ll probably just go into mindlessly bringing up the network interface instead in the long term, but even months or weeks of having a working technique are better than not having one.
Maybe you could team up with an Ita who works with the Reticulum and become an Avout who is forbidden from it.
Yeah, I tried this for a while, along with putting Chrome in increasingly obscure places on my hard drive. After these failed, I came upon the flash drive idea, which has the feature that it involves physical activity and therefore can’t be done mindlessly. If you need to, you can throw it across the room.
You could just physically unplug your broadband modem while working then, as long as you’re the only person using it.
I don’t mind having web browsing as a default state but what I’ve done succesfully in the past is have alarms throughout the day to remind me to exercise, leave the house, do chores, etc.
I used to live someplace close to a church with a bell tower that rang the time every fifteen minutes. I no longer live there, but I have considered writing a program to do the same thing—I recall it being useful for productivity, and for escaping default-mode (which has a terrible sense of time).
In my experience adderall can ameliorate this problem somewhat.
I’ve experienced similar feelings, and find some exercises from “The Now Habit” to help.
There’s an exercise he calls the focusing exercise which involves taking five mintues to get in flow state before starting, which helps, and also found the advice to reframe “How soon can I finish” to “When can I start?” to help as well.
It sounds pretty familiar to me. My version seems to be background anxiety, and it can help to check my breathing and let my abdomen expand when I’m inhaling.