The problem is almost never the problem.

The real problem is the anticipation.

The worrying.

And analyzing.

And expecting.

The constant vigilance.

The problem is the tension, the dis-ease, the restlessness that is caused by the non-stop feedback, the planning, and the constant looking around.

What fucks us up is not what we’re afraid of, but our endless reflecting on it, preparing for it, and dealing with it.

While it’s not even there.

There’s not a single event or situation we can’t handle, something that we’ve seen countless times in the history of mankind.

And yet there’s this constant managing and manipulating, where we’re incessantly taking our emotional and physical temperature and trying to change how we feel.

Life doesn’t need us to do that.

It’s not your job.

The irony, even, is that this kind of spontaneous (very human) fear-mongering, this non-stop sensitivity, often causes what we were so deeply afraid of to begin with.

I meet people all the time who are afraid of a single big event, like losing their minds or suffering a brutal panic attack that will paralyze them forever.

Sometimes they’ve been living in fearful anticipation of that thing for decades.

Decades.

It’s a cycle that is fed by the cycle.

A self-containing system of anxiety release.

Drip.

Drip.

Vigilance.

Sensory confusion.

Discomfort.

Drip.

Drip.

Suppressing it.

Fearing it.

Hating it.

Drip, drip, drip.

Managing it, running away from it, or, eventually, obeying it.

And that might be the saddest of all consequences.

How we fully empower a specific future event, a mere mental image, and lose our autonomy.

How that misunderstanding makes our world smaller and smaller.

How the thing we fear the most gets stronger because we make it so very important, and because we feel so much tension around it, which is caused by our thoughts.

The problem is hardly ever the problem.

It’s the frantic fantasizing about the possible outcome.

The steering away from the feared event (even if it’s not there and hasn’t been there for years and probably will never be there, ever).

It’s the changing of our routines so we might be able to outsmart it.

And the cure is not found in new habits.

The cure is found in understanding.

It’s found in an insight that can happen just like that.

‘I’m trapped in my self-created maze, the one I innocently made up to avoid a specific future I fear, the one I keep on enforcing because my anxiety tells me I should.’

It’s like being afraid of nothing.

And that is very sad.

What if nothing is actually the coolest thing ever?

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(Photo by @justusmenke, for Unsplash)