3 Tricks to Stop a Freakout in its Tracks

First: ask yourself The One Question to Rule Them All.

Welp. It’s time to take my own advice.

My mental health has been on struggle mode lately, for a number of reasons. One is that I hate it when my environment is disrupted. Haaaaaate it. I like things to be clean, calm, and orderly—in fact, I NEED things to be that way. I’m the kind of person who uses interior drawer organizers. The hanging garments in my closet are arranged by length. I label my storage bins. You will never open a cabinet in my house and find a higgledy-piggledy pile of shame.

Which is why it’s shredding my nerves like Slash on his Les Paul that for the past two weeks, my beautiful little oasis of a yard/garden has been transformed into a dig site.

It’s for good reason: we’re putting in a pump system to guard against future flooding of the sort we experienced back in November. But that just means that in addition to the wraparound mud trench and the three-foot high piles of dirt and cinderblocks and the dust and the noise and the dudes thumping back and forth across the deck leaving splotches of drying cement in their wake, the whole raison d'être of this project is activating my general anxiety over the climate crisis that brought us three major water events this fall, and which is surely just getting started.

So there’s that.

And there’s more, but I didn’t come here to whine into your inbox. (Lord knows January is bad enough as it is. How you doin’ out there?)

The point is: I’ve been allowing myself to spin and wallow for a while now, and it’s not good for me. I know it’s not good for me. I’ve written AN ENTIRE BOOK detailing all the ways in which anxiety is the pits and offering simple, effective ways to manage it.

Hence it being time to take my own advice—advice that I hope will help you too, the next time your shit is on struggle mode.

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The One Question to Rule Them All

If there’s one nugget of wisdom in the whole of Calm the Fuck Down that I know will do me a world of good right now, it’s asking and answering one simple question:

Can I control it?

And if the answer is no, I’ve got to let it go.

Believe me, I know that second part is easier said than done. But as someone who craves a sense of order, I find it helpful to distill a problem to its binary essentials: i.e., is this something I have any control over, Yes or No?

If it’s a full-throated YES INDEED, well then, I’d be off to the races. If I knew how to install an underground pump system, I would have done it myself, I would have known exactly how long it was going to take, and I would have managed the fuck out of my own expectations.

But alas, I am neither a plumber nor an electrician. I lack the strength, stamina, and leverage to dix two six-foot deep holes, let alone that wraparound trench. I cannot control this process and therefore—for my own good and to stop my mounting anxiety in its muddy tracks—I have got to find a way to let it go.

Luckily, I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

It’s time to Houdini this shit.

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Sleight of mind

My first line of defense in times of encroaching anxiety is employing a tactic I call “sleight of mind.” Just like sleight of hand enables a magician to perform his thrilling act, sleight of mind is how you can make your worries disappear—at least temporarily, and maybe even for good.

It works on the principle that multi-tasking is a myth, so if you can shift your focus to something else, it’s that much harder to keep worrying about the first thing. (Hey, I said I had a few tricks up my sleeve, not a stack of peer-reviewed science journals.)

For me, anxiety is a state of out-of-control overthinking and overwhelm, and the flipside to that is zooming in and focusing on something I can—you guessed it—control, in order to tune out the rest of the noise.

Here are three tips from Calm the Fuck Down that can help you do just that.