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Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

I'm 30 and have a tv and Bluetooth speaker in every room. Both me and my wife get anxious in silence. We do retreat to the bedroom if we need silence though. Our puppy seemed to have figured out the same... We used to think she did it when she was sick, but it became a pattern and seems to be her way to tune out the world.

The best way I can describe the effect of silence is like what brains do in extreme sensory deprivation: they begin imagining and hallucinating external stimulus. Silence makes my internal stream of consciousness stark. It is severe to the point of causing me decades of insomnia. As soon as I lay in bed, if I don't have white noise or otherwise, the recursive nature of my thoughts spirals immediately into existential panic.

Anyways, I love TV.

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Depending on TVs to save you from existential panic doesn’t seem like a sustainable solution.

If you have a sustainable solution to provide you'll be rich. I default to squelching thoughts of my mortality. That is at the top of the list of mental frames that have improved my life. I otherwise lived in constant existential panic from the ages of 12 to 25. Thanks a lot Nietzsche...

What works for me is negative visualization. Thinking of the worst possible thing that can happen, and how I'd feel in that situation. It's kind of like exposure therapy.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_visualization

Have you tried psilocybin? The dissociative state could help you realize that are more than your ego.

You are not one but many, and the ego is truly the only thing that dies in death we fear.

Several trips. Microdosing for weeks. It helped me understand Alan Watts. No real impact on the existential terror thing.

Active stoicism worked for me. I think only ryan holiday is getting rich from it though.

I had the same issue I think, struggled with it up to around 25 when a doctor asked me to try melatonin.

It actually changed my life, now I can sleep and be like a normal person. I used to joke that I was a C-type person (instead of A/B) when it comes to sleep.

Meditation

I thought so too. I have at least 150 hrs of meditation under my belt. I can't say I'm worse or better, just another silly thing for my ego to carry around.

Take it from me. Ignoring your mortality is a lot easier.

150 hours over how long time? Those who aren't "naturals" may need more than that to "get it" and start seeing benefits (coming from someone who after several attempts in various forms finally "broke through", in lack of better words, on day ~6 of a 10 day Goenka-Vipassana retreat. That'd be ~10 h / day during that time).

After that I was able to do 30-60 minute sittings at home and experience the associated change. If you're also a very cerebral person you may also need a similarly concentrated "boot camp" or similar to get to some base level.

In a similar vein, if someone has extremely weak physique, it's not really convincing when they claim that physical exercise doesn't work for them, as they did spend 150h at the gym machines ;)

That's a great point. I guess hype made my expectations unrealistic. I have it on my to-do list to get the habit going again. I'll try this weekend!

I've wanted to do a retreat very badly. I would need to work to organize my current world to fit it in but it's something I have in the back of my mind.

You may want to experiment with your diet.

I have a thing where I get weird anxiety ~18hr after I eat pasta, maybe you get something similar.

If your anxeity has a biological cause (ie excess cortisol or something), then modulating what you put into your body may help.

Or maybe you just need to accept that every moment might be your last and try to enjoy it. :)

I'm in my 30s and I went through the phase of watching a lot of TV as a teen, then not watching at all in my 20s and not owning a TV for many years, and now I'm back at moderately watching TV everyday. There're several pros of TV compared to streaming: you turn it on and there's immediately something playing, if it's not interesting you just change the channel (I hate scrolling through stuff on a streaming service and getting stressed that I can't find anything interesting and just wasting time), there're many movies I would never watch otherwise but sometimes you just leave something on because "there's nothing better to watch" and it turns out to be a great movie, there's also many classic movies and TV series that are hard to find online, even "trash" daytime TV shows sometimes are fun to watch if you just want to "reset" your mind :-)

Yes. I missed putting on the History channel and just letting it run all day and night. Pluto TV made that possible again and it's free. RiffTrax, MST3K, Pluto History, Pluto Science, and on and on. I hat the stress of trying to figure out what to watch on demand.

I get anxious with noise around, especially TV. My brain generates plenty of stimuli all on its own, no need to add more ;)

I have the opposite problem and need some background noise in order to stay focused. That said, I can't use TV as background noise unless it is something I have zero interest in. The visual component is too distracting, so I tend to use music instead.

Brains are weird.

That's funny, I've always hated it when someone turned on the TV or put on some music in the same room as me because it disturbed my inner monologue.

My inner monologue is only there to say disturbing things, so it's nice to drown it out.

Try meditating. Learn to let the thoughts wash over you.

That's not always good advice, particularly for folks who experience depression and anxiety...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...

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