anxiety

A look at anxiety in its many forms and manifestations; what is the nature of this specific pattern of extreme fear and worry?

Overcoming Awkward
The truth is, I like to think I like who I am. And yet, when I enter a new situation, I hide her. I need to test the waters first. Which version of me will be accepted here? Is it safe to express myself authentically? Despite reality, my answer to the latter question is often no. I fear judgment. I mean, no one likes feeling judged. But not everyone lets that dictate who they are in a crowd.
By Vivian Rose22 days ago in Psyche
Being the First Dreamer in a Family of Survivors
I did not come from dreamers. I came from survivors. They woke before the sun because survival does not wait for rest. They worked through pain because pain never paid the bills. Their lives were shaped by necessity, not desire. Food mattered more than fulfillment. Stability mattered more than passion. In my family, dreams were considered dangerous. They were luxuries people indulged in when rent was paid, when cupboards were full, when tomorrow was guaranteed. Dreams, we believed, could distract you from staying alive. And then there was me. I wanted more than endurance. I wanted meaning. I wanted to imagine a future instead of bracing for the next emergency. I wanted to ask questions like “What do I want?” instead of “What do we need right now?” I wanted a life that did not revolve entirely around fear. That is how I became the first dreamer in a family of survivors. No one prepared me for the guilt. Every step forward felt like a quiet act of disobedience. When I rested, I felt lazy. When I imagined a different life, I felt ungrateful. When I pursued joy, I wondered who I was leaving behind. Their sacrifices built the ground beneath my feet. How dare I stand taller than they ever could. I learned early that ambition can feel like betrayal. That wanting more can sound like criticizing the lives that came before you. That growth can feel like saying, “Your way was not enough,” even when that is not what you mean. I loved them. And still, I wanted something different. That contradiction lived inside me like a second heartbeat. They taught me how to survive. But no one taught me how to dream without shame. I watched them carry exhaustion like a family heirloom. I inherited their discipline, their resilience, their silence. But I also inherited their unfinished hopes, buried so deep they no longer had names. Sometimes I think my dreams are not entirely mine. They are borrowed courage. They are postponed desires finally asking to be lived. Still, pride and guilt walk beside me everywhere I go. Pride, because I am doing things they never had the chance to imagine. Pride, because their struggles did not end with them. Pride, because survival evolved into possibility. Guilt, because my life is lighter. Guilt, because I can choose. Guilt, because my fears are not as sharp as theirs once were. Being the first dreamer means translating survival into something gentler. It means honoring the past without being imprisoned by it. It means carrying gratitude without carrying chains. I am not rejecting where I come from. I am continuing it differently. Their strength taught me how to endure. My dreams teach me how to live. And maybe that is the quiet purpose of progress. Not to erase the struggle of our families, but to make sure it does not have to be repeated.
By Luna Vani22 days ago in Psyche
No One Talks About the Grief of Becoming Better
No one warns you that healing will ask you to mourn. They tell you growth feels empowering. They do not mention the quiet grief that follows becoming better.
By LUNA EDITH22 days ago in Psyche
The Muffled Scream
The clock read two-seventeen. Not that it mattered. Time had a way of blurring when every day felt like a repeat of the last, a faded carbon copy. Arthur sat in the dark living room, a cold cup of coffee by his elbow, the faint hum of the refrigerator the only thing keeping the house from absolute dead silence. Then it hit him, a different kind of quiet. A heavy, plush quiet. He knew, without looking, that it was snowing.
By HAADI22 days ago in Psyche
Reclaiming the Morning: How 30 Minutes of 'Analog Calm' Transformed My Creative Potential. AI-Generated.
The Morning Dopamine Trap: Dissecting Digital Depletion In the fragile threshold of awakening, reaching for your smartphone is an act of quiet sabotage against your own mental sovereignty. By flooding the brain with the hollow dopamine of notifications, you subvert the natural surge of cortisol meant for clarity, replacing poised alertness with a state of compulsive agitation. This is the anatomy of digital depletion—a shift from the proactive architect of your day to a reactive prisoner of the feed. It creates a cognitive fog that leaves you mentally bankrupted before your feet even touch the floor, turning your morning into a desperate, breathless chase for a focus that was surrendered at dawn.
By Mohammad Hammash23 days ago in Psyche
The Moon's Confession
Elias couldn't sleep. Again. The mattress felt like a griddle beneath him, even with the windows cracked. It wasn’t the heat, not really. It was the hum, a low, constant buzz in his skull, the kind that meant everything was wrong, always wrong. He pushed himself up, swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floorboards creaked under his bare feet, a familiar complaint in the dead quiet of the house. Two-fifteen AM, the digital clock glowed red, judging him.
By HAADI23 days ago in Psyche
Bare Branches
As I was driving home from town earlier this month, I suddenly noticed that the trees had no leaves on them. It struck me in surprise, because the last time I had noticed them, the trees were just beginning to turn colors. Time had slipped right past me, and I had flowed right along for the ride, never once paying attention to where I was going - not even lifting my head one time from what I was doing to look at the beauty of my surroundings and my favorite season. Looking back, I realize that the social media/internet break I had planned had turned into a walking fugue state.
By Mother Combs23 days ago in Psyche
Why Abrupt And Immediate Change Rarely Works
We are getting ready to come into a new year. You know what that means... Everyone is going to be trying something "new" to start off the year.
By Dr. Cody Dakota Wooten, DFM, DHM, DAS (hc)24 days ago in Psyche
Why Identity Is Not Self-Constructed: Mental Health and the Social Feedback Loop
Whitman Drake Abstract Contemporary mental health discourse frequently treats identity as an internally authored construct—something individuals can revise through cognition, self-reflection, or therapeutic insight. This assumption underlies popular clinical and cultural narratives that emphasize self-esteem, positive self-talk, and personal meaning-making as primary mechanisms of psychological stability. While these approaches offer partial benefits, they obscure a deeper and empirically supported reality: identity is not self-constructed in isolation. Rather, it emerges through sustained social feedback, recognition, and institutional response. Drawing on symbolic interactionism, social psychology, and mental health research, this article argues that mental health outcomes are inseparable from relational processes that validate or destabilize identity over time. Understanding identity as socially constituted clarifies why individual-level interventions often fail, why distress clusters around structural conditions, and why durable mental health requires collective as well as personal change.
By Whitman Drake24 days ago in Psyche
When Winter Teaches Us How to Feel Again. AI-Generated.
December doesn’t arrive loudly. It seeps in. Earlier sunsets after a day of rain. Streets that look familiar but feel emptied of color. The air sharp enough to make you aware of your breath. Winter, more than any other season, doesn’t ask for productivity or performance. It asks for honesty.
By Ahmet Kıvanç Demirkıran24 days ago in Psyche
The Psychology of Emotional Contagion. AI-Generated.
Walk into a room where tension hangs in the air, and you may feel uneasy before anyone says a word. Enter a space filled with laughter, and your mood often lifts almost instantly. This phenomenon is not coincidence or imagination; it is emotional contagion at work. Emotional contagion is a subcategory of social psychology that explores how emotions transfer from one person to another, often unconsciously. It shapes group dynamics, relationships, workplaces, and even entire societies, influencing how we feel and behave in ways we rarely notice.
By Kyle Butler24 days ago in Psyche
The Static Hum
The air on the platform tasted like old rust and forgotten rain. Elias pulled the collar of his threadbare coat tighter, the fabric scratching at his neck. His duffel, one measly bag, felt lighter than the hollow ache in his chest, an ache that had burrowed deep and set up shop weeks ago. He watched the train pull in, a long, dark serpent of ancient steel, its breath a sigh of steam that dissipated quickly into the cold, a fleeting ghost in the fading light. This was it. The last one. The one to wherever.
By HAADI24 days ago in Psyche