Anxiety
It was the friendships that I was holding onto out of guilt, not out of love. It was the dreams I clung to like they were my lifeline, even when they no longer brought me joy. And it was the constant, relentless feeling of being tired! Tired of pretending, tired of giving, tired of convincing myself that things would get better if I just kept trying. If I just kept pushing. But later, I realized that pushing when you’re already broken only makes the cracks deeper. You don’t get stronger from pushing things that aren’t meant for you. You just get more tired. You just get more lost.
Anxiety is the enemy of empathy. Fear makes us egocentric; egocentric makes us blind. An amygdala/prefrontal-cortex two-step that narrows the search parameters of the pattern recognition system. Pretty soon, as anxiety climbs too high, we lose our ability to find one another.
Steven Kotler • Last Tango in Cyberspace: A Novel
Your brain is trying to control and predict everything that’s taking place in your life, because stress is actually created when you can’t predict something, or you have the perception that something is going to get worse.