Building a Non-Anxious Life

by John Delony

Anxiety isn’t the problem. Anxiety is just the alarm system letting people know things are off the rails. People have created very anxious lives, and their bodies are trying to get their attention.”

Your body senses you are alone and disconnected from your friends, family, community, or tribe. You are lonely and on your own. Your body senses you are unsafe, or a place, a person, or a group of people is unsafe. Your body recognizes it is unhealthy, overstimulated, sleep-deprived, or struggling with relational and physical boundaries, trauma, illness, drug-use, hormone dysregulation, or other health or healing concerns. Your body understands you don’t have autonomy in your life (due to a relationship or your environment, for example). Someone or something else is making decisions about how you will live your life.

Thus anxiety can become a habit.

Don’t miss how profound this is. Your alarms, according to Dr. Brewer, turn into a feedback loop of “trigger – behavior – reward.”17 Before long, anxiety can become your default setting. Here’s an example:

that “if things aren’t perfect, they aren’t any good.” Many of us have been there: believing or behaving like everything is ruined if anybody makes one mistake. I’ve walked off a stage to a standing ovation and had one individual in the book-signing line tell me they didn’t like my talk . . . and I didn’t sleep that night. I zeroed in on the critic and totally disregarded the thousands of people who loved our time together. Anytime we are toggling between what’s going to happen and how we can make it perfect—or between the curated images on social media and magazine covers—the nagging, prickly shame that accompanies it is actually our body sounding an alarm, informing us that we’re a failure. And in those times when we do hit a perfect homerun? The alarms quickly direct us to someone who has already done it before—or better. That person who has made more money, has fewer wrinkles, has a more romantic husband, or is a better parent. In this state of mind, our bodies are quick to whisper that we’re no good, we’ve never been good, and we’re never going to be good. And sometimes, when you’re conscious enough to avoid manic actions and ruminations, you find yourself quiet and tranquil. It is here that you are honest with yourself about the chasm between what you wanted your life to look like and what it truly looks like in reality. This is often heartbreaking and sad, its own form of grief.

grief is the gap between what you hoped would happen, or how you thought things would be, and what actually happened. When your body detects the gap, it feels your world is not as it should be, so it sounds the alarms.

The alarms can sound when your world

explodes and when you’re left picking up the pieces. Grief is accepting reality. Sitting in it. Owning it. No matter how dark and scary reality is.

Make no mistake: Grief is dreadful and uncomfortable. So much so that our bodies try to work around it with actions and movement and overthinking, as I said above. We deny it. We work more hours. We write another grant or paper for publication. We live at the g...

Choosing reality is owning that your kids didn’t make you raise your voice. They don’t have that kind of power. You were unprepared, tired, stressed, and impatient—and you took it out on them.

Enlightenment reductionism: You can best know about something by taking it apart, down to its smallest pieces, and studying those individual parts. Truth is found in the pieces, not in how they all work together. In this way of learning, water isn’t the life-force of all living things and also a powerful destructive force; it is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.

Anger and fear are part cortisol, part norepinephrine,

You have to step into new relationships and grieve old ones.

You have to incorporate exercise and movement into each day. You may need a therapist. You certainly need some blood work. You have to choose to believe you’re worth being well.

Memento mori. Remember you will die.

Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. . .

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

You’re worthy of being loved. You’re enough. You always will be. AND you cannot do it on your own.

Ask Yourself: Look at your calendar and your budget and ask: What do I worship? My car? My home? My body? Beauty? God? The news? Social media? What gets the lion’s share of my time, attention, and resources? What do I believe about submitting to God or a higher power? What are ways I can improve my relationship with God or a higher power? In what ways am I not ready or willing to do so just yet?