If you are one of those people who can worry about almost anything to the point of helplessness and fear of doing something wrong, help is here. It is akin to the old saying about life handing you a bag of lemons and turning them into lemonade. But what if you add too much sugar and make people sick? Or maybe not enough sugar and people spit out your drink? Or was boiling the water three times enough to kill all the bacteria? Or is ten cents a drink too much for a glass of juice? Are the ice cubes you bought at the convenience store safe? Maybe the best thing is to just throw the lemons in the garbage. Well, maybe you should put them in the compost - but do the compost worms like lemons? Perhaps the best thing would be just to go back to bed - tomorrow might be a better day. Who gave you those darn lemons anyway?
Step 1 in an anxiety-free life is to examine the event or problem and determine the worst case scenario. What is the worst thing that could happen to your lemonade? The accountant inside you might say you could invest too much in sugar and not recover your investment. Two dollars of sugar is not going to break you - it just means you have to skip a Tim’s one morning - not to worry. That self-esteem imp that lives on your left shoulder might have you worried about your reputation in the neighbourhood. You do not want to be known as the worst lemonade maker on the street - bad enough that your pie crust at the last potluck was soggy. But who cares - my sister could never make a decent cool drink from those Freshie powders and she was only in therapy for a couple of weeks last summer.
Step 2 is to write down your anxiety issue. That’s correct - actually find a lead pencil and a piece of paper and write it down. The very act of taking the effort to form the letters on a page can show you how insignificant the perceived problem was. If you cannot find a pencil and paper you may use your Smart phone and tweet the problem to yourself with an appropriate hash tag like #sourlemons. The very act of writing or tweeting the issue will give you time to consider the worst case scenario.
This method of hiding your anxiety is used by the Tweeter-in-Chief down there in the States. If there is something that is secretly worrying him, he tweets about it and uses many, many adjectives like awesome, wonderful, beautiful, China and big walls. He soon convinces himself that there is nothing to be anxious about. He has even suggested this anxiety-curing method to the head spy of the CIA. Tweet it or write it. How bad can anything be?
Step 3 is to share your anxiety. This will spread the worry around and others may offer suggestions about solving potential problems. Remember how we all worried about the high cost of metered water last year? All the things we were going to do about not using water - drinking less, parching our lawns, driving dirty cars - the cost of our water bills was going to bankrupt us. Even council members were worried into a standstill until Uncle George took the reins and set rates that only gouged us a little - certainly not enough to worry about. Now council has money to stash away for a rainy day. In the case of the lemonade, get one of your children to help make the drink - you can always blame them for any disaster.
Step 4, and this is the important part, is to consider how the problem is going to affect you mentally, psychologically or possibly, even physically. Chances are the lemonade will not make you physically ill - for long. However it may be the possible emotional stress that is giving you anxiety. This is where you must look closely at the consequences of feeling really, really stupid about the issue. Now some people don’t have these ego attacks - look at the aforementioned water rate issue for instance. No one at City Hall really cares about the over-charging for water any more than they care about collecting too much money for capital projects and then stashing away the excess for a rainy day. Or if they do care, they are not getting very emotional about it.
You should not worry too much about what people will think about your failure to turn lemons into lemonade. In the grand scheme of things (and really, there is no grand scheme) these little challenges in life do not matter that much. Most of the anxiety we have are about things that we cannot change on our own. We need group help and leaders to attend to our anxieties. That is why we elect leaders, join service clubs, go to church, see our therapist and write letters or tweet.
Step 5 is to change the object of your anxiety. That is not to say worry about something else, but just move on with life. I looked at the inner workings of our toilet that is making little gurgling noises and instead of worrying about how to fix it, I just turned on the radio in the washroom so my wife would not hear the noise. I mean, I could have broken something and flooded the whole house before I got down to Canadian Tire and back with a part that would be the wrong size and I might have slipped and fallen on the icy parking lot in my rush. A thousand things could go wrong with a project like that.
Maybe I’ll tweet something about flushing. It could be really awesome and wonderful.
