this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2024
126 points (95.7% liked)
Asklemmy
43962 readers
1333 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Adding to that, don't stress about things that are still up in the air, once the therapist has responded with a bad reason for missing the appointment there is plenty of time to get stressed about all the potential repercussions, no need to imagine worst cases while you don't have all the relevant information yet.
“Don’t stress” is terrible advice to someone who has no experience of control over what upsets them, which seems to be an issue OP deals with.
You’re a human being in the body of a human animal. While you can try to use your thoughts to fix/rationalize/justify your feelings, I suspect you’ve already made those attempts with limited success.
OP, here are 2 implementable suggestions:
DO stress. If you’re already in that state, trying to force yourself to feel another way will make it worse. Let yourself feel what you feel. Have the experience of allowing the sensations in your body to be what they are. If the sensations involve pressure, heat, discomfort, tension, etc, have them. If you find yourself having new sensations in reaction to the feelings you experience, have those new ones too. This kind of somatic practice can help you discover a new way of experiencing life that your mind doesn’t dominate.
Pick a breathing exercise and do it for 2 minute, 2 minutes, 5 minutes, whatever works. Doesn’t matter which one, as long as it doesn’t have an end goal. Breathwork can help you discover the different modes of being in your experience.
Dismissing advice that doesn't work for you personally isn't helpful - different strokes and all. I've dealt with anxiety and have found that rationalizing emotional responses to events outside my control normally works well for me. Ultimately, there's no one-size solution, so people need to try different approaches to find what works for them. A variety of perspectives is always best
I’m pushing back on the notion that telling someone “don’t stress” is in any way helpful.
They would already be not stressed if an obstacle didn’t come up. Telling them to not stress is akin to telling them to not be depressed or to just chill out. There’s no pathway to how. There’s no meeting someone where they’re at. There’s just a well-meaning person lacking emotional tooling to support another.
There are lots of ways to actually provide the support. There are lots of ways for a person to reset their nervous system. “Don’t stress” isn’t either.
No one is saying simply "don't stress". Recognizing when stress is centered around something outside your influence can be a step toward dealing with it. That may not work for some, but it does for others - as I said, different strokes. Making a broad generalization about what is and isn't good advice is reductive and only shuts down advice that may help OP