self-destruction by Vincent H. '23

warning: mentions of anxiety, panic attacks, heart attacks. please skip this post if you’re not feeling well

ted chiang’s short story understand explores the consequences of superintelligence. in the story’s climax, he introduces the idea of self-destruct commands – since the brain is just a collection of neurons that have no choice but to fire in response to external stimuli as well as to each other, there might be a set of input stimuli that, when perceived, causes the neurons in your brain to fire in a way which destroys you:

“He means the Word: the sentence that, when uttered, would destroy the mind of the listener. Reynolds is claiming that the myth is true, that every mind has such a trigger built in; that for every person, there is a sentence that can reduce him to an idiot, a lunatic, a catatonic.”

1am: i climb onto my bed and try to fall asleep. unfortunately my neighbors are having a lengthy conversation in our suite lounge, and it’s just loud enough that it’s preventing me from falling asleep but not so loud that it warrants me coming out to tell them to be quiet. it doesn’t help that i consumed a large drink at around 11pm, so every thirty minutes or so i have to get up to use the bathroom

at the beginning of january i flew to sf for a job interview. i was pretty nervous for it – it was my first ever in-person job interview (that’s what happens when you go to college during covid) and i was also traveling alone and didn’t really know anyone in the company

moreover, the night before my flight to sf, nfl player damar hamlin collapsed on-field after a cardiac arrest. i’ve always been the kind of person to worry about my health more than i should because of some conditions i went through while growing up and also because i’m worry-prone in general, so when i heard the news i couldn’t stop thinking:

• if damar hamlin, a top-tier athlete many times more fit than me, can have his heart stop working suddenly, the same can happen to me at any time
• if damar hamlin’s collapse didn’t occur in the middle of a football game, surrounded by teammates and medics who were paying attention to him and could administer cpr and heart shocks, he probably wouldn’t have gotten help quickly enough and wouldn’t have made it
• the natural conclusion from the previous two points is that my heart can give way at any moment, and if that happens i probably won’t get help quickly enough

of course all these concerns are silly. it’s extremely unlikely any of these things will affect me anytime soon, and even if they do there’s no sense in worrying about them. that’s beside the point – when you’re anxious you focus on these kinds of scenarios regardless of how absurd they are, and you enter thought cycles where you keep telling yourself that all this is stupid and you should stop thinking about it but you just can’t shake it off, and even if you do manage to focus on something else at some point your mind wanders back again and you can feel yourself beginning to spiral and you think oh shit here we go again and suddenly you have to start all over again and again and again

my trip to sf was mostly fine. specifically it was fine when i was around other people; it was only when i was alone that the thought of if something happens to you now, you’re fucked would creep in, and i would have this dull tension in my abdomen that would persist for hours on end

3am: i still haven’t been able to fall asleep, though at this point my neighbors have all gone to bed and stopped making noise. suddenly i’m acutely aware that i’ve locked the door to my room, and that means if something happens to me at night nobody will be able to reach me for a while and –

i unlock the door. hopefully that makes falling asleep easier

i get back into bed and feel my heart flutter. i’ve had the occasional heart palpitation for a while now and they’re supposed to be harmless, but i begin to panic and my chest tightens and suddenly i’m breathing manually and wondering if i’m about to have a heart attack and i feel the free-fall sensation you get on the descents of rollercoasters and did i ever mention i hate rollercoasters?

i get out of bed and open my laptop to respond to emails and texts since it looks like i’m not going to be falling asleep soon anyway. i consider telling someone what’s happening but nobody is awake, and besides, i don’t have the vocabulary to describe what i’m experiencing. i google what does panic attack feel like and read some articles and it doesn’t exactly line up with my case but i guess it’s close enough

i get back into bed. the worst of the symptoms are behind me, but every half hour or so as i’m about to doze off my chest tightens and i panic and sit up straight, heart racing, and i think please can this night just end already and then i do some breathing exercises to calm down and prepare to sleep again. this repeats for the next two hours

i’ve experienced various self-reinforcing thought loops in the past, but none as destructive as this one. the problem with anxiety about heart problems is that, if your psychosomatic symptoms are similar to mine at least, you tense up your abdomen and end up with a lot of chest tightness, and feeling that only makes you more anxious and if you have enough stress you can actually trigger heart problems yourself even if you’re physically in good shape

during mit admissions blog meetings we sometimes joke about how, despite being extremely unathletic, i’ve written more athletics-tagged posts than any other active blogger. who could’ve guessed that keeping up with athletics would also be my downfall, that news about a football player would end up being the infohazard that threw my brain and body into dysfunction in a way not so different from what ted chiang described (though it is in a much more mild manner, thankfully)

5am: at this point my stomach feels extremely empty because i’ve been awake this whole time and haven’t eaten anything since dinner. normally that would be an unpleasant feeling, but in this case it’s actually a good thing because the empty stomach feeling is stronger than the tight chest feeling, so i’m finally able to relax a bit

dr k used to always say that depression is the past-focused mind and anxiety is the future-focused mind (apparently this is attributed to lao tzu; dr k is just who i first heard it from). i’ve had my share of being fixated on the past or the future, and what i need now is a more reliable way to ground myself in the present

for a while i thought the answer was something along the lines of meditation or breathing or bodily awareness. and it’s true that those things have been a tremendous help to me, but i think i also need to make some more fundamental changes in worldview

6am: it’s starting to get bright outside, and i’m finally able to fall asleep, though not for long since i have to get up around 8am for class

the following day i’m somehow able to pay attention in class despite being stressed and sleep-deprived. and going to class helps a lot – it’s nice to dive into stem and forget about everything else for a bit

i read more about heart problems until i’ve once again convinced myself that occasional heart palpitations are in fact harmless. i decide to reduce my obligations and to not pursue any research for the semester, even though there were some people i was looking forward to working with. i commit to doing more cardio, because it seems like something that would help here and i wasn’t doing enough before anyway

i talk to a friend with more experience than me. we talk about the differences in how we develop anxiety, and then they tell me to see a professional if i still feel bad in a week, or if my issues are making it hard to carry on with my regular life, but otherwise it’s probably fine

it feels strange to say this but i’m not upset at all; i’m actually… a bit happy that my anxiety decided to rear its ugly head now. i’ve known for at least the past few years that i wasn’t managing stress and uncertainty in a healthy manner, and that sooner or later it would all resurface and i would have to figure out how to deal with it properly. this is a pretty low-stakes semester for me (done with graduation requirements,  job search winding down, etc) so there’s really no time better than the present for me to learn how to either solve or live with my problems

in spite of everything, i believe i will figure this one out