Fear and Absent Danger

An easy way for me to be unproductive is to hop on Youtube and watch old episodes of the Daily Show. Jon Stewart is a goddamn genius at political satire and I missed his tenure at the helm, so I kinda want to catch up on what I missed…even though I’ve watched each video at least a million times over, but that isn’t the point. Those familiar with his work will know that the Daily Show often uses pretty tongue-in-cheek captions and titles for his segments and sub-segments, as many shows of its mold do as well. However, little did I know that one satirical title would forever change my attitude towards an issue I have faced for as long as I can remember.

I have always had problems with anxiety. I’ve never been “diagnosed” with it, and I honestly don’t quite know if what I experience is what psychologists associate with the term, but it’s been such a normal part of my life that I can’t imagine life without it. I’m immensely anxious in anticipation for anything of even minor importance – music performances, class tests, saying like 3 words in front of an assembly, meeting new people, reuniting with old friends. My stomach does backflips, my chest feels heavy and like something inside it wants to get out, I go in loops of random thought that get worse and worse until I want to run away, I get so nauseous I can’t talk. For the longest time, I believed that there was nothing I could really do about this but “breathe in and out”, and that never really seemed to work. Though my mother always says “it’s all in the mind”, that mantra seemed not to apply to me.

Now, political satire may seem kinda unrelated to my anxiety issues, and that’s because it is. I was watching a random segment when a title popped up on screen that I didn’t really pay attention to at the time – “Fear and Absent Danger”, referring to the Republican fears of a “takeover of Texas” following a standard military training exercise (it’s available on Youtube, I’d highly recommend watching it). I just thought it was funny and moved on, but it was after few more re-watches of that segment that I noticed something.

The anxiety I feel comes about in anticipation of anything for which I don’t have control over the outcome, for any situation with which I am not familiar. My endless thought loops always revolve around possible outcomes of these situations, a never-ending list of what-ifs. However, what I never used to do was examine just how disproportionate my anxiety and fear is when compared to the actual consequences of my actions in these scenarios. Though these situations tend to elicit a fight or flight response in me, I never really stopped to look at what it was that I’m fighting or running away from. I asked myself: What is the worst that can happen? Are the potentially negative outcomes really bad enough to justify me giving them so much of my time and energy? And the answers were clear and simple: nothing, and nope. The last time I messed up during a band performance, nobody even noticed. That class test I don’t want to fail is a tiny part of my education, and a minuscule part of my life as a whole. My fear and my anxiety revolved around perceived, yet absent, dangers that punched well below their weight.

Now that I had realized this, the question then became: What am I gonna do about it? The answer to that one wasn’t – and isn’t – as easy. Of course, every time I feel anxious and nervous and gross ahead of these minor things, I tell myself that I’m overthinking, that the worst case scenario is a 0/10 on a scale of importance. I repeat the mantra of “Fear and Absent Danger” again and again, trying to use it to calm me down and enable me to see things clearly. This has helped me control my anxiety immensely, but there is a limit beyond which I cannot reach. After all, though we humans might consider ourselves to be rational beings, anxiety is a wrestling match with the primeval remnants of the caveman brain, the parts that don’t listen to reason and tell me that my very survival depends upon the outcome of these things.

Nevertheless, the next time I feel the telltale signs of my anxiety come knocking, I’ll remember the words of wise old Mr. Stewart and fight my demons as best I can. And though I don’t see anxiety disappearing from my life any time soon, I really hope I can keep pushing it back one step at a time… after all, I’m on a winning streak, aren’t I?