Control the Anxiety
You have power over your mind- not outside events.
“When I see an anxious person, I ask myself, what do they want? For if a person wasn’t wanting something outside of their own control, why would they be stricken by anxiety?” - Epictetus
Anxiety (read more here- 1, 2, and 3) has robbed me of a lot- it has taxed my potential and levied a heavy fine on the experiences that would have made my life a story worth telling.
I remember the remorse of that fine during a gathering at Maya’s apartment after a bruising week of night shifts. The room was thick with warmth, smelling of cheap Malbec and someone’s Chanel No. 5, humming with the kind of overlapping laughter that makes you desire to belong. People were having fun. And there she was- standing near the bookshelf- the woman I’d noticed three times before in the hospital cafeteria- her fingers tracing the spine of a Borges collection, dark hair falling across her cheekbone, occupying her space with an ease that suggested she had never doubted her right to exist. For a moment, she was alone, wine glass balanced in one hand, eyes sweeping the room with what looked like mild amusement or mild bored- I couldn’t tell which.
The gap between us was six steps. Maybe seven if I wanted to angle past the coffee table.
All I had to do was cross that distance and say something- anything. “I didn’t take you for a Borges reader” would have worked. Even “Hey” would have been enough. Instead, I stood welded to the floor while my mind staged an elaborate catastrophe. You’ll stumble over the opening line. She’ll smile that practiced, pitying smile people reserve for the socially confused. You’re not that cool to interest her. You’re not clever enough for someone who reads Borges in the original Spanish. I stood there negotiating a peace treaty with my own vanity, weighing the humiliation of failure against the comfort of invisibility. By the time I’d finished litigating my own worthiness, someone else had crossed the gap- some guy in a faded Metallica t-shirt who clearly hadn’t prepared a sonnet or questioned his existential value. He just had momentum. They laughed about something. They left together twenty minutes later. I went home and told myself a story about bad timing, but we both know the truth. Fear had stolen the clothes of prudence. Cowardice wore the mask of discretion.
See, anxiety arrives exactly when you’re about to expand. It walks in when you want to seduce someone you genuinely like, when you need to confront a mentor who’s taking credit for your work, when you’re about to pitch the idea that could change your career. The body tightens. The throat becomes the Sahara. The mind sprints in circles. And here’s the paradox- this response signals that you’re standing at the verge of something important.
Søren Kierkegaard, the melancholic Danish philosopher who wrote extensively about dread while rarely leaving Copenhagen, called this sensation “the dizziness of freedom.” He understood that anxiety is a symptom of the ocean of possibilities available to us rather than illness. For example, a vending machine doesn’t worry about its performance because it has no choices to make. You feel anxiety because you’re standing at the cliff edge of your own potential, staring into the abyss of what could happen, suddenly aware that you are free to succeed and therefore catastrophically free to fail. The vertigo comes from recognizing that your life is not predetermined- that you must choose, and that choosing means abandoning all the other lives you might have lived.
But our imagination- that magnificent, terrible engine- doesn’t stop at reasonable caution. It weaponizes freedom. It takes a moment of genuine uncertainty and metastasizes it into full-scale catastrophe. It conjures a courtroom where you’re already on trial, a jury of strangers who’ve somehow assembled solely to judge your inadequacy. It convinces you that the social world is a panopticon with you at the center, everyone watching with forensic attention, cataloging your failures, measuring your trembling hands against some Platonic ideal of confidence.
This is the ego’s great lie, and Viktor Frankl- the psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz by finding meaning in the most meaningless hell- would have called it ‘hyper-reflection.’ The more you observe yourself, the more you interrupt the natural flow of action. A centipede, asked which leg moves first, becomes paralyzed. When you watch yourself trying to be charming, you cease to be charming. When you monitor your anxiety, you amplify it. Frankl’s answer was ‘de-reflection’- to stop obsessing over your own performance and redirect attention outward, toward the task, toward the other person, toward something that matters more than your ego’s comfort.
The liberating truth, which hits you only when you stop obsessing over yourself, is this- nobody is watching. We move through life convinced we’re protagonists in a grand drama, but to everyone else, we’re background extras, bit players, the blurred figure in someone else’s photograph. They’re too busy worrying about their own mortgage, their own mediocrity, their own messages left on read to critique your trembling voice. Your social failures barely register as a footnote in anyone’s narrative. Embarrassment is just the cost of admission to an interesting life. As the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote while managing an empire, “You have power over your mind- not outside events.” The woman at the party was probably wondering if she seemed interesting enough, if her dress was right, if anyone would notice her standing there alone.
So how do you move when the dizziness strikes? Of course, you don’t wait for divine intervention. The mind- that chittering monkey, as Buddhists call it- will always chatter. The Bhagavad Gita, that ancient conversation between warrior and god on the edge of battle, doesn’t advise Arjuna, one of the main characters, to stop feeling afraid. It tells him to act despite the fear, to fulfill his dharma while his hands shake. The feeling is irrelevant; the action is everything.
You change your relationship with the unknown. Stop treating anxiety as a stop sign and start treating it as weather- as just the atmospheric pressure of a challenging environment, neither good nor bad, simply present. When storm clouds gather, you bring an umbrella rather than canceling your life. The ancient Stoics practiced premeditatio malorum- the premeditation of evils- to rob catastrophe of its power rather than to become pessimists. They imagined the worst outcomes in advance to realize they could survive them. What’s the actual worst case? She says no. She laughs. She walks away. And then what? You continue existing. The sun still rises. Your life proceeds.
You counter the chaos of your mind with strategic preparation. This means building a foundation so you don’t fall through the ceiling when adrenaline floods your system. If you fear conversational silence, you prepare three genuine questions that function as anchors: What brought you to medicine? What’s the last book that changed how you think? What’s the thing you believe that most people don’t? If you fear the confrontation with your boss, you rehearse your opening sentence until it becomes reflex, muscle memory, something your body can execute even when your prefrontal cortex goes offline. You do the cognitive work beforehand so that when your heart rate spikes and your higher brain shuts down, your habits can pilot you through. You trade the anxiety of total improvisation for the studier confidence of ritual. Jazz musicians improvise from thousands of hours of scales, from deep knowledge of chord progressions, from a vocabulary of riffs they’ve internalized. Freedom emerges from structured routine.
Then comes the harder work- the practice of voluntary discomfort. You acclimatize. You enter the arena to expose yourself to the heat, to teach your nervous system that this sensation- this racing heart, this shallow breath, this electric panic- poses no real danger. The neuroscience is clear- your amygdala can’t distinguish between excitement and fear. The physical sensation is identical. The interpretation is everything. You learn that your heart can gallop like a terrified horse and your voice can fracture like thin ice, and yet you can still function, still connect, still say the thing that needs saying. Ask any soldier, any surgeon, any parent holding their child’s hand in the emergency room about courage. It’s the willingness to act while your whole body desires to retreat. Aristotle called it the mean between cowardice and recklessness- managed fear, fear that propels rather than dulls you down.
You start small. You say hello to the barista and endure the three seconds of eye contact. You raise your hand in the meeting even though your palms are sweating. You send the message before you’ve perfected every word. Each small act of exposure teaches your brain that the predicted catastrophe doesn’t materialize. The rejection you feared doesn’t destroy you. The awkwardness you dreaded lasts fifteen seconds, not forever stuck on your forehead. Gradually, through sheer accumulated evidence, your threat-detection system recalibrates. The situations that once felt existential- the parties, the hangouts, the conflicts, the high-stakes conversations- become ordinary ground. You grow acquainted with fear, even friendly with it. You stop viewing your anxiety as a character flaw and start seeing it as resistance in the gym- a weight that, when lifted repeatedly, builds strength.
There’s a Zen teaching about the nature of thought- you’re not the clouds, you’re the sky. The anxiety is weather passing through the vast space of your awareness. It will come, and it will go, and your essential self- the one capable of love, of courage, of connection- remains untouched beneath the turbulence. The woman with the Borges book, the promotion you want, the conversation you’re avoiding- they’re all just weather. And you’re the sky. As Frank Herbert said in dune,
“I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
The question was never “Will I feel anxious?” You will. You’re human, you’re conscious, you’re alive to possibility, and that awareness brings dread as its shadow. The real question is- Who’s in command when the dizziness starts? Will you let the simulation rob you of reality- of the cool and fun in your life? Will you let the imagined tribunal overrule the lived experience?
The next time the gap appears- and it will appear, probably tomorrow, probably in some form you’re not expecting- walk the six steps without negotiation. Say the imperfect thing. Survive the discomfort of being seen. Because the cost of anxiety extends beyond what you don’t get to who you don’t become. Every avoided conversation is a version of yourself left undeveloped, a story untold, a connection unmade. And time, as it turns out, is the one resource that doesn’t wait for you to feel ready.
The gap is always six steps. Walk them. Happy valentines!
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P.P.S: Most people loved the series on How to Deepen Your Friendships, Part I, Part II & Part III. Also check out the practical entries on How To Deal With Toxic People, How to Process & Overcome Grief & How to Prevent and Overcome Burnout. Happy reading!
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I teally liked this. Of course, im going to jave to read it again, and again. It's a revelation, but it also tajes practice.
Stoic philosophy beautifully explains the idea of controlling what is within our power. Interestingly, this mirrors the Indian philosophical concept from the Bhagavad Gita — “कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन” — which teaches that we have control only over our actions, not the outcomes.
Anxiety often arises from attachment to results. Both Stoicism and Indian philosophy suggest detachment (वैराग्य) as a solution — not indifference, but inner steadiness.
Similarly, the Stoic idea of observing thoughts aligns with Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, where the mind’s fluctuations (चित्तवृत्ति) are to be witnessed without identification.
Different civilizations, same timeless wisdom: control the self, not the world.