In our current COVID climate, it’s easy to see a heightened sense of anxiety all around us. Anxiety is a terrible condition to live with and through necessity I’ve found it really helps if you can understand it and develop some tools that can assist in its management.
Anxiety and fear are mostly caused by our perception of what may or may not happen in the future. Most of us don’t like change or uncertainty and with our built in negative bias, we tend to catastrophise the future rather than deal with it when it actually happens. Our 24 hour, mostly negative, news media feeds into and heightens our fears but in reality most of what we see on the news never actually impacts us directly. As Mark Twain famously wrote: ‘I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.’
So how do we separate this perception from our reality and find some peace at the same time? This is where a good metaphor comes to the rescue.
My current favorite is to imagine yourself riding a bike in a bike lane alongside a busy road. The traffic is quite heavy at times but you are actually fine riding in your own lane. You are worried however, that a car might swerve and hit you at some point in the future as you ride along. So because of this you take extra precautions. You ride a little wider off the road where possible, you try not to ride at peak times and you are extra vigilant when the lane narrows. It then dawns on you that until you are actually hit by a car you are completely fine. You are dealing with the dangers to mitigate the risk so you may as well just enjoy the ride. If by chance the worst happens you will deal with that situation then.
I’ve realised this is how life works. We observe the world (the traffic) going on all around us (mostly through the news) and this makes us anxious but in reality very little of what we see directly affects our lives. If it does we usually have the ability to deal with it or have assistance available to help us. The key I’ve found is to separate the perception of the future from the reality of today and its clear to me that the former causes us much more harm than the latter.