Anxiety.

It eats at humanity in a way that is perhaps only surpassed by cancer. Anxiety isn’t productive. It isn’t healthy or helpful. Yet we all experience it to one degree or another. As with all personal and societal struggles, the foundation of overcoming is understanding. So what is anxiety, and why does it plague us so?

Linguistically, anxiety is a feeling of worry, concern or nervousness over events not yet occurred, but that are, or seem to be, unavoidable. Psychiatrically, anxiety is an unhealthy level of apprehension that usually leads to avoidance behaviors and classic physical signs of stress such as muscle tension, hypertension, etc.

So in both cases, anxiety is not only predicated on, but driven and sustained by fear of the future.

Many anxiety treatments are so cliché that roll our eyes when they are mentioned. Eat healthier. Get more sleep. Don’t drink caffeine. Do yoga three times a week. Meditate 10 hours a day. Move out into the woods away from everything that stresses you out and be a hunter-gatherer for the rest of your life. As we know, these answers have varying degrees of practicality… and perhaps sarcasm.

But if anxiety is worry about the future, then none of these things will fix the problem, will they? That’s why we roll our eyes, because we know that they aren’t curative, otherwise we would have done them years ago.

Fear of the future, though…

That’s the problem. We don’t know what it holds. But we well remember what the past holds, and so we fear that the future may hold the same, or worse. How do we beat an enemy that never lays down? Because the future is always lurking, right? It’s always on top of us, but never with us. It’s always threatening, but never close enough for us to grab ahold and wrestle it to the ground.

As a representative of Transonic, the author of this blog spends his time thinking about health, yours and everyone else’s. Anxiety is a plague on every part of your mind and body. Anxiety interferes with every cure, slows every healing process, and worsens every prognosis.

So here’s an Anxious Thought for you. The future can be frightening because it’s never here. You can never touch it, and so you can never control it.

But…

That means the reverse is also true. The future can’t control you either. If you can’t grab it, then neither can it grab you. Permit me an eye-rolling aside of my own: as former children, we are all aware that the monster in the closet is scary because we can’t see it.

But why is it scary if we don’t even know what it is?

Because of what we imagine it to be.

It’s frightening because it never touches us, yet it always lurks. Our imagination gives it immense, almost omnipotent power. Therein lies the truth of anxiety—both definitions of it are wrong in a small, but critically important way:

We don’t actually fear the future. We fear only our imaginations of it.

Imagination is one of the most wonderful gifts that human beings possess, and also one of the most powerful. With it, we have created, built, loved, explored, dreamed, and believed. Remember that every achievement of humanity, from the sleekest sailing vessel to the most beautiful temple, to the most world-changing book, was imagined before it was created. It was seen in the mind before we could make it reality. Imagination is the inception of all things beautiful, wonderful, and good in our world. With it, we have metaphorically and literally left this planet.

So then, just as arrogance is confidence gone bad, so anxiety is nothing more than imagination gone bad. That is why none of our countless cures obliterate the problem. Their actions (physical and mental fortification) miss the real issue.

The issue is simply misapplication of one of imagination.

To defeat anxiety, and the host of ills that come with it, we need not combat those ills with sleep and vitamins, we need to pour our powerful imaginations into things we love and cherish.

As adults, we sometimes think we left our imaginations behind us when we left childhood, but anxiety proves how false that is. The more intense your anxiety, the more powerful must be the imagination that drives it. That power is always with us, we’ve just stopped using it for our good.

But that door is always open.

The power is always with you, because it belongs to you. Let's prove it.

                                                    The person you love most.

When you read that sentence, a warm image, sensation, or memory leaped into your mind, even if you chose to let it fall away. Your imagination is always with you, and always capable of warmth and beauty, because that’s what it was intended to do.

Anxiety, then, is a sham, a paper tiger. Because your imagination was always meant for your good.

It was meant to make you smile, remembering the best times.

It is meant to make you laugh, anticipating good things to come.

It is meant to help you find hope in the face of a friend.

It is meant to make you happy and healthy.

In ways, it was meant to be your closest companion. That’s why, even after leaving childhood so far behind, your imagination is still with you, helping you laugh when your dog, friend, or child did something so ridiculous that you could only imagine what was going through their head.

And I’ll bet, right there, it helped you smile.

Thanks for reading,

               Transonic Systems, Inc

                                 The Measure of Better Results