(Without Losing Your Mind or Your Car Keys)

By Bob the Dog Edited by Penelope the Owl

Anxiety is the national pastime. Forget baseball — that ship sailed when hot dogs got more expensive than rent. No, America’s favorite sport is fretting, a kind of mental rodeo where your brain rides every wild horse of worry until you’re bucked flat on your dignity.

It’s like keeping a tiny paranoid screenwriter in your head, typing out horror films where you star as the victim. You’re just ordering coffee, and suddenly you’re picturing bankruptcy, public humiliation, or marrying someone who claps when the plane lands.

And you’re not alone in this rodeo. A Harvard study says 20 percent of adults in the U.S. — over 60 million — get roped by anxiety every year. A third of us will meet the beast face-to-face before we kick the bucket.

But here’s the kicker: anxiety isn’t evil. It’s not a villain twirling its mustache while plotting your ruin. Sometimes it’s just a well-meaning idiot friend waving red flags where maybe only a pink Post-it is needed. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard — who never had to deal with Spirit Airlines — once said, “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way, has learned the ultimate.”

So maybe the trick isn’t to banish anxiety but to listen to it without letting it drive the damn car.

What Is Anxiety, Anyway?

Fear is when a bear shows up on your porch. Anxiety is when your brain spends all night imagining bears with credit cards, bears who date your daughter, bears who file lawsuits.

It comes in two flavors: body (sweaty palms, racing heart) and mind (dread, worry, conspiracies starring you as the patsy). It’s not a monster; it’s the dashboard light flashing “check engine.” You don’t put tape over it. You get the oil changed.

The problem isn’t the jitters themselves — it’s how we treat them. If you stop seeing anxiety as the devil and start seeing it as an overzealous smoke alarm, you can use it instead of being used by it.

Trick #1: Reframe It as Excitement

You can’t just tell anxiety to scram — that’s like telling your mother-in-law to “just relax.” Never works. What you can do is rebrand.

Studies show that when folks were told their pounding heart was simply their body revving up for action, they performed better under pressure. Same sweaty palms, new interpretation. Suddenly, you’re not terrified — you’re an Olympic athlete about to nail the triple axel.

It sounds hokey, like telling yourself you’re not broke, you’re “pre-rich.” But the science says it helps. Try whispering, “I’m not nervous, I’m jazzed!” next time you’re giving a speech. Sure, people might edge away from you at the podium, but you’ll feel better.

Trick #2: Plan Something, Anything

The real villain isn’t anxiety, it’s uncertainty. Anxiety without uncertainty is just caffeine. But uncertainty walks in uninvited, dumps muddy boots on your sanity, and raids your fridge.

The antidote? Planning. Even a lousy to-do list beats gnawing on your fingernails. Write it down, make a plan, and suddenly the beast shrinks.

It doesn’t make life predictable — hurricanes still happen, and your Wi-Fi will still quit in the middle of a Zoom interview — but a plan gives you something anxiety can’t: a sense of control.

Trick #3: Excellence, Not Perfection

Perfection is the Paris Hilton of mental habits: looks glamorous, delivers nothing. You’ll exhaust yourself chasing it, and all you’ll get is a hangover.

Perfectionism doesn’t improve results; it slows you down, makes you less creative, and guarantees you’ll hate yourself before the day’s over. Excellence, on the other hand, is perfection’s cooler cousin — shows up with chips and guac, gets the job done, and doesn’t judge your dirty laundry pile.

Aim for excellence. It means you’ll still care, but you won’t grind yourself to dust over every typo or casserole gone wrong.

Trick #4: Phone a Friend

Science calls it “social buffering.” Regular folks call it “not drinking alone.” When you’ve got people who love you, anxiety stops gnawing your bones like a junkyard dog.

A laugh with a friend, a hug from your kid, or just sitting with someone who doesn’t think you’re nuts can turn Mount Doom back into a molehill.

Wrangling the Beast

So here’s the short course in wrangling this wild bronco called anxiety:

• Remember, anxiety is trying to help (it’s just not very good at it).
• Reframe it as excitement — think rodeo, not apocalypse.
• Make a plan — lists are cheaper than therapy and easier than bourbon.
• Choose excellence over perfection — guacamole beats quiche every time.
• And don’t go it alone.

Because if worrying were an Olympic sport, we’d all have more medals than Michael Phelps. But at the end of the day, the world is not a booby-trapped obstacle course — it’s just a messy, lovable place where mismatched socks are fine and sometimes the low bidder still gets you to space.

Alan Shepard, the first American in orbit, was asked what he thought about before liftoff. His answer: “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the low bidder.”

Now that’s anxiety. The rest of us? We’re just trying to survive Monday morning.