Calm the Fuck Down

by Sarah Knight

  Now you try, with that same list of what-ifs you made here and that you already sorted by category. Use these questions as your guide:

  • Can I control it?

  • If not, can I accept that reality, stop worrying about it, and conserve freakout funds?

  • If I can’t stop worrying about it, can I convert freakout funds to productive, helpful, effective worrying that will prevent or mitigate it?

  10 WHAT-IFS I MAY OR MAY NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT: CAN I CONTROL THEM?

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Category:

  Can I control it? [Y] [N]

  Are you feeling a little more—dare I say it—in control? I hope so, and I hope asking the One Question to Rule Them All becomes a vibrant element of your daily process.

  It certainly has for me; I estimate that I’m 75 percent less basket case-y as a result.

  In fact, lately it’s been especially helpful being able to categorize my what-ifs and let go of stuff I can’t control. Have you been watching CNN? I’m surprised the chyron below Jake Tapper’s skeptical mug doesn’t just run “THIS SHIT IS BANANAS” on infinite loop. When nearly every hour of every day brings to light some further debasement America and/or the rest of the world has endured at the tiny paws of a D-list wannabe Mafioso—well, it’s useful to have some defense mechanisms firmly in place.

  I read the news today, oh boy

  It did not take a master’s in guruing to discern that as of the time of this writing, people around the world are more in need than ever of calming the fuck down.

  The United States of America, as mentioned, is a total shitshow. The president is an unhinged narcissist, the ruling political party is composed largely of simpering cowards, and affordable health care is nothing more than a collective hallucination—treatment for which is not covered by your insurance company.

  England and the rest of the United [for now] Kingdom: not doing so hot either. Perhaps you’ve noticed? In fact, if you watch the news, or even just scroll through Twitter, it seems like every continent is seeing fascism, xenophobia, and sea levels on the rise—or icebergs, honeybees, and civil liberties on the decline.

  Ugh.

  I don’t know if there’s actually more war, pestilence, extreme weather, or dismaying cultural regression going on than ever before, but I do know we’re more aware of it, because technology has seen to it that humans can’t go a millisecond without finding out about the latest school shooting, terror attack, election meddling, or rendezvous between evil dictators hell-bent on destroying Western civilization.

  Double UGH.

  It’s a problem, and one I hope this book will help you address in some small but significant way, she writes, as women’s right to bodily autonomy hangs perpetually in the balance.

  ROE V. UGHHH.

  What to do? Well, because I still believe in the benefits of an informed/enraged citizenry, I’m afraid I cannot personally advocate for Total Ostrich Mode, aka “not consuming the news at all.” But a few minor bouts of ostriching in service to shit you can’t control? I’ll allow it. Go on, get that face in the pillows and that ass in the air!

  As to anger, you’re entitled. Letting loose a full-throated howl while your face is in the pillows can be satisfying. You know, if the mood strikes. And if you can channel your anger into something productive, so much the better—like, after hurling every glass container in your home against a wall as though it were an old white man trying to steal your children’s future, you could take out the recycling. Smash the patriarchy, save the planet.

  When you’re done—and apart from just hoping things will improve or that you can primal scream them into submission—there are other ways to counteract the feelings of helplessness you might have when being bombarded daily with the worst the media has to offer. Rather than scrolling through your newsfeeds each night before bed and giving yourself teeth-falling-out dreams, perhaps you could try one of the following calming, control-regaining techniques?

  They work for me, and I’m about as despondent over crumbling democracy and devastating climate crisis as it gets!

  5 TIPS FOR CALMING THE FUCK DOWN ABOUT THE WORLD FALLING APART

  LIMIT YOUR EXPOSURE

  An informed citizen doesn’t have to be gathering information over breakfast, on the toilet, astride an exercise bike, during their commute, AND right before going to sleep (or trying to go to sleep, anyway). A once-per-day news dump should be sufficient to keep you in the know without also keeping your blood pressure higher than Snoop Dogg.

  BALANCING ACT

  If you can’t dodge the twenty-four-hour news cycle, for every @WashingtonPost you follow, add a palliative account to the mix. I recommend @PepitoTheCat, which is just time-stamped black-and-white footage of some cat in France coming and going through his cat door, accompanied by the captions “Pépito is out” or “Pépito is back home.” I like to scroll through Pépito’s feed before bed. It’s like counting sheep, but instead you’re counting the same French cat over and over again. Trés relaxing.

  BONE UP

  It may seem counterintuitive, but doing a deep dive into whatever single current event is giving you the biggest case of the what-ifs can help you vanquish some of your more paranoid fantasies. For example, researching how the “nuclear football” actually works and learning that a certain feeble-minded president would have to memorize certain information in order to launch an attack may have done wonders for a certain someone’s ability to stop worrying [quite so much] about the prospect of this particular mushroom shitcloud sprouting anytime soon.

  TAKE A MEMO

  Drafting an angry letter—to a global leader, a local representative, or, say, morally repugnant NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch—can really get the mad out of you. Journaling is scientifically proven to help calm you down by moving all those burning, churning thoughts out of your head and onto the page. And you don’t even have to send your angry missive to reap the in-the-moment benefit, but for the cost of a stamp it might be nice to know it’ll reach its intended target. Or at least clutter their inbox, which in my opinion is a fate worse than death.

  DO GOOD

  When I’m feeling powerless about the state of the world, one thing that brings me comfort is donating to a cause—be it a natural disaster relief fund, a local charity, or just a single person who needs a hand. Is this my economic privilege talking? Sure, but if spending my freakout funds this way makes me feel better and helps someone less fortunate, all I see is a two-for-one special on good deeds. And “giving” needn’t require a cash outlay—you have other FFs at your disposal. Time and energy spent calling your reps to protest inhumane immigration practices, volunteering at Planned Parenthood, or mocking up some zesty protest signs and taking a brisk walk around your nearest city center will help you sleep better in more ways than one.

  Now if you’ll excuse me, while my husband is watching the orange howler monkey’s latest antics on MSNBC, I have a French cat’s whereabouts to monitor.

  (Pépito is out.)

  Stirring the shit

  Okay, folks. We are neck-deep in part II. I trust you’re starting to see that, logically and rationally, much of the shit you worry about is unlikely to happen—and that you can do enough PHEW-ing to ensure that even the likely stuff can be made less terrible with some effort on your part.

  Just don’t get cocky.

  I would be remiss if I didn’t warn you that it is possible to
trick yourself into thinking you’re PHEW-ing, when what you are really doing is WILLING A SHITSTORM INTO EXISTENCE.

  In psychological terms, “catastrophizing” is the belief that a situation is worse than it actually is. And I promised I wouldn’t argue with you about how hard things suck for you right now. I fucking hate it when people do that. But if you do happen to be catastrophizing, you may also be creating your own catastrophe—something I can and will caution you against.

  That’s right: you have the ability to send a shitstorm out to sea, but also to conjure a Category 5 out of thin air.

  For example, if your friend Andy hasn’t gotten back to you about you taking his extra ticket for the Cubs game tomorrow night and you’re paranoid that he’s mad at you even though he hasn’t said anything specific, you might text him to be like, “Hey dude, are you pissed because I wrote your email address on that Church of Scientology sign-up sheet? Sorry, they surrounded me when I was leaving the gym and I panicked. My bad.”

  And maybe he wasn’t mad at you (just busy getting off the Church of Scientology mailing list). BUT NOW HE IS.

  If you’d stopped to study all available data you would have realized there was no way Andy could have known you were the clipboard culprit. If you hadn’t panic-texted, he never would have put two and Xenu together and you’d be slammin’ deep dish in the box seats—no harm, no foul.

  Instead, you overthought it and you’re watching the game on TV with your good friend Papa John.

  Other times, when a shitstorm is already tracking as “inevitable,” your actions may significantly hasten its arrival and amplify its effects.

  Historically, this has been a bit of a problem for yours truly. On the one hand, and as I wrote about in You Do You, my natural tendency toward anxiety can in some ways be a good thing. It helps me plan ahead, because I can envision the perils and consequences of not doing so. It helps me be prepared, be on time, and generally stay on top of my shit.

  But every once in a while, the anxiety, and the overthinking it enables, knocks over a domino that might never have fallen on its own.

  And then I’m left picking up the whole damn pile.

  That was not a chill pill

  It was finals week during my junior year of college. I had exams to study for and papers to write, and both time and energy were running low. I’d done all the research for my last remaining essay, but it was already early evening the night before it was due. My late-nineties desktop computer sat there judging me like Judy.

  I was mentally and physically exhausted, at the end of an already frayed rope. I knew I didn’t have the juice—let alone the hours on the clock—to pull this one out. But as a classic overachiever and rule-follower, the prospect of not handing in an assignment on time was simply off the table. I couldn’t fail to show up at my professor’s office at 9:00 a.m. with dot-matrix printout in hand, and I for damn sure couldn’t beg for an extension on a final paper. That would be madness!

  Speaking of which, I had started to go a little nutso myself worrying about what would happen when I blew this assignment—and in the throes of the ensuing freakout I made a Very Bad Decision in service to what I thought was Productive Helpful Effective Worrying.

  Can’t stay awake for the limited number of hours left in which to craft a piece of writing that will account for 25 percent of your final grade in a Harvard undergraduate seminar?

  Accept two mystery pills from a friend who tells you “This will keep you up and help you focus!”

  NARRATOR: It kept her up. It did not help her focus.

  By dawn I was thoroughly cracked out, defeated, and dehydrated from an hour or so of inconsolable sobbing triggered by the realization that I was definitely not going to finish this paper on time. Since swallowing the mystery pills I’d spent ten hours growing increasingly frantic, my heart thumping in my chest, fingers shaking over my keyboard, and pacing my dorm room like an extra in Orange Is the New Black.

  Now it was time to swallow something else: my pride.

  Still huffing and snuffling, I pecked out an email to my professor. Rather than compound my sins by concocting a dead grandmother or severe tendinitis, I decided to tell her the truth—that I had backed myself into a corner time-wise and attempted to rectify my [first] mistake with an influx of energy-by-what-was-probably-Adderall. I was sorry and ashamed and had generated four pages of gobbledygook instead of fifteen pages of cogent argument. I needed an extra day.

  Then I collapsed onto my futon and waited for the other Doc Marten to fall. (As mentioned, it was the late nineties.)

  My professor didn’t curse or rage or threaten to have me expelled. She was matter-of-fact about the whole situation. She granted me the bonus time and said whatever grade I received on merit would have to be taken down a point for lateness.

  Well, that was… easier than I thought it would be.

  I still had to deal with the original task, sure. But in the meantime, I’d had to deal with the total shitstorm I’d summoned by freaking out about the original task and making a Very Bad Decision fueled by anxiety. Had I been able to calm the fuck down in the first place, I might have missed my deadline, but I would have asked for the extension up front; gotten a good night’s sleep; spent the following day writing my paper with a fresh brain; and avoided the ten-hour interlude of weeping, shaking, and pacing.

  Also: I would have avoided emailing my professor at six in the morning to tell her I TOOK SPEED.

  So there’s that.

  I love it when a plan comes together

  Before we round the corner to part III: Deal With It, I feel a pressing urge to drive home the power of all of the tips and techniques from part II. What can I say? Sometimes I just can’t stop guruing.

  In the next few pages, I’m going to take a sample what-if and help you calm the fuck down about it. We will:

  • Assign a category and status to this potential shitstorm

  • Determine what (if any) control you might have over the outcome

  • Accept the reality of the situation

  • Discard worries stemming from the parts you can’t control

  • Spend your freakout funds wisely to prevent, prepare for, or mitigate the results of the rest.

  I’ll even throw in a preview of dealing with it, because I’m a full-service anti-guru and I respect a seamless transition.

  Categorizin’ cousins

  Let’s say, hypothetically, you have two cousins named Renée and Julie. Recently Renée posted something nasty on Facebook that was oblique-yet-clearly-aimed-at-Julie, and now the two of them are about to cross paths… at your wedding.

  Do you feel a freakout coming on?

  Assuming for the sake of our hypothetical that the answer is yes (or that you can imagine how it would be a yes for some people, given that weddings are traditionally known to be intrafamilial hotbeds of stress and strife), you have a decision to make.

  You could spend time and energy worrying about your cousins getting into a parking lot fistfight during the reception, working yourself into a double-whammy Anxious/Angry Freakout Face—but that’s neither going to prevent it from happening nor help you deal with it.

  Instead, let’s activate your inner whetherperson and assemble all the available data. Such as:

  • What’s Renée and Julie’s history?

  • Has this kind of thing happened before?

  • How well do they hold their liquor?

  Asking logical, rational questions like these will help you determine whether it’s HIGHLY UNLIKELY, POSSIBLE BUT NOT LIKELY, LIKELY, HIGHLY LIKELY, or INEVITABLE that these bitches are getting ready to rumble.

  And who knows? Maybe they’ll be so inspired by your vows that they will “vow” to stop being so nasty to each other. Maybe they’ll hug and make up in the photo booth, before the pigs in blankets hit the buffet. Maybe at least one of them will take the high road as her wedding gift to you.

  I certainly don’t know, because I don’t know them—but you do.
Check your probometer and make a reasonable guess as to which category this potential shitstorm falls under. Then earmark your freakout funds accordingly.

  SCENARIO 1

  Trolling each other online is Renée and Julie’s standard MO and so far, it hasn’t resulted in a parking lot fistfight. They tend to circle each other like wary cats, bond over their shared passion for twerking to Nicki Minaj, and then all is forgiven over the third SoCo-and-lime shot of the night.

  Probometer Readout: Cat. 1 / 2—Highly Unlikely or Possible But Not Likely

  • Worrying about something that’s unlikely to happen is a risky use of valuable freakout funds. You know this. If the storm never comes to pass, you’ve wasted time, energy, and/or money; and if it does happen, you’ll be forced to pay double—having freaked out about it then + having to deal with it now. Conclusion: Your FFs are better reserved for other potential wedding day snafus. We all know your friend Travis is a loose cannon.

  SCENARIO 2