What To Do With An Anxious Mind
I promise this is a mental health blog, stick with me for a minute.
There’s an old wisdom in stock trading that says the market mostly “ranges”, meaning that even though the price is constantly moving up and down, over a longer time period, it’s often just oscillating between two points. For example, a stock price might go from $10 to $30, then back to $8, then $24, then $10, $33 and back to $24 again. It might take a few years, sometimes even a few decades, to sustainably move out of that ~$10-30 price range. And while there’s no hard numbers for it, conventional trading wisdom estimates that markets range 70-80% of the time and only “trend” (aka moves sustainably in one direction) the remaining 20-30% of the time.
So why am I telling you this?
As someone who’s spent a lifetime dealing with panic attacks and catastrophizing thinking, I’ve come to realize that life is similar to the market: it mostly ranges.
The majority of our days don’t end in disaster or miracles. The doom that our minds constantly predicts rarely comes to pass. But that’s not how an anxious mind lives. It sees danger everywhere. It feels it in every moment. It spends all its waking hours waiting for the sky to fall, then wonders why it can’t fall asleep at night.
And even when good things show up—some success or fortunate turn of events—the anxious mind is so desperate for relief it completely overreacts. It pushes us to overindulge. It uses every moment of relief as an excuse to check all the way out. Then, when life inevitably falls back into the range, it makes us feel twice as bad. It makes life about either a race to the top or a desperate escape from the bottom, even though we spend hardly any time at the extremes.
Instead, most of our life will be spent cycling between okay days and less okay days. Some mornings the mirror will feel kind, and on others it will reflect our failures and self-doubt. Each time, the mind will try to convince us that this is how things will always be, that how we feel now is how we’ll always feel—never mind the decades of evidence supporting the impermanence of all things.
If you’re anything like me, it can start to drive you mad. How the heck do I make it stop? How do I keep my mind from living at the edges? How do I stop chasing peaks and make better use of the middle ground where most of my life exists?
In teaching me how to deal with emotionally immature parents, Dr. Lindsay Gibson taught me a lesson I’ve implemented everywhere, including here: expect things to always be exactly how they’ve always been, then optimize for that reality.
Meaning, if I believe life is like a ranging market, if I know I’ll spend a few months, maybe a few years, in generally the same place—same environment, same impulses, same woundings—what can I do to help myself extract the most goodness from both good and bad days alike so that I am more ready to act when the time finally comes to sustainably move beyond where I am?
For me, the answer is in an old saying I love: when do soldiers train for war? In times of peace.
When do we prepare for life’s extremes—the big changes, the hard losses, the intense grief? In between.
Most of us spend so much energy being surprised by our patterns. We’re deflated when the highs end and devastated when the lows show up—as if we haven’t lived the same cycle a hundred times.
Maybe the way out isn’t in trying to eliminate the swings, but in learning how to let go. Maybe it’s in practicing surrender when we’re at the bottom of the range, and not becoming careless when we’re near the top. Maybe the goal is to build a life that extracts meaning and growth from all the moments that live between our extremes. To find stability within the range.
What if instead of being surprised by the natural rhythm of our life, we optimize for it? What if we start tracking our ranges like a trader tracks price?
What if we refuse to abandon the habits that got us there when things are good—and use that time to strengthen our foundation? What if we write letters to our future self while the sun is shining? What if we schedule the therapy appointments that feel less urgent when we’re well? What if we meal-prep for the weeks when self-care feels like it requires more effort than we have?
And when the dark days do come, when we’re inescapably at the bottom of the range, what if we reject the voice that tells us everything is broken and that things will always be this way? What if we remind ourself where we are in the cycle, and lean on the routine we created? The words we wrote, the relationships we fostered, the safety net we created during lighter days.
Most importantly, what if we stop beating ourself up for life being exactly how it’s meant to be—peaks, valleys, and all the spaces in between? What if we look at each cycle as nothing more than another opportunity to fortify ourselves—a time for preparing to take full advantage when the true breakout finally comes?
I’m still trying to answer these questions for myself, still learning to ride the wave of the anxious mind, but if there’s anything the market has taught me, it’s that the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from escaping our patterns, but from learning how to profit from them.
— Will Watson
More From Me