For us it's pretty much:
- If you think you're not anxious, you will be
- If you're unsure, go back to step 1
- Even if you have nothing else, you will still be anxious about your own anxiety
It's only called a "disorder" because those gosh-darn neurotypical normies think that anxiety is a bad thing! We use it to protect ourselves by simply not taking any risks whatsoever! What's the harm in avoiding harm? :3c
And hey, false positives are better than false negatives, right? Right?
...:3
Anxiety is a normal part of the human condition*, and it helps keep you from danger. Being anxious that a cave lion is going to get you was, for most of the history of our species, a very good thing. People still get anxious about dangerous situations, whether the danger is "real" (driving in a snow storm) or more "conceptual" (you think this surprise meeting with HR means you're getting canned).
Something that is a normal part of the human condition (grief, anger, anxiety) becomes a disorder when it "gets in the way" of a "major" part of functioning. When my anxiety disorder was un/undertreated, I couldn't cook with the stove, or make phonecalls, or write emails, or stand up for myself, or start transitioning. My experiences at my previous jobs had conditioned me into being so anxious about my weekly meetings with my boss, all I could do for several hours beforehand was freak out, and then the rest of the day was recovering from that. So one day out of the whole week, I was not capable of doing anything, because of a 1 hour meeting.
My sibling has agoraphobia, so they don't go to the movies or the grocery store. They go to the office a few times a week, because they have to, and to band practice, and that's it. It's normal to be nervous visiting a new place, or being at an event with tons of strangers around. But it's a problem when it prevents you from doing errands or having a social life.
In my experience, "normal people" don't over-patholgize by saying [x] is a bad thing. If anything, they dismiss your concerns by saying [x] is normal. Everyone gets anxious! Everyone is sad sometimes! Everyone isn't happy with how they look! You just want an excuse/an easy way out. I'm sure tons of people are telling my sibling that their agoraphobia is "normal," because of covidtimes, but they were like this pre-covid, too, but that's not relevant to people that would want to dismiss their experiences.
*by this I mean that your body/brain is that of a Homo sapiens, and you're living in a human society, with human pressures and problems. This isn't erasing otherkin identities at all, just acknowledging how our current bodies are wired
Hun, what I posted may have been sarcasm, but I'm not at all saying that anxiety isn't a suitable protection mechanism ever. I hinted at this in the post by claiming "false positives are better than false negatives", pointing out the actual disordered part—that being the false positives, not the anxiety itself.
It's an "anxiety disorder" not because you have anxiety, but because "ordered" anxiety would back off when it's not needed, but having an anxiety disorder means you are anxious about things that don't help you to be anxious about.
That is.. a false positive—being anxious about something that you probably shouldn't be. A false negative is when you don't worry about something that you probably should worry about—regardless of whether taking the risk resulted in a good or bad outcome.
I've never seen an abundance of false negatives called an anxiety disorder (it can be typically described as "being reckless", "getting carried away", "disinhibition", etc.), but an abundance of false positives? That's basically what most people think when you say "anxiety disorder", being anxious when you shouldn't be.
That is, it's only a disorder when it causes some sort of unwarranted disruption or distress. When anxiety is simply a protection mechanism that keeps you out of danger, it is working as intended. The actual disorder is only when you have too much anxiety or have anxiety too frequently, to the point where it's no longer just a protection mechanism but a state of unnecessary suffering.
Usually even to the point where you, yourself, recognize that you're more anxious than you should be, and have to (or fail to) push past in it in order to do things that are logically not as risky as the anxiety would suggest. Social anxiety is a big one here, where you know you want to do something socially, but you're anxious about it and can't stop worrying about what might go wrong.
Anyway, I'm sorry if the sarcasm in my post came across too strongly... I didn't mean to say that all anxiety is disordered; just that being in a state of constant anxiety over everything (including the anxiety itself) is a situation that a lot of people find themselves in and sometimes even justify, even if they recognize the harm it causes.
We justify some of our disorders to ourselves even if we recognize them as disorders. It was partially self-deprecating humor, hehe.
For eample, some of our PTSD we recognize we'd be better off if we didn't have, but we don't remove it because we're afraid of what would happen if we lost that protection (for example, if we stopped avoiding humans, humans have a much higher risk of being really mean compared to people who are otherkin or furry in some way). We justify it by saying it protects us more than it hurts us, because we don't know that everything would have been fine (and still don't).
Just like how we justify our own anxiety disorder because we know how emotionally hurt we can get if we mess up and we don't want to take any social risks. That is... for us, false positives are better than false negatives, because false negatives usually end up with us getting very hurt over it.
In other words I already knew all this and didn't intend to imply otherwise with my post.
P.S. now that I've read past the first couple words of your reply, there is one thing I didn't already address: my post wasn't at all written from the perspective of an outsider looking in. I'm not trying to normalize anxiety, just trying to make fun of how we justify the disorder in ourselves. In effect this is a false dilemma because the alternative to worrying too much is not necessarily worrying too little; there's an entire spectrum. Again, sorry if my joke didn't come across that way. If I attached a huge disclaimer to my joke posts then they wouldn't be very good jokes. It was mainly intended to be relatable instead of a statement against anxiety in general.
P.P.S. anxiety isn't specific to humans (or entities inside human brains). Other animals get anxious too; you can see this most obviously in cats and dogs since they're very common pets, but a lot of other animals have it too, certainly most/all mammals if I remember correctly. So you don't need to include a reality check about the host body, I am sure that we are all painfully aware...