what activity brings you the most stress/anxiety

for me, it's scheduling - I hate having to map out scheduled things onto a calendar and invariably dealing with the three competing options that all conflict, as well as being hyper paranoid that I "forgot" to add something to google calendar and being afraid to give a 'yes' or 'no' immediately (which is why I don't - always take the evening to make sure I've crossed my Is and dotted Ts. think this goes back to my days as a project manager.

what activities bring YOU the most anxiety/stress?

posting on ilxor.com

too many things to list out, but the first one that came to mind was planning travel. I absolutely hate it, looking for flights, booking hotels. I constantly feel like I'm being taken advantage of and losing out on a better deal, and I find the aggregate websites for this (things like Orbitz and Expedia) absolutely awful.

things which require multiple steps in which the actual process or outcome of any one of those steps is vague or uncertain

so basically any interaction with bureaucratic systems

too many things to list out, but the first one that came to mind was planning travel. I absolutely hate it, looking for flights, booking hotels. I constantly feel like I'm being taken advantage of and losing out on a better deal, and I find the aggregate websites for this (things like Orbitz and Expedia) absolutely awful.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Tuesday, December 19, 2023 12:41 PM bookmarkflaglink

ugh yes. the hotel part especially, logistically finding an affordable one close to the airport (if I'm flying). flights it's more like "ugh how much of a college tuition payment is this going to be"

things which require multiple steps in which the actual process or outcome of any one of those steps is vague or uncertain

so basically any interaction with bureaucratic systems

― Left, Tuesday, December 19, 2023 12:45 PM bookmarkflaglink

HI SOCIAL SECURITY! yes, this exactly

Getting a haircut

Air travel. Not flying or airports, just, like, leaving home, the morning of. High anxiety, no good reason.

oof yeah the getting ready to fly is worse than the flying

driving, especially around parking lots / big box store hellholes. entering said big box store hellholes in order to acquire things like cat litter.

having to interact with people who rate high in combination of: passive aggression, control freak, bourgie.

paying bills. interacting with customer service interfaces / pipelines in order to try and pay fewer bills.

planning any activity where there's a point of no return, specifically diy or similar, ill plan and research and plan and caveat and will tend to sit in a muddle of procrastination rather than absorb the effort/risk of taking a misstep

and maps middle one also

also, calling to make doctors appointments, for some reason. i have three referrals right now for physical therapy, gastroenterologists, audiologists...I just can't pick up the phone and do this

Being alive.

lol I LOVE travel planning. So does my wife. Thinking about and planning trips is one of our favorite activities. It’s part of the whole fun of traveling, imagining a trip into being.

What stresses me out is customer service. I end up doing most of it for my business and every situation is different, billing problems, email problems, some of it stuff I can solve easily, others not so much, but I have a tendency to put off dealing with it, just the idea of it stresses me.

any activity that invokes feelings of duty & responsibility, but devoid of any feeling of love or choice

i've been putting off updating my car registration for, like... a year?

also, laundry. asking people on dates. driving. working alone. shopping.

making doctors' appointments is hard for me too... i'm still needing to get a DEXA scan... and I need to find a new dentist...

god i don't know, a lot of things stress me out.

Driving, easy. Last night I had to spend almost two hours driving on barely lit two-lane roads and it was one of the most tense and unpleasant experiences of my life.

Being "at work" without having any actual work to do is also extremely stressful for me. I spend a lot of my days lately thinking "I don't do shit around here — they're definitely gonna fire me" and then...they don't. I would much rather be overworked than be idle and then submit a timesheet at the end of the week asking to be paid for doing almost nothing, like I was some kind of on-call surgeon or something.

being paid for hardly working has been eating away at me for 3 years now.

1. Being stuck in bureaucratic/IT system/customer helpline loops without any seeming chance of resolution. For example, when I stopped using a gmail account for my Apple ID and changed to an iCloud email - and tried to combine previous long-standing subscriptions, apps purchased etc. I don't think I'd ever have the mental strength to go through it again.

2. Having to allow someone in my apartment for any kind of repair/maintenance work.

ditto making appointments, anything that requires initiating communication with a stranger

My anxiety over making appointments etc over the phone is compounded by voip systems that have a slight lag or bad sound quality, making such calls all the more awkward.

Bureaucratic forms. My brain just freezes and the whole thing will look impossible to me. Idk why, since I had to fill out a multi-inch stack of papers full of subtly tricky questions when I applied for my green card, and I did it all on my own. But I need to do a tax thing asap and as soon as I looked at the instructions/forms it was like I went immediately dumb and couldn’t understand a word of it.

lol I LOVE travel planning. So does my wife. Thinking about and planning trips is one of our favorite activities. It’s part of the whole fun of traveling, imagining a trip into being.

Me too! It's this totally irrational anxiety that takes over after all the planning is done and the closer I get to the day-of. Like, everything is planned, things are packed, bookings made. I'm not even worried about anything going wrong, but it's not until I'm actually in the airport when I finally breathe easy. (And probably catch covid, but I'm not really worried about that, either.)

yeah they make those things impenetrable so that you have to hire an expensive professional to fill it out.

like you look online for a reference to explain the field you're filling out and then that reference has a reference, and it turns into "I'm just gonna figure it out and let tehm tell me i'm wrong"

xpost ever since a hotel I booked for an out of town trip cancelled my reservation without explanation the day of, leaving me with still a hold on my card and being in a situation where booking another took every inch of cash I had left, I fear reading any emails the morning of travel. have weirdly had a great record with flights though.

xpost I heard a story on the radio about doctors/researchers using AI to dumb medical forms down from "average medical student" to "6th grade reading level."

Social interactions with acquaintances, like walking past someone I vaguely know in the street and having to acknowledge them, just this rising panic that I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Or even worse meeting someone I want to impress. For context I've had two decades of teaching now, have presented in front of audiences of hundreds, run training sessions for people massively my senior, present a radio show at least once a month, but that's all fine because I know the script - otoh I have twice this year chickened out of social events with people I only know from the internet because arriving at the venue I felt the start of panic attack at the prospect of introducing myself and basically ran away - happily I have also three times managed to push past this and have had a great time, but I would be lying to myself if I said this was behind me.

group social things are a big one for me. work parties and such. like when people are already kind of standing around each other chatting small talk and i've just walked into the situation. total shutdown for me, i'd rather give myself a paper cut or something.

yeah, feel that. "where's my entry point to the conversation?" type feeling. particularly if you don't know everyone well enough to where interjecting feels comfortable.

remember one time being at a cast party with a cast I'd had a hard time connecting with, and my ex-girlfriend (who'd broken up with me two days earlier), and just kept bouncing from group to group trying to join conversations and getting frozen out, and then I'd sit by myself and people would come over and be like "why are you over here being anti-social" only for me to try and join convos again and once again be frozen out. so I went outside for a half hour and sat criss-cross applesauce under a staircase, finally at peace.

someone from the party who had come outside ran by and saw me and interrogating me "why are you out here?" and I was like WTF you can't let me be in peace out here either?

basically everything mentioned in this thread so far except for maybe driving, but even that I don't really enjoy, but it's mostly stress-free for me at least.

Having to endure people monologing loudly and at length about nothing in particular.

Chaotically busy spaces with crowds of people heading in different directions - there were some shopping areas in Beijing which would instantly get the panic rising, the only ways to get out of the crowd were to go into very brightly lit clothes shops with very loud music and nowhere to sit down, which was no better than the crowd tbh. Have been trying for ages to get my wife to understand how those places make me panic, thankfully don't encounter them in Cambridge or London.

anything requiring phone calls is generally the worst, I almost always end up either forgetting to mention something important or forget or misunderstand something important that was said to me. I always try to go through some form of written communication if I can.

being paid for hardly working has been eating away at me for 3 years now.

― ꙮ (map)

it's so complicated for me, i _like_ working, i feel better when i get to do what i'm paid to do, but i avoid doing it. first off because the work conditions suck - that's why i said "working alone". when i can get someone over to co-work i get so much more done. second off is that even though i love my work, i fucking hate the corporate entity i work for. at this point i would say without reservation that my employer is actively evil. what i'm doing _personally_ isn't evil at all. it's pretty good, actually. it's just that my strategic goals are in service to an evil organization. i mean yes yes yes capitalism etc etc. i don't _blame_ myself for it, it just makes it _really difficult and stressful to do_. i'd be less stressed about working if i wasn't working for an evil organization.

group social things are a big one for me. work parties and such.

I had some level of social anxiety that persisted into my 30s and then at some point it just kinda ... vanished. Like I finally internalized the realization that mostly people aren't thinking about me one way or the other and I can show up and just stand there and not say anything and it's fine, but it's also fine if the conversation is such that I have Things To Say. And also that I just don't care if/whether people leave some event thinking I was a cool guy, a total dork or with no impression of me at all. Basically, the stakes in these situations are in fact very low and it's only insecurities that build them into anything more. Easier to say than do I guess, but I feel so much more relaxed now than I used to. (lol how I feel about ilx too for that matter.)

second off is that even though i love my work, i fucking hate the corporate entity i work for. at this point i would say without reservation that my employer is actively evil.

I work for a health insurance company that does its business in one of America's reddest states. Their policies say more about what they don't cover than what they do. So yeah, I am 100% complicit in harming people. And yet my co-workers are all really nice people! I've met a bunch of them face to face and I liked them!

Getting a haircut. Doesn’t matter now because I’m balding so much that it makes sense for me to use clippers on myself. But back in the day, having a barber ask me what I want and not knowing what I wanted and then getting a bad haircut because of all of that was pretty stressful.

Shopping for nice clothes will just about reduce me to tears I hate it so much.

Social gatherings where I don’t know many people. We’re relatively new to our town so this happens a lot and it’s tempting to just NOPE out of everything, but that wouldn’t be healthy for me or my marriage.