Adding to your anxiety

One way to eventually reduce your career and life direction anxiety is to try to become exceedingly more anxious than you are right now. No, really. Go crazy. Up the anti. Crank up the volume. Hit that panic button with a sledge-hammer. WHAM! Swing with both hands. Get yourself worked up into an emotional frenzy. Cut loose. Have a complete meltdown. Savour the moment. Try to temporarily feel the full weight of your desparate sate.

In other words, make a concerted effort to really freak yourself out. It won’t take long. But the overall positive impact on your perspective could be long-lasting.

This dramatic and intense approach isn’t, of course, usually a very good idea. If you are like most people, you need to be encouraged to worry less not more; you need to find time to focus on what is positive and get in the habit of tuning-out what is negative; you also need to turn up what is true and learn to turn down all the anxiety-producing lies.

Chances are very good that you won’t get to the end of your life and say, “If only I had worried more. If only I could go back now and achieve that level of stress that I had always dreamed of. Oh, all those wasted years!”

But desperate times may well require desperate measures.

A word of caution here: If you are already in a very tender emotional state, you might want to try to come up with another solution to deal with your ongoing anxiety: one that won’t initially inspire you to jump off the nearest bridge. Find a method that isn’t going to cause any permanent personal damage – something that works for you.

And for anyone who may be concerned, be assured that in suggesting the “All out anxiety” approach to eventually reducing your level of anxiety, I have no desire to trivialize the clear command in the Bible, “Be anxious for nothing.” No, routine anxiety doesn’t accomplish much of anything, and chronic worry turns out to be a colossal vote of non-confidence from God’s perspective.

Having said that, adding to your anxiety temporarily can bring some much-needed relief and perspective on your present concerns. Getting in touch with the sheer terror of daily existence, for example, can have a surprisingly calming effect.

As I write this, I am taking a brief break from traveling across the North American continent and specifically across the country of Canada. If you have made this journey yourself, you know that there are all sorts of interesting signs to read along the way. “Grow your own dope, plant a man” is one that caught my attention a few hundred miles back. Then there was “Dazed. Doze.Dead” and “La fatigue tue.” They hit you with cheery words of encouragement in both official languages up here in Canada.

Came around a corner the last time I was making this journey, and came across two large trucks that had tragically collided during the night, bursting into a ball of flames. They were still sitting there in the right hand land smoldering as I drove by. My guess is that the guy travelling west fell asleep and drifted into the oncoming lane causing an explosion that could be seen for miles.

And last night, as I was watching TV in my hotel room, I was reminded that galaxies sometimes collide. Unfortunately they occasionally do. If our Milky Way galaxy ever takes a wrong turn while it is travelling at astronomical speeds through the universe (yes, this is a possibility)…let’s just say that all of your personal worries and concerns will instantly come to an end.

The universe is an incredibly dangerous place.

The more you get to know, the more you will understand that the odds of being alive at all and staying alive for very long are not good. It makes much more sense to assume that you are going to win the lottery each and every day of your life.

For me, this helps to put problems in perspective. I woke up this morning with the shocking realization that the universe is still here and I still exist. It is awesome to think that there are also other people out there who also exist and might actually be reading this. The unthinkable has actually happened once again.

So maybe nothing really is impossible with God after all.