Anxious Living

More Flow

December 6th, 2006 by Aaron

A little more on flow, to follow up what I posted a couple weeks ago.

Finding Flow emphasizes the importance of where we place our psychic energy (of which we have limited amounts). The best way I can think to describe psychic energy is it is where we put our attention and how much energy we devote to that attention. One of the problems we encounter with social anxiety is that we invest a lot of psychic energy in examining our attitudes towards ourselves. There is so much concentration on the internal battle that we don’t have as much energy to take on the challenges of the life.

If I were to think of how much time and energy I have spent looking at my own thoughts, being angry about my thoughts, thinking about how I am bad person and then trying to talk myself into feeling better about myself, only to watch everything crash down to terrible again the moment a social interaction went sour, I’d get depressed. The thing is, that is exactly what I do.

An easy way for me to spot this is in social situations. If I am at an event or holding a conversation that causes me anxiety, I devote so much energy to worrying that I have trouble following what is going on. This often starts a chain reaction of recrimination, but it is the matter of where my attention gets focused that causes the most trouble.

A hoped for ability to control my attention was one of the reasons I was drawn to meditation. Are there other techniques anyone has found work well for shifting your attention away from the internal struggle and towards other challenges?

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