The dogs won’t stop wrestling on the bed while I’m trying to work. I lose patience and settle one of them downstairs.
There are a lot of bananas in the fruit bowl and this makes me anxious because if there’s one thing I can’t stand more than food waste it’s an overripe banana.
While I work out how many I can reasonably eat in a day and divide all the bananas in the bunch by that number to find out how many ripening days remain my thoughts turn to a presentation I’m doing on anxiety later that day.
In my head, the event begins at 4 pm but something makes me check even though I am usually fastidious in such matters.
To my horror, it’s in my diary for 3 pm.
I glance at my watch.
2.57 pm.
The sudden rush of anxiety and sheer panic is palpable but then I concentrate on the crisis at hand and rush to set up my laptop and microphone simultaneously shooting off an email to the host,
“Sorry, I’ll be 2 minutes late.”
“Anxiety always lives in the future,” I hear myself saying no more than twenty minutes later, and then, “You’re never anxious when you’re doing the thing you were anxious about because you’re too busy doing it.”
When I first qualified I held the impossible belief that a therapist should be able to rise above the issues brought to him by his clients. Later I realised that it is precisely his inability not to that makes him of any use at all.
I run through my twelve best tips for managing anxiety with my audience and to illustrate each offer them an example of my failing to take my own advice.
“Limit your exposure to media,” I tell them.
All week throughout the exciting but somewhat terrifying political farce I have spent too much time scouring Twitter looking for posts confirming anything I have felt the need to believe.
“Accepting that you have no control is also a way of taking control,” I suggest.
After a fraught day and night of sickness last weekend I try hopelessly to see what the dog is eating along with the dewy early morning grass and move her on whenever I feel anxious.
There are so many little mushrooms it seems implausible she won’t inadvertently scoop some up in her mouth and trigger another gastric catastrophe.
My son tells me he’s off to celebrate a friend’s birthday by playing “Pub Golf” which apparently involves downing copious amounts of drink in as few gulps as possible.
I make a mental note to leave my phone on in case the police or hospital need to get hold of me.
What gets me through most effectively though are three other of my suggestions.
Gratitude. The ability to see the best in every day, most powerfully in the almost imperceptible.
An apple pulled from the tree in the park reminded me of doing the same in my garden at home as a child. The same smells and taste of utter freshness and shared with my dogs as they eagerly trot open-mouthed at my side.
Journaling. Writing about what I feel and telling you all whether you like it or not.
Self-compassion. The art, many years in the making, of treating myself with kindness and patience when I am unsettled by even the most ludicrous of stimuli.
The shopping arrives and to my dismay, there is another huge bunch of bananas.
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