Is approach anxiety associated with regular anxiety?

frogma · 2012-10-06T21:22:36+00:00

It depends on the anxiety, but yeah, usually if you have anxiety, it's gonna spike when you're talking to strangers in general. It'll spike even more when you're talking to a girl you're attracted to.

I'd say "approach anxiety" is definitely a result of general anxiety -- I'd also say approach anxiety exists in some form for almost everyone. Even some of the best public speakers will still admit that they get nervous before/during a speech. The only exception I've seen is Ron White in his AMA, where he said it's never been an issue for him. But he's Ron White, so he doesn't really count.

EricDisco · 2012-10-06T23:16:00+00:00

Generalized anxiety is different than approach anxiety, but people who experience one are more likely to experience the other.

Generalized anxiety is when you start to feel anxiety for no particularly reason at all. You're in your kitchen fixing a sandwich and you start to feel anxiety. What usually accompanies that feeling are negative thoughts. Your mind looks for thoughts to attach to that negative feeling. You may start to think about something in your life that unsettles you. "I wonder if my friends think I'm weird when I approach women with them around. Are they turned off by it? Do they think I do it too much?"

Approach anxiety is a very specific occurrence that happens only when you're about to approach a woman. This may seem obvious, but that's part of what makes it so difficult to tackle. You're sitting in your bedroom and you read a great opener. You feel confident about it and think that a woman would love it. But then once you're in front of a woman, you start to feel those feelings. Negative thoughts are triggered. ("She looks like she doesn't want to be talked to.")

Getting social rejections can increase your overall tension and thus increase the occurrence of generalized anxiety in the short term. But if you do a lot of approaching and you become more confident, your generalized anxiety in life will tend to be lower. You don't worry so much about what people think.

The other link between the two is that when you have bad social interactions, you tend to ruminate. Every guy who has approach anxiety thinks about his social interactions A LOT afterward. It's like worry in reverse. You may remember an incident hours or days later. Even weeks, months, or years later you may still remember an incident. I would still not label this as generalized anxiety. This to me is social/approach anxiety because it's triggered by remembering a specific social event.

Louis_DM1 · 2012-10-07T00:28:51+00:00

They may be correlated, but I think approach anxiety is associated more closely with insecurity, fear of uncertainty and rejection, and low-self esteem, among others.

Title	Is approach anxiety associated with regular anxiety?
Author	TBizzcuit
Upvotes	4
Comments	3
Date	October 6, 2012 8:34 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/seduction
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/seduction/comments/1121pb/is_approach_anxiety_associated_with_regular/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/seduction/is-approach-anxiety-associated-with-regular.1340667 https://theredarchive.com/post/1340667

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