YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Like anyone else who suffers from them, I hate anxiety attacks. I'd be very happy if I never had another one again. But sometimes I fear that I'm actually being conditioned through positive reinforcement to have them. And since they're so unpleasant, that's really a horrifying throught.

There are two parts to this: First, I'm apparently physically attractive to women. I don't see anything special when I look in the mirror, but I've heard it many times from many girls, and I figure that's a better objective assessment of my attractiveness than my own abysmal self-esteem and negative self-image.

And a handful of times in my life, having anxiety attacks in the presense of single, attractive women has led to comforting cuddling and subsequently to sex. It hasn't happened super often, but it's happened often enough to notice a pattern. Now, consiously, it's totally not worth it. I'd happily give up sex for the rest of my life if it meant no more anxiety attacks, ever. But I worry that some part of my subconsious makes a connection between anxiety attacks and getting laid, and increases the risk of having one.

I don't even know if conditioning works that way, and then there's the fact that an overwhelming majority of the attacks I've had in my life did not lead to sex. But in any case, I feel like my brain should never, ever be rewarded for being broken. because that can only reinforce its brokenness.

Yeah, I've definitely had an anxiety attack lead to sex before. In fact, that happened earlier today.

It makes me sad to see you describe anxiety as being "broken." It's actually the opposite. I don't know if you know the biology of anxiety attacks, but this is how it was explained to me: an anxiety attack is your brain going into fight-or-flight mode. It's your body going into total survival mode and doing whatever it can to get through a perceived danger. Everyone goes through this in a life-or-death situation. But, for those of us with anxiety, everything is a life-or-death situation. We perceive the world, on a subconscious level, as 100% dangerous. In order to manage our anxiety, we have to suppress our natural survival instincts.

So, really, you're not "broken" at all. Your body is doing EXACTLY what it's supposed to do to keep you safe. You just have to consciously pick and choose what a danger is.

As far as "training" yourself to have anxiety attacks, I don't think that's the case. If you find yourself faking an attack for attention or having attacks out of nowhere because you want to have sex, that might be an issue. But being led into sex by someone comforting you is perfectly natural. Which of course makes me have to whip on the armchair psychology and wonder what your relationship with your mother is like. Because IF (and this is a gigantic if) you ARE having anxiety attacks to attract female attention, it might have to do with that.

tl;dr: Anxiety does not make you "broken," you're probably not being trained to have anxiety attacks, if you think there's a connection, maybe there's a deeper issue there.