Anxiety – The Ties that Bind and Break
Yesterday I was listening to an episode of the Reply All podcast. It’s a podcast about different aspects of the internet, actually pretty cool because you can sorta keep tabs on interesting digital world things going on. So…. anyway, this episode was titled “Anxiety Box.” The show description goes like this, “Sometimes, on his way to work, a feeling of pressure begins thumping in Paul Ford’s chest. His breaths shorten. They speed up. And, sometimes in those moments of extreme anxiety Paul’s phone talks to him. It tells him everything that’s wrong with him.” I had clicked on this episode arbitrarily, I hadn’t read the description, but it turns out that Paul created a program called Anxiety Box … stay with us to find out what this is and a sure fire way to break that tie that binds.
Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee and I’m excited about for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. The power of story serves you best when you know how to use it.
So as it turns out, the Anxiety Box is a computer program where you can type in all the things you’re anxious about and your email address, and all day your “anxiety” will send you messages, in the general language of that anxiety voice, to remind you how you’re probably not going to succeed, or live, or get pregnant or whatever you’re feeling anxious about. It sounds like a horrible program, but what it did for him was to dehumanize the voice in his head, the voice of his deep anxieties, and he could see them for the spam that they were.
Now, I bring this up because until I heard his description of what he was going through – about sitting on the couch and feeling like he really had to get on that project, and then the voice saying, “Ya, but you’ll never be able to do it.” And then that sense of overwhelm hits, and then there’s that want to crawl under a blanket and not think about it, or maybe I should subscribe to Netflix…I hadn’t known what that was. My inner voice was calling it “pathetic ineffectiveness,” I explained it to my friends as “hitting a wall,” but once he explained it as anxiety, it suddenly felt more normal, less like a flaw and more like something to be managed. I don’t think of myself as an anxious person, so I could work that through – couldn’t I? The Atlantic magazine calls Anxiety “America’s most common mental illness.” That sounds pretty normal.
For the last three months, I’ve had a list of things that need to be done on this podcast that I am completely inexperienced in. I’m having to learn, every step of the way, how to do each and every little thing, like setting up email campaigns for my listeners, collecting email addresses to start the community, effective social media marketing – not just regular social media marketing – no, effective social media marketing, integration with programs like lead pages, Aweber, lead magnet construction, and what feels like a hundred other detours along each route. While you guys out there that know how to do all of this are thinking, “What’s the big deal?” for those of us who don’t know how to do all of this there is deep anxiety around figuring it out. In my case, it’s three months of staring at this list – there are actually about five lists now. I just keep making new lists of things that should be done. Now really, I’ve been watching how-to videos and listening to the more experienced folks who have done this, and then… freezing up. My partner and I have been pushing the items on this list back and forth to each other…. Neither of us knows how to do them.
A few days ago I was talking to my son. I told him that I wished he knew how...
