NYT Sunday Magazine article on the Anxious Mind

There’s a long arti­cle in this weekend’s Mag­a­zine about the hardwiring/predisposition toward anx­i­ety as a psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der, some­thing that adds to the Nature v. Nur­ture debate. This, in par­tic­u­lar, rang true:

“Two peo­ple can expe­ri­ence the same level of anx­i­ety, he said, but one who has inter­est­ing work to dis­tract her from the jit­tery feel­ings might do fine, while another who has just lost his job spends all day at home fret­ting and might be quicker to reach a point where the thrum becomes over­whelm­ing. It’s all in the con­text, the inter­pre­ta­tion, the abil­ity to divert your atten­tion from the knot in your gut. These vari­a­tions also hap­pen when some­one grows up from an anx­ious infant to some­one either fret­ful or tranquil.”

Envi­ron­ment mat­ters. Take a “nat­u­rally” anx­ious per­son, set them in a stress­ful envi­ron­ment, and what do you get?

Well– messy is maybe the best, most con­cise, least judg­men­tal way to put it.

Dis­en­tan­gling bio­log­i­cal over-responses to objec­tively stress­ful sit­u­a­tions– not easy. And how to say how much “bad” stim­u­lus is the tip­ping point, that makes some­one Offi­cially Anx­ious? (Depressed? Bipo­lar? Insert Your Biologically-Based Dis­or­der Here.) How much of it can be resolved through sys­tem­atic self-analysis and self-discipline? Can you talk your­self out of anx­i­ety? Stop think­ing there’s some­thing “wrong” (aka moral or wor­thi­ness notions) with you, and accept it sim­ple is what it is, and apply cop­ing mech­a­nisms with­out pro­cras­ti­na­tion and guilt?

No answers– and hardly from me, since I get that wash of tin­gles up and down my arms and neck when the phone rings some­times, break out in a sweat when I’m sort­ing the mail, though my anxiety’s more some­thing that comes along with the depres­sion angle of things. I am BOLD (and my house is damned clean) when I’m on a hypo­manic swing.

I’ve started see­ing my shrink again, am con­tem­plat­ing new meds after hav­ing been on (effec­tively) none since early this sum­mer (topa­max, trilep­tal, risper­adol, depakote monother­apy), and am see­ing a prospec­tive new ther­a­pist Mon­day. My prob­lem with my old one was that even though she was the one to sug­gest that Bipo­lar II might be what I was work­ing with, every­thing for her came from a Nur­ture per­spec­tive– I couldn’t just be hav­ing a bad day, I always had to be react­ing to some cur­rent stres­sor trig­ger­ing a past trauma. But it’s not true– some­times you just feel like shit, and things really are Fine all around you.

Per­haps I could do a bet­ter job work­ing on that angle of things– it’s work, think­ing about how par­ents are messy even as they’re well-intended and every­one has their own crazy to deal with, much less admit­ting what my stum­bling blocks are and acknowl­edg­ing that I am now doing things to mess up my own life– but we never really talked about cop­ing mech­a­nisms and con­crete ways of ask­ing for help, and I think work­ing from a set “You will always have a cer­tain level of X” and not try­ing to attach blame or feel­ings of psy­cho­log­i­cal lazi­ness to the mat­ter on top of every­thing else would be useful.

Sigh.

Being a grown up sucks. Well-timed arti­cles prim­ing me to act like one and actu­ally try to have a game plan? Not so much.