A funny thought occurred to me the other day. I had been having a lot of anxiety over the week and was just terrified of so many things that I thought might go wrong. As usual, none of them did. The next time my inner Chicken Little started tweeting my immediate reaction was this:

“Dude no offense but you’re literally ALWAYS WRONG.”

It’s not really self deprecation. It’s just telling Three Finger Joe I want to take Chainsaw Safety Class from someone else.

And honestly, I’ve started thinking that more and more. It’s not that my anxiety went away, per se, it’s just that I’m catching it more often and discrediting it. Once I saw a redditor suggest visualizing their anxiety as a little kid tugging on your shirt wanting to tell you something. You can politely acknowledge the thought but firmly tell it you’re busy and need to focus on other things right now. Which is probably better advice than shit-talking your anxiety’s K/D ratio, but use whatever reframing works best for you.

Is your anxiety as inaccurate as mine? Maybe we should train ourselves to discredit and filter out those thoughts – then we can focus on more helpful ones. Let’s not be self-deprecating, of course, but if your smoke alarm went off every time someone farted you’d probably take the batteries out. That’s all I’m saying. Life is too short to stop, drop and roll every time someone eats Taco Bell.

Additional Resources: Meditation has helped me catch these chicken little spirals way faster, and big shout out to Sam Harris’ Waking Up app for the assist here. It’s got a new guided meditation every day, sends me a notification to remind me to meditate daily, and has great lessons on consciousness, morality, and philosophy as a bonus. Maybe it could help you too.