You have no quiet moment.
A knot of worry and stress in your stomach goes with you everywhere. You can't really relax and feel… light.
You know, somewhere at the edge of your consciousness, that this anxiety isn't entirely real. That it's an interpretation, that it's the weight of a thousand dumbbells you loaded onto your own heart, and you're stung when you see how others around you go about the world easily without those weights.
But in your feeling, in your body, that anxiety is completely real. You feel it. Physically.
Let's take a step back and try to look a little more objectively at this lady, anxiety.
Long ago, when we — the human species — were scurrying about in caves, anxiety served us well. Today, in the sophisticated world in which we try to live, work and love, it does us damage, consumes unnecessary resources, and pushes us backwards.
We used to be surrounded by real threats that could kill us. Today, not any more.
Anxiety is an emotional response we have carried since the years when our emotions served their original purpose — to direct our behaviour.
Anxiety was the psychological structure that signalled to us what was safe and what was dangerous.
Take an unexpected example — in the Stone Age, a two-degree drop in temperature was a terrifying sign. The cold season was about to arrive, and we had no air conditioning, no electric heaters, and not even pastel-shaded Scandinavian wool capes to order online.
Once, when the temperature dropped from twenty to eighteen, we had to organise quickly — gather the tribe, give up the cave, and get out of there smartly to warmer regions. We began a race for life and death against the rain.
If we jump back to the present, what I am trying to say is that in most cases the intense anxiety you feel is unnecessary.
It is not an accurate reflection of tangible threats that might kill you.
And it's slightly funny to say this in these hysterical, social-media-saturated 2000s, which try to present you every other day with new things to be afraid of.
And you know deep down that it's nonsense — the economy won't collapse, the earth won't be destroyed in nine years — and the romantic rejection you received yesterday will not cause you a fatal heart attack.
Let's skip to the practical part — what do you do with it?
Generations of professionals labour to help people manage and regulate and gain control over their anxieties, and as I see it, we have managed to identify two key principles common to most cases of successfully coping with anxiety.
Have you got a pen and paper? Write these down:
1] Ultimately, you have to move toward the source of the anxiety, not away from it.
Defeating anxiety means going against our survival instinct, which screams at us whenever we "feel" a sliver of danger — run!
He comes home with a face on. Your heart starts pounding. You wouldn't dream of asking him what happened. You remember that leads to quarrels. You remember how your soul turns over in those quarrels.
So you avoid it. You float quietly about the house and do your own things. You don't communicate with him. Two hours later your partner drifts off to the internet and the danger seems to have passed. For now, at least.
Coping with anxiety is exactly that — coping head on. Looking it in the eye and finding a way to go on behaving in an organised manner.
You can approach it in small hops. You can take preparatory steps, but at the end of the day, you will have to jump straight at the "dangerous" thing.
Only to discover that it didn't kill you.
2] Repeat it. Repeat it. Repeat it.
Have you ever jumped out of a plane? Do you have any idea what happens to your heart rate when the plane door opens and the instructor says, "Right, off you go"?
But suppose you repeat it. And again. And again.
The forty-eighth time you jump out of a plane is fundamentally different from the first.
And you know what I'm talking about. You've been through it yourselves.
The first time you drove. The first time you made a move on someone. The first day at nursery or at school. The first time you spoke in front of an audience.
The first times, your body screamed: "Get me out of here! I don't want to!"
And there were times when you didn't listen to it.
And you did it. You forced yourself to do it again and again.
And you trained your body. You did not obey your emotions. You governed them, until your body said, after twenty-three repetitions: "Actually, it's not that terrible."
And that is perhaps the greyest and driest meaning of the grand expression "summoning courage."
Anxiety is a nuisance, but it isn't a decree of fate. It doesn't have to run the show for you.