The Cure for Anxiety

The source of all anxiety is looking at things you can’t touch. Touch is the cure for anxiety; if you can interact with something, physically move it or speak to it or draw on it, then it ceases to be something that hijacks your amygdala.

That sensation you feel, when you feel anxious? That’s supposed to be a set of chemicals and impulses that help you deal with the problem. It gives you the alertness to find an escape route or the strength to fight or even the social impulse to befriend. But it’s reactive. Something frightens you, and that part of your brain goes “Oh, you seem to have a problem! Here’s a bunch of brain juice that will help you solve it.”

But if you can’t solve it? Then you just keep that feeling, and your brain just keeps pumping in more jitter-juice and you overload. That stuff is meant to come in short bursts.

In the days when we evolved this particular function of our brains, there was no such thing as a non-immediate problem. Our savanna ancestors didn’t think about things like the state of a distant world or a looming proposal at work. The sorts of problems we evolved that response to deal with are all problems that would be dealt with swiftly, and then the panic would recede until it was needed again.

Listen to me. You are not meant to panic all the time. And if you are, it’s not a disorder or a psychological problem. It’s a very expected response to a really terrible behavior that most modern people have adopted, which is paying attention to problems you can’t solve, all the goddamned time.

Look, your brain can’t tell the difference between a tiger and a really realistic video of a tiger, which is why scary movies work on us even though we know they’re movies. So when you look at a picture of a problem that would be really, really concerning if it was happening right in front of you, your brain reacts the same way. But unlike the problem in front of you, you can’t actually respond to the distant one. So it never gets solved, so you never stop panicking. You can’t fight, can’t take flight. You just soak in the jitter-juice.

You need to stop.

I know this is hard. For one, when there’s a tiger in front of you the last thing your brain wants to hear is “just ignore the tiger.” For two, things like “doomscrolling” and other ways we let our lives become flooded with distant fear-generating scenarios are downright addictive for many. And for three, a whole lot of people have figured out that numbers One and Two mean that they can make a lot of money or gain a lot of influence by constantly feeding you this stuff.

But despite all that, you need to do it. You need to stop allowing that stuff to constantly hijack your brain. If you don’t, it’s just anxiety all the time, forever. In order to get rid of anxiety, you need to be able to solve problems. And this is one you can really, truly solve.