Life Inside My Mind Stupid Monsters and Child Surgeons by Maureen Johnson I have had anxiety. I suffered a serious bout of it a few years ago. It hit me like a bolt out of the blue and stuck with me for a while. If you have anxiety, you may know that reading about anxiety usually makes more anxiety. When I had anxiety, I could not read about anxiety without getting anxiety, and yet I read about it pretty compulsively, looking for answers. I was looking for something that told me there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I am letting you know that this essay has that light. It has a sunrise.

I know that matters. Trust me. Hold my hand as we go, if you want to go with me. Anxiety bouts can end. They end all the time. Never give up hope that yours can and will end. I am not a mental health professional, and if you are suffering from severe anxiety, I strongly, strongly suggest seeing one. You may already be doing so.

Also, what I write about here is what happened to me. We are all different, and your mileage may vary. Anxiety has a lot of causes and pathways. There is no one way to deal with it--which is good. There are a LOT of ways. Millions--billions?--of people deal with anxiety. Almost all of us deal with some form of mental infirmity at one point or another in our lives. You''re not only not alone--you''re in the majority.

I want you to know that people can have it and do lots of stuff and actually be happy. I want you to know that exists. I want you to know it is not all bad. I swear I am not making this up. I want you to know the bout of anxiety that I thought would crush me may have been one of the very best things that ever happened to me. It can be useful. Now I''ll just tell you my story, and if it is of use to you, that''s good. So what happened was that things were going pretty well for me when the anxiety hit.

Before then, I thought I knew what anxiety was. I thought it was that feeling I''d had before tests, or in certain situations. I thought it was just that nervous feeling. I soon learned that anxiety was a very weird beast. It came on first as some strange sensations--pounding in the chest, things that felt like electrical shocks going down my arms. At the time, I was working a lot. I thought nothing of sitting at my desk until midnight or later, pounding away. My brain was going and going like a train, and then these shocks would come on.

It really felt like I had been hit with a bolt of juice right out of a power outlet. Then came the panic attacks in the night, when I would wake up with my heart racing, feeling like I couldn''t breathe. They got more and more frequent. Then I was often up at five a.m., pacing around. And then one day I had one of those that didn''t shut off when I woke up. My body was racing.

What was most disturbing was that suddenly I didn''t feel like I was in control of my thoughts. It was like I had always been in the driver''s seat of my brain, and then one morning it was hijacked. I was shoved to the passenger''s seat. I could see where we were going, but I couldn''t steer. Almost as if I was watching myself think. I was filled with dread and energy, and I had no idea why. My brain was veering around all over the place. This all happened on a beautiful summer''s day.

I was supposed to meet two friends to write. I got myself dressed and went out. I called my mother (who is a nurse) and spoke to her. I was teary and shaking. I tried to work, but the words were moving around on the page in front of me. I told my friends what was going on, and they were very helpful. I felt like I had to walk. They walked with me for a few hours, and then one of them got in a cab with me and took me to the doctor.

(The doctor had already checked me over for the symptoms I''d been having. He had concluded I had anxiety.) I was given Ativan that night. My mother came up to stay with me--I was in that much of a state of distress. I took the pill. My system slowed down a bit for the night and kicked up again the next day. This was the start of months of this. I won''t go through the bad stuff and all the thoughts I had, because you probably already know them if you have been through it.

I did wonder a lot about how I was going to do anything, how I was going to live my life and do my job. I wondered how I was going to go to bed, and then what would happen when I woke up. These are the kinds of fun times anxiety gives you. It''s a jerk. During that summer, writing was hard. I couldn''t focus very well. Then I got angry, and I attacked the anxiety. I attacked it with EVERYTHING I COULD FIND.

I said, "I have decided this anxiety is a signal that I need to do something, so I am going to do it." Let me tell you what I learned and WHAT I DID ABOUT IT, because that is what matters. First, the anxiety is not you. It''s drifting around you, but it''s not you. I like to imagine anxiety as the big red monster from Bugs Bunny. (Google this if you want the visual.) It sits outside you. It''s kind of ridiculous-looking.

The anxiety may be with you now, but it can just as easily go away. It is not a permanent part of you, no matter how it seems. Second thing: You know how depression lies? Well, anxiety is stupid. I did not just say people with anxiety are stupid. No, no. I mean that anxiety itself is stupid. If you asked anxiety what two plus two is, anxiety will think very hard and then say "triangle" or "a bag of Fritos" or "a commemorative stamp." Because anxiety doesn''t know what anything is.

It will try to convince you that things that are totally fine are worthy of dread. That summer, when it was bad, it didn''t matter what I looked at or engaged in at first; the anxiety monster was scared of it. It was scared of busy situations, accidents, spiders, sleeping, being awake, my sneakers, the wall . I caught on to the stupidity thing the day I broke down and watched the most boring nature show I could possibly find, just to slow my mind down. It was just pretty pictures of mountains and trees. An anxiety attack came on as I was watching, and I said to it, "You are totally stupid. Nothing this stupid can defeat me. You''re going down, you idiotic monster.

I AM RULER HERE!" Another helpful visual: I started to think of anxiety as being very, very small, like a child in an oversize lab coat who was trying to order me around. "You''re adorable, kid," I said. "Now let''s go find your parents. Or maybe put you in an orphanage."1 With that realization, anxiety was genuinely put on notice. Third: I looked around at my life and situation. I saw a few things clearly for the first time. For a start, I had no boundaries between work and life.

I had no time limits. I would stay online until all hours and let my brain drink in the electricity. There is a lot of research (so much I can''t just link here) that indicates this is not super good for our brains. I started to set limits. I stopped work at certain hours, no matter what. If the anxiety had made it hard to write during the day, I didn''t try again at night. I stopped. I slowed down everything.

I put myself on a gentler mental diet, and I didn''t care who knew it. If it was slow and boring and something that would be enjoyed in a nursing home, then it was for me. I adopted what I called the Grandma Lifestyle, and I''ve never looked back. This idea that we have to be Doing! Things! All! The! Time! is bullshit. That''s television talking to you, or articles, or the persistent but false impression that literally everyone is out accomplishing more and doing more and loving it all 100 PERCENT OF THE TIME!!! Lies. People do some things using various units of time and under all kinds of conditions. This is not a competition, and there is no metric. I walked slowly.

I went out and looked at whatever there was to see. A tree. A duck. Storefronts. Other people. I dialed it all back and stopped judging what I had to be reading/doing/thinking/appreciating and suddenly realized I had a lot of weird ideas about what I "had" to do. I''d been knocking myself around and making myself jump through hoops to accomplish things that had no discernible benefit. I didn''t learn this in one day.

It took a few months. My thoughts began to clear, and I was able to do more and more. And a major part of the way I got there was through meditation. That''s four: meditation. And it is a BIG ONE. I know. It''s in magazines at Whole Foods and it''s everywhere and trendy, but you know what? It changed my life, and I do it every day. Again, plenty of science out there you can easily find online.

You need to be consistent. This is the key. You don''t just do it once and then you''re changed. It is like exercise. I tell you true I know it changed my way of thinking and has probably physically changed my brain. It is part of my life to this day and will remain so.2 Five: I got help. I went to the doctor and got medication that I was on for about a year and a half, and I did cognitive behavioral therapy, which helped me break down my thought patterns.

I also had a more serious look at WHY I was so burned-out and exhausted and found the medical problem that was really at the root of all of this. Which was a good thing. I mean, it''s annoying, but it''s good to know, because I can do something about it. Six: I exercised. I started going to yoga classes a lot. Which, again, seems like a cliché but does.