Anxiety and Stress - Modelling

Stress

According to Naval Ravikant, stress is the pull between two opposing decisions, creating the mental stress on mind. While physical stress is similar to pressuring an Iron bar from two sides, it might hold as long as its intrinsic strength is not overcome by the force. At some point iron bar is going to be fractured. Similarly minds, stuck within dilemmas, can come out in unhappy places like angry or sad or it might survive the stress leading to another happy occasion. But here is the thing, we face such stressors all the time throughout the day. Some are so subtle that we do not consider them as stressors. As an example, when I go to the bakery to buy some snack, I would often look at the various food items, not knowing what to buy. Should I go for a plain bun, or some fancy one. Often, I would make a wrong choice and be unhappy about it. Yet, next time also I might do the same mistake. So much stress for a bun I might chose to avoid going to the bakery at all. Lol. Of course I am extreme in the spectrum. Generally, the people who knows what they want would spend less time in bakery as they do not have that analysis paralysis problem in their genes. Those who have it will understand what I am saying.

Paralysis of choice

Anxiety and stress - what is the difference?

So, what is the difference between anxiety. You can read my previous article on Sharpes ratio and anxiety where I produced that anxiety is a ratio of risk vs return. If we consider above analogy of two factors acting as stress someone can say it's just stress. Anxiety from the sound of it, looks worse than stress. On one hand, a balanced stress might lead to progress. But anxiety seems to be always harmful. Something to be avoided in life at all costs. But the problem is often we cannot. Anxiety seems to be a collection of large number of stressors, acting simultaneously, that the boundary and clarity of the two stressors for each factor is not clearly visible. As an example, you can be having a relationship problem giving two choices of staying or leaving, at the same time you might have trouble with your job, again, staying or leaving. But if both of them acted together, interactions and feelings might be overwhelming, that anxiety and panic is the result for most minds. That can cloud your judgement that you're unable to decide on anything as you do not know why.

Grass

Turing machines and limits.

This modeling of Anxiety and stress have good advantage over the previous model using Sharpes ratio. Although anxiety has variety of reasons behind it, at one moment we cannot tackle everything altogether. Our minds are like Turing machines. One step at a time is the way to do anything. So, that guarantees, although stressors can go away with action immediately, anxiety will not go away. As there are more and more problems to solve. It is better to expect, a reasonable relief once you have tackled enough of these individual stressors. Maybe old school method of going back to a paper and writing each of these problems down is the easy way. Maybe getting help, professional or otherwise is the way. Little bit of mindful awareness practice daily, being with the nature might do better bringing out clarity to solve one of these problems. But my intuition is that we all should have a deeper understanding about life, which is closer to what is actual happening. Not just modelling of anxiety. Then we will be able to solve all our problems once and for all. You can call it knowledge, wisdom, or even truth or even Ride on the asymptote to the limits of infinity.