I’m going to explain my perspective on anxiety and stress. If you’d rather not read all that, feel free to skip to the sections headed “Tips,” or “Resources.”

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Normal amounts of anxiety, like normal amounts of stress, are healthy. They motivate us to do tasks we might otherwise avoid, like checking the bank during a low-income month to make sure we’re not about to overdraw, remembering to lock doors, wash our hands, avoid touching our faces, and keep the 6’ rule in mind.

Anxiety is fear’s cousin. It’s a defense mechanism we’ve retained through evolution because it worked so well to keep us safe that we’re still here 200,000 years later. It’s a misunderstood and sometimes even misguided friend we would not have survived without. To live with it more harmoniously, we need to understand it, and figure out how to make it for, rather than against us.

As is true of everything, too much is a bad thing. Too much anxiety can lead to panic attacks, depression, obsessive-compulsive behaviors and anxiety disorders.

Here is where anxiety goes wrong:

Fear and anxiety work similarly to a radar system. They scan for threats. They alert you when they find one, and then they activate your defense systems by pumping you full of adrenaline and cortisol (the stress hormone) to prepare your body for fight or flight (or freeze, although that’s not so helpful outside Jurrasic Park).

Your dentist injects you with adrenaline, and that’s why your face goes numb and you might have uncontrollable body tremors and tachycardia (a racing heartbeat).

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend cavemen lived alongside dinosaurs. Grog is spit-roasting a mammoth with his wife Matilda. Suddenly, T-Rex sticks his head through the trees. Grog and Matty involuntarily freeze in place. Rex gingerly removes their mammoth from the fire and goes home to Mr. Rex and the little chompers.

Did they go to Trog for trauma therapy afterwards? Maybe. Maybe Grog just cried on Matty’s shoulder.

Probably not. They may not have needed to, because their brains didn’t have fully-developed language capabilities yet. It’s the left cerebral cortex that gets us in trouble, because this is where our complex language centers live. Grog lived in a perpetual state of Zen, which isn’t to say his body didn’t react to danger, only that his brain didn’t make up a story about why. Life was too simple for him to need to. Danger > reaction.

In trying to translate what we experience into terms we can understand, navigate, and survive, our brains analyze and translate our experiences:

That creak was the wind moving the back gate. We go back to sleep.

Or was it someone trying to break in through the patio? We start to feel the physiological effects of anxiety, prepping us to wake up and go find out.

It can go both ways. Maybe the back gate slams and we get that rush of nerves all at once. The brain starts up the story: someone is breaking in! Grab the bat!

Turns out it’s just a fat raccoon in the garbage, but hey, you were ready in case it wasn’t.

This scenario is all too common. How many times a day do you wonder what someone meant by that comment, or that expression, or whether he or she or they really love you, or what people think of your new haircut, or your outfit, or your makeup, or your job performance, your blemishes. Usually, we don’t imagine it’s anything good — but it’s just as possible people want to compliment you, but they’re afraid of you thinking they’re weird.

We over-think. We’ve forgotten how to live in the moment, which is the only place we ever are. If you catch yourself thinking anything beginning with “what if” or “but,” don’t numb those thoughts with Netflix and carbs or alcohol or nicotine. That’s like seeing smoke billow out from under the hood of your car and thinking a drive to Starbucks would be a great stress-reliever.

Do what the thoughts and feelings are there to help you do: Sit down with your fear and anxiety and make a plan. If I lose my job, I will ________. If I get sick, I will ______. If my family gets sick, I will ________. If you come up blank, substitute an answer with, “Make the best decision I can in the moment, like I always have.”

Avoidance is the root of addiction of any kind. We begin to distract ourselves from our problems by doing something else, whether that’s smoking, drinking, or playing video games. It’s okay to have fun and relax, but if your coping mechanisms are harmful, like nicotine and alcohol, and even an excess of gaming that prevents you from spending your time doing activities that add value to your life, like learning and connecting with people, they are addictions you’re forming in order to avoid things you find too unpleasant to face head-on.

I quit smoking six years ago, after smoking for seven in order to deal with a lot of stressors. What you find when you quit is your cravings happen alongside daily routines. Get in the car, light a cigarette, you’ll crave one every time you get in your car.

The parts of our brains that form habits are always paying attention. They automate these habits in order to help us be more efficient. You learn to multitask while driving a car because after enough practice, your brain automates most of the actions involved, leaving more of your attention free to watch the road.

Sometimes you’ll find a cigarette in your hand without meaning to pull one out, because that efficiency-creator needs our conscious attention to direct it if we want to change our habits.

Addictions can make us feel like we did something to deal with our problems. Have a fight with someone? Go out and smoke. But over time, the problem keeps getting worse, because we’re not dealing with it in the moment. We’re trying to avoid the situation, and even how we feel about the situation. Even having big arguments is an automated, habitual reaction to a situation. If you feel, deep down, that this helps you solve the problem, you’ll keep on doing it until you put in a conscious, effortful attempt to change your response.

When you quit an addiction, you have to learn that the only way out is through. You have to go through your cravings, not around them. You have to go through your withdrawal symptoms, not medicate them with nicotine gum and patches past the point they’re intended to help.

You have to go through your negative feelings to resolve them. They exist to tell you something’s wrong. If you don’t take a positive action to solve the problem, even just realizing there’s nothing you can do but accept it, they will keep coming back, like a check engine light, to tell you something is wrong. This is why, in Buddhism, we say, “The obstacle is the path.” Improvement happens when you turn your challenges into opportunities to grow.

Sometimes that means that if you have that argument, instead of leaving and having a smoke, you have to sit down and brave a hard conversation about the problem. But this way, you only have to deal with the situation once. You stop being haunted by it.

If there is no solution, you must remember: now is the only moment we’re ever in. The future doesn’t exist. The future doesn’t “arrive.” You create it with your own choices. If you’re afraid to get sick, you know it’s less likely if you heed proper recommendations to avoid it. If you’re doing that, when you get that anxious thought that starts, “What if—“ you can remind yourself you’re doing everything you can, and anxiety in that case is no longer helpful. Over time, your body will stop reacting so negatively to the thought.

Sometimes all you can change is your own reaction to other people’s choices, to natural disasters, to everything that is outside your control. Learn not to own those things. All you can do is trust yourself to make the best decision possible in each moment. It also helps to practice exposure therapy, so that you can change your habitual thoughts about situations that bother you, thus changing your physical reactions to those thoughts and situations. We know disasters happen. That’s why things like insurance were invented. They seem like terrible anomalies, but they’re actually normal, unavoidable consequences of life. That’s no reason not to take comfort and find happiness in the little things, and in milestones, successes and relationships. It’s all the more reason to seek that happiness out while it lasts and enjoy life to the best of our ability.

To live alongside helpful anxiety, and avoid having it develop into a real problem, you have to find a healthy way to ground yourself, live in this moment, accept situations, and stop over-thinking, no matter what you’re facing.

Tips:

A word on strength: Most people don’t get an education in emotional intelligence unless they seek it out intentionally. As a result, we grow up confused about many things, or live out misinformation learned from similarly misinformed parents.

Maybe you’ve encountered toxic masculinity in your own life. The kind of “masculinity” that assumes anything less than stony-faced self-reliance is weakness, that believes talking about your feelings in any capacity makes you a “sissy.”

This is actually a warping of masculinity itself. People who act out toxic masculinity are confusing survival through negative coping with actual strength and resilience.

We’ve all seen the stereotype of the macho dad who doesn’t want his kid to grow up as a “wimp” and be bullied. Who thinks you can solve any problem with a good punch to the face.

When I see this guy, I think about how you’re not supposed to feed wild animals, because it makes them less self-sufficient in the wild, and exposes them to predation by other animals, or capture and abuse by humans with less benevolent intentions.

What this macho man is really saying when he says, “You have to look out for Number One, because no one else will,” is, “Every time I got hurt emotionally or physically society told me to suck it up and keep quiet, and if I didn’t, I faced more abuse. I can’t trust people, I don’t believe anyone cares about me, and I don’t believe they’ll care about my kids, either, so my kids need to be tougher than I was as a kid.”

He’s passing the same abuse he suffered onto them, but he never realizes it, and the world never changes for the better.

Real strength is understanding that problems have to be talked about and dealt with. Emotions have to be worked through and processed. A refusal to engage with your children or your spouse when their emotions might be overwhelming, negative or upsetting is not strength, it’s just another addiction to running away.

Feelings only hurt or kill when ignoring them causes them to build to unmanageable proportions.

Men commit suicide more often than women because society punishes them for any show of vulnerability — therefore the real strength is in risking ridicule to change society and improve the mental health of men, and the perception that emotions are “womanly” (which also perpetuates harm against women, who are dismissed by everyone from spouses and sons to doctors due to this particular piece of ignorance. Women live longer than men partially because they’re more able to express themselves and ask for help, and are generally more resilient than men because of it).

Onto the other tips:

Box breathing: Breathe in for four seconds. Hold it for four seconds. Breathe out for four seconds. Hold for four seconds. Imagine each breath is drawing a line to create the four sides of a box. Keep doing this until you feel calmer.

It works in two ways: breathing slowly gives your nervous system the signal to switch out of panic mode, and focusing on your breath and the box forces you to stop doing all that mental “storytelling,” which only winds you up further. Without the mental chatter, you can make better decisions and gain some perspective.

Ground yourself: What are three things you can see? What are three things you can hear? What are three things you can taste? Touch? Smell? This works similarly, by taking your attention away from your runaway thoughts and pulling it back to the present moment, where you may find you don’t have as many immediate problems as you thought, and can calm yourself to create a better future with a clearer head.

Learn to meditate: You may think it’s New Age nonsense, but Buddhists were the original psychologists. Roman Stoics based their philosophy on Buddhism. Most of modern-day psychology is based on ancient Buddhist texts and techniques. It isn’t about “manifesting” and levitation. What it’s really about is doing away with confusion, superstition, ignorance and suffering. With “wrong thinking.” It’s about asking yourself what you really know for sure, as truth, as absolute fact.

Do you know for a fact your coworkers don’t like you? Not unless you’ve asked them. It doesn’t make sense to worry about it otherwise. What other people think is none of our business unless they choose to share it with us. If you ask, and they do dislike you, does that matter? Will it hurt your ability to work as a team? Now that you know for sure, you can try to work that out, but don’t let it hurt your feelings. Don’t take it personally. And if you can’t change it, work to accept it.

Buddhism teaches us the skill — and power — of honest inquiry. If we ask ourselves why we do things that aren’t exactly kind, every time it’s going to come back to personal pain. Something we suffered in the past. Something we’re suffering now. Suffering, suffering, suffering. That’s where cruelty comes from. So instead of being angry or hurt, and perpetuating our own pain and suffering, we can be compassionate towards those who try to hurt us and recognize they’re acting from their own pain, in misguided self-defense. We can’t make peace by fighting back and making it worse. Sometimes, we can make peace by recognizing that pain and self-defense, and offering kindness and understanding.

Buddhism also understands that nothing has meaning we don’t give it. Some people are put off by the idea of a “meaningless” life, but here’s the thing: if there was only one meaning to life, what if it limited diversity? What if you couldn’t achieve the meaning of life because you were Black, Hispanic, an amputee, gay, neurodivergent?

We create the meaning of our lives because meaning is individual. The world is a blank slate upon which each living thing paints its own perspective, in its own mind. I believe the only unifying meaning of life should be constant self-improvement, with the aim of being as kind and self-sufficient as possible. Do no harm.

And realize this: if the world outside our heads is a blank canvas with no inherent meaning, sometimes we desperately need to just sit in that silence and allow ourselves to do nothing. Settle into the quiet. Watch your thoughts and emotions come and go like clouds. You’re the sky, unchanging behind them.

Everything else is just the weather.

Resources:

1. How to meditate:

• Sit comfortably, either on the floor, or in a chair with your back as straight as possible. This is just so you don’t fall asleep, although, if you’re tired, and you have time, heed your body’s call to take a nap. Sometimes your stress and anxiety are a result of lack of self-care.

• Close your eyes, or half close them and look at a spot on the floor, with no visual distractions, a few feet in front of you.

• Move your attention to the physical sensations of your breath, either at the end of your nose, or at your belly.

• Without labeling these sensations with words, simply notice them and how they feel. At first, it can help to label your inward breath in your mind as ‘expanding,’ and the outward breath as ‘contracting,’ or simply ‘in’ and ‘out.’

• Meditation is not about stopping your thoughts. They may sometimes still on their own, especially if you practice regularly, but the idea is not to make them stop, as whatever you fight will only fight you back. The idea is to watch them as if they are the weather, without forming any judgments or opinions about them, and without following them down the rabbit hole into “storytelling.”

• Whenever you notice that you’ve wandered off after a thought, bring your attention back to your breath.

This is the practice. It works by giving your mind something to focus on — your breath — without engaging the part that habitually labels everything as ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ You start out with your mind like a pool of muddy water, and the more you pay attention to the feeling of your breath without labeling your experience or allowing your mind to run wild, the more the mud settles at the bottom, leaving you clear and focused, better able to sort objective truth (what is really happening) from subjective opinion and guesswork (what I think about what is happening).

1. Alan Watts on YouTube. Alan Watts (1915 – 1973) was a self-styled “spiritual entertainer.” He was fascinated by, and well-versed in, Eastern philosophy and schools of thought. His lectures are entertaining and thought-provoking.

2. Eckhart Tolle, at eckharttolle.com. Eckhart and his wife, Kim Eng, are currently offering some free content in response to the pandemic. Eckhart has several invaluable books on living in the moment, and goes in-depth, especially in The Power of Now and A New Earth, in regards to some of the nonsense humanity has picked up as a result of over-thinking, and how to change your thinking to improve your life.

3. Ten Percent Happier, by Dan Harris. A book, a website (at tenpercent.com), and a mobile app. Dan is also offering free content during the pandemic. If you’d like to try meditation, but are what Dan calls a “fidgety skeptic,” his content is for you.

4. BetterHelp.com. Somewhat expensive, with a $260 upfront fee and costs from $35 to $70/week, but you can message, live chat, video chat or talk on the phone, and have unlimited access to your counselor for the fee.

5. 211.org can be more helpful than the suicide hotline (1-800-273-8255), as the hotline may direct you to resources, but they can be unreliable, inaccessible, and depend on the volunteer’s knowledge of your area and circumstances.

6. Smiling Mind. At smilingmind.com.au. Designed to help children specifically, but fantastic for adults who might just be starting a mindfulness and meditation practice. They have a mobile app that can be used for people of all ages, tailored to age groups, and some paid content to help adults with mindfulness at work.