Great Article on the Anxious Mind
Whether you call us “Highly Sensitive People” as Elaine Aron does or “Highly Reactive” people as this researcher does, some of us are born to worry and fret more than others. Great article on someone researching those of us who were pretty much designed for high-anxiety, especially for someone like me who (as my Mom reports with grim detachment) screamed every time I was taken out of the house for the first two years of my life. I screamed until they brought me home. Every time. Imagine how joyous that was for them. But also imagine how overwhelming I must have found the world back then, and how scared I must have been to react in that way every single time they took me out. That’s why I totally get this:
But the 19th baby was different. She was distressed by novelty — new sounds, new voices, new toys, new smells — and showed it by flailing her legs, arching her back and crying. Here was what Kagan was looking for but was not sure he would find: a baby who essentially fell apart when exposed to anything new.
Baby 19 grew up true to her temperament…
The interviewer asks Baby 19 what she worries about.
“I don’t know,” Baby 19 says after a long pause, twirling her hair faster, touching her face, her knee. She smiles a little, shrugs. Another pause. And then the list of troubles spills out: “When I don’t quite know what to do and it’s really frustrating and I feel really uncomfortable, especially if other people around me know what they’re doing. I’m always thinking, Should I go here? Should I go there? Am I in someone’s way? … I worry about things like getting projects done… I think, Will I get it done? How am I going to do it? … If I’m going to be in a big crowd, it makes me nervous about what I’m going to do and say and what other people are going to do and say.” Baby 19 is wringing her hands now. “How I’m going to deal with the world when I’m grown. Or if I’m going to sort of do anything that really means anything.”
Her voice trails off. She wants to make a difference, she says, and worries about whether she will. “I can’t stop thinking about that.”
via Magazine Preview – Understanding the Anxious Mind – NYTimes.com.
That last paragraph there? It’s hard for me to understand that that’s NOT the dialogue that’s going on in everyone’s head all the time. It must be quiet in there for the rest of you.
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What’s really hard is dealing with the nasty glares from other people, who very obviously feel that any time a kid makes a disturbing sound within their auditory range, it’s because the parent is lazy and hasn’t programmed their kid properly to act like a miniature adult. (Because kids are like dogs you see, if you reward good behavior and punish bad, they never do anything wrong! Srsly! You’re just a lazy and terribad mom if you can’t make it work!) There’s never any allowance for us to be helping our kids grow into adults; it’s like we’re expected to keep our anxious and socially inconvenient children shut up in basements until they’re 18, and then loose them on the world because somehow that birthday will miraculously transform them into well-adjusted adults despite the fact that we never allowed them to integrate with other people in normal settings.
The encouraging thing is that while I know I used to think like this all the time (obsessing on what people are thinking, what’s the right thing to do, etc), I hardly ever do it anymore. So it -is- something that can get better if you find a way to work on it that’s good for you.