Daeus Jorento

This is a working map I’m building for myself.

What is Anxiety

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
– Søren Kierkegaard

The mind is a reality simulator. Anxiety is the brain simulating threats, seeking certainty where there is none. Our brains prefer false positives over false negatives. This trait helped us survive for hundreds of thousands of years. The degree of anxiety depends on intolerance of uncertainty, lack of control, and what’s at stake.

When anxiety feeds too heavily into action, especially avoidance, it becomes self-reinforcing. Avoidance teaches the brain the threat was real.

When the mind mistakes a prediction for reality, the body responds. Attention follows perceived threats. The more something triggers anxiety, the more attention it gets, which online algorithms amplify. This is how doomscrolling works. The brain and the algorithm reinforce each other, creating a feedback loop that feels like vigilance but behaves like addiction.

Types of Anxiety

Main categories:

• Time: what will happen / what happened
• Identity: who I am
• Reality: what is real
• Social: how I’m seen / interpreted
• Empathy: concern for others
• Decisions: what should I do
• Capacity: can I handle it
• Subconscious: my body detects a threat without a clear reason

Amplifiers:

• Ambiguity: multiple stories
• Anxiety about anxiety

Main Types

Time (future): The future will never be in focus, no matter how hard I try. Planning and the future are not the same. I sometimes take control to my own detriment. When running a race, the possibility of winning is out of my control, but I can guarantee I lose by not starting.

Time (past): The past cannot be changed. I did my best with what I knew at the time. Regret means I have values. I can’t fix the past by replaying it, only by absorbing the lesson.

Identity: Concerns about my place in reality. What role am I playing? Am I the villain? Internal incoherence can wreak havoc. One way to reduce this is to broaden my identity and blur the line between self and non-self. In Buddhism, this loosens the attachment that drives anxiety.

Reality: Fear of the unknown. It shows up as existential dread or in my fascination with cosmic horror and thalassaphobia. It’s fearing the deep end of a pool, even though the water is the same.

Social anxiety is fear of the reveal, and the things we do to avoid the reveal are what get in our way.
– Ellen Hendriksen

Social: For me, this usually boils down to two things: a sense of internal validity (imposter syndrome), and how I am perceived. It’s worse in new groups, where snap judgments are common. A silly example: I leave a public bathroom that smells terrible. Someone looks at me like I did it. It wouldn’t matter if I had. And yet.

Empathy: Social media can manipulate this through sympathy traps, scams, and engagement loops. I consume pain as if it helps anyone. Humans have a deceptively narrow circle of influence. When someone I love is struggling, sometimes the best I can do is just sit with them.

Decisions: For decisions, we can’t know ahead of time if they’re right. We can control our actions, not the outcomes. Did I remember to turn the oven off? For bigger events in the world, I use this mantra: I care, and nothing is required of me.

Capacity: I don’t know my future capacity. There are often no safety nets. My earliest memory of this is running to catch the school bus, realizing I probably wouldn’t make it. Folks with ADHD live in two time modes: now and not now. A packed schedule can feel like both at once. Everyone has a limit to what they can handle.

Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the street and then getting hit by an aeroplane.
– Nitya Prakash

Subconscious: I can feel anxious and not know why. My body detects a threat before conscious awareness. It could be evolution introducing randomness, spiritual intuition, or pattern recognition I don’t have access to. Not every alarm has a story. I can feel anxiety or panic in my body without knowing if it’s a false trigger, a flashback, or something else. It can show up hours later when I can’t sleep, bridging the conscious and unconscious.

Amplifiers

Anxiety should match the task at hand.
– Ellen Hendriksen

Ambiguity amplifies anxiety by creating multiple possible stories. The mind tries to resolve the uncertainty by finding a clear source or solution. Hunger, loneliness, lack of sleep, or past trauma can amplify what might have been low-grade anxiety. The reason only matters if it informs action, even if that action is choosing not to act.

Anxiety about anxiety creates a vicious circle (Alan Watts video). I used to fear not being able to sleep because the next day would be brutal. I would stay up late, afraid sleep wouldn’t come. Like hunger, the longer you go without it, the more your body pushes to fulfill the need. Sometimes the body needs rest from fatigue, not sleep, like when I’m wired.

I push back on the urge to understand anxiety in the moment with the mantra ‘don’t sharpen your sword while in battle.’ Fear needs to be processed. When it gets stuck, it becomes anxiety. I don’t always have all the puzzle pieces.

Non-solutions

Attempts to escape anxiety take many forms, but they all try to get out of the feeling. Some non-solutions I’ve noticed in myself:

• Blame: Fight response. Projecting outward onto “tribal enemies,” a pattern as old as humanity.
• Escapism: Leaving reality for a fantasy. Internal flight response.
• Perfectionism / Rumination: Procrastination through overthinking or overpreparing. Delaying action until uncertainty is reduced. Can be a freeze response.
• Numbing: Blunting the feeling directly. Hacking chemicals. This can be a cold shower or limerence.
• Nihilism / Rationalization: Minimizing meaning or invalidating my own experience.

The same action can either help or harm. Exposure and repetition can reduce anxiety, like giving presentations or improv. Other times they can retraumatize, like returning to dangerous areas after being robbed to regain a sense of control.

The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.
– Alan Watts

What matters is telling the difference between working through it and escaping it. Comfort isn’t bad. During a panic attack, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding can turn a crash into a glide. When my nervous system settles and I think it’s gone for good, that’s a form of escapism. There is no permanent fix, and nothing lasts forever.

Solutions

What is the opposite of anxiety? It’s not more certainty or control.

Anxiety is an attempt by the mind to control uncertainty. The alternative is not eliminating uncertainty, but changing your relationship to it. That’s what this section is about.

This shift happens gradually. A friend showed me this with their cat. They wanted the cat to sit on their shoulder, but it resisted. Each time it struggled, they put it down. Over time, they lifted the cat a little higher each attempt. The cat learned it could leave whenever it wanted, and as that trust built, it eventually stayed on the shoulder, relaxed.

Anchors

At the center of that shift are a few anchors:

• Presence: This is what’s happening right now. Sensations, my immediate environment, and my breath. My breath is always there. This stops feeding the simulation. My worries about the future don’t exist outside of my head. When everything feels like too much, the only move is one thing at a time.
• Reality: Anchor on facts, not predictions. Clarify. Anxiety is often vague.
• Trust: I can respond when things happen. Sometimes this is action first, and confidence comes later with experience.
• Connection: I don’t have to carry everything alone. Talking to someone is taking action and can help unburden it. Being seen and understood helps.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness
– Peter A. Levine

Working With Anxiety

Not all anxiety is cognitive. It can be a physiological response. Recognition and regulation matter more than understanding, especially in the moment. A cold plunge, a walk, a shower, or a nap can help the nervous system settle. It may be something physical, and the best thing I can do is breathe and accept it. Trying to fix it in the moment often makes it worse. At times, it’s just a blocked process that needs to continue.

The hard part is that I won’t know if my response is right or wrong in the moment. It takes time to learn. Like getting stuck on the same level of a video game, challenges come up in different forms until they’re mastered.

Before successful therapy, it’s the same damn thing over and over. After successful therapy, it’s one damn thing after another.
– Lori Gottlieb

True solutions return me to regulation, like catharsis after deep grief. Non-solutions give brief relief but keep resurfacing or increase sensitivity over time. If a strategy reduces anxiety in the moment but leaves me more reactive or dependent, it’s likely a non-solution, like going to the gym whenever angry. If a strategy increases tolerance, insight, or clarity, even if uncomfortable, it’s a solution.

There is no permanent solution, and the goal is not zero anxiety. Some anxiety is the cost of having a brain. An appropriate level doesn’t prevent me from meeting my needs or living authentically.

For example, with work, the right amount of anxiety isn’t zero. If it were, I wouldn’t show up some days because I wouldn’t care. Too much can be paralyzing and damage my relationships. The ideal is somewhere in between.

Ideally, navigating my anxiety is like brushing my teeth, or meditating to clear accumulated internal grievances. Success isn’t feeling less anxiety, but being controlled by it less. Anxiety can still be loud. It just doesn’t get the final say.

A playbook recap:

• Presence: what’s actually happening?
• Specify: what exactly am I feeling or worried about?
• Reality check: what is actually true?
• Start small: what can I do next? Who can I talk to?
• Trust: I can handle this. I’ve handled everything up to now.

Decomposing my anxiety has been the work of my whole life. Now I’m sharing it with you.