我踏马而来

The best way to combat anxiety is to let go. There is a famous experiment in psychology called the "white bear experiment." The psychologist told a group of people: "For the next five minutes, you must not think about the white bear. If it comes to your mind, ring the bell." As a result, everyone pressed the bell like crazy, and their minds were filled with thoughts of the white bear. This experiment revealed a counter-intuitive truth - the more you try to control something, the more it will control you. We want to control our weight, our savings, our children's grades, and preferably our boss's mood and future direction. This is the source of modern anxiety. Just like the person who desperately wants to avoid the white bear, we desperately want to avoid anxiety, and as a result, we live like a tight spring. The way to get rid of anxiety is just four words - do everything in reverse. The more you are afraid of something, the more likely you are to let it happen. This method sounds counterintuitive, but it works. For example, I know a friend who is in sales. When he first entered the industry, he was particularly afraid of making phone calls. Every time he picked up the phone, his palms would sweat. He was afraid of being rejected, scolded, or the other party would just hang up. The more afraid you are, the less you dare to fight. The less you dare to fight, the worse your performance will be. The worse you are, the more anxious you will be. Later, the supervisor said to him: "You should treat every phone call as a sure loss now. The worst thing you can do is not buy it anyway, and you won't lose anything." He tried it and told himself that he would be rejected anyway, so there was nothing to be afraid of. As a result, once he accepted the worst outcome, he let go - his words stopped shaking, his mind became clear, and he closed several clients in a row. The essence of anxiety is the fear that something bad will happen in the future. You have been in a tug-of-war with fear. You say "no, no, no," and it says, "yes, yes, yes." How do you win? let go. There is a therapy in psychology called "ambivalent intention method". If you are afraid of insomnia, just lie in bed tonight and tell yourself: I will never sleep, I will stare until dawn. If you are afraid of making a fool of yourself in public, tell yourself before going on stage: I am going to perform badly today and make everyone in the audience laugh. Can't you see what's going to happen? When you completely give up resistance and allow the worst to happen, anxiety will retreat on its own. A friend has been troubled by insomnia for a long time. He starts to get scared every night when he lies down. Later, he tried this method and said to himself while lying in bed: "I won't sleep tonight. I will just lie down and wait for dawn." Within half an hour, he fell asleep. He later told me: "It turns out that I couldn't sleep before because I wanted to fall asleep too much. The desire to sleep was so anxious that I woke myself up." When Wang Yangming attained enlightenment in Longchang, he faced a desperate situation of life and death. He made himself a sarcophagus, lay down in it and said to himself: I will treat myself as dead. Since he is dead, I am not afraid of poisonous insects or miasma. The moment he gave up resistance, the study of mind was born. If you are not afraid of death, what is anxiety? The more you want to rush, the more you have to stop and be in a daze. The world today is too urgent. I want to complain when the takeout is overdue for one minute, I want to honk the horn if the red light is delayed for one second, and my children start to feel anxious when they are one step behind others. Everyone is like a clockwork clock that keeps ticking. This fast pace gives people the illusion that as long as I run fast enough, I can leave my anxiety behind. But in fact, the faster you run, the higher the dust rises, which confuses your own eyes. In the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, there was a great scholar named Zhang Dai, who was born into the second generation of wealth. In his later years, his country was ruined and his family was ruined. He was so poor that he hid in the mountains to compile books. Most people would go crazy with anxiety, but Zhang Dai didn't. It had been snowing heavily for three days, and there was no sound of people or birds on the lake. Everyone was hiding by the stove and shivering. Zhang Dai took a small boat and went to the lake pavilion to watch the snow. When I arrived at the pavilion, I found that there were two people drinking together. He was so happy that he drank three large glasses of wine with others before staggering back. When someone asked, he said: "Don't say that your husband is crazy, there are even more idiots who are as crazy as your husband." So what if the world collapses? So what if there is no food to eat tomorrow? The snow is falling and the wine is warm. This is life. Anxiety is because you live in the future. Only by slowing down and bringing your mind back to this minute and second can you feel the feeling of being alive. The more you want to prove yourself, the more you have to admit that you are ordinary. A lot of anxiety comes from being strong - you must take root in a big city, you must have an annual salary of one million, you must live a decent life. For the sake of decency, put yourself on the fire. Once the performance is not good, the whole person will collapse. Zhuangzi told a story about the "useless tree". Because the material of a tree is not good—it will sink when used as a boat, rot when used as a coffin, or infested with insects when used as a piece of furniture—the carpenter will not even look at it. But because it was useless, no one came to chop it down. Instead, it lived for thousands of years and grew into a sacred tree worshiped by thousands of people. The same goes for people. The more you try to prove yourself useful, the easier it is to be pruned and cut down by life. It's better to do the opposite and admit that I am just an ordinary person - my colleague got promoted, he is lucky, I don't want to argue, I want to go home early and lie down; my neighbor bought a luxury car, which is great, but it's also cool for me to ride an electric bike. Lower yourself into the dust. In the dust, no one can hurt you, because no one will step on an ant. When you stop trying to prove something to anyone, your anxiety will instantly return to zero. Romain Rolland said that there is only one kind of heroism in the world, which is to still love life after seeing the truth of life. I would like to add: There is only one true freedom in the world, which is to learn to do everything in reverse. If you want to win, learn to lose first; if you want to be fast, learn to be slow; if you want to be strong, learn to be weak first. Shake hands with anxiety and say, "Brother, sit down for now while I take a break." You will find that the monster with its teeth and claws is actually a paper tiger. Try not to rush away from anxiety when it strikes. Stay with it for a while and ask what it wants to tell you. Most of the time, what it wants to say is: you are too tired and it’s time to take a rest.