Ishan Shivanand argues that much anxiety is self-generated, and that paranoid thinking transfers power to whatever information source you fear. He traces the same manipulation patterns from cybersecurity threats to everyday worry, showing how doom narratives trap people by making them dependent on the very sources that scare them.
In anxiety, we study, and we've done a lot of work on anxiety. We've used very standardized systems of testing. Even now, we're using the GAD-7 to study anxiety in various nations, demographics. And we've realized a lot of anxiety is imagined, self-imagined, self-inflicted. And anxiety breaks you. Anxiety makes you susceptible to stress. Stress harms you long-term physiologically. And all these things for any personality type that is paranoid, this is a poison telling them again and again that, oh, these planets are out there to get you, or these jadu chuna is out there to get you, or somebody has done some phoom phoom totka to you. You are thinking this is just information. This is not information. This is an attack on your well-being. This is an attack on the vulnerable. Because then they can't let go and they keep on imagining the worst. They keep on doom prophesying. And what do they do? They give all their power. They give all their power to the person who has given them this information that now you help me. And why I know this? Because when we are working in anti-hacking, when we are working with intelligence agencies, we see the same pattern. We see the same pattern.
