Anxiety and Distractions

A state of chronic anxiety and despair is one of the scariest things to manifest itself on anyone. It's your mind getting in your own way. You get anxious and lose your appetite and sleep. Next you get even more anxious because you're can't stop being anxious. You get mad at your own silliness. Thus begins a vicious feedback loop.

You try to distract yourself. With work, going out, maybe partying a little. And it's successful, but then you have to go back to being with yourself. Trying to find distractions to get away from your own mind never works because you cannot ever travel without it, and sooner or later you're back to where you started.

You devote your time to feeling busy, and feel extremely uncomfortable with silence. Being alone with yourself. A compulsive habit of thinking and overthinking things. So you go back to trying to find more distractions, without focusing on the problem of thinking too much.

Why do we start going back to all our cringiest and awkwardest experiences just before we sleep. Overthinking things that happened, and making plans about what needs doing and how you'll totally do it when morning arrives. It's because all day we're doing something or the other. Finding distractions, running away from thinking about problems. And as soon as the mind gets some time to be truly alone, it starts working, almost like clockwork.

And when you give your mind some time to be alone, when you don't try to find distractions to run away, then the mind will quiet itself. Just like you cannot turn a tumultuous river calm by splashning it, instead of forcing your mind to stop thinking, you have to let it meander into different directions first.