I can remember once having a conversation with a client who suffered from an array of terrible anxieties in which he told me how hard he found it to either walk or drive across a bridge.
One of the phrases I remember uttering to him in the course of the work we did together was something along the lines of,
Some years later in 2018 when the Viadotto Genova-San Giorgio collapsed I reflected on my misplaced chutzpah.
Of course, I didn’t mean that they literally never fall, just that it’s not very likely, but I still half expected a terse email from him which never came.
Most of the people I work with suffer from anxiety, and I’ve recently been thinking about how we try and deal with it.
One of my most trusted methods is journaling although even that isn’t bulletproof as I discovered recently when I had titled an entry “Avoiding the truth” and then wrote nothing in the space beneath it.
I tried to create a flow diagram to help people understand how to deal with their anxiety having been unable to find an existing example that was neither too complex nor too simplistic.
My version hung on the ability to distinguish between anxiety over which you might have some influence versus that which comes from out of nowhere and is beyond control.
I hypothesize that pushing ourselves to act when we can do something about how we feel will reduce the overall burden, but sketching it out on a piece of paper I found that it required too many different boxes and variables for the space available on the page which made me anxious, so I gave up and put some washing on.
Anxiety came front and centre again later when we were trying to fit a bike into a car and I was reminded of the time we went on holiday with three bikes fitted to the roof rack.
I tried to stifle the terrible anxiety I felt about hitting something and damaging the car, the bikes, and the family, although not necessarily in that order.
Arriving back in Calais I relaxed having managed to get us there and back without disaster but my overconfidence caused me to drive into a car park at the hypermarket forgetting about the height barrier and smashing all of the bikes off the top of the car no more than 30 miles from home.
To really cope with anxiety it is not enough to comfort ourselves with the dubious certainty that the worst won’t actually happen because sometimes it does.
There is a step beyond trying to convince ourselves that bridges don’t fall, planes won’t tumble from the sky, and that we can’t possibly be that sick. It’s the acceptance that they do, they might, and that we could be.
If emotional tranquility exists anywhere it does so in the certain knowledge that literally anything can smash it in an instant. If we can come to terms with that and realise that we’ll survive most things, even when they’re really bad, life becomes a lot more manageable.
I hope that’s calmed you down.
Leave a Reply