Why We Spiral

> He’s here to take my job. The VP knows him and hired him directly. There’s so many signals each week that say I’m right. He’s trying to take credit for a decade of my hard work. He’s going to exploit me and everyone will believe him and not me.

I think this is where it’s important to know yourself.

If you’re having a constant stream of anxiety inducing thoughts and light paranoia, learning how to silence those and introduce a more objective view is helpful.

It can be taken too far, though. I had a friend whose company was showing all of the warning signs of financial problems, yet he was on a positivity kick and chose to substitute an “everything works out eventually” mentality. Instead, he rode the company right into their inevitable shutdown and missed some good opportunities to take other jobs along the way because he thought ignoring his gut was the right thing to do.

Yeah absolutely! That’s the challenge I’ve seen with anxiety (I’m painting with a broad brush here, and I’m no authority). You can’t outright disable the smoke alarms because sometimes they’re actually working.

That's the difference between functional and disfunctional anxaety. The trick is to figure out which is which.

I am incapable of knowing which is which.

The problem is my rate of correct anxiety guesses is too high. I'm right a lot. But the ridiculous stuff sneaks in as well. This leads to me being constantly anxious and just hating my professional life.

How to fix? Sweet Lord in heaven. How to fix?

Keep an anxiety log for a few months. In my experience, this feeling of correctness is a retrospective impression that relies heavily on confirmation bias, and in reality is nowhere near that high. Either way, a concrete log will confirm or deny it.

If it's truly correct, then I'd say it's not anxiety and that you're probably more attuned to subtle cues. You can learn to pay conscious attention to these cues, evaluate them, and decide strategically if you want to act on them. The idea is to keep your advantage without the negative emotional reaction.

If it's not that accurate, having proof can help you internalize that you're just going through some particular emotional process, without according it any undue weight. Having let go of that, you can start picking up mechanical tricks for anxiety management, like breathing techniques.

If the friend was ignoring his gut feeling, what objective instruments did he use instead?

If none, wasn't it was just choosing one gut feeling over another gut feeling?

^^^ This ^^^

Also, a CBT (Cognitive behavioral therapy) with a professional helps a lot.

Even then shutting down the anxiety and paranoia is a good idea. You're friend didn't know how to process reality without feeling negative, maybe. But it can be done and they should probably learn how to do that. A calm & confident person can still see if a problem is coming, the real world isn't determined by the feelings of the viewer but by actual evidence present and a very fine sliver of basic world modelling. The difference is a well grounded person will just note it and feel pretty good about the whole process as they brush dust of the resume and start job hunting. Did their best, had a good time, made some friends, exciting new opportunities, etcetera.

Nobody has to be a pessimist to make accurate forecasts. It doesn't even help. The more your emotions and personality influence the forecast the worse a forecast it is, the future does not rewarp itself because the viewer feels positive or negative.