audio-talk

Cressy Snr wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 9:48 am The major and sometimes insurmountable problem for anxiety sufferers is something that I would term as thought crowding. When thought crowding occurs it becomes difficult to function properly. The sufferer has tremendous difficulty sorting through what is important and what is not, as everything in your head is demanding your attention and that you do something about it ‘right now.’ These intrusive thoughts that we have to concede we cannot deal with right now, get packed up into a bundle that gets projected into the future with an arbitrary deadline attached and sits there like some malevolent spectre, reminding you that it still needs dealing with and you can’t relax for one minute. Cue vicious circle.
The anxiety sufferer or the depressive can’t live in the present. They are either in the past regretting, or in the future worrying.
This is why projects like the ones we as a group do are often difficult to stay focussed on for more than five minutes. There are simply too many intrusions.

Intrusions for a normal person might be work related or something comes up that we have to deal with and put our project to one side for a while: and indeed the anxious or depressive person will get these too. Nothing wrong with that and both anxious and depressive people will happily accept that some things are more important than your hobby, just like anyone else would.

However 99.9% of distractions that interfere with anxious or depressed people are not real, they are thoughts: events in the mind, which pile in one after another until the person becomes paralysed mentally and can deal with neither project nor everyday life.

In the early days of my own depressive/anxious behaviours I embarked on a feverish amp building programme. No sooner had I finished one than I tore it down and started another one. Looking back (oops! regret stoppit!) all it did was cost me a packet. It certainly didn’t advance my knowledge, because basically it was build, dismantle, build, dismantle, build, dismantle ad infinitum: not much learning. But build, dismantle, build, dismantle was I learned later, a coping mechanism, a means of pushing the world, as I perceived it, away. Not the best strategy, but I didn’t know any better at the time.

Anyway, enough of the psychology lessons. It’s just good to try to expand people’s understanding of the of the anxiety issue. Anxiety disorders manifest themselves differently in different people, so it is difficult to generalise about how to cope with it. This makes it a complete pain in the arse to talk about.
Paul will have started a new thread by now so this one shouldn’t get any further off topic.

Cressy Snr wrote: ↑Sun Aug 29, 2021 9:48 am Paul will have started a new thread by now so this one shouldn’t get any further off topic.