This is the eighth installment of my series Philosophical Chats. In this episode, I have a conversation with Marise Timmenga who is a student at the University of Groningen. After discussing my recent post on my anxiety disorder, we thought that we might contribute to social awareness by talking about some of the ingredients of anxiety. We ended up having a quite intense conversation, which I cut down to a podcast of just under an hour. If you feel like skipping bits or want to focus on a specific topic, here is a rough overview:
Introduction 00:00
What anxiety disorder can be like 01:45
The misleading mind-body dualism 06:00
What helped? 08:43
Awareness and the (un)availability of psychological vocabulary 13:20
Social infrastructures: What can others do to help? 15:00
Do you really have to settle it yourself? 16:25
Educating health professionals 17:50
Mental health in academia 22:05
Some ways of sorting it out – and trigger warnings 25:40
Catching tacit beliefs: magical thinking as a crucial ingredient 34:25
What does anxiety do for me? 35:55
The role of guilt, moral judgments, and pessimism 44:22
Magical thinking as self-ascribing agency 48:30
The role of disowned beliefs 50:40
Having anxiety as a way of keeping yourself safe 52:30
Handling Ideas 
Thank you for opening up and talking so openly about this topic.
Having writing anxiety myself I recognize a lot of this as well. It becomes a kind of default setting of oneself in order to relate to the situation, kind of habit that sometimes seems impossible to break free from.
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