Psychologists learn to treat disorders and solve “issues,” but those goals don’t even touch on the real problem. I call it the “what goes on in the chest cavity” problem, namely the anxiety with us at all times. How we feel, whether or not we’re having any fun. Now, some anxiety is good. But we know what I’m talking about.

Why is it so important to learn to manage your anxiety? Defining a self.

Because you’ll feel miserable and have a mess of a life if you don’t.

Anxiety is the fuel that pushes at your emotions. You are one person when you are calm and another person, making other choices, when you are anxious. Guess which person makes the best decisions?

The Shrimp Cocktail Incident that Changed My Life

Dateline: Dallas, Texas

            It’s nine o’clock in the evening after a rather long day at a private hospital and a seminar at the Dallas Museum of Art. At the moment my life was changed, I was standing at the seafood take-out counter at Eatzi’s, my favorite to-go food source. The lecture at the art museum was given by Dr. David Eagleman, Head of the Neuroscience Lab at Baylor Medicine. His presentation was about his new book. Sum, which he’d started on a lark, is a collection of forty possibilities for the afterlife, without a particular religious or ethical point of view. This is important because Eagleman’s book isn’t about what he or anyone else believes the afterlife to be. His goal was to get the reader thinking about how he or she lives.

            MysteryShrink has the same purpose. Not to get you to believe anything or buy anything. But to think. The afterlife possibility in the title of his book, Sum, goes something like this:

You die. Then you wake up to discover that in your afterlife, you have to live every minute of your life over again, exactly the way you did the first time. (I know. Maybe if I’d known about this earlier in my life, I wouldn’t have . . .) 

The very thought of going through it all again is exhausting, and you haven’t heard the rub. In the Sum afterlife, instead of experiencing events and activities in a sequential order—wake up, get out of bed, get a headache, take some aspirin, spill coffee, stub toe, traffic jam, encounter jackass on freeway, fall in love, get married, have a baby, worry for thirty minutes a day about your child, go on a diet, encounter jackass at work, think about going on a diet ten times a day, take out the trash—In the Sum afterlife, you are required to relive your life in chunks determined by activity. So, stub your toe for a couple of hours, spend a month jammed up on the freeway, two years straight worrying, a decade complaining (hopefully, not noticing how little changed for all of your effort), live one love experience after another, and take out the trash over and over and over.  You get the idea.

I know. Prit-tee terrifying.

Okay, back to the seafood to-go counter at Eatzi’s in Dallas.

Now, imagine the biggest, coldest, yummiest cocktail shrimp you’ve ever seen or imagined. Well, those puppies are under the counter glass. I always get the shrimp. These babies are forty dollars a pound, each one is about six bucks. As I do every month, I on the evening my life changed forever, I stood glassy-eyed, caught between desire and restraint. “Do I get four or go all out and get five? That’s a lot of money. I spend too much money on the road. What’s the point of working on the road if you’re going to spend so much of it?  No, the cost is ridiculous, who do you think you are? You’re not one of the up-towners in this neighborhood. Suck it up and get four. Poor people all over the world would love to have four of these shrimp. But then . . . Maybe I’ll go on that all protein diet again and these shrimp would be a nice start . . .”

I stood pondering. And running my PBS (Personal number BS—important term, it comes a lot because each of us has a whole library of PBS.)

Then I remembered Dr. Eagleman’s frightening little “what if” story? What if I have to do my life over again, with the same amounts of time lived out as before, but in lumps?

Oh, dear. The way I was going I’d have to spend six weeks standing in front of the seafood counter at Eatzi’s, especially since I’d have to spend the six weeks in angst over whether to buy four or five shrimp? Can you think of a better waste? (Of course, you can. I can, too. While I’m re-living three years of explaining why I can’t do anything, I’d be glad to trade out that six weeks at Eatzi’s, but unfortunately, that’s not how the system works.)

Still, did I want to spend any more time in my afterlife in angst? No. In fact, there were a lot of chunks of my days that I didn’t want to relive, particularly the worry fits and the discouraging minutes spent while I plan out the worst that can happen in every situation.

If you knew that whatever time you spend worrying and angry and complaining in your life now—you would have to spend again, in lumps, what would you do? 

The How to Be Happy All the Blasted Time page of MysteryShrink is dedicated to the struggle to have a better time while we are here, and just maybe a better time for those around us.

T-Shirt: “If you can’t do something about your attitude for you, do it for the rest of us.”

For now, consider Eagleman’s story. Not because it’s true. Because it makes you think.

Next in this column: Understanding Anxiety, The Horse in the Cattle Guard Incident.

Tags: Anxiety, Anxiety Management, Baylor Medical Center, Baylor Medical Neuroscience, Better Relationships, Big Shrimp, Dallas Museum of Art, David Eagleman, Dr. David Eagleman, Emotional Development, Improvement, Personal Change, Relationships, Stress, Stress and Disease, Stress Management, Sum