Sonali Gupta - Anxiety: Overcome It and Live Without Fear

For Gagan and Aneira

who are a soothing balm to my anxiety

A note on the client examples

The book has a lot of references to my clients struggles and their inner journeys as they learnt to manage their own anxiety. The word client doesnt do any justice to the therapy relationship. However, I find the term patient very labelling so I made a choice to refer to them as clients throughout the book.

The names, ages and other identifying details about clients have been changed to protect their privacy. References used in the book are from my clinical practice and experience from 2004 to 2020.

Disclaimer

The content and information provided in the book is a primer for all of you as readers to understand your relationship with anxiety. This is in no way a substitute for individual therapy. The techniques mentioned in the book are based on research and my experience, at the same time they may not work for everyone.

OKAY, really speaking, there is a lot to be anxious about so dont worry about picking up this book and looking inside. Youre not alone. You have a right to be anxious. We all are.

But most of the time its not the Big Issues that worry us. Yes, were all concerned about global warming and the unequal society and the rise of political leaders of doubtful intelligence and probity. But sometimes, its just the feeling that youre not doing it right; that youre not maximizing your life; that its all passing you by. All around you, your friends seem to be leading great lives. Everyone you know has moved to Goa and they all live in a big house with a balcao and a luscious garden. Or they are all on vacation, with the sea glittering behind like an accomplished extra. If theyre at home, Ma has just whipped up another batch of some beautiful old recipe that Phuiji handed over on her deathbed. A well-groomed dog is doing his adorable shtick or a cat is behaving with inhuman chic. And you look up from the little screen of your phone and your life is a sad mess. Even the peltophorum in the street outside has decided not to bloom in time for you to combat your best friends roktokorobi pictures.

And the anxiety begins: Why is my life not like theirs?

The answer is simple, of course. Your life is exactly like theirs. Your feed is as much of a lie as theirs. You curate your world and decide what is instafriendly just as much as they do. Your feed is giving someone else the same jitters right now. But when youre not at your best, social media can turn from a way to spend a few minutes looking at all the things other people find exciting into a trigger for doubt and self-hate. Then you discover that the few minutes have turned into a few hours and you havent done what you were supposed to do. Youve been goofing off.

More anxiety.

We Are Social and Hootsuites Global Digital Report for 2019 revealed that world internet users are spending about six hours forty-two minutes online every day. Thats more than one hundred days of online time per user per year. At least half of this time was spent on the phone.

This was news to me but hardly surprising. I would be really startled if that number hasnt spiked during the lockdown. In the old days, people stared at you, stared past you, simply stared. Their gazes were not acquisitive, they were looking because their eyes were open, and their minds were not occupied. This often discomfited the busy, the urban, the sophisticated mindworkers. But today, that gaze has been turned on to a small screen through which flows everything: cat videos, sexual material, friendship requests, food porn, family histories, commercial offers, and sometimes bona fide news. No one can keep track. No one ever could, not since Gutenbergs revolution but no one was ever expected to. But today there seems to be no excuse. Your boss expects you to know what s/he knows; s/he also expects you to have a similar understanding of that knowledge and expects that you will have incorporated that similar understanding into your actions and responses. This is impossible because your processing is completely different from your boss because we are all totally unique. Except were expected not to be. Our uniqueness must be used homoeopathically, in discreet dilutions so that we bring innovation to the table but not personality. Whats not to be anxious?

You turn to the news and you find that the world has turned into a slanging match. Everyone is shouting angrily at someone else. Everyone is saying that if this is not attended to, the apocalypse will happen now. If it is being attended to, the solution is all wrong. Tomorrow, a new issue will come down the pike and that will mean the end of the world as we know it again. And each time the feeling: why dont I care? Or if you care, have I cared enough? Or if you care enough, am I caring too much? And also: what can I do?

Anxiety, chronic anxiety, seems to be the virus in our new software. But this is also because we want so much more from our world. I think of generations who went before us who endured dead-end jobs and did not expect to make charts of what they wanted out of their jobs. They knew what they wanted: the wherewithal to make ends meet, to pay for better lives for their children. They took the needless cruelty of tin-pot dictator bosses; they did repetitive and mindless jobs; they sat in airless offices with slow-moving fans where the toilets were always blocked and they didnt expect better. Its a good thing we do; its a bad thing we do. Because once you ask for creative satisfaction, for a sense of purpose, for some idea of where the job stands in the greater scheme of things, you might be setting yourself up for a disappointment. I dont know how many seats in engineering colleges are filled with young women and men who want to be filmmakers or poets or dancers; but Im guessing its a fair few.

Whats not to be anxious?

Oh sorry, I am writing this in the time of the coronavirus and we dont know if that will be the end of the world as we know it.

What better time to be reading this book?

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There was a time when you wanted your life to be the way it is now. As a child, you looked at how much agency your parents had, what complete control they had over the world. You looked at the freedom of elder siblings and cousins and you thought you would love to be there, to be able to do all that, to think and feel and then put those thoughts and feelings into words and actions and have an influence on the way the world was. If your Dad wanted eggs for breakfast, he got eggs. When your elder brother got a call from a friend, he got dressed and left with barely a cursory word tossed over his shoulder. That would be the life, you think.

I know the feeling.

I have spent all my life in a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen in Bombay. I wanted to be able to live on my own. I dreamed about it. I knew what my pad would look like. I would have real art on the walls. I would have a single divan for all the prurient imaginings an adolescent could think up. I got this dream, in part when I won the Chevening Scholarship for Mid-Career Journalists and went to live in London. One of the perks of the scholarship was keys to a flat in Tottenham Court Road, much to myself. I could finally close the door and be alone.

I found I was lonely.