I’d typically describe myself as an anxious person. It has enough of an affect on my life that I should really talk to a therapist about it.
Anxiety has a lot of different manifestations in my life - one of the more reliably severe instances of anxiety that I have typically gotten is during job interviews. It ends up creating a viscous cycle where I’m anxious about the interview, the anxiety ends up harming my performance, and I become anxious about being anxious about the interview and so on recursively.
At one point, and I don’t know how this happened, I realized that the way to overcome this cycle (at least in job interviews) was to just stop thinking about the results of the interview during the actual interview. Much easier said than done, but while I was interviewing at Reddit that fact kind of clicked. As a result, interviews started taking on a new flavor where instead of being in this dreadful anxiety cycle I was instead just doing a thing - programming or talking about culture and so on. And I do things all the time so who really cares.
It’s worked quite well - I find I do much better in interviews these days and have less (albeit still substantial) anxiety about them.
That revelation made me start to examine why it was that just not thinking about something reduced my anxiety so much. And I realized that, at least for me, I generate a huge amount of anxiety by constantly replaying thoughts or worries in my head. I instinctually assumed that I was replaying those thoughts and worries because I was anxious, but the more I examine it the more I realize that it really is the other way around. I bring a thought up in my head, that thought produces some anxiety, and like a scab that you just can’t stop picking I keep going over it over and over again so the thought is just constantly present, which means the anxiety associated with that thought is constantly present.
Then when I consciously decide to drop the thought, the anxiety (quite quickly actually) fades away. The hard part for me is trying to work my way out of the pattern of constantly bringing the thought up.