Secrets Keep You Sick

Anxiety is a problem for people with or without an addiction to nicotine. Is it possible that someone, someplace, is enjoying a cigarette in a secret room full of other people who’ve decided to commit their whole life to being a closet smoker? Are they happy? Knowing the answer to that will not make you happy because it’s going to be yes and no…at the same time. Quit your compulsion for you.

Life begins with an arbitrary set of circumstances, an arbitrary name, an arbitrary country, an arbitrary set of rules. An arbitray set of eyes in society. And an arbitrary set of people who care about you. There is not a conspiracy to make you fail. There is a dream that you will succeed. Find your own dream. It might take a little time. It might take a little while, but it will come. For right now, don’t do whatever you’ve committed to trying not to do.

Anxiety is a disorder that many of us have, but there are numbers to call. There are people funded to help you, sitting here as we speak. But no one person can be there to pick up the phone 24/7, for free. If you’ve stumbled on this blog, here are some tips that worked for the author to deal with anxiety.

Tell yourself to commit to counting to 30, in your head, while focussing on how your body feels, without trying to change anything about it until the time is up.

Set this goal and keep it.

If you’re crawling out of your skin, keep crawling until you get to 30 seconds. Then, do whatever you want. Many, but not all, people will find that doing something you want to do is impossible for long periods of time, but attainable for 30 seconds. If you’ve smoked, drank, gambled, obsessed about anything and compulsively acted out on that craving while reading this, that’s ok, but I doubt you had to. Try the counting thing, hearing your own voice just works.