Husky Syndrome

Some n=1 college experiences

I recently got this comment on my “Maybe Social Anxiety Is Just You Failing At Mind Control” essay:

Maybe it’s better to have no goals. As in, drop the goal of consciously trying to manage the other person’s mind, and don’t replace it with anything. You are unconsciously attuning yourself to the other person anyway, whatever comes out of you when you’re calm and relaxed is unlikely to be creepy or weird, vulnerability is not gonna turn into the movie Liar, Liar.

I was thinking about that statement. It’s a reasonable point to make, and I think I have an answer to it.

Let’s Talk About Huskies

Huskies are working dogs. Sled dogs. They’re bred to run forty miles through tundra while pulling cargo. They have endless energy and an ironclad conviction that their job is extremely important.

As the Tumblr post goes,

Which brings us to: what happens when you put a husky in a suburban home with nothing to do?

It eats your fucking couch, that’s what.

Anyway

Here’s a thing I noticed in college: I was very, very socially anxious, to the point where I would have tiny panic attacks whenever I’d consider proposing a thing to do even to people I already knew, and any time I wanted to socialize I felt that I needed an excuse to do it. “I’m bored” didn’t cut it; I’d need an explicit invitation and not just that, but I’d need to also have some specific reason I was continuing to be there that wasn’t just “socialize.”

The way I eventually dealt with this was by going to a board game night hosted by a bunch of nerds (self-christened Geek Tower) who I soon became friends with; frequently we would play Magic: the Gathering and I noticed something extremely useful there: I could chill the fuck out in social situations if I was playing a game. Didn’t matter which game, didn’t matter who it was with.

I didn’t understand what was going on at the time, but now in retrospect I do. See, whenever I was in a not-games-playing context, I would default to my standard goal in social situations: “ensure I am coming off well.” This goal— being impossible to either perform with certainty or to meaningfully verify— resulted in me being stressed the fuck out for the whole thing, which is why I never stayed long at parties in college. I’d show up, mill around aimlessly while being worried that I was being weird in some undefined way, and then jet off after my obligatory 20 minutes of partygoing was over.

Once a guy in my college friend group got super drunk and needed a babysitter while he wandered around campus and vomited, and I loved it. I loved having a specific thing to do that wasn’t “marinate in anxiety”. The hilarious bit was that I’m pretty sure the guy felt terrible about ruining my evening but that is false, because with babysitting him as a useful-thing-that-I’m-doing I could actually be normal at the party. It was amazing.

The Husky Situation

The brain is a working dog. It needs a job. When I’d walk into a social situation in my college years, it looked around frantically for instructions: WHAT IS THE TASK? WHAT ARE WE PULLING? WHERE IS THE SLED? And I would have no instructions to give it.

The husky needs something to keep occupied; sitting in a corner is boring and it knows it should be doing something. And since I didn’t give a job, it would invent one: the doomed mind-control task. The psychic equivalent of running around in circles at maximum speed, tearing apart everything in reach, absolutely convinced that this is extremely important work.

And now the house is destroyed. Great job, brain.

When I was playing Magic, husky-brain had a real job: win this game (or at least make interesting plays, pilot this deck competently, don’t miss obvious lines). That’s a task with:

• Clear moment-to-moment decisions

• Verifiable success criteria

• Actual things to think about that aren’t “am I being weird?”

The husky is busy pulling a sled. No time to eat couches. It’s having a great old time!

When I was babysitting drunk guy, same thing: keep this person alive and safe. Crystal clear job. The husky was THRIVING. I was calm, present, even charming. People probably were like “wow, Aaron is so solid and dependable.” Hilarious! What actually happened was I was finally not in a crisis because my brain had something to do besides attempting psychic mind-control and I latched onto this task like a drowning man to a surfboard.

Conclusion

The substitution goals I made up as part of my makeshift anti-social-anxiety protocol are basically there to give your internal husky something to do that isn’t gnaw on the metaphorical table leg. If you can do without them, great; but if you can’t, “say true things, be kind, be just a bit selfish” is a task you can usefully point the internal husky at which should result in it not performing deeply counterproductive anxiogenic behaviors. Which gives you a stable holding pattern until you can get back into your conversational flow state.