Yeah, I think we're on the same page. Our general sentiment of "I will remind myself that the situation is not as awful as my anxiety is making me feel" is the same.
I basically want to push back on the idea that saying "fuck it, she's just a girl" is harmful. It might not be, depending.
Right! Depending on what you mean by that, it might not be harmful at all. But I think there's value in being really precise and unambiguous about which things to care less about, because otherwise you might accidentally stop caring about some pretty important things, thoughts being cache-able and all.
Yeah, there's a trade-off though. Simple slogans seem to be much more effective, especially slogans with curse words. At least for my brain.
I started going out with a fantastic girl a couple of weeks ago. Everything is great, except that whenever I've sent her a text message or email requesting something and haven't received a response yet, I experience significant dysphoric anxiety, fearing that her response will be not just "no" but "no and I don't want to date you any more". This is due to brain chemistry or personal history, take your pick—either seems like a possible explanation to me. But there's certainly no evidence supporting the idea that this is likely to happen, nor is the anxiety helping me prevent it or helping me in any other way.
Does anyone have evidence-based advice, or pointers to same, on dealing with this kind of issue? It is the only splotch on what have otherwise been the best two weeks of my life.