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CronoDAS comments on Open Thread: October 2009 - Less Wrong
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Hmmm... Yeah, anxiety sucks.
You know, physiologically, fear and excitement are very similar. My Psychology 101 textbook mentioned an experiment in which experimental subjects who met a young woman in a situation where the environment was scary (a narrow bridge over a deep chasm) reported her as being more attractive than subjects who met her in a neutral setting. Many people are afraid of public speaking or otherwise performing before an audience. I'm something of an exception, because I find it exciting instead of scary. Maybe some practice at turning fear into excitement could help? I don't know exactly how to do that, but you could try watching scary movies, or riding roller coasters, or playing games competitively, or something like that.
Also, perhaps another possible way to deal is to not care as much about the outcome? Always look on the bright side of life, and all that. Maybe I've just read too much fiction and played too many video games, but it seems like things usually do tend to work out okay. After all, humanity did survive the Cold War without blowing itself up. I don't know how to do this, but if you think you could try to take a more abstract and less personal perspective on whatever is scaring you, it might help.
<tangent> CronoDAS, are you enjoying being useful in this context? Is it more fun than video games? If so, that's important information. Note it. </tangent>
Well, one way I do nothing is by reading LessWrong and other blogs, and posting comments. I tend to be hesitant to give authoritative advice about dealing with personal issues, as I'm probably more screwed up than average, but I can still make suggestions. I find it hard to imagine myself as a counselor of any kind, though.
As for "better than video games", sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends a lot on the particular video game.
I feel it's a curiosity stopper to think of browsing the Internet as "doing nothing". You learn, you communicate, you help, you signal your expertise. Find better understanding of the gist of your motivation and turn it into a sustainable plan for driving your day-to-day activity (in particular for making some money).
It's not so much "doing nothing" as "something I do for no other reason than it's become part of my standard routine". I think I've become very much driven by habit; I have a tendency to keep playing a video game even after I've decided I don't like it very much and have plenty of others I could be playing.
Sometimes I play through my videogames repeatedly trying to set time records. (OK, I've only really done that once, for a couple weeks.)
To quote a friend of mine, 'it's pointless to doubt yourself. It only reduces what you can do.'
My meta-suggestion is to find things that you enjoy or care about (not the same thing) enough to put effort into handling them them better. Giving advice in general doesn't seem to fall into that category - I don't remember seeing you do it regularly, which is the only measure I really have access to - but you seemed pretty engaged in this case, so there may be an aspect of this situation that you care about more than you would care about a run-of-the-mill situation. If there is, and if you can figure out what it is, you can use that information to find more things of that type, which is likely to be useful - you run into that 'having something to protect' effect.