The Anxiety-Distraction Feedback Loop
There’s been a lot going on in our world lately, and it seems that people are dangerously flitting in and out of anxiety, with the help of distraction techniques, like binge-watching a TV show after spending the whole day at work.
To specify, anxiety is a pervasive sense of worry over impending events, especially when there are a lot of unknown variables involved. Anxiety starts to become maladaptive when the internal fear of the unknown does not correspond to the actual threat. For example, if you know that the worst-case scenario of not getting something done is just personal regret, elevated levels of anxiety may treat this scenario as if it were a do-or-die scenario, an evolutionary survival trait learned from humanity’s earliest days, back when humankind lived in caves.
To combat this line of anxietal thinking in modern-day, people often engage in a variety of exercises, such as outlining a series of positive self-affirmations, where you can remind yourself that your worth it not tied to a singular event, but the summation of many skills and interests. Furthermore, others will employ distraction techniques, such as binge-watching TV.
