I definitely buy that “most people are much more anxious than me” is a key load-bearing factor here. I do not buy that the anxiety goes away when one has a safety net. Anxiety generally directs itself at various ways things could go wrong, so it often feels like more safety net would yield less anxiety. But from the people I’ve best known who have lots of anxiety, it seems much more like the anxiety is a conserved quantity. Remove one thing they’re anxious about, and their subconscious will promptly find something else to be anxious about.
(This is a common pattern with lots of emotions—e.g. the most obvious evidence of hangriness or hormonal anger is that if one thing the person is angry about is resolved, they promptly become angry about something else.)
I don’t know what is true for the typical person, and I’m definatly not a typical person.
With those caviats, what you describe is not true for me. To feel ok, I need to have a handfull of close friends that I see regularly. This provides some sort of validation, among other values. If I have this, my social anxiety is low. If I don’t have this my anxiety is high, and causes lot’s of problems.
It might look like my anxiety was recistant to be cured by more safety, because it took me a long time to find the people I need. Before I found people of my approximat neurotype, I was so far from being ok, that it was unclear to me that the thing I could clearly feel I was missing, was something that could exist.
And it’s not the case that the further from the safe situation I am, the more anxiety I feel. It’s more like a step function.
Also, sometimes the anxiety need some time to fully update on a new situation. This looks like the anxiety comming back. And then I focus on the evidence that things are acctually ok, or ask for some help to do this, and then it goes away. This does not work if things are not acctually ok.
I can see how this could look like anxiety is conserved, over a lot of diffrent datapoints, and I don’t know how someone can tell the diffrence untill they have experienced sufficient safety.
I think that case matches what I had in mind with the “anxiety is conserved” model. I don’t mean that nothing can ever make the anxiety go away; the point is that the things which one feels anxious about are not counterfactual to the emotion.
It’s generalized hangriness: if someone is hangry, they’ll feel angry about X, and if X is resolved they’ll quickly latch onto something else to be angry about; that’s the conservation. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up their hangriness; they just need to eat something.
Likewise, it sounds like you probably felt anxious a lot, and if one problem cleared up you’d feel anxious about something else. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up the anxiety; you apparently needed time with certain kinds of friends, just like a hangry person needs to eat. The anxiety was resistant to being cured by a generic safety net. You needed a particular thing which was not just safety in the literal sense of the word.
No, I don’t think what you say maches my experience. My anxiety was pointing straight at the thing I needed. Although I acknolage I did not put forward enough details for thus to be clear to you.
But it did not tell me how much I would need exactly. So it’s more like your hungry, and you eat some, and notice that you’re still hungry, and then start to wonder if eating is actually what you need, or this hunger feeling is about something else.
I don’t know what you mean by “generic safery net” or “safety in the literal sense”. I assumed based on context that we’re not talking about physical safety.
I mean things like: I’m not lonely and I expect to continue not to be lonely, because I found people I like who reliably also want me around.
I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.
I definitely buy that “most people are much more anxious than me” is a key load-bearing factor here. I do not buy that the anxiety goes away when one has a safety net. Anxiety generally directs itself at various ways things could go wrong, so it often feels like more safety net would yield less anxiety. But from the people I’ve best known who have lots of anxiety, it seems much more like the anxiety is a conserved quantity. Remove one thing they’re anxious about, and their subconscious will promptly find something else to be anxious about.
(This is a common pattern with lots of emotions—e.g. the most obvious evidence of hangriness or hormonal anger is that if one thing the person is angry about is resolved, they promptly become angry about something else.)
I don’t know what is true for the typical person, and I’m definatly not a typical person.
With those caviats, what you describe is not true for me. To feel ok, I need to have a handfull of close friends that I see regularly. This provides some sort of validation, among other values. If I have this, my social anxiety is low. If I don’t have this my anxiety is high, and causes lot’s of problems.
It might look like my anxiety was recistant to be cured by more safety, because it took me a long time to find the people I need. Before I found people of my approximat neurotype, I was so far from being ok, that it was unclear to me that the thing I could clearly feel I was missing, was something that could exist.
And it’s not the case that the further from the safe situation I am, the more anxiety I feel. It’s more like a step function.
Also, sometimes the anxiety need some time to fully update on a new situation. This looks like the anxiety comming back. And then I focus on the evidence that things are acctually ok, or ask for some help to do this, and then it goes away. This does not work if things are not acctually ok.
I can see how this could look like anxiety is conserved, over a lot of diffrent datapoints, and I don’t know how someone can tell the diffrence untill they have experienced sufficient safety.
I think that case matches what I had in mind with the “anxiety is conserved” model. I don’t mean that nothing can ever make the anxiety go away; the point is that the things which one feels anxious about are not counterfactual to the emotion.
It’s generalized hangriness: if someone is hangry, they’ll feel angry about X, and if X is resolved they’ll quickly latch onto something else to be angry about; that’s the conservation. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up their hangriness; they just need to eat something.
Likewise, it sounds like you probably felt anxious a lot, and if one problem cleared up you’d feel anxious about something else. That does not mean that nothing can ever clear up the anxiety; you apparently needed time with certain kinds of friends, just like a hangry person needs to eat. The anxiety was resistant to being cured by a generic safety net. You needed a particular thing which was not just safety in the literal sense of the word.
No, I don’t think what you say maches my experience. My anxiety was pointing straight at the thing I needed. Although I acknolage I did not put forward enough details for thus to be clear to you.
But it did not tell me how much I would need exactly. So it’s more like your hungry, and you eat some, and notice that you’re still hungry, and then start to wonder if eating is actually what you need, or this hunger feeling is about something else.
I don’t know what you mean by “generic safery net” or “safety in the literal sense”. I assumed based on context that we’re not talking about physical safety.
I mean things like: I’m not lonely and I expect to continue not to be lonely, because I found people I like who reliably also want me around.
I think it’s complicated and some anxieties do just redirect themselves, while in other cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real and does go away when the circumstances change.
Suppose that right now as you were reading this, a man with a gun showed up and started making threatening gestures with the gun and angrily shouting at you in a language you didn’t understand. I expect that this would make you anxious. I also expect that it would be an incorrect prediction to say “well anxiety is a conserved quality, so if the situation would resolve itself, John would probably just feel equally anxious about something else”.
Nah, I don’t really get anxious in emergencies like that. I get very physically tense, but it doesn’t feel like anxiety; if anything it feels like mental clarity and focus and a drive to act. There’s a kind of relief to it, like a bunch of the usual day-to-day constraints just ceased to be binding and I can act more freely to resolve the problem. (I guess there might be momentary panic as well at first, but that’s also different from anxiety.)
Nonetheless, you have a fair point: certainly there are at least some situations in which a person’s circumstances are counterfactual to their anxiety in the way they feel to be counterfactual. I guess I would claim that those cases are a pretty small minority, for anxiety, at least in the first world. Definitely for that particular emotion, the prior should be very heavily against “the thing someone feels anxious about is counterfactual to their feeling”.