one of the most difficult features of anxiety is that it tends to be all-consuming it's squats in the middle of our minds and refuses to let anything else in or through though the anxiety causes us great pain it denies any attempts to be questioned analyzed probed or reconfigured we are both terrified and unable to think beyond our terror our thoughts become low relentless repetitive stymied things returning again and again to the issue of whether the door is locked the accounts were signed off or the social media account is not under attack anxiety dominates over and
excludes any other form of mental activity all that's in our minds is terror but there is one nimble way to try to outwit anxiety and that is with a question that recognizes a fundamental feature of anxiety that it is frequently a smokescreen for something else something beyond what we consciously think is worrying us one of the peculiar facets of our minds is that we may choose to feel anxious rather than to confront things that may yet be more painful or emotionally awkward in our lives it can be easier to fret than to know ourselves properly
so for example we might feel anxious about whether we're gonna get to the airport on time as an escape from the greater challenge of wondering whether this holiday is even worth it or whether our spouse still loves us oh we might get intensely anxious about a financial issue in order to avoid a yet trickier acknowledgement of our confusion at the course of our emotional lives oh we may develop a sexual anxiety as an alternative to thinking about our sense of self-worth and the childhood that destroyed it panic may be invited to shield us for more
profound sources of self-aware agony and yet of course we're always better off getting to the root cause of our troubles rather than filling our minds with diversionary panic and in order to do so we would be wise at points to ask ourselves a simple but possibly highly revealing question if your mind wasn't currently filled with these particular anxious thoughts what might you have to think about right now the question a simple in structure as it is acute indesign is liable to unlock a moment of original insight one answer might go like this I might realize
how sad and lonely I am I might realize how angry I feel towards my partner I might realize how abandoned I feel and that of course is precisely what we should be doing now filling our minds with and processing all the stuff that our anxiety is normally trying to keep at bay certain anxieties can be taken at face value for they do clearly relate to worrying things in the world but there is another class of anxieties and a rather large one at that that is there for no better purpose than to distract us from understanding
important parts of ourselves if we need to suffer and often we will the least we can do is to ensure that we're suffering for the right reasons at points we should trade our anxiety in for something far more important a confrontation with the real ambivalence and complexity of our lives and we should do so thanks to a naively simple question if your mind wasn't currently filled with these particular anxious thoughts what might you have to think about right now our wisdom display cards explore what it really means to be wise and how we can strive
to become more enlightened in our everyday lives you
