Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Anxiety Is A Tool, Bubba

Anxiety is a strange little animal. Furry, ugly and quite bizarre in origin and intent.
Just read an article in Time magazine about anxiety. It focused on the potential good effects or uses of anxiety. The point, as far as my tiny brain could interpret, was that if you can teach yourself that dire consequences typically do not follow the things you worry about, anxiety will not consume you.
Richard Lewis, the king of anxiety, performs his stand-up without a fixed script, insisting that he needs his anxiety to make it through his time onstage. "Before I go on, I'm a nervous wreck. But ultimately I feel more comfortable being uncomfortable.  I spend about 30 to 40 hours looking over thousands and thousands of ideas on my computer before a show, and I tell myself to let it go, have some confidence. The anxiety will creep in there really fast, but I eventually embrace it and say enough is enough."
Athletes use anxiety to their benefit. There is a definite relationship between stress and performance and the pros take it to it's peak and then walk away. In other words they don't torture themselves with anxiety, they use it as a tool.
The article caught my attention because anxiety is my most constant companion. I have spent more time with anxiety than I have with Carol.
I can't seem to make the leap from useless worry to a "screw it what's the worst that could happen" attitude. I'm working on it, just not quite there.
I have consulted with Dr. Joe Testa who came up with the diagnosis that I am not comfortable in my own skin because I am living someone else's life, and this causes me relentless anxiety. I respect Dr. Joe, he is knowledgeable and free with the prescription pad, so I believe in his theory. I got off track way back in my childhood and have floundered in the wilderness of lost souls most of my life. I am just recently trying to swim back upstream in attempt to fuse the ethereal me with the physical me.
It's quite a struggle.
One thing that bothered me about the article was the negative physical effects of unfocused anxiety on your health. Weakening the immune system and so on. Makes me wonder why I am not dead. Also makes me think I am pretty invincible if I can survive 42 years of stress and still keep moving.
I have this theory that it will all come home to roost one of these days. I'll wake up one morning with a face like Morley Safer (60 Minutes), boils on my back, a curmudgeonly attitude, stooped over and rapping people on the ankles with my cane.
Deep breathing helps, but at my level of dysfunction I have had to learn how to survive while hyperventilating 73% of the time.
I imagine most of us are anxious. Life ain't no cakewalk, baby. Maybe other people handle it better than me. Maybe not. I see a lot of anxious people every day lovingly clutching their bottled elixir as they walk happily out of The Booze Emporium towards the sanctity of recliner, TV and oblivion.
After 42 years of self imposed stress, those thought patterns get hard wired into your brain. That's why what I am attempting to do now is like trying to dismantle the Empire State Building with a spoon. What I need is a blowtorch, sledgehammer and a fiercely focused laser scalpel.
I laugh sometimes when I realize I am stressed about some meaningless thing, when I think about how often I feel this way, how it creeps in over and over again. I fight it back with logic and breathing (and whiskey when it gets really pernicious) and then, when I am distracted, it is right back there again. Apparently my brain is receptive to illogic and repels logic.
I'll keep chipping away at it. Reading Time magazine, maybe erecting a Richard Lewis shrine in my writing room. He turned anxiety into a pot of gold.
I can respect that while worrying about the odds of my own success.

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