Why am I anxious about everything – and nothing?

Anxiety is a beautiful servant and a terrible master. Generalised anxiety, much like the prick of passing your finger through a burning candle, is a helpful alert to get out of harm’s way before it’s too late. It’s a signal that something isn’t right. But sometimes it doesn’t feel like a finger passing through a burning candle, sometimes it feels like your house is on fire. In the fog of this raging fire, it’s often difficult to identify the source of real danger this fireball of anxiety in the pit of your stomach is trying to warn you about.

My natural resting state in life is anxiety. This doesn’t mean I don’t experience joy, happiness and the beauty of life. It just means, like gravity, when those moments are over, I’ll settle back into my little bundle of nerves. When I have nothing to worry about, my otherwise lazy mind will use its spectacular power of imagination to invent worst case scenarios so I can begin worrying about them. These worse case scenarios never actually came to fruition over the three decades of my life, but they weave together the fabric of my everyday mental state. For the longest time, I thought this was normal. I was wrong.

We don’t talk about anxiety in Pakistan. We call it tension or high blood pressure. We can barely name the villain that robs us of so much – both personally and as a society. Since I’m not a licensed doctor or therapist, I’m not going to diagnose our collective anxiety or tell you how to heal your heart. But I will open up about my struggle with anxiety in the hope that it might help someone out there.

Almost since I remember gaining my own consciousness, I remember feeling anxious. The first anxiety I had as a child was: what would happen to my family if something happened to my father, our breadwinner? I was less than eight years old when I first felt this sensation (I remember because we moved to Saudi Arabia when I was eight and I remember both crying and praying). Incidentally, this is when I picked up the habit of praying to calm my nerves.

I can now post rationalise to understand where that fear was coming from: my grandfather (father’s father) passed away when my dad was young. And when I was born, money was tight. So much so that I can still savour the taste of both the French fries and ketchup my parents ordered to treat me when we realised we’d be able to pay off our debts because my father got a job in Saudi Arabia.

This anxiety has been one of the biggest gifts and one of the most debilitating curses of my life. It’s a gift because it drove me forward to achieve my goals, including working hard to achieve financial security. It’s a curse because at some point, my mind internalised that the only way to achieve these goals is to let the anxiety stay rather than to overcome it. I’m a grown man today but the debilitating, catastrophic, irrational anxiety which cripples me today is comparable to what I felt as an eight-year-old.

And now, the irony of it all is that the prick of passing your finger through a candle is never the problem, the real danger is that of burning one’s finger if one doesn’t act on the prick by removing the finger. Ultimately, the prick of anxiety isn’t the problem itself but signalling that a problem exists. My anxiety problem today then is twofold. First, it’s to discover, isolate and understand; what is the underlying problem that this anxiety is trying to signal. There’s no easy or scientific way to do this in the fog of everyday life so the best one can do is the trial and error of confronting each source of anxiety and unpacking it.

The second challenge is to not let anxiety become an overwhelming, pervasive sensation that takes over our life. I call this anxiety for the sake of anxiety. This is now my muscle memory, my natural state. I must actively fight, confront and challenge it every time it rears its debilitating head.