I’m an idiot

I’m an idiot. It’s a source of constant amazement how big of an idiot I insist on being.

I’ve been struggling with acute anxiety since I was 16 years old. During that time I’ve learned a number of things about how to keep my anxiety in check. Basically, it’s all about mental discipline. Anxiety floods your mind with unpleasant and unproductive thoughts: Things are ruined, Things are not now ruined but will soon be ruined, You yourself are the source of all manner of inevitable ruination, etc. etc. So it follows that what an anxious person needs to do is to find a way to stop those thoughts from coming, or, if that isn’t possible, to stop them from sticking around or talking so loudly once they do come.

I’ve discovered two very effective ways to accomplish this. The first is cognitive therapy, a type of psychotherapy that teaches you to attend to your automatic anxious thoughts and subject them to scrutiny. It’s like being a scientist observing your own neuroses, and it takes vigilance. You feel a flush of anxiety, you look at what you said to yourself just prior to that flush of anxiety, and then you ask yourself pointed questions about what you said. Did you have the thought, “My wife doesn’t love me anymore?” Well, what evidence do you have for this? Is it true? How can you be sure? If it does turn out to be true, what will be the results? Will you survive? Engaging in this exercise can be hard — at first it’s very hard — but it’s remarkably effective, for it treats anxious thoughts not as conclusions but as insidious propositions. And all propositions should be examined for accuracy.

The second method that helps mitigate my anxiety is meditation — specifically, Zen meditation. Like cognitive therapy, meditation is a discipline, but instead of capturing and scrutinizing thoughts as if they were butterflies to be pinned down meditation teaches you not to cling to your anxious thoughts. But “just sitting” — which is the creed of the Zen tradition I have practiced — you learn not to assign so much weight to the thoughts that come into your head. You learn to think of your brain as a sort of gland, a gland whose nature it is to secrete thoughts. These secretions won’t kill you. They aren’t true or absolute or permanent. They are fleeting things, and you do not need to hold onto them or covet them. Your job, in fact, is to let them come and go, so that you can remain in the present moment.

These two disciplines — cognitive therapy and Zen meditation — have, at various times in my life, helped me immensely. And yet I am an idiot because although I know damned well that they help me immensely, I refuse to do them. It’s so dumb. Time and time again, I rediscover the lesson that my anxiety is not a fait accompli. There are things I can do to help myself, if I would only spend 10 minutes a day — just 10 minutes, that’s all it takes! — doing them. So I do those things. I scrutinize my thoughts, or I sit on a folded pillow and count my breaths. And I feel better.

Then, feeling better, I stop doing those things. I become complacent. Worse, I fall back into behaviors that are self-defeating and anxiety-provoking. For example: drinking coffee. A person like me should not be drinking coffee. Giving me coffee is like giving a squirrel crystal meth. Yet I keep drinking coffee!

Also: drinking to excess. If I go out and have several drinks, I will feel very good in the moment. But when the drunkenness wears off, I will inevitably start obsessing about the things I may or may not have said while I was drunk. I will wake up in the middle of the night in a panic, and lose sleep, and the next day will be ruined. Yet I keep drinking to excess!

And so the neurotic pendulum swings back and forth: self-discipline, stupidity, self-discipline, stupidity, self-discipline, stupidity. Right now I’m in a stupid upswing. May the pendulum swing back soon.