by Sarah Knight
As an example, let’s examine a perpetually outlying shitstorm offered by an anxious parent in my Twitter feed:
• What if I fuck up my kids and turn them into bad people?
This is a big, complex worry that causes many parents low-level anxiety every day, plus occasional bouts of hard-core freaking out.
Challenge accepted!
First, I absolutely understand why lots of them might not be able to “just fucking let it go.” And I understand that it might be hard to employ sleight of mind and focus on other things while parenting. In fact, maybe you shouldn’t get too distracted. Especially at the playground. Accidents happen.
But I humbly suggest that what you could do if you are constantly worried about fucking up your kids and turning them into bad people—and you are unable to let that worry go—is to spend your time, energy, and money on being the best parent you, personally, can be.
You don’t have complete control over whether your kid turns out to be a bad person. At some point, that’s on them. But you can indulge your worries and at the same time contribute to the cause by engaging in child-rearing tactics that are objectively proven to result in positives—such as reading to your kids, telling your kids you love them and are proud of them, and teaching them to say please and thank you and to not kick sand on me at the beach.
At least if you’re taking these actions—actions that are not shifting your focus via sleight of mind, but rather are directly related to the worry at hand—you may still be yanking your metaphorical yarn, but you also know you’re doing what you can to help your kids become good people.
That’s PHEW in a nutshell. Not the worst advice you’ve ever received, if I do say so myself. (It’s also not the first time I’ve given it here in this very book. Remember Really Cool Hat Guy? That was PHEW—you just didn’t know it yet.)
You can’t stop worrying? Fine. Worry away! But make it count for something.
Sending a shitstorm out to sea
As someone who once sat glued to the Weather Channel for ten days as two Category 5 hurricanes charted a collision course with my home on a fragile Caribbean peninsula, I know there is no greater relief than watching a seemingly inevitable monster storm veer away at the eleventh hour.
But of course, those near misses were due to sheer luck. (As Puerto Ricans know all too well, both Mother Nature and a certain world leader are capricious when it comes to visiting chaos and destruction upon a people.)
When it’s a shitstorm on the radar, however—and a low-probability one at that—you may be able to engineer a downgrade. Sometimes you can gin that probometer readout from a 2 or 1 down to a harmless little tropical shitclone that potters off the grid before you can say “I presided over and directly contributed to the worst humanitarian crisis America has seen since the Civil War.”
There are two different ways to prevent an already unlikely shitstorm from making landfall:
1. Take action (PHEW)
2. Do nothing (Counterintuitive, I know. Bear with me.)
Each has its place; deciding to implement one or the other is simply a matter of recognizing what you can control, and then acting (or not acting) accordingly. For example:
• What if I spend thousands of dollars to paint my house and on a large scale the color turns out to be ugly?
Action you could take: They have apps and online simulators for this. Do your research. (Same goes for drastic haircuts, BTW.)
Outcome: No surprises.
• What if my wife doesn’t like the gift I bought her for our 25th anniversary?
Action you could take: You’re so sweet! Ask your wife’s most trusted friend to help you shop, or to slyly solicit ideas from her BFF over coffee. Also: DIAMONDS.
Outcome: Happy wife, happy life.
• What if I get seasick on my first-ever boat ride, which also happens to be my best chance to impress a client on his private catamaran?
Action you could take: Dramamine, for the win.
Outcome: Your cookies remain untossed.
In each of the above scenarios, the total shitstorm is unlikely to evolve, but if you know you’re going to be worrying about it anyway, you can take action to prevent it.
If you like that shade of blue on a small scale, chances are you’ll like it at split-level size, but it pays to make sure beforehand. If you’ve been married for twenty-five years, you probably have a pretty good sense of your beloved’s taste, but calling for reinforcements can only improve your chances of a tearful “Oh my God, how did you know?!?” (Maybe improve your chances of a little something else, too, if you know what I mean…) And not everyone experiences motion sickness, but there’s no point in finding out you’re susceptible the moment you’re attempting to close a deal. “Barfs on clients” doesn’t look good on your LinkedIn profile.
Sure, these happen to be somewhat low-level problems with fairly easy, self-evident solutions, but that’s what made them unlikely to begin with. If you’re the kind of person who worries about unlikely shit happening, you just gained the perspective to wipe a few Category 1s and 2s off the screen before breakfast. Not too shabby.
Your other option to stave off a shitstorm is to do nothing at all.
Yes, I know, I’ve previously advocated for taking action in order to prevent a freakout, but now we’re talking about the problem itself, not your reaction to it. If you can blow the shitstorm out to sea by taking ZERO action, the freakout is rendered moot anyway.
Like, let’s say you’re hella concerned about the prospect of an unwanted pregnancy. If you use birth control regularly (and properly), then What if I get pregnant? should already be a Cat. 1 Highly Unlikely—but if you really can’t afford any room for error, I know just the thing to nip that fetus in the bud.
Abstinence! I’m talking about abstinence, guys. Jesus.
Hey, if you care as much about sex as I do about skiing, then doing nothing totally works. Groan away, but it’s true, isn’t it? In fact, there’s really no limit to the things you could never do if you never want to risk a potential bad outcome—as long as whatever you’re giving up is worth the sacrifice.
For example:
You could never go canoeing so that you never flip over in a canoe and drown. There are other ways to transport oneself across water. Like bridges.
You could never handle fireworks, so that you never get into a freak Roman candle accident. You know what they say: it’s all fun and games until someone has to be fitted for a glass eye.
Or you could never agree to retrieve the sacred sivalinga stone for the villagers of Mayapore and therefore never be forced to drink the blood of Kali and almost die at the hands of a prepubescent maharaja in a faraway temple of doom. Easy-peasy.
Are you sensing a little sarcasm here? Good. You sense correctly. Because what’s not useful is never doing something because you’re afraid of an outcome so unlikely in its own right that you’d actually be doing yourself a bigger disservice by avoiding the original thing entirely.
Or to put it another way, being crippled by anxiety is no way to live.
Houston, we have an irrational fear
I’d like to treat you to a bonus what-if scenario that’s near and dear to my own heart, and that might give you a new way of looking at something you may have long considered an insurmountable problem. Or this could be the point in the book where you snort derisively, proclaim me a fucking idiot, and go on your merry way. It’s your world, squirrel.
For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that you’re traveling from New York to New Mexico, and you’re worried that this Delta Death Blimp is destined to go down over the Great Lakes and take you and 114 other easy marks along with it.
The first step toward staving off a freakout in Terminal A is to categorize the potential shitstorm in question (dying in a plane crash), and acknowledge that it’s not probable.
To wit: the odds of dying in a plane crash are one in eleven million, which makes it less likely than being killed by a shark (one
in eight million), dying on a cruise ship (one in 6.25 million), or getting hit by lightning (one in twelve thousand).
You are dealing with a Category 1 Highly Unlikely here. No two ways about it. Furthermore, even if your 747 is destined to fall out of the sky like a drone operated by your drunk uncle Ronnie at a Shriners’ picnic, what the fuck are you going to do about it?*
Unless you plan to abandon your current career to spend a couple of years in flight school and become a pilot, which you would have to overcome your fear of flying to do in the first place, you cannot control the situation. It is 100 percent out of your hands.
Which means what?
THAT’S RIGHT. It’s a waste of time and energy to worry about it.
If you still want to play devil’s advocate, I suppose you could also control the situation by never flying anywhere, ever—but then you should stop driving, riding, sailing, walking, or rollerblading anywhere too, because the probability of death goes way up the closer to Earth you travel.
Let’s stop talking about it.
The thing is, I know that the irrational fear of flying (or irrational fear of anything, for that matter) is very upsetting. I myself am terrified of air travel for all kinds of reasons that, when examined in the weak glow of the overhead light, do not hold up.
So when I’m settled into seat 5A staring down the barrel of a cross-country hop to give a lecture at Marriott Corporate on getting your shit together, I counter this pernicious what-if with a big ol’ dose of Is there one single goddamn thing you can do to prevent this plane from exploding, falling apart, or dropping out of the sky? No? Then calm the fuck down and worry about something you can control, like writing out your speech all professional-like on some index cards and then not spilling your miniature vodka tonic on them.
I also treat this particular case of the what-ifs with .25 milligrams of Xanax, but that’s beside the point. I didn’t even have a Xanax prescription for the first thirty years of my life and I still got on planes when I was feeling wicked anxious because it’s just not logical or rational to avoid them for eternity—and, as mentioned previously, I am a very logical and rational person.
Most of the time.
Hi, I’m Sarah and I have a mental illness (More than one, actually!)
As you may have gleaned, I’m a proponent of better living not only through logic and reason and emotional puppy crating, but also through pharmaceuticals. In addition to employing nonchemical techniques like deep breathing and walking on the beach and balancing pineapples on my head, I take different daily and situational prescription medications to keep a lid on my anxiety and keep panic attacks at bay. And I TAKE THEM BECAUSE THEY WORK. Pills aren’t for everyone, of course, and neither is meditation or electroconvulsive therapy. But I want to talk about this stuff to do my small part to help eradicate the stigma surrounding mental health issues and getting treatment for them. Mental illness is a disease like any other and if that’s your underlying problem, you don’t deserve to be shamed for or feel shame about it.
There, I said it. Now back to our regularly scheduled menu of absurd hypotheticals, dirty jokes, and meteorological metaphors.
The calm before the shitstorm
At this point in our journey—a word I use with the utmost sarcasm—I hope you’re feeling really good about your prospects for calming the fuck down.
• You’ve been armed with the knowledge and tools to prioritize.
• You understand the concept of control and what it means to accept that which you cannot.
• And I’ve presented you with many techniques for discarding, distracting yourself from, or converting your what-ifs and worries like a boss—and steering clear of freakouts along the way.
As such, now is the time on Sprockets when we put everything you’ve learned into action.*
To show you how it’s done, I’m returning to the what-ifs from the list I made at the beginning of part II. I already gave you my thought process for categorizing each of those potential shitstorms. That’s where I ACKNOWLEDGED them. Here, I’ll go further, asking myself which parts of these potential shitstorms I can control—and then ACCEPTING the answers, aka the reality of my situation(s).
We’ll start at the bottom of the Shitstorm Scale with my Category 1s & 2s, and work our way up.
10 WHAT-IFS I MAY OR MAY NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT: CAN I CONTROL THEM?
CATEGORY 1—HIGHLY UNLIKELY
What if…
• More tarantulas appear in my house
Can I control it? Nope. On the sliding scale of control, this is an “out of my hands” for the ages. When it comes to worrying about tarantulas, I’m going to just fucking let it go. (And if Lucky comes back a third time, I think he’s officially our pet.)
• I order a different pizza than usual and it isn’t very good
Can I control it? Yes, but that’s exactly why it’s highly unlikely to happen in the first place. Every practice test has a trick question.
• My editor hates this chapter
Can I control it? I can definitely heavily influence this outcome by not sending Mike a piece of shit, but then again, his opinion is his alone. However, one’s thing’s for sure: if I’m sitting here obsessing over what he might think about something I sent him, then I’m taking time away from finishing the rest of the book—arguably a worse outcome, since I’m on a bit of a deadline here. So I’ve elected to press SEND and convert those worries (productively, helpfully, and effectively) into “writing more chapters.” Then on the off chance that he does hate this one, I’ll spend my FFs ordering a perfectly topped large pizza, calming the fuck down, and dealing with the revisions.
CATEGORY 2—POSSIBLE BUT NOT LIKELY
What if…
• My house key gets stuck in the door
Can I control it? Since I don’t know why it happened the first time, there’s nothing I can do to ensure it doesn’t happen again—except stop locking the house altogether, which invites a shitstorm of a different stripe. Nope, can’t control it, so I’ll discard that worry and save my freakout funds for conducting a little light B&E if necessary.
• A palm tree falls on my roof
Can I control it? Nope. (Technically, I could spend some time, energy, and money on Productive Helpful Effective Worrying and have the two trees within spitting distance cut down before they can fuck with us, but they grow out of the neighbor’s yard and I don’t think she’d appreciate it; plus then I wouldn’t get to look at them every day while I bob in my pool.) The freakout funds remains untouched… for now.
• I get into a car accident on the winding mountain road to the airport
Can I control it? This is a “contribute to the cause” situation. The reasons for the difference between the amount of freakout funding I give to speaking gigs (a lot) vs. the Return of Lucky (none) vs. airport transport (some) are simple: My relative preparedness for a speech, I can heavily influence. But I can’t do anything about keeping the tarantula out. Spiders gonna spider. Whereas on the airport road, although I’m not driving the car myself and directly influencing the ride, I can control whether we only book flights that have us traveling that stretch during daylight hours, and I’m not shy about asking the driver to slow down or pull over if it starts pouring rain. Control what you can, accept what you can’t, and wear your seat belt.
• I show up for a speaking gig and totally bomb
Can I control it? Again, yes, but the way to control this outcome is not by worrying about failing. It’s by spending my time and energy preparing a great talk and rehearsing the shit out of it. PHEW. So productive! So helpful! So effective! (And sure, there’s a first time for everything, but if I worried about that I would have used up all my freakout funds on What if aliens invade Earth and make us their space bitches? a long time ago.)
Et voilà! With seven unlikely what-ifs on my radar, I’ve CONSERVED freakout funds by discarding my worries about four of them (tarantulas, bad pizza, stuck keys, fallen palms), and CONVERTED funds
via Productive Helpful Effective Worrying for three more (speaking gig fails, seat belts, subsequent chapters).
I’ve still got plenty of FFs in reserve for total shitstorms, if (Categories 3 and 4) and when (Category 5) they occur.
CATEGORY 3—LIKELY
What if…
• I ruin my favorite pineapple-print shorts by sitting in something nasty
Can I control it? Eh. I can heavily influence this outcome by watching where I sit, but I don’t want that to be my full-time job, so I’ve decided to let this one go. Thus far, club soda and dish soap have staved off ruination, but one day it’s likely that the shorts will be unsalvageable, at which time I will spend $16 in freakout funds to get another pair from Target and restart the clock. Discard that worry for now.
CATEGORY 4—HIGHLY LIKELY
What if…
• It rains on my day off that I wanted to spend at the beach
Can I control it? That’s a big “no” to the weather itself and “barely” in terms of predicting it. Weather apps might as well be made of old soup cans and string for all the good they do me here. This is a perfect example of a shitstorm that—despite its high level of probability—is pointless to worry about. (In this case, a nice tall piña colada does wonders for my attitude.)
CATEGORY 5—INEVITABLE
What if…
• My cats die
Can I control it? Nope. That’s the thing about “average life-spans.” Should I spend FFs worrying about it? Hell nope! I’ve suffered through the deaths of a couple of pets in my time, and it’s horrible. When it happens again, I’ll be really sad, but I’ll deal with it then. What I’m not going to do is preemptively freak out and stop surrounding myself with feline friends just because one day I’m going to have to decide where to display their ashes or whether to have them stuffed and mounted above the dining table over my husband’s strenuous objections.
