Don’t Let the Terrorist in Your Brain Win: 5 Ways to Battle Anxiety

In the event that I ever accidentally give off the impression that I’ve got life figured out, keep in mind that I spent most of the month of April this year crying, panicking, and wondering how I was going to get through this.  And by “this” I mean nothing.  Nothing was happening to me, and I felt like it was going to kill me.

Let me explain.

Upon facing the reality of a major, giant, earth-moving (or, down here in reality: small) life transition, I underwent a month-long episode of severe anxiety.  And because I had never gone though anything quite like it before, it hit me like a fucking train.  It felt like my brain was on fire and I was trapped in there with it.

You may think I’m being whiny or dramatic, and at times, I agree.  But then I remember my symptoms.

I was sweating on cold days, anti-social (okay, more than usual), I was perpetually unable to catch my breath or slow my heart, sleep became a fantasy I could only (day)dream about, the only thing regular about my poop was that it was regularly diarrhea, and I cried for the first time in 12 years (about 25 times).

I lost my appetite completely.  Two bites of filet mignon looked like 30 pounds of spoiled oatmeal to me.

I lost so much desire for sex that my penis shrunk.  That’s not a joke.  Like it wasn’t permanent, but when a bad episode would hit, it would rapidly descend like, “Nope.  No way dude.  Even I’m not here for you.”

The whole thing was like combining a terminal illness diagnosis, dysentery, and jumping into a cold pool.

But the worst part was that it was so overpowering that I couldn’t feel anything but the anxiety, meaning I couldn’t feel any joy.  I felt nothing about my girlfriend, my dog, I couldn’t laugh.  Happiness became a memory, and the stress of missing out on it made everything a million times worse.

At its worst, anxiety can be truly debilitating, and I wouldn’t wish it on any human being alive (eh, ISIS excluded).

With that said, anxiety is likely coming for a lot of you.  Given our generation’s propensity to avoid adulthood and instead turn to processed carbs, a lot of you will meet your anxiety firsthand when you finally go crashing head first into reality.  So let me help prepare you by first explaining what’s going to happen.

Imagine your brain is a room.  And in that room, you’re relaxing on the couch, watching TV, picking something out of your teeth, minding your business.  And that’s generally what your life is.

And then one day, a naked red demon, with a giant penis bursts into the room with an explosive vest on saying, “HEY YOU FUCKING LOSER IT’S ME AND I’M HERE TO PISS ON YOUR DREAMS.”  He threatens to blow up the room, he smells like someone vomited ball sweat, and he persistently tells you that everything is terrible, it’s only going to get worse, and it’s all your fault.

And because you, you know, weren’t expecting that to happen, you get really freaked out, you believe him, and your room becomes this chaotic, miserable, balls-smelling hellhole.  The demon follows you everywhere you go, and overpowers every experience and possibility with negativity, and dread, and threats to your well being and he just won’t fucking leave no matter how much you want him to.

So in my experience, that’s anxiety. A red-dicked demon terrorist (RDDT) invades your brain, threatens every experience, makes you afraid, and convinces you that everything is terrible.

So yeah, this will suck.  But the good news is that there are ways to wrangle the RDDT, and even make him work for you.

That’s not to say I have a “cure.”  As far as I know, there isn’t a cure short of banging your head against a brick wall over and over until the anxious part of your brain is splattered onto it (also known as Xanax).  But I do have some things that have helped.   So here are the lessons I learned that might help you in dealing with your very own naked demon houseguest.

When your house is first invaded by a naked terrorist demon, your tendency may be to make the same mistake I did, which is to go, “Oh God. You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?  You’re going to stay here forever, and rape me with your giant penis and then stab me in the neck and I’m going to die and it’s somehow all my fault!”

Which, frankly, is pretty rude of you.  Invited or not, off-putting or not, the RDDT is your houseguest, and you should treat him as such.  Invite him inside, make him some tea, ask if he needs to borrow some pants.

Why do this?  Because anxiety is like an internet troll, or a stray cat.  It only really sticks around in earnest if you feed it.  And the best way to feed it is to do what I did–to worry about its existence.

So the best way to properly dismiss your anxiety is to accept it with open arms.  That sounds like some kind of new age, self-help Deepak Chopra bullshit, but it can work.  Accept that the feeling is there and that you have to function with it, and suddenly, your anxiety has lost a lot of its ability to terrorize you.

Don’t let your brain terrorist win.  Deal with him the exact same way this guy dealt with his plane hijacker.

No matter how awful you feel, smile in your terrorist’s face, make him a sandwich, and offer him your nice pillow for when he sleeps on the couch (He won’t sleep.  He’ll just jump in your bed and scream in your ear, but that’s beside the point).

If you let your RDDT get close enough, you’ll be able to see something you couldn’t before.  Just as in that picture, the bomb your terrorist is threatening you with is fake. The knife he holds up to your throat, the AK he wields–they’re all toys. His giant penis is perpetually flaccid and superfluous.

His threats are all empty.

You learn that your anxiety does not have to stop you from living your life.  Once you accept that there is an annoying little shithead threatening to ruin everything, and that you can carry on as normal anyway–that you can still shower, eat breakfast, and do your job with that awful feeling inside–the demon goes from the soul-crushing presence imprisoning your brain to an annoying roommate that you’re stuck with.

2. Listen to Your Guest…Briefly

You can’t completely ignore your houseguest.  After all, anxiety is part of our evolution for a reason.  It’s there to make us worry about whether or not a tiger is following us in the jungle or about whether the lingonberry we just stored in our bearskin crotch cover is poisonous.  It’s there to keep us alive.  These things are a little outdated now that we live in houses and have supermarkets, so our anxiety turns elsewhere.

Still today, anxiety can push us towards a necessary direction.  It drives us to avoid procrastination, to work out, to get good grades.  Anxiety can be really helpful–even necessary in the right dosage.

It becomes a disorder when there is no tiger there and your brain is like “There are 8,000 tigers and they all notice your double-chin and they all agree that you’re fundamentally incapable of taking care of yourself.”  It’s that wrong dosage of anxiety (the penis-shrinking-diarrhea variety) that sucks, but even then, there are things you can take away from it.

90% of your most anxious thoughts might be stupid bullshit like, “BUT WHAT IF MY DOG GETS HIT BY A TRAIN TOMORROW SOMEHOW AND MY PARENTS GET CANCER AND NO ONE REALLY LOVES ME BECAUSE OF MY STUTTER?”  But there can also be bits of truth about yourself, and about what needs to change about your situation, and it’s worth it to take some time to delineate between what’s real and what’s not.

It wasn’t until I did this, and legitimized some of my anxious thoughts that I was able to fully dismiss the others, and realize, “Okay, but the dread of ending up homeless because I’m quiet sometimes is actually bullshit.”

So wait for a moment of relative calm–where you may not feel great, but where it doesn’t feel like the walls are closing in on your life.  Then sit down with your demon, listen to his entire crazy spiel and take notes whenever he’s bringing up actual problems.  Scribble down ideas so that when you get through this, you can try to fix them.  If you do this, congratulations.  You’ve just begun to use anxiety to your advantage.

3.  Debate Your Guest and Win 
Your RDDT is going to try to convince you of the worst things, and his primary way of doing this is to make you over-think your way down a twisted path of logic until you’ve reached your worst possible conclusion.

And how do you debate someone who thinks too much?  By thinking even more.  That seems weird, but over-thinking really isn’t the enemy.  Negativity is.  If you approach over-thinking positively, you can reverse its power, and convince yourself of even the most insane optimism.  You can one-up every stupid negative thought your demon has with the next positive logical conclusion.  Once you get good at this, you can be chillin’ in a death camp like, “Don’t worry, baby girl. We’ll be aight.”

So over-think positively.  Morph your logic like a ball of clay until you become that irritating douche that tries to convince the world that every turd sandwich is a pastrami from Katz’s. Think your way towards that, and you’ve made something that caused anxiety into something that can reduce it.

4.  Live as Normal with Your New Roommate

It’s okay to lose some of the battles against your demon, as long as you win the wars. So yes, sometimes, it’s okay tocurl into a ball and worry, or to take a couple moose tranquilizers and disappear for 12 hours into your bed, or to spend a few hours watching the Guy Fieri eat cornbread stuffed with pepper-mayo to forget about how gross you feel inside…sometimes.

But to win the war, you have to limit the fetal position escapism to when it’s actually necessary.  Limit your surrenders to when life is not merely shitty, but actually unbearable–when you really just need a fucking minute.  Once you can stand again, it’s time to start making progress.  It’s time to go on and live as normal with your new roommate.

The RDDT tries to prevent this.  He ensures that your main instinct is to stare at a wall, and fret, and cry.  So the only way to live normally–to do things that make you happy and productive–is to persevere through that instinct.  In other words, you have to painfully, awkwardly, and unnaturally force yourself into a normal life.

So if you’re not enjoying a typical source of joy, just force yourself to do it anyway.  Talk to your friends anyway.  Rock-climb anyway.  Smile anyway.

If you keep trying, these things can chip away at the anxiety and eventually build into a feeling of not-wanting-to-die-ness.  And when your demon is really wreaking havoc, not-wanting-to-die-ness feels like your brain having ten orgasms at once while eating a grilled cheese.

And once you’re feeling a little better, grit your teeth and try to force productivity.   If you’re productive, you may actively disprove what the RDDT is yelling into your ear (Since it often calls you a lazy, thoughtless, shiftless waste of flesh.  Your terrorist and I have that in common), and that can shut him up for a while.

So if your anxiety is calling you unaccomplished, get work done.  If it’s calling you annoying, maybe stop being one of “those people” on Facebook.  And if it’s calling you a friendless, loner weirdo, maybe stop collecting hair samples of your crush and instead, try talking to another person.

Which brings me to the next step.

5.  Invite Another Houseguest Into Your Room

Part of what makes the RDDT so intimidating is that it’s just you and him in your room.  So invite someone else inside by sharing your problems with them.

Ideally this would be someone you know and relate to, but if you feel like you have no one, don’t be picky.  Saying your problems out loud is like 90% of what works about this, so just find someone.  Talk to a bus driver.  Talk a mute person, and hear to them breathe back at you.  Draw a picture in crayon on a wall and pretend really hard that it’s God.  Just get those feelings off your chest.  This helped me every time I did it.  It was more reliable in improving my mood than orgasms and sugar combined.

People are afraid to do this because it makes them feel weak.  But expressing your vulnerabilities is actually a huge sign of strength.  People who hold everything in, and suffer inside are doing so because they’re too afraid to be vulnerable. That’s weakness.  That’s being a baby.  That’s holding in tears like a little bitch.  On the other hand, the strength it takes to come out and say, “I’m suffering.  Somebody please fucking help.” is some superhero shit.  That’s like your emotional core lifting a car.  Check you the fuck out.

Find someone and be vulnerable.  Bare your soul–and I mean your entire soul.  Show them your soul’s butthole.  Say all of the crazy shit in your head out loud, force yourself to hear how ridiculous your thoughts are, and let yourself feel not entirely alone.

You’ll find that when you let someone else into your room, the demon feels far less frightening.

Perhaps the most important thing is to not give up hope because frankly, you’re not the center of some unique story of despair.  Life just isn’t that interesting, and neither are you.

And just like everyone else, you can overcome a lot more than you think and that includes this tirefire taking place in your skull right now.  There are idiots who are millionaires.  There are bipolar rock stars.  Abe Lincoln was clinically depressed (and you know, fugly).  If you accept that even little unique snowflake you can find hope again and you don’t give up on it, you will eventually find some.

None of this will end the anxiety forever.  You will get through it, and it will return.  But since it’s temporary for now, don’t succumb to it. You can manage it.  You can bear it.  You can stand up and fight your terrorist.

So roll your eyes at your demon’s death threats, snap a selfie with him, and live like normal with the red dick dangling in your face.  I can’t say it will ever leave, but I promise, you will eventually get used to the odor.