There are a few books that have helped me deal with anxiety.

When I started going to a therapist, one of the things I wanted was to stop feeling bad. That seems pretty natural, right? I have bad feelings: looping, anxious thoughts, endless worry that feels compulsive, tightness in my chest, a kind of restless energy that I really want to get rid of. In some way anxiety is by definition a kind of energy I want to get rid of. If I didn’t want to get rid of it, it would be excitement.

In San Francisco, I was lucky enough to work with a therapist who saw his job as not helping me get rid of what I was feeling, but helping me be able to embrace what I was feeling and have more space for it. I have found that embracing what I’m feeling can often transform how it feels, so that anxiety and other challenging feelings feel more expansive.

All of these folks have a similar message: our feelings, including difficult feelings, are important sources of information for us. Sometimes what those feelings want might be deeply confused, but they have positive intentions for us. When we’re able to embrace those feelings rather than suppressing them, they become dramatically less painful.

So all these folks want to help you embrace your feelings. Which doesn’t mean that you start believing everything your anxiety may tell you. But it can lead to having more freedom, so the anxiety you feel doesn’t feel like it’s controlling you.

Here are a few resources I’ve found helpful:

Books about anxiety

• David Burns, When Panic Attacks

  David Burns is one of the therapists who helped develop Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. This book is the best summary of his work and it focuses specifically on anxiety. (Despite the title, it doesn’t focus only on panic attacks — it’s about anxiety in general.) He focuses a lot on being willing to feel fear around what you’re doing, but choosing to do it anyway and see whether the fear was justified. I found this book really helpful for me.
  

  I used to take “When Panic Attacks” with me on business trips. Before I moved to San Francisco, I went out for a Macworld conference to meet up with other employees of a company I was working for. At a party one evening, I was talking to one of my coworkers and asked him why he didn’t start a company of his own. He seemed like a good programmer and a smart guy. He told me that he wasn’t good at talking to people or making connections, and then he said “I’m not like you” and mentioned how I was going up to people and introducing myself to them at the party. It was a really nice compliment — but what was really funny about it was that I’d taken time between the conference and the party to go back to my hotel room and re-read a section of “When Panic Attacks,” trying to psych myself up for the party and give myself the courage to talk to a bunch of new people.

• Eugene Gendlin, Focusing

• Ann Weiser Cornell, The Power of Focusing

  These two books are both about the same thing, and they’re both very good. “Focusing” is a word that Eugene Gendlin came up with for a particular way of feeling what’s happening within your body both emotionally and physically.

  
  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is, in part, about finding ways to see some of the ways your thoughts may be misleading you. Focusing takes a different approach: it’s an opportunity to feel what you’re feeling physically. I find that Focusing can help me have some distance from what I’m feeling, but lets me see what I’m feeling as important information for me. For me this is an important component of emotional fluidity. I want to be able to feel things, but I don’t want those feelings to get stuck (which can happen if I don’t let myself feel them), and I also don’t want to believe all of the thoughts that come up when I’m feeling any particular thing.

Non-books

There are a couple non-book resources that have been helpful for me as well.

Steven Hayes is a psychologist who developed a therapy type called “ACT.” He has a wonderful Ted Talk where he explains the core idea of ACT, which I think is applicable to everyone. His idea is that trying to shut down your painful feelings is like not listening to a close friend in need.

I also recommend this Joe Hudson podcast episode about anxiety. Joe Hudson has a good approach to emotions. I find him a little hard to summarize.

During COVID, when the CDC and Anthony Fauci were lying me, I read a lot about masks and disease transmission from Zeynep Tufekci. She made strong arguments for masks and for COVID being airborne. Now she’s someone I take seriously about bird flu. I am fairly busy, and I can’t be an expert on bird flu. Zeynep can. Great.

There’s a ton of stuff I want to know about but don’t want to become an expert on.

• Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein and Josh Marshall help me make sense of politics

• Tyler Cowen helps me make sense of economics

• Romeo Stevens & many other Twitter folks help me make sense of esoteric therapy/meditation technology

Having access to trustworthy experts is incredibly useful in a world where context is that which is scarce.

It’s also helpful to have a sense of people who talk a lot but are idiots. I tend to mute these people on Twitter as a useful shorthand for “You looked into this person at some point and decided they were an idiot.”

I have fantasized about creating a web service to let people easily categorize folks in this way, becuase it can be hard to remember the folks who aren’t trustworthy. Some people vaguely on this list: Michael Hobbes, Glenn Greenwald, Robert Reich, Alex Berenson.

This is a very important process and maybe it’s just too obvious to talk about. One thing this internal process is not is an argument for other people. When my friend asks “Why shouldn’t I like Tulsi Gabbard,” the answer “I looked into her at one point, became convinced that she’s a fucking moron, and then jettisoned the reasons why she’s a moron because I have limited mental capacity” isn’t very satisfying, and for good reason. I read “How to Disagree” and it’s good and correct about how to refute an argument. That's not what this process is for.

Tulsi Gabbard was recently right about something, which is great! Good for her. Being right about multiple things over time may move her out of fucking moron status, but being wrong about one important thing is probably going to keep her there forever. Whatever, she doesn't care.

Some tips:

• Revisit your sources over time and figure out if they’re actually reliable. Maybe you’ve changed! Maybe they’ve gotten brainworms!

• Don’t confuse disagreeing with you about something with being a fucking moron. A friend of mine sent me an episode of the Tucker Carlson show podcast to listen to where Tucker interviews Jeffrey Sachs. The episode is called “Jeffrey Sachs: The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin.” Tucker is untrustworthy. My view of Jeffrey Sachs is that he’s probably a useful stooge about Ukraine / Russia, but I haven’t actually read or listened to anything by him about this. It’s worth reading the transcript and figuring out whether he seems trustworthy. Even better would be to read his writing about something else and get a feel for his sensemaking before engaging with him on an issue where I have very strong priors that tell me he’s a fucking moron.

Normies trust the NYT or WSJ editorial boards. There’s something useful to that. I trust Tulsi and Matt and Ezra and Tyler and Romeo.

How I do this is by by keeping some part of my attention on my body. Here with me. Not in the computer.

I read the blogger John Gruber describe the computer as “a place you can visit” and describe Apple Vision Pro as even moreso. When I visit my computer, sometimes, I am not elsewhere. The same with my phone. My consciousness disappears. Sometimes this is on purpose; when I’m stressed out, I can retreat into the phone. If I’m at a party, I can take a break and just be on my phone. Bob’s not here right now.

But I am practicing being here some more.

The last of the best-smelling roses in the Peninsula Park Rose Garden.

Also, I’m realizing that I want to do more than just be, like, in-person encouragement for people. I’m angry seeing so many of my friends waste their potential. I’m angry that there aren’t better resources out there to help people figure out how to be more alive, more able to feel their feelings and pursue their fullest ambitions.

Plus is doing this and I’m jealous.

Some problems and experiences I want to think through:

• How do I experience and heal from my own anxiety? What have I been learning, what’s been helpful for me? What is out there that seems worth exploring for my own growth and healing?

• What practices lead people to healing and growth?

• How can we maintain our time and attention when so much technology seems devoted to taking it away from us?

• How do I create a life full of human connection, both to people immediately around me and physically distant friends and family?

• How does an internal vs external internal locus of control change how people experience the world?

• What is it like to design software in accordance with Christopher Alexander’s nameless quality?

• What are my Feynman problems?

You can expect: infrequent posting; sentence-case section titles; images of things I’ve encountered wandering around outside. Here’s a little figure on a beach in San Francisco:

Talk soon.

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