I want to focus on self-help because lately I’ve been thinking it’s a bottlekneck when I wanna take something serious in life. I wanna write about self-help books to see if they can help me.
I’m reading this book about anxiety:
Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind
The part im readin is chapter 2 called The Birth of Anxiety. Here’s a paragraph I’m gonna write about:
As a psychiatrist, I learned that anxiety and its close cousin, panic, are both born from fear. As a behavioral neuroscientist, I know that fear’s main evolutionary function is helping us survive. In fact, fear is the oldest survival mechanism we’ve got. Fear teaches us to avoid dangerous situations in the future through a brain process called negative reinforcement.
The first sentence:
As a psychiatrist, I learned that anxiety and its close cousin, panic, are both born from fear.
It seems the author is a psychiatrist. I forgot what those kinds of people do. I think they can prescribe medication for you if you have a mental illness.
The sentence is about the author learning something. He learned something about anxiety and panic. He describes panic as a close cousin to anxiety. I think that means they’re related or connected. Idk what the differnce between related and connected is.
The author says that anxiety and panic are both born from fear. That means if it was written as a logical statement, it would look like this: AND(1,1). When both values are true then the statement is true I think.
Idk what “born from” means like I don’t use those kinds of words to describes concepts daily. I read merriam webster and it said this is what born means:
deriving or resulting from
a partnership born of necessity
I think that means you can’t have anxiety without fear. Like, if you were to find anxiety or panic their source or where they came from would be fear.
Second sentence of the top quote:
As a behavioral neuroscientist, I know that fear’s main evolutionary function is helping us survive.
So fear has an evolutionary function? I didn’t know that there were evolutionary functions. What does it mean if something has an evolutionary function? Fear apparently has other evolutionary functions? Fear has a purpose? If fear had a goal, it would be to help us survive? How?