22: The Status on Anxiety

Full Notes: Tuesday, April 7, 2020 What I’m talking about, self-deception, is not a contributing factor to mental illness. If it were a contributing factor you could take it away and still have mental illness. No, it is common to all cases. It’s common to us all. Again, it’s like internal combustion in gasoline engines, or lift for something that flies. There all the time. Therapy is probably great, I guess, but isn’t therapy really hard to do for some people, and maybe less effective for some people?  Wouldn’t some people sooner self-medicate before they go make an appointment to talk to somebody and spill their guts out to a stranger?  Not saying they shouldn’t do therapy, just saying some people find it harder, for one reason or another, and that’s why many people don’t. Even if they “need it.”  Maybe some of those people would listen to a podcast, though, or read a book. Or watch YouTube. Maybe some people would rather do it in private than do it with a therapist. Just a thought. Thursday, April 9, 2020 Again, not that more people maybe shouldn’t do therapy. But you might reach more people that way. Plus not everybody has an issue at a “clinical level”. Many people might struggle with depression or anxiety or whatever, but it might be “sub-clinical”.  Surely this is a spiritual thing. Surely depression is a spiritual sickness. And same with anxiety. May have physical factors, I guess. But surely it’s a spiritual thing. Why do I say that?  I guess for me there is an attitude issue. There is a lack of faith. There’s a gratitude issue. There’s a lack of forgiveness. There’s a lack of hope, which is despair. The lack of faith is doubt. The lack of confidence is fear. Doubt not, fear not. Look into me in every thought. I’m sure I don’t look into the Lord in every thought when I’m struggling with depression and anxiety.  What does LDS social services say about this all?  How do they handle it?  (What are they called now, by the way?) Monday, April 13, 2020 Find a way to illustrate how sometimes you can't do much in the moment of great alarm, but you can in other moments.  It's true, right?  How do you illustrate that? Tuesday, April 14, 2020 How about tending to a plant?  Allegory of the Lord's olive trees.  Should I edit the Spirit episode to nix the unenlightening discussion on Christ and the legion of spirits, and put in instead how in ways we don't understand we are influenced by both good and evil spirits.  I have to imagine that's how we are tempted/influenced to do bad things, and that's how we get stuck in traps of bad behaviors, etc.  Evil spirits don't just help us in that process, they are integral to that process.  And also good spirits have their part to play in our protection and who knows what else.  We are surrounded.  Both by the good and the evil spirits.  And our choices make us subject to the evil spirits, who have the power to captivate as we subject ourselves to them.  This is how I imagine it.  Friday, April 17, 2020 Peace and happiness. Happiness and peace. Don’t those correspond to depression and anxiety?  Those are the two things we want, right - peace and happiness?  And the absence of peace is anxiety, and the absence of happiness is depression? The opposite of hope is despair (and despair cometh because of iniquity…). The opposite of faith is fear. What am I getting at, here?  I don’t know. But we all want peace and happiness. And instead we get anxiety and depression. Depression is misery. It’s not just the absence of feeling. I’ve been wondering if depression doesn’t describe more than one thing. Because there’s absence of feeling, and there’s misery. There’s being out of touch with yourself, and there’s acute misery, right?  I don’t know. All I know is I need to have more fun in my life. What was that elder describing on my mission?  It was basically depression, I’d say, but it was more about being out of touch with myself. What was that?  What is that?  I’ve been calling it depression. But then what’s the more acute misery?  Tuesday, April 21, 2020 Ok, what is anxiety? If  you read any psychology book on the matter we’re on the subject, it will tell you that anxiety that troubles us is no different than the normal healthy kind that we experience that keeps us out of danger and keeps us being smart. I just don’t know that I think it’s really the same thing. Seems to me like this bad, damaging, maladaptive kind of anxiety is different. It’s born of a lie. That things are going to be bad and we can’t take it and it will be the end of the world. There’s a lie behind this stuff. There’s not a lie behind driving safely. It’s distorted. It’s maladaptive. That means it’s not helping us, and we’re going in the opposite direction of what we should. So I guess to me it seems like there’s a qualitative difference to this kind of anxiety. I could be wrong. But it seems like there’s just a qualitative difference. What do you guys think? If we figured out the depression is in essence the lie that you are not worth anything, and anxiety is the lie that your world is going to end, and depression is a rejection of the self, or a failure to forgive yourself, Then what is anxiety? There’s got to be an answer.  There’s got to be a way to understand this. No anxiety is definitely fear, right. Man, I don’t know why this is so hard for me to wrap my head around. But I will celebrate when we figure this out. Anxiety is fear, or giving into your fear, and chronic anxiety, or the pattern of anxiety that we see, is an inset, established, biological practically or really actually form of the shorter term thing. Just like the shorter term depression is dissing yourself, and the longer-term is all the results of that, anxiety in the short term is fearing, and then the long term is all the yuckiness that goes along with that. Seems like these spiritual principles have a little lag time or something. To what can we liken that? We will keep working on this question. It’s an important one – the relation between the immediate action and the long-term condition.  I wish I had the answers to these questions right now, for your sake, but I don’t. And that’s what this podcast is. Maybe one day I’ll have a podcast where I disseminate information without asking any questions, but it’s not now.