You Don't Have to Obey Your Anxiety Anymore

Ask anyone who spends time at goodsugar. Monday through Friday, I spend a couple of hours a day talking with guests. Some have become friends, and even the people I only know casually have become an important part of my life. They support this business, but they also remind me why I wanted to build it in the first place.

What makes goodsugar different from Starbucks or Dunkin’ isn't just the food. We serve healthy, plant-based food, but I also like getting involved in people's lives. Not in a nosy way, I hope. I'm interested in the things I'm working on myself: regulating the nervous system, noticing addictive behavior, expanding consciousness, and developing character. Call it woo-woo if you want. I'm still interested in becoming a better person, and I'm interested in helping other people work on that too.

Sometimes a two-minute pep talk is enough to remind someone of something they've been thinking about for years. Sometimes a conversation helps a person consider a new behavior. And sometimes somebody is dealing with addiction, trauma, anxiety, or psychological difficulties that are far too complicated for a juice bar owner to solve. I don't pretend otherwise.

I'm not a psychotherapist or an interventionist. I talk about self-help, and I speak from my own experience. I've lived through trauma, made a heap of mistakes, spent years in therapy, explored different approaches, and done a lot of reading, research, and listening. Over time, I've put together a personal program that helps me deal with my own issues. That's what I can share. Professional treatment matters, especially when a problem is severe, persistent, or dangerous.

When you finally reach a bottom with an addiction or a destructive habit, something can open up. Maybe you're exhausted. Maybe the consequences have finally become impossible to ignore. You might still be in denial about parts of your behavior, but at least you're willing to look. That's a beginning.

Here's one thing I suggest: write about all your addictions and compulsive behaviors. Be thorough. Write about the obvious ones and the subtle ones. Write about what happens right before you act out, what you're feeling in your body, what you tell yourself, what you do, and how you feel afterward. If writing feels like a big production, talk into your phone and let it transcribe your words. That's how much of this piece began. It took me only a few minutes to get the thoughts out. Writing it is helpful to me, too.

And here's the part I most want you to hear: you don't have to obey every anxious feeling anymore.

You might not be able to choose when anxiety appears. You might not be able to stop your nervous system from sounding an alarm. But as an adult, you can practice choosing what you do next. The urge to repeat an old behavior isn't an order you have to follow. The first step is getting tired of the old habit and the results it keeps delivering.

Imagine you're home and anxiety starts rising. Your familiar response might be to eat compulsively, pick a fight, reach for a substance, obsess over somebody, scroll endlessly, or do whatever you usually do to escape the discomfort. This time, don't run straight into the old routine. Sit down and pay attention to your breath.

Take ten comfortable, deliberate breaths. Nothing heroic. There's no medal for inhaling until your head spins. Notice the reluctance, the skepticism, the boredom, the frustration, and the voice insisting that this is stupid. Let them all be there while you keep breathing. You're learning to observe a feeling without immediately doing what it tells you to do.

If you get through those ten breaths, congratulations, you just meditated. It was short, but it counts. Now try another ten breaths later in the day. And another ten tomorrow. The objective isn't to become a serene statue with excellent posture. It's to interrupt the automatic reaction long enough to discover that another response is possible.

Your problems aren't over after ten breaths. If you're willing, the next step is action. Can you write for five minutes? Call someone you trust? Go out and be of service? Stay home and ask somebody else how they're doing? Can you lie on the floor and breathe comfortably for ten minutes? Maybe it's time to clean your apartment, do your laundry, wash the dishes, or clip your fingernails. These aren't glamorous acts, but they're esteemable acts. They tell your brain and your body that you can take care of yourself.

I also recommend keeping a few good books by your bed, and I mean within arm's reach. Books on Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, basic psychology, addiction recovery, and neuroscience are wonderful starting points. Order five if you have none. Take them with you when you travel. Don't put a lamp on top of them. Don't use them as coasters. They're not a decorative installation proving that you own books.

You don't have to read an entire chapter. Read a page. Read a paragraph. Read a single sentence. If opening the book feels impossible, pick it up and carry it around your apartment for a minute. I'm serious. Sometimes moving one inch toward a healthier behavior is how you eventually move a mile.

And if prayer is part of your practice, use it. When you're scared, delicate, confused, or unsure where your anxiety is leading, kneel beside the bed and pray for willingness. Pray for awareness. Pray for your fears to loosen their grip. Pray for the strength to do the next sensible thing. You don't have to have a perfect philosophy of prayer before you begin. If prayer isn't for you, you can still sit quietly and set the same intentions.

Now comes the part nobody wants to hear. You might do all this and not feel better right away. This isn't a quick fix. It's not a drug. You're not dropping a tab of LSD and, 45 minutes later, tripping your balls off. This is slow-drip medicine. It's the repetitive, sometimes deeply unexciting work of learning another way to live.

There may be no dramatic revelation, no instant euphoria, and certainly no guarantee that anxiety will disappear. But five breaths here, ten there, twenty tomorrow, a little writing, a phone call, a good book, a small act of service: over time, those actions become a practice. Repetition helps the brain learn, and practice gives you more opportunities to choose differently.

You can't expect to build a new habit by doing it once in a while and hoping for a miracle. Show up every day you can. If you miss a day, don't turn that into another excuse to give up. Begin again. If you need psychotherapy, a recovery program, medical care, or other support, use those resources too. Personal responsibility doesn't mean doing everything alone.

That's what I practice. That's what I talk about with people at goodsugar. I can't fix anybody, and I'm still working on myself. But I can remind someone, including myself, that a difficult feeling is not the same thing as a command.

I'm going to stop writing now, do my breathing exercises, and go to bed.

Farewell.