first, we make the beast beautiful: A New Story About Anxiety

Try a Think Week. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has one every six months. He extracts himself from his chino-wearing Silicon Valley brethren and heads to a wee cabin on a hill, eliminating all distractions.

But it gets worse, you see. We then try to cope by revving up the angst, don’t we? We use coffee and fast-speak and sugar and staying back at work longer. We grind harder. Try harder. Think harder. We should be able to work our way through this. We think this is what will fire us up out of our funk and get us back on our game. It’s a self-perpetuat

my insomnia bottomed out after almost a year of trying to get by while berating myself relentlessly for not coping better.

And when we veer or we deviate from the truth, anxiety steps in and forcibly tells us ‘Wrong Way Go Back’.

We’re grasping outwards for satisfaction, sense of purpose, and for a solution to our unease. When we really need to be going inwards, where the comfort lies.

‘You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,’ he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You buil

That said, I do have one trick that I play with a bit. It accesses a sneaky portal to the gut. I flip a coin. But before I uncover it, I monitor my emotions to see what I’m hoping the result will be. There it is, my gut decision, peeking through my head clutter. This technique tricks you into thinking some divine intervention

I rise at 6am. Non-negotiable. And drink hot water and lemon. I attend to ablutions. Then I slide straight into sneakers and move. I keep a bucket by my door with one pair of running shoes, one sports bra, one pair of green shorts. Every day (non-negotiable) I put on my one outfit (no room for faffing over what I’ll wear) and get out the door. I’ll

That’s the thing with my important life moments, they always seem to emerge slowly, like a Polaroid picture.

It’s like when I have to motivate myself to do exercise when my inflammation, or my anxiety, flares and it hurts to even think about leaving the house. Gentle movement has been shown to help both. I know this. I have to do the work on this one, despite the pain entailed.