Anxiety Contra Anxiety

Friends, I believe I have discovered a brilliant little unscientific method to block anxiety -- that petty pestering creature, a destroyer of many a decent man’s glorious morning or glistening afternoon.

Here, I’ll share it with you for free. 

Say you are like me, unsuspectingly sipping that first cup of Monday morning coffee in the beauty of your California patio, or not, when all at once, you are beset by a random and quite uninvited worry. 

It’s that writing deadline due on Wednesday, which had remained blissfully hidden from the view the entire weekend, that suddenly holds you in full grip, like it held me the other day. 

A triple thump of the heart closes in on the edge of your chest, a rush of hot sweat blushes your cheeks, a whistling breath tightens your throat, and before you know it, your whole body is under siege, your poise irretrievably gone, along with the coffee, splayed on your left lap. 

The writing! You shudder at the writing! 

Black are the days ahead, you think, as black as that Arabian coffee, timely imported via African black markets well before all deadlines. 

But you can beat the enemy at its own game by resorting to the following sly tactics, rooted in a simple paradox: exhort worry with even more worry! At the first rush of original worry, promptly pile on ten thousand new worries, each one more malicious and disastrous than the other! 

For the naturally anxious, morbidly gloomy, and instinctively foreboding like us, this should be an easy matter. Work with the talents mother nature richly bestowed upon you: imagine the worse, to which you are already so generously predisposed. 

What if on top of the writing deadline, say, you were facing three other deadlines (or even five!), also due on the same doomsday as the first one, but a little earlier. What if there was an unexpected blackout, or even worse, a water breakage, or even better, both, along the way? Now you are looking at meeting three to five deadlines, typed in utter darkness, on an old typewriter (mind your typos), undershowered and undersouped -- in the most hateful and dehumanising conditions of utter decaffenation and bedraggledness to boot!

You can always allow yourself to go morbidly further. What if, just before you sat down to write, you realized you had bacterial pneumonia, or even worse, some lethal illness nobody has ever even heard of, much less recovered from, and on top of that there is the news of an encroaching wildfire sweeping away entire communities at a formidable speed, and you need to evacuate within the next hour or half.  

Possibilities are endless, but you get the point. Anxiety needs perspective. What is one tiny deadline to be worked upon in the comfort of your home, surrounded by the sweetness of your family, compared to working on it homeless and wireless, amidst a bitter, doubly waged --  medical and ecological -- war for survival? 

The good news is, you have it in you to give anxiety a perspective, and a black one, too.

The good news is, anxiety might be the only sickness where imagination truly helps, and not in pseudo medical terms either. 

The good news is, anxiety resists the laws of logic and makes the improbable true: match the bad with an even worse, and you’ll get to the good. 

Now, on to the good meeting of that writing deadline.