Skip to content

Anxiety can be like a virus

Your Mental Health
anxiety

Coronavirus. 

There. I said it. Haven’t we all thought about that tiny, lifeless entity and felt a tingle of fear, of anxiety? 

“That guy on the bus last Tuesday. He was sniffling. There’s no flu going around. What if he’s got corona?” In our quiet moments, we might ask this question. 

It is not my custom, as I write to you, to address current affairs – to pivot off what gets top billing in the news. We see on TV, listen to on radio, and read in our newspapers enough about the scary state of our human universe. You don’t need me to remind you about that stuff. You know already. 

But today I will make a slight exception and talk about anxiety. About how frightening a viral pandemic may be. And how you might be able to use that justifiable fear to understand your own day-to-day emotional jitters. 

It is real. There is a new virus doing what viruses do, which is to replicate. 

Anxiety, too, can multiply itself and infect our well-being and invade those private, protected and vulnerable emotional places we nurture and need. 

There is anxiety that we can associate with something (or somebody) in our space. That’s the easy stuff, because we can walk over to that source and deal with it. We can identify it.

But what about the anxiety, the unaccountable nervous shivers, we feel when no cause is apparent? 

Some of us, just standing in the kitchen, feel our nerves becoming keen and aware. Our skin. Our muscles tensing. A vague sense of worry. 

In the psychiatric trade, non-specific anxiety is seen as a treatable illness. That may well be so. But it is my view that concern for what’s not readily apparent to us, attention – and yeah, fear – are inherent and good. 

A basic, low degree of anxiety is natural. Perhaps, it is the word itself that is negative. But we can use that word, that feeling, to better understand ourselves. 

Back in the 1970s, a good friend created a TV show called Up With People. It was quite jolly. All about how happy life is. How music and dancing and optimism were the universal solvents to our personal difficulties. That was likely true, but in those days I didn’t get the message. I lived with what was then called “clinical depression” and “anxiety,” which are parts of me to this day. 

Bob was right. His idea was right. And when I saw him last, the day before he died of cancer and was so clear in his thoughts, he told me to stop being anxious. Not to sweat the little things. To not be such a blind, egotistical idiot, and to feel the sunshine. To look out the window and say “all is good.” 

Anxiety is something we can overcome. When it sneaks its way into our emotions and, like a virus, infects every part of us, we can stand up and say, “No way. You’re not welcome here. Be gone.” 

Then, we use our best tools. We go for a walk on our favourite beach. We tend the garden. We chop wood. We cook our best soup and sing in the kitchen. We are mindful about all that is good.