[Retra]

I have the opposite problem: I don't know what anxiety is. Supposedly it's an emotion people have (and it's certainly possible I feel it too,) but I have no way to identify my feelings as anxiety because nobody has ever expressed the meaning of that term in a way the conforms to any feeling I have ever had.

[dkarl]

I originally glossed over your comment pretty quickly, but the more I think about it, the more I realize this is true in practice for me as well. I know what it feels like to feel joy or sadness, but for me anxiety is more often a collection of things I observe about myself than something I feel. This is partly because my anxiety is so often coupled with depression, and partly because anxiety pushes your brain into a fight/freeze/flee trichotomy, and the "freeze" and "flee" responses can feel pretty emotionally blank when the fear is distant or ill-defined (like a deadline or social rejection as opposed to a grizzly bear.)

Again depending on the fight/freeze/flee response, my anxiety can manifest as stiffness in my body, requiring special concentration to force myself to do normal things, or it can manifest as a jitteriness, like when you drive a car with a lot more power than you're used to and every time you touch the accelerator it surges forward in an alarming way. It can be accompanied by elevated body temperature, even sweating.

The way I differentiate the paralyzing kind of anxiety from depression is that depression paralyzes with lack of energy and an inability to believe that anything you do will come out well. Anxiety paralyzes with stiffness and a blank mind that is too twitchy to make plans.

Paralysis is the flight/freeze response to anxiety, but it also has a fight response, where I single-mindedly execute the next thing to do. I can get a lot of things done this way, and sometimes this is the only thing that snaps me out of procrastination, but sometimes the "clear next step" I'm unthinkingly executing is not the right thing. And when it becomes unclear what the next thing is, I'm back to being paralyzed.

Likewise, in social situations, anxiety can make me talk a lot (for me) and become much more open and engaging, and it can be a great thing to get me over the hump to knowing someone well, but more often it just makes my mind blank and makes me so slow to say the things I want to say that the moment passes. From the point of view of my social anxiety, I guess that's a win, preventing me from engaging more than superficially.

[therealdrag0]

One of the few times in my life where I have palpable anxiety is when I go for on-site interviews. Most other things I'm a cool cucumber. I think there is something to having feelings but not recognizing what they are, but there is also the other side which is people are different and different people feel things more keenly than others.

[alecst]

Yea. There a lot of flavors to anxiety, and the word itself is almost too generic to be meaningful. I experience it as a kind of "wiredness" or "on edge" feeling. The somatic experience tends to precede the mental one too. So, I'm with you, I think people tend to oversimplify "anxiety" and that it's actually a complex of zillions of little micro-disorders that share some rough features.

[physcab]

What I’ve heard from my therapist is that anxiety is often a cloud that covers the real emotion underneath. I experience anxiety when I’m really upset because I don’t know how to express anger. But sometimes it is sadness or fear. Anxiety is basically an evolutionary adaptation — we no longer are being hunted or having to hunt for survival, but our minds still think danger is present.