Calm the Fuck Down

by Sarah Knight

  I call it the NoWorries Method. It’s based on the same concept that anchors all of my work—“ mental decluttering”—and it has two steps:

  Step 1: Calm the fuck down

  Step 2: Deal with it

  Sounds promising, no?

  Or does it sound overly reductive and like it couldn’t possibly help you in any way? I hear that, but “overly reductive yet extremely helpful” is kind of my thing, so maybe give it another page or two before you decide.

  For now, let’s circle back to those questions you already admitted you can’t stop asking yourself:

  What if X happens?

  What if Y goes wrong?

  What if Z doesn’t turn out like I want/need/expect it to?

  The “X” you’re worried about could be anything from getting your period on a first date to the untimely death of a loved one. “Y” could be your dissertation defense or the landing gear on your connecting flight to Milwaukee. “Z” might be a job interview, a driving test, or the rather large wager you placed on the latest Royal baby name. (It’s a four-thousand-pound shame they didn’t go with Gary, I know.)

  In the end, it doesn’t matter precisely what your what-ifs are—only that they exist and they’re occupying some/a lot/too much of your mental space on any given day, unraveling your metaphorical sweater bit by bit. You would therefore do well to note the following:

  Lesson #4: A bunch of this shit is unlikely to happen at all.

  Lesson #5: You can prevent some of it and mitigate the effects of some of the rest.

  Lesson #6: Some of it is and has always been completely out of your hands and locked in the steely grip of Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II. You need to take your licks, learn the lesson, and let this one go.

  And hey, no judgments. I’m right there with you (hence the hard-won qualifications to have written this book).

  For most of my life, I’ve been a champion worrier. What-ifs swirl inside my skull like minnows on a meth bender. I fret about shit that hasn’t happened. I obsess over shit that may or may not happen. And when shit does happen, I possess an astounding capacity for freaking out about it.

  But over the last few years I’ve found ways to keep that stuff to a minimum. I’m not completely worry-free, but I have become less anxious and am no longer, shall we say, paralyzed by dread and/or driven to the brink of madness by unmet expectations and a boiling sense of injustice. It’s an improvement.

  I’m amazed at how good it feels and how much I’ve been able to accomplish with a relatively simple change in mind-set—accepting the shit I can’t control—which allows me to focus on dealing with the shit I can control, leaving me better equipped to make decisions and solve problems both in the moment and after the fact.

  And even to prevent some of them from happening in the first place. Nifty!

  I’ve learned how to stop dwelling on unlikely outcomes in favor of acting to create more likely ones. How to plow forward rather than agonize backward. And crucially, how to separate my anxiety about what might occur from the act of handling it when it does occur.

  You can learn to do all of that too. Calm the Fuck Down will help you—

  Stop freaking out about shit you can’t control.

  AND

  Enable yourself to make rational decisions.

  SO YOU CAN

  Solve problems instead of making them worse.

  Here’s what that process looked like for me during the last few years, and a little taste of how it can work for you.

  I can’t deal with this shit. (Or can I?)

  The beginnings of my change in mind-set happened to coincide with a change of location when my husband and I moved from bustling Brooklyn, New York, to a tranquil fishing village on the north coast of the Dominican Republic.

  I know, shut the fuck up, right? But I swear this isn’t a story about idyllic, sun-drenched days full of coco locos and aquamarine vistas. I do enjoy those, but the primary benefit of living where I do is that it has forced me—like, aquamarine waterboarded me—to calm down.

  During the previous sixteen years in New York, I’d had a lot going on: I climbed the corporate ladder; planned and executed a wedding; bought real estate; and orchestrated the aforementioned move to the Dominican Republic. I was always good at getting shit done, yes, but I was not especially calm while doing it.*

  And when anything happened to alter the course of my carefully cultivated expectations—well, fughetaboutit.

  You might think that a high-functioning, high-achieving, highly organized person would be able to adjust if the situation demanded it. But back then, I couldn’t deviate from the plan without experiencing a major freakout—such as when a downpour on the day of my husband’s thirtieth-birthday picnic sent me into a fit of Goodbye, cruel world!

  In those days I had a tendency to melt down faster than a half pound of raclette at a bougie Brooklyn dinner party—making all of the shit I had to do far more difficult and anxiety-inducing than it needed to be. Two steps forward, one step back. All. The. Damn. Time.

  Something had to give; but I didn’t know what, or how to give it.

  Which brings us to that tranquil fishing village on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Three years ago I moved to a place where you might as well abandon planning altogether. Here, the tropical weather shifts faster than the Real Housewives’ loyalties; stores close for unspecified periods of time on random days of the week; and the guy who is due to fix the roof “mañana” is just as likely to arrive “a week from mañana”—possibly because of thunderstorms, or because he couldn’t buy the materials he needed from the hardware store that is only periodically and inconsistently open.

  Or both. Or neither. Who knows?

  Caribbean life may look seductively slow-paced and groovy when you’ve called in sick from your demanding job to lie on the couch bingeing on chicken soup and HGTV—and in lots of ways it is; I AM NOT COMPLAINING—but it can also be frustrating for those of us who thrive on reliability and structure, or who don’t deal particularly well with the unexpected.

  After a few weeks of hanging out in Hispaniola, I began to realize that if I clung to my old ways in our new life, I would wind up in a perpetual panic about something, because nothing goes according to plan around here. And THAT would negate the entire purpose of having gotten the hell out of New York in the first place.

  So for me, landing in the DR was a shot of exposure therapy with a coconut rum chaser. I’ve been forced to relax and go with the flow, which has done wonders for my attitude and my Xanax supply.

  AGAIN, NOT COMPLAINING.

  But through observation and practice, I’ve also determined that one doesn’t need to uproot to an island in the middle of the Atlantic to calm the fuck down.

  Anyone can do it—including you.

  You just need to shift your mind-set, like I did, to react to problems in a different way. In doing so, you’ll also learn that you actually can prepare for the unexpected, which helps a lot with that whole “one step back” thing.

  How is that possible? Wouldn’t preparing for every potential outcome drive you crazy in a totally different way?

  Well yes, yes it would. But I’m not talking about securing multiple locations for your husband’s thirtieth-birthday party because “what if” it rains; or preparing three different versions of a presentation because “what if” the client seems to be in less of a pie chart and more of a bar graph mood that day; or erecting a complicated system of moats around your property because “what if” your neighbor’s frisky cows get loose someday. That could definitely drive you crazy in a different way. And possibly to bankruptcy.

  I’m talking about preparing mentally.

  That’s what this book helps you do, so that when shit happens, you’ll have the tools to handle it—whoever you are, wherever you live, and whenever things get hairy.

  (Pssst: that’s what we in the biz call “foreshadowing.”)

  A few months ago after a pleasant night out at
a local tiki bar, my husband and I arrived home to an unexpected visitor.

  I had opened our gate and was slowly picking my way across the flagstone path to our deck (it was dark, I was tipsy) when a larger-than-usual leaf caught my eye. It seemed to be not so much fluttering on the breeze as… scuttling on it. A quick beam of my iPhone flashlight confirmed that the presumptive almond leaf was in fact a tarantula the size of a honeydew melon.

  Yup. I’ll give you a moment to recover. Lord knows I needed one.

  Now, assuming you haven’t thrown the book across the room in disgust (or that you have at least picked it back up), may I continue?

  Having previously declared my intention to BURN THE MOTHERFUCKER DOWN if we ever spotted such a creature in our house, I was faced with a quandary. By this time, I had grown fond of my house. And technically, the creature was not in it. Just near it.

  What to do? Stand frozen in place until the thing wandered back to the unknowable depths from whence it came? Sleep with one eye open for eternity? Politely ask the tarantula to skedaddle?

  None of those were realistic options. As it turned out, apart from shouting at my husband to “Pleasecomedealwiththetarantula!” there wasn’t much I could do. We live in the jungle, baby. And no matter how many real estate agents and fellow expats had told us “those guys stay up in the mountains—you’ll never see one,” there was no denying the seven-legged fact that one had found its way to our humble sea-level abode.

  (You read that correctly. This gent was missing one of his furry little limbs—a fact that will become important later in this story.)

  What we did do was this: my husband grabbed a broom and used it to guide the uninvited guest off our property and into the neighbors’ bushes, and I fled into the house muttering “Everything is a tarantula” under my breath until I was safely upstairs and sufficiently drugged to sleep.

  It wasn’t totally calming the fuck down, but it was a step in the right direction.

  The next morning we got up early to go on an all-day, rum-guzzling boat trip with some friends. (I know, I know, shut the fuck up.) I staggered downstairs in a pre-8:00-a.m. haze and as I turned at the landing toward the bottom of the stairs, I saw it.

  Hiding behind the floor-length curtain in the living room was the very same tarantula that had previously been shooed a good hundred feet away from its current position. I knew it was the same one because it had only seven legs. And lest you think I got close enough to count them, I will remind you that this spider was so fucking big you did not have to get close to it to count its legs—with which it had, overnight, crossed an expanse of grass, climbed back up onto the deck, and then CLIMBED AGAIN UP TO THE TERRACE AND SQUEEZED IN BETWEEN THE CRACKS OF OUR SLIDING DOORS TO GET INSIDE THE HOUSE.

  I know what you’re thinking. THIS is when you burn the motherfucker down, right?

  And yes, my instinctive reaction was I can’t deal with this shit.

  But you know what? Upon second viewing, the tarantula was not so bad. Or rather, it was still bad, but I was better.

  If we’d found a spider like that inside our Brooklyn apartment, I would have lit a match right then and there. But now it seemed I’d been trained by all those unpredictable monsoon rains and unreliable roof guys: Expect the unexpected! Nothing goes according to plan! SURPRIIIISE!!!

  From our practice run the night before, I knew it wasn’t going to move very fast or, like, start growling at me. And I had to admit that a honeydew-sized spider operating one leg short was a lot smaller and less nimble than a five-foot-tall person with both her legs intact. (It turns out that exposure therapy is clinically sanctioned for a reason.)

  By activating the logical part of my brain, I was able to one-up that instinctive I can’t deal with this shit with a more productive Okay, well, what are we going to do about this because I have a boat to catch and vast quantities of rum to imbibe. This was no time for hysterics; freaking out was not going to solve the problem.

  Recall, if you would, my jacked-up version of the Serenity Prayer:

  ACKNOWLEDGE what has happened (a tarantula is in my house)

  ACCEPT what you can’t control (tarantulas can get into my house?!?)

  ADDRESS what you can control (get the tarantula out of my house)

  I had officially calmed the fuck down—now it was time to deal with it.

  Fine, it was time for my husband to deal with it. I helped.

  Using an empty plastic pitcher, a broom, a piece of cardboard, and nerves of steel, he trapped the thing humanely and secured it on the dining table while I rounded up sunscreen, towels, portable speakers, and an extra pint of Barceló because last time the boat captain underestimated and really, who wants to hang out on a deserted beach with an infinite supply of coconuts and a finite supply of rum? YOU CAN CONTROL THE RUM.

  Then we drove a mile down the road with our new pal Lucky (ensconced in his plastic jug), released the wayward spider into a vacant lot, and boarded the SS Mama Needs Her Juice.

  So what do my newfound Caribbean calm and tales of tarantulian derring-do have to do with acknowledging, accepting, and addressing your overactive what-ifs, worries, anxiety, and freakouts?

  A fair question.

  In addition to spending many years as a professional worrier, I am currently a professional writer of self-help books, including The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck, Get Your Shit Together, and You Do You. Each has recounted aspects of my personal trek toward becoming a happier and mentally healthier person, combined with practical, profanity-riddled tips re: accomplishing same.

  They call me “the Anti-Guru.” Not gonna lie, it’s a pretty sweet gig.

  Collectively, the No Fucks Given Guides—NFGGs, for short—have helped millions of people cast off burdensome obligations, organize their lives, and be their authentic selves. If you are one of those people, I want to thank you for enabling this supersweet gig. If you’re new to the party: Welcome! And sorry about the spider stuff. I know that was off-putting, but the NFGGs are like that sometimes. You’ll get used to it.

  Anyway, I’m glad you’re here. And between us, I believe you are holding in your hands the most useful No Fucks Given Guide of them all, since, as I think we’ve agreed, everyone has problems.

  That’s right: You cannot get through life without shit happening to you!

  But also: HEREWITH, A MANUAL FOR LEARNING HOW TO COPE!

  In Calm the Fuck Down, you’ll learn about:

  • The Four Faces of Freaking Out (and their Flipsides)

  • Managing your freakout funds

  • Mental decluttering

  • The One Question to Rule Them All

  • How to sort your problems by probability and prioritize them by urgency

  • “Sleight of mind”

  • Ostrich Mode and how to avoid it

  • Productive Helpful Effective Worrying (PHEW)

  • The Three Principles of Dealing With It

  • Realistic ideal outcomes (RIOs)

  • And much, much more…

  So if you’re like me—if you’ve ever thought I can’t deal with this shit, or if you’re asking What if? more than you ought to be, worrying too much, freaking out too often, and wasting time and energy obsessing over things you can’t control—I can help.

  Remember: I’m not here to invalidate or minimize your anxiety or your problems. I just want to assist you in dealing with them, and calming the fuck down is the first step. Along the way, I swear I’ll never tell you “everything’s going to be okay” or push the narrative that “it’s not so bad.”

  Whatever’s going on in your life sucks as hard as you think it does. No arguments here.

  But I will say this:

  I am 100 percent positive that if I can spend ten minutes in a car with a tarantula on my lap, you can calm the fuck down and deal with your shit, too.

  I

  SO YOU’RE FREAKING OUT:

  Acknowledge the real problem and rein in your reaction

 
In part I, we’ll establish some parameters, beginning with what your problems are, exactly, and what variations of havoc they’re wreaking on your life.

  Could you BE any more excited???

  Then we’ll study the evolution of a freakout: how it happens, what it looks like, and what it costs you. I’ll introduce the Four Faces of Freaking Out and their Flipsides, and show you how to transition from one to the other. This section includes a primer on a little something known in our household as Mexican Airport Syndrome. Pay attention, amigos.

  Next, we’ll talk freakout funds. These are the resources you have at your disposal to forestall or combat a freakout: time, energy, and money—they make the world go round, especially when shit is going down. Plus, there’s the Fourth Fund, which you may have unknowingly been overdrawing for far too long. We’ll discuss.

  I’ll wrap up part I by explaining the concept of mental decluttering (both in general and as it pertains to calming the fuck down); introducing you to the One Question to Rule Them All; and finally, walking you through a technique I call “emotional puppy crating.”

  All of this may sound a little wacky (especially the emotional puppy crating), but give it a chance. The way I see it, there are thousands of self-improvement methods on the market that peddle far more suspect solutions to life’s problems. At least I know the stuff in this book works, because it works on ME—and in addition to being very logical and rational, I am also, at times, a Bona Fide Basket Case.

  Anti-gurus: they’re just like us!

  Now, let’s freak out—together.

  What seems to be the problem?

  Forgive me for saying so, but you seem a little anxious.

  Perhaps it’s about something small, like wrapping up the last thing on your to-do list or the niggling concern that you should be calling your parents more often. Maybe you’re worried about something bigger or more complicated, like you want to apply to grad school but you’re not sure if you can fit it around your day job and budget. The source of your anxiety might be hard to pinpoint, or it could be pretty fucking obvious—like you just totaled your bike, or discovered your house was built on top of an active gopher colony.