Fighting anxiety like my life depends on it

TLDR: The struggle is real.

In January 2025, during a vacation from work, I focused on a few philosophical exercises that decreased my anxiety to an astonishing degree. I recommend them wholeheartedly. However, in spite of keeping up those habits in February, going back to work immediately re-ignited my bad anxious habits… I would say to an equally astonishing degree! This forced me to wonder why these philosophical exercises did not rescue me in this new context and to reckon with the depth of my anxiety disorder – its intensity, pervasiveness, and origin. I share all the philosophical insights I can muster.

Anxiety is what happens when you sense that you are in a situation of “problematic uncertainty”¹. You feel that you lack information in a way that leaves you vulnerable to a potential threat. The French have this wonderful idiom that literally translate as “I do not know what sauce I am going to be eaten with”². It means that we do not know what to expect exactly (though we suspect it can’t be good). Anxiety works exactly like that: how will the threat present itself exactly? Are my precautions enough to bear the brunt? The point of this feeling – of these perceived high stakes – is to motivate you to think longer and harder about your circumstance than you otherwise might have, in order to cope with danger.³ To be clear, anxiety is the sense that allows you to perceive this dangerous situation, and not merely a passive reaction to perceiving this situation. Anxiety actively tells you that you are in trouble. And unfortunately, you can get stuck with this feeling.

I personally am stuck with this feeling a lot of the time. I wear anxiety-colored glasses: everything feels high stake, and everything feels like it demands of me a lot of defensive thinking to avoid danger. 

There are two ways in which I am stuck:

Firstly, I am stuck with anxious rumination. As Jodie Russell explains⁴, pathological rumination occurs when we come to rely exclusively on a single emotional register to face certain situations. Normally, each emotion delivers a kind of ‘action readiness’ that might be useful (for example, anxiety defends from harm by increasing inquisitiveness, which is very useful), but what sometimes happens is that we come to favour only one family of emotions to face a situation and we lose the ability to switch to other emotional registers. In my case, there are some situations, like thinking about my day tomorrow, where I will automatically favour defensive emotions – fear, anxiety, anger, etc – and the prospect of using other emotions has become utterly alien to me.

Secondly, I am stuck with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. As Juliette Vazard describes⁵, what normally happens with anxiety is that it signals to you that you should be more inquisitive about a potential threat, and then the emotion dies down once you have satisfied that requirement. But, as Vazard also describes, with OCD, the anxiety signal does not go away that easily. I might check that the stove is turned off twenty times, and still come to experience crippling doubt “but… what if it’s still on? What if I checked wrong?” All kinds of strange OCD rituals are born to make the anxiety signal finally go away (e.g. counting to ten while checking, etc).

I have vowed to do my best to get unstuck. When it came time to decide on my 2025 New Year’s Resolutions, I reflected on the past year and I realized how much generalized anxiety had taken away from me. Therefore, I decided to treat the problem more seriously than I tended to do. My resolutions were very simple: 20 minutes of formal mindfulness meditation daily (seated and focused; like a workout for the mind), + journaling daily + fleeing from my OCD rituals daily + using the Time Since App to keep in touch with types of activities. I told readers of the blog that I’d come back to them on this.. and I am happy to report that those philosophical exercises worked like a charm. I found that my anxiety level decreased significantly when I switched from doing those activities as a mood-repair trick on a need-to basis to doing those same activities but daily and as preventative measures. Putting in the work ahead of time eliminated a lot of OCD, painful apprehensiveness of the future, and social anxiety. And as I predicted, it was impressive to see OCD rituals disappear on their own even when they were not exactly the ones that I had targeted with my efforts.

And now the bad news... When I went back to work in February after my January vacation, I kept going with my New Year’s resolutions, and yet my debilitating anxious thoughts and OCD rituals came back with a vengeance, triggered by various work projects. I was very dismayed by this. How could recovery be so impressive and yet relapse so violent? I do not think it proves that the success of my anti-anxiety practices was only due to the fact that I was on holiday. No. I think the problem is that I was unwilling to let them target a deeper obsession that I have. My obsession with work.

The problem is that I am loyal to two masters: Wisdom and my Work Obsession. As the Bible says: “No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money.”⁶ This makes sense logically: when the second master comes back home, they can give orders that contradict the orders of the first master. In my case, this is exactly what happened, Work Obsession came back home and made demands incompatible with the goal of healing.

You see, I have this Work Obsession, it’s pretty simple to understand really.. it yells at me: “you have to work; you have to earn a living; you have to be productive; are you employed, unemployed, retired or dead? Those are the four existential options and there are no others.” As I said previously, anxiety can be understood with the following equation: High Stakes = High Inquisitiveness. Well, personally I do not manage to get this Work Obsession out of my head when it comes to thinking about what is at stake in my daily existence. And the stakes feel very high. This triggers a reaction of defensive inquisitiveness that manifests itself in anxious ruminations and OCD about my daily schedule.

I am in a constant state of uncertainty about my daily schedule. I feel that if my daily schedule were perfect and productive I would be safe from the danger of not being a productive member of society. As a result, I ruminate endlessly about the precise order in which I should do things on a given day (if you are sane, you would not believe how precise). I obsess incessantly “should I read in the morning and write in the afternoon or should I write in the morning and read in the afternoon”. I obsess over minute schedule-related details in my environment. But worst of all. Most soul-wrenching of all. I obsess over minute details within me. I feel things within me, like physical sensations or beliefs, and I start to wonder “is this thing I am feeling indicative of low morale? … or indicative of low energy perhaps?” Because if it is, if it is an early warning sign of dereliction from duty, of an inability to keep up with the productive schedule, then perhaps I should re-think the entire schedule once again and reshuffle those planned activities in my head for the thousandth time.

When I am gripped by these obsessions, every single gesture or movement I take is filled with anxiety (it sounds like an exaggeration but it’s not). To walk from point A to point B becomes a rigid process, full of hesitations. The abrupt return of this experience made me revisit some of the writing I did for this blog (May 2024) about anxiety, daily living, hope and despair… I was quite surprised to find that my writing at the time reads like a mad cry for help! Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“[This month’s exercise] allowed me to be very attentive to the difference between two ways my body can move through space: ON THE ONE HAND, my attitude when I’m hoping “to just be done with something”, to “get it over with already” […] ON THE OTHER HAND, my attitude when I perform a long task “without hope”⁷ = settling into it [...] A relaxed demeanor, not of mechanical gestures, but of exploratory gestures.

I really need to be attentive to that difference. I need to feel it in my flesh and bones. It is a matter of life or death.”

A matter of life or death! Damn... What follows this quote is a lengthy description of how hard I find it not to be immediately drawn to my computer to work first thing in the morning (skipping breakfast, skipping everything else). When I re-read that recently, I thought to myself “yep, those are not the thoughts of a sane man!” And indeed, they are not. This is the reason why I felt like I simply had to write them down, and why they sound so dramatic. I badly need to free myself from all of this anxiety.

By way of conclusion… How can I solve this mess? Even as I write this very article I am chasing imaginary deadlines, so I do not want to sound like I have it all figured out. I very much don’t. But here are all the insights I could muster:

After going through this January/early February experiment, I am in a better position to tackle the root of my anxiety. There are four reasons to be optimistic about the way forward:

1) I have more conceptual clarity: I see that the way I relate to my daily schedule is a problem, and that this problem consists in OCD and anxious rumination. Two things that I understand better now, thanks to the philosophical work of my colleagues.

2) I have a strong commitment to getting better, which will make it easier to retain this conceptual clarity. The main benefit of this crusade that I am on against my anxiety disorder is that it prevents me from forgetting that I have an anxiety disorder. This mental illness has a way of fading into the background and making itself forgotten. When I forget about it, its deleterious effects do not go away, but my awareness of what causes these effects does! Since pathological rumination consists in only using one emotional register to understand the world around you, you come to forget that there are other ways of seeing the world, and therefore you even come to forget that you are dealing with a way of seeing the world.⁸ When anxious rumination becomes absolute, you come to believe that you are not anxious at all and that this is just how the world is, in and of itself. A world of threats around every corner, and nothing else.

3) The combination of this conceptual clarity and this strong commitment forces me to be painfully honest with myself. It forces me to reckon with the fact that anti-anxiety measures do not work when I am unwilling to let them work. If I am purposefully shielding some of my obsessions from its effects, because I do not want to let go of what they tell me, then I cannot be surprised that these philosophical exercises are inefficient.

4) I can learn to let go of what my Work Obsession is telling me. It is plain to see that this obsession comes from the way the society I live in is currently organized. It is one of the masters I am trying to serve: I strive to be the perfect neoliberal subject: “an autonomous, individualized, self-directing decision-making agent who becomes an entrepreneur of [oneself]”⁹

And as we have seen on this blog, though it is admittedly difficult, there are reasons to think that Philosophy as a Way of Life and philosophical exercises might be a way to change how you view yourself without having to wait for a change of society. Hopefully, that new self-conception can be a prelude to a better society. Thus, my dear wish is that I might stop conceiving of myself as an “entrepreneur of myself” and start conceiving of myself as a “custodian” of the natural and social world around me.

To Be Continued, I’m Sure...

(PS: On this blog, we explore a new philosophical exercise every month. For example, we thought about death everyday for a month with Marcus Aurelius. Another time, we cultivated the sense of earth with modern postural yoga. We’ve been going for a year now, take a look around the blog and see what you like!)

(17/02/2025)

Pierrick Simon

my email: lemiroirtranquille@outlook.fr

(do not hesitate to reach out)

Bluesky: @pierricksimon.bsky.social

Twitter: @PhiloTranquille

1Juliette Vazard, “Epistemic Anxiety, Adaptive Cognition, and Obsessive-Compulsive

Disorder”

2“Je ne sais pas à quelle sauce je vais être mangé.”

3Juliette Vazard, “Epistemic Anxiety, Adaptive Cognition, and Obsessive-Compulsive

Disorder”

4 Jodie Louise Russell, “Stuck on repeat: Why do we continue to ruminate?”

5Juliette Vazard, “The doxastic profile of the compulsive re-checker”

6Matthew 6:24

7In this context (Spinoza’s philosophy) lack of hope is positive and feels good.

8Jodie Louise Russell, “Stuck on repeat: Why do we continue to ruminate?” : see section 4 on hypocognition, especially the passage about the illusion of insight “ Experiences of insight or understanding may be due to the fact that people who are dysphoric may think they have grasped the whole picture, when in actual fact they are hypocognitive of important or alternative concepts relating to their problem.”

9 Türken S, Nafstad HE, Blakar RM and Roen K (2016) Making sense of neoliberal subjectivity:

A discourse analysis of media language on self-development. Globalizations 13(1): 32–46.