These are good days for Madam Anxiety. Her popularity is soaring. Everywhere people are talking about her.
Usually we push her to the margins of consciousness, and then suddenly a crisis arrives, and everyone is full of advice and insights about how to cope with her, how to protect the children, and how one carries on.
Incidentally, anxiety disguised as anger is still anxiety.
There is an enormous miss, in my view, in this fire-fighting mentality. The current events will come and go, but we will remain with this anxiety in its genuinely problematic version — that existential, nagging, faintly humming anxiety. The anxiety that undermines our capacity to decide and extracts from us resources that are too precious, all without our noticing.
So if I genuinely want to help, I want to tell you three things I have learned about anxiety, and perhaps these things should stay with you long after the current threat has passed.
One. First of all, there are very good things in proportionate anxiety.
The child said to his mother: why do you always worry? And his mother looked at him and answered: because you do not.
Anxiety is the emotional mechanism within us that responds to uncertainty. Why do we need an emotional mechanism that responds to uncertainty at all? Because this world is genuinely full of uncertainty and bursting with unknown things.
Because this life is an enormous set of problems you have to solve with minimal information. Anxiety keeps you alert, and it has an even more important function.
Anxiety signals to you, occasionally, that you are doing something wrong.
It does not speak in a clear language, admittedly — which is the whole difficulty.
Two. Anxiety is not a question, so it cannot be answered.
This is where most people lose years. They treat the anxious thought as an enquiry requiring resolution, and set about researching, checking, seeking reassurance. But reassurance is a substance the system metabolises within hours, and then requires again in a slightly larger dose.
Three. The aim is not to feel less. The aim is to act while feeling it.
Anxiety shrinks in proportion to the number of times you have done the thing anyway. Not the number of times you have understood it, or discussed it, or traced its origin. Done it.
Which is unglamorous, and slow, and the only route anybody has ever found.