GHDR Report 03/03: Blunting Fear and Anxiety

Happy Groundhog Resolutions Report Day! In the last post, I made a big list of questions and directives that would guide this year’s quest to become both happier and financially secure by creating stuff that I think is cool. However, there has been this nagging feeling I might not be capable of doing it.

It’s been almost two decades of me trying to make progress on this goal in one form or another, and I still find it extremely difficult and mentally draining. If this was really what I want to do, shouldn’t I feel more motivated? Shouldn’t it feel easier?

So bothersome and demoralizing.

Seeing Deeper

In that long list of questions and directives, I did try to capture the essence of my unease with these three beauties:

• How can I be myself without pushing people away?
• Am I not intrinsically motivated? Are my aspirations beyond my grasp?
• Do I actually like doing anything? Or am I just coping with social isolation?

Looking at this list today, what I see is FEAR framed as SELF REFLECTION. By using rational language, I blunt the feeling of anxiety that arises and feel more in control, but it really comes down to something deeply emotional that is stopping me in my tracks.

Revisiting Pathological Demand Avoidance

I was reminded of Pathological Demand Avoidance (PDA), and it’s been a few years since I looked for newer references. PDA is described as a set of traits that some people on the autistic spectrum have related to, well, avoiding demands of ANY type. This list of traits from What is Pathological Demand Avoidance matchesSee the article on Psychology Today for the detailed description of each trait. It’s worth a read! me disturbingly well:

1. Resistance and avoidance of the ordinary demands of life
2. The use of social strategies as a means to avoid
3. Appearing sociable on the surface, but struggling to understand aspects of social interactions
4. Experiencing excessive mood swings and impulsivity
5. Presenting with “obsessive” behavior, commonly geared toward other people
6. Seeming comfortable in role play and pretending, sometimes to an extreme extent

The gist of PDA is that any demand, even ones I make of myself and want to do, will be automatically derailed. In the past, I’ve described this as extreme difficulty in starting and it’s been a mystery without an apparent cause.

Persistence versus Pathology

Being pathologized by empathy-lacking psych clinicians is a demeaning experience for autistic people, so an alternate description of PDA we have adopted is Persistent Drive for Autonomy. I considered using this term instead of Pathological Demand Avoidance, but in the context of my struggles I want to face the chronic and enduring nature of my resistence to just starting to do stuff. In that sense, it is a pathology that I’d like to treat myself.

I’m not sure if what I have really is PDAAnd to be fair, PDA itself is not an “official” clinical designation in the way ADHD is as research continues, but the SHAPE of my experience is close enough that I’d like to use it as an experimental template for the remainder of this year’s GHDR.

Connecting PDA to my GHDR Goals

PDA is said to be driven by intense anxiety leading to defiance of any demandThis is a signature trait of the PDA neurotype. In my case, this defiance expresses as a difficulty in starting a task. I become sluggish and easily distracted, despite knowing it’s easy to start. Once I’m able to fall into something, though, I seem to be okay. Because modern work is full of things we have to do, every start/restart is an enormous productivity-crashing pothole.

I have recognized this outside of the context of PDA, and have come up with all kinds of productivity tools, concepts, and personal insights to help me push through the confusion and grab some feeling of control over it. I think I can call this leg of the productivity journey as Persistent Drive for Autonomy. I’ve got a trick for everything, but these tricks don’t work against my wily resistant mind for long.

Time to consider what the next leg of the journey could look like. I’m stuck doing this for the rest of life, it seems.

A New Productivity Vector to Explore

What I haven’t tried yet is directly addressing the anxiety behind my theoretical PDA. And I think that might be understood by revisiting my three questions from earlier:

• How can I be myself without pushing people away?
• Am I not intrinsically motivated? Are my aspirations beyond my grasp?
• Do I actually like doing anything? Or am I just coping with social isolation?

What I see reflected in those sentences is fear and distrust of people coupled with expectation of not being liked and a belief that if I don’t show some value, people won’t like me. This is the sort of thing that is embarrassing for most people to say in public, but for me I’m just acknowledging a most basic human fear:

I also know that this is totally a mood and isn’t true. Clearly I have met people in the past that became friends. Clearly I have done some cringey things, and have survived them. I know now I’m a social misfit because my communication style is vastly different due to the way I think, but there are populations of people—nerds, artists, inventors, grumpy designers, etc—that do share cognitive traits that are not so common. And outside of those small populations there are people who share the desire to connect and share stories with each other, despite their different backgrounds, goals, or cultural experiences. It’s a significant population!

The situation is not totally hopeless.

GHDR Goal Amendments for March

Rather than pursue my persistent drive for autonomy through the creation of directives and reporting of progress, I want to address the root anxiety instead. That is, the fear that keeps me from reaching out to people and being part of other people’s lives. I’ve found that I’ve withdrawn from people because there is so much hate in the media being reported in the abstract, and this combines with my own long struggle to find my identity and where I happily “fit” in society.

My hypothesis is that if I can overcome the anxiety simply by talking to more people regularly, this will lead to a lowering of demand avoidance. This is a reframing of the past directive to find like-minded people and build a community. The desired outcome? By finding good experiences, I’ll blunt the edges of fear and anxiety a little bit at a timeExposure Therapy is a behavioral therapy used to treat anxiety. I’ve experienced directly, but I do know that as I become familiar with a repeatable situation I am able to handle it better. .

So for March to April, my GHDR Goals consist ONLY of this statement:

I know from past experience that this can workIn particular, I enjoyed making friends with the vendors at our summer farmer’s market. It was quite a revelation to discover that connections could grow just by consistently liking their pastries, and friendship grew from that!. The problem is that it’s a kind of demand which of course I will be tempted to avoid because DUH, PDA. By focusing on just this as my GHDR directive, though, maybe I’ll have enough energy to do it more than a few times.

In April, I’ll have a better idea whether this works for me. A simple metric would be to count the number of times I go out to make new acquaintances or try new social venues of any kind!

Relaunching the Design Business is Still Going!

That said, I still have to relaunch my design business. In particular, I want to get the new store listings up for existing and new products, then hook up all the ecommerce stuff. I’ll adapt this to the PDA experiment by not planning the whole thing out as I have done in the past. While such planning looks impressive and makes me feel competent, all it does is create more stuff that I want to avoid doing because PDA DUH. Making more stuff for me to do is like stabbing myself in the leg repeatedly, expecting that I’ll be motivated to run. Ugh.

So that is the other focal point this month. This gives me two main tasks, which is very compatible with my Two Slot / Aux modelThis is based on the idea that in a single day, I only been able to focus on two separate projects, as they are comprised of many small decisions and drain my attention+discipline quickly. And then there is all the other stuff that just happens. The two slots+aux model page goes into the details. for preventing overload.

Many of the directives I listed in the February 14 Kickoff still apply. I can trust myself to apply them. The hard part, as always, is getting unmired from my persistently pathological demand avoidance.

Thanks for reading! I’m looking forward to testing these ideas and reporting back!

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