Introspection doesn't help.

Social anxiety, depression, hypochondria, etc are quite common in modern society, but I want call them diseases. Not because they shouldn't be treated, but because the label hurts. Being sick requires a visit to specialist, medication and that creates the an atmosphere of something very serious, but tension doesn't help with these. Even if someone can't help by themselves, they shouldn't label themselves with a sick person, but rather someone, who wants to enhance life by acquiring positive attitude and self-regulating skills from a trainer. 

Do I suffer from them? It is a bit complicated, if only because I don't feel like admitting it. Seriously I believe at this point of my life I don't, but there was a time, when I probably would easily be diagnosed with at least one of them. 

I remember a book of a Jewish psychiatrist, who described in it his experience in Nazi's concentration camp. The main idea of this book is, if the life had only a meaning, when everything is great in our lives, than the life would have no meaning at all, so every suffering we endure in our life has also a meaning. He supported his thesis with histories of prisoners, who at one day stopped seeing any meaning in their suffering and without one they were unable to live further and without any particular reason died. If you have any problem with your life, don't feel like you are worse than anyone else. Every anxiety attack, every moment of sadness you suffer is as important as the moments of happiness. You don't even have to know the meaning of your life, as long as you remember, that every moment has the same value. The book is called "Man's Search for Meaning. An Introduction to Logotherapy" by Viktor Frankl. 

If you ever played any board game like Chess or Go, than you definitely know, that there is optimal amount of time (depending on your skill), you should use before taking another move. If take too much time, you won't necessary make a better move, but actually you will start too make even worse moves. Probably poker players know it even better, when they outguess themselves to take a certain action, just to find out, that their first thought was the best. Psychologists did some research about how well, we can understand our motivation. There are two experiments I heard about, that kind of prove it. In one they asked people who were in relationship, why they love their partner, but they asked them in two different ways. One was very straightforward without very much time for answer, but in the second they gave them a lot of time and ordered to think about their relationship. I believe the number of different reasons were considered, but I may be wrong about the details. Than they waited, and after some time, they revisited people to check if they were in the same relationship. What was the outcome? It happens, that the quick answers were quite well correlated with the time their relationship lasted (means less reasons, less time), but there was no correlation in the second group. What does it mean? I means, that when they had more time to think about their life, they didn't necessary come to a better conclusion. In similar experiment, people were given one of two paintings, one they chose by themselves. Two groups were divided similar as above and after some time, they were asked, how much they liked their painting. The experiment showed similar results. People who had less time to choose, were happier about their choice than those who had much more time. 

What has the meaning of life to do with our ability to make a correct decision? Here we get to the subject. Introspection doesn't help. If you constantly think about your life and what's the point of doing this or that, you outguess yourself in the same way, when making a more straightforward decision about what shoes you should buy. Have you ever tried to think about every breath you take? How strange it becomes after couple a minutes. How scared you become, that you may just not take another one. People are smart creatures and many skills are there in your brain waiting too pop, but if you do it in hard way, than they remain unused. If I thinking about myself and my actions all the time, I deliberately divide the world into two pieces: me and the rest of the world and it is so huge and hard to understand, how can I be not frightened, how can I be important in it? Well you are already a part of it, so you are as important as any other. 

Nice ideas, but they are still introspective. I propose an exercise to let our subconscious skills to work. Whenever you start to think about yourself or part of your body, stop immediately and imagine yourself, or if it is too hard, someone else, that looks he same and had the same life, and then in your imagination try to see, what the person will do or say. Viktor Frankl proposed something similar, imagine yourself as if you already had your life and now you are living for the second time.