by Sarah Knight
There is no physical exertion involved. You won’t catch me chanting, ohm-ing, or downward dogging my way through this shit. You’re free to engage in those activities if you wish, whether it’s to calm the fuck down or just to pick up nice single moms named Beth at the YMCA. But it’s not required.
(Will mental decluttering eventually leave you feeling physically refreshed? It sure will! After all, fewer panic attacks and rage-gasms are good for your heart, your lungs, and the tiny bones in your feet that tend to break when you kick things that are not meant to be kicked. But that’s not the primary focus, just a snazzy by-product.)
The two steps of mental decluttering align not at all coincidentally with the two steps of the NoWorries Method.
Step 1: DISCARD your worries (aka calm the fuck down)
Step 2: ORGANIZE your response to what’s left (aka deal with it)
That’s it. Discard, then organize. And the way you begin is by looking at whatever problem you’re worried about and asking yourself a very simple question.
The One Question to Rule Them All
Can I control it?
This inquiry informs every shred of advice I’ll be giving for the remainder of the book. Just like Marie Kondo asks you to decide if a material possession brings joy before you discard it, or like I ask you to decide if something annoys you before you stop giving a fuck about it, asking “Can I control it?” is the standard by which you’ll measure whether something is worth your worries—and what, if anything, you can do about it.
Mental decluttering and the One Question to Rule Them All really shine in part II, but before we get there, I have one last parameter I want to parametate, which is this:
When what-ifs become worries and worries become freakouts and freakouts make everything harder and more miserable than it ever had to be, one of the things you can control right away is your emotional response.
With that, I’ll turn it over to man’s best friend… who is also sometimes man’s worst enemy.
(Please don’t tell John Wick I said that.)
This is your brain on puppies
Emotions are like puppies. Sometimes they’re purely fun and diverting; sometimes they’re comforting or distracting; sometimes they just peed on your mother-in-law’s carpet and aren’t allowed in the house anymore.
In any case, puppies are good for short periods of time until you have to get something accomplished, and then you need to coax them into a nice, comfy crate because you cannot—I repeat: CANNOT—deal with your shit while those little fuckers are on the loose.*
It doesn’t even matter if these are “bad” puppies/emotions or “good” puppies/emotions. (Emuppies? Pupmotions?) ALL puppies/emotions are distracting. It’s in their nature. You can totally get derailed by positive emotions—like if you’re so excited that the McRib is back, you go straight to the drive-through having forgotten that it was your turn to pick up your kid at preschool. Oops.
But I think we both know that happy and excited to make digestive love to a half rack on a bun aren’t the emotions Calm the Fuck Down is here to help you corral.
What we’re trying to do is take the freakout-inducing puppies/emotions and:
Grant them a reasonable visitation period in which to healthily acknowledge their existence;
Give them a chance to wear themselves out with a short burst of activity;
And then exile them while we get to work on solving the problems that brought them out to play in the first place.
Quick reminder
Hi, it’s me, not a doctor or psychologist! Nor am I a behavioral therapist! Honestly, I can’t even be trusted to drink eight glasses of water every day and I consider Doritos a mental health food. But what I do have is the learned ability to relegate emotions to the sidelines as needed, so that I can focus on logical solutions. This is my thing; it’s what works for me and it’s why I have written four No Fucks Given Guides and not the Let’s All Talk About Our Feelings Almanac. If you do happen to be a doctor, psychologist, or therapist and you don’t approve of sidelining one’s emotions in order to calm the fuck down and deal with one’s shit, first of all, thanks for reading. I appreciate the work you do, I respect your game, and I hope my Olympic-level floor routine of caveats makes it clear that I’m presenting well-intentioned, empirically proven suggestions, not medical fact. If you could take this into consideration before clicking that one-star button, I would greatly appreciate it.
Alright, just to be sure we’re all on the same emotionally healthy page, let me be superduper clear:
• It’s okay to have emotions. Or as another guru might put it: “You’ve got emotions! And you’ve got emotions! And you’ve got emotions!” Having them is not the problem; it’s when you let emotions run rampant at the expense of taking action that you start having problems (see: The evolution of a freakout).
• In fact, there’s a lot of science that says you must allow yourself to “feel the feels” about the bad stuff—that you have to go through it to get past it. This is especially true when it comes to trauma, and I’m not advising you to ignore those problems/emotions. Just to sequester them periodically like you would an unruly puppy. (See: I am not a doctor.)
• It’s even okay to freak out a little bit. To yell and scream and ostrich every once in a while. We’re not aiming for “vacant-eyed emotionless husk.” That’s some prelude-to-going-on-a-killing-spree shit, right there, and not an outcome I wish to promote to my readership.
That said—and in my decidedly nonscientific opinion—when your emuppies are running amok, it’s time to lock ’em up and at least temporarily misplace the key. What I will henceforth refer to as emotional puppy crating has been useful to me in the following scenarios:
It’s how I continued to enjoy my wedding reception after the train of my dress caught on fire, instead of going on a champagne rampage against the culprit. Love you, Mom!
It’s how I managed to write and deliver a eulogy for my uncle’s funeral instead of being incapacitated by grief.
It’s how we decided to call an emergency plumbing hotline at 2:00 a.m. when the upstairs neighbor’s toilet went Niagara Falls into our bathroom, instead of succumbing to despair (and sleep) and making everything that much worse (and wet) for ourselves the next day.
First, I acknowledge the emotion—be it anxiety, anger, sadness, or one of their many tributaries (e.g., fear)—and then I sort of mentally pick it up by the scruff of the neck and quarantine it in a different part of my brain than the part that I need to use to deal with the problem at hand. If you practice mindfulness, you might know this trick as “Teflon mind,” so termed because negative thoughts aren’t allowed to stick. I think the puppy analogy is more inviting than the image of an eight-inch frying pan anywhere near my skull, but tomato, tomahto.
Am I successful every time? Of course not! In addition to being not a doctor, I am also not an all-powerful goddess. (Or a liar.) Emotional puppy crating isn’t always feasible, and even when it is, it takes practice and concerted effort. Much like herding a twenty-pound package of muscle and saliva into a five-by-five cage, if you don’t fasten the lock firmly enough, your emuppies could escape for a potentially destructive/exhausting scamper around your mental living room, scratching mental floors, chewing mental furniture, and further distracting you from calming the fuck down and dealing with your shit.
Who let the dogs out? You. You let them out.
That’s okay. You can always wrestle or gently lead or even trick them back in—all tactics I’ll explore and explain in part II. Like I said, practice. But it’s worth it.
And don’t forget: in the same way that you can lock those rascals up, you can also let them back out whenever you want.
Whenever you must.
Whenever their precious puppy faces will make you feel better, not worse.
It’s not like you’ve sent your emotions to live with an elderly couple on a nice farm upstate. They’re just chillin’ in their crate until such time as they
are once again invited to roam freely. When that time comes, go ahead, open the door. Let them romp around and entertain you for a spell, distract you from your woes, nuzzle your face, lick your toes. Whatever, I don’t even have a dog, I’m just spitballing here.
But oh, hey! Once you’ve had your emotional puppy time, back in the crate they go.
Now be a good boy, and let’s calm the fuck down.
II
CALM THE FUCK DOWN:
Identify what you can control, accept what you can’t, and let that shit go
If part I was all about parameters, part II is all about practical application—the how-tos for converting the what-ifs into the now-whats, so to speak.
To ease you in, I’m going to focus mainly on Shit That Hasn’t Happened Yet—the still-theoretical what-ifs, the kind of stuff that worries you whether or not it’s even likely to occur. I’ll help you determine if those worries are justified and if so, how to prepare for and mitigate the damage should the problems they stem from come to fruition.
And in some cases, how to prevent those problems from happening at all.
We’ll start by classifying your what-ifs by category, much like the National Weather Service classifies hurricanes. Except in your case we’re not dealing with hurricanes; we’re dealing with… shitstorms.
Oh come on, you saw that pun coming a mile away.
Next, we’ll assign a status—prioritizing not only what needs dealing with, but how soon—a calculation based on my very favorite factor: urgency.
At the end of part II, we’ll use all of these tools to mentally declutter your worryscape, one hypothetical shitstorm at a time. And by practicing it on Shit That Hasn’t Happened Yet, it’ll be even easier to employ the NoWorries Method on Shit That Has Already Happened (coming right up in part III, natch).
Soon you’ll be turning what-ifs into now-whats like a pro.
You won’t even need me anymore. Sniff.
Pick a category, any category
As you probably know, hurricanes are categorized on a scale of 1 to 5. This is called the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.
Those numbers are then used by meteorologists to forecast (and convey to you) the level of damage the storm is likely to inflict along its path, 1 being least severe, 5 being most. Of course, weatherpeople are not always correct—there are many unpredictable variables that determine the scope of the actual poststorm damage, such as the relative stability of the roofs, power lines, trees, awnings, boat docks, and lawn furniture in the affected area. (This is why weatherpeople have the best job security in all the land; it barely matters if they get it right all the time, because they can’t get it right all the time and they seem totally okay with that. I would be a very bad weatherperson.)
But anyway, the 1–5 categories themselves are indisputable. They reflect the hurricane’s strength in terms of its maximum sustained wind speed, which is a totally objective measurement. The anemometer don’t lie.
Shitstorms are different in the sense that there is no “-ometer” that can measure the precise strength of any single event; its strength, or what we’ll term “severity,” is informed solely by how the individual person affected experiences it.
For example, say you’ve dreamt of playing Blanche Devereaux in Thank You for Being a Friend: The Golden Girls Musical for your entire life, but after a successful three-week run, you were unceremoniously kicked to the curb in favor of the director’s new cougar girlfriend. You’re devastated. On the other hand, your friend Guillermo is positively jubilant to have been let go from the funeral home where he was in charge of applying rouge and eye makeup to the clientele.
Same objective shitstorm, different subjective experience. (Though maybe you could hook G up with the director’s girlfriend? It would be a shame to let his talent for reanimating corpses go to waste.)
Further, you cannot compare your experience of any given shitstorm to anyone else’s experience of a different shitstorm. Is your broken heart more or less “major” than my broken tooth? WHO CAN SAY.
Therefore, shitstorm categories are based not on how severe they might be—but simply how likely they are to actually hit you. One to five, on a scale of least to most probable. For example, if you’re a popular person, then “What if nobody comes to my birthday party?” would be a Category 1 Highly Unlikely, whereas “What if two of my friends are having parties on the same weekend and I have to choose between them?” is a Category 5 Inevitable. Or vice versa, if you’re a hermit.
From here on out, probability is your barometer. We’ll call it, I don’t know, your probometer.
And instead of having one weatherperson for the entire tri-state area charged with forecasting the accurate potential damage of a Category 3 storm passing over a thirteen-thousand-square-mile radius, who may or may not get it right when it comes to your house—we’ll have one weatherperson focused solely on your house.
Oh, and your house is your life, and you are that weatherperson.
Actually, you’re the “whetherperson,” because you and only you get to predict whether this shitstorm is likely to land on YOU.*
The five categories on the Sarah Knight Shitstorm Scale are as follows:
Category 1: HIGHLY UNLIKELY
Category 2: POSSIBLE BUT NOT LIKELY
Category 3: LIKELY
Category 4: HIGHLY LIKELY
Category 5: INEVITABLE
Again, note that this scale indicates nothing of the “strength” or “severity” of the storm, merely the probability of its occurrence. When it comes to boarding up your metaphorical windows and battening down your metaphorical hatches, your probometer rating will help you budget your freakout funds effectively. Fewer FFs on less likely stuff, more on more likely stuff.
(And sometimes you won’t need to spend any FFs at all on preparation; you can save them exclusively for cleanup. More on that later.)
To familiarize you with the category system, let’s look at some potential shitstorms in action.
For example, do you ski? I don’t, so it’s HIGHLY UNLIKELY that I will break my leg skiing. Category 1, all the way. (Though if I did ski it would be Category 4 HIGHLY LIKELY that I would break my leg. I know my limits.)
Now consider Olympic gold medalist and nineties superhunk Alberto Tomba. Breaking his leg skiing might also be a HIGHLY UNLIKELY Category 1, because he’s just that good. Or it might be a HIGHLY LIKELY Category 4 because he skis often, at high speeds, threading his obscenely muscled thighs between unforgiving metal structures. I leave it to Alberto in his capacity as his own personal whetherman to decide how likely he thinks it is that he’ll break his leg skiing, and therefore how many (or few) freakout funds he needs to budget for that outcome on any given day.
Or, let’s look at earthquakes. Those are fun.
People who live in Minnesota, which Wikipedia tells me is “not a very tectonically active state,” are Category 1 HIGHLY UNLIKELY to experience a major earthquake; whereas homeowners along North America’s Cascadia subduction zone are flirting with Category 5 every day. (Did you read that New Yorker article back in 2015, because I sure did. Sorry, Pacific Northwest, it was nice knowing you.)
But that said, keep in mind that a Category 5 shitstorm doesn’t have to be a catastrophic, earth-shaking event. It is not necessarily all that severe; it is simply INEVITABLE.
For example, if you’re a parent, getting thrown up on is fully in the cards. If you’re a female candidate for office, you’ll be unfairly judged for your vocal timbre and wardrobe choices. And if you’re a frequent flier, one of these days your connection will be delayed and leave you stranded in the Shannon, Ireland, airport for six hours with nothing but a complimentary ham sandwich and your laptop, on which you will watch The Hateful Eight and think, Eh, it was just okay.
Oh, and death is obviously a Category 5. It’s gonna happen to all of us, our cats, dogs, hamsters, and annual plants.
Can I get a downgrade?
Each what-if is like a tropical cyclo
ne brewing on the radar screen of your mind. A shitclone, as it were. Some will turn into full-fledged shitstorms and some won’t—but unlike tropical cyclones, you may have control over the direction your shitclones take. Especially the Category 1s, since they’re highly unlikely as it is. For example, if I continue to never go skiing, I will NEVER break my leg skiing. Crisis completely and totally averted! Yeah, yeah, I heard you groan, but that was a freebie. I can’t give away my best stuff this early. Later in part II, we’ll discuss less ridiculously restrictive but equally effective ways to send a shitstorm out to sea. Promise.
Mulling the likelihood of a potential shitstorm actually coming to pass is a useful exercise. Consulting your probometer helps you focus on the reality of your situation instead of obsessing over what-ifs that are often as unrealistic as the “after” photos in an ad for cut-rate diet pills. You know she just went for a spray tan, sucked in her stomach, and tricked out the tatas in a more flattering bra. Stop falling for that shit, will ya?
And by the way, I apologize if all this talk of impending doom is triggering a freakout, but it’s for the best. Because when you start thinking about shitstorms based on probability, you’ll begin to realize you don’t have nearly as much to worry about as you thought you did.
Soon, when a what-if pops up on your radar screen you’ll be able to say, “Total Cat. One. Not worth worrying about.” Or “Category Two, no need to spend those freakout funds quite yet.”
LOGIC CAN BE VERY SOOTHING.
Logicats, ho!
Speaking of logic, from here on out, I’m going to see your emotional puppies and raise you some cold, hard logical cats. Think about it: a puppy will flail around in the yard trying to scratch his back on a busted Frisbee, whereas cats can reach their own backs and, generally speaking, they’re not much for flailing. Dogs are players—giddily chasing a ball one minute, then getting distracted by a body of water that needs splashing in. Cats are hunters—approaching their target with laser focus and pouncing (it must be said) with catlike reflexes. They are the official spirit animal of Calm the Fuck Down.
