This is the subject of my (short) talk this afternoon at the Ateliers d'Art de France general assembly.
Here's the outline:
1. Learning to manage anxiety without solving your problems
Problems will never stop. Never!
A bit like the "end of history" we were promised after the fall of the Soviet Union.
"Nothing stands in the way of peace anymore!"
"The economy will flourish!"
"The dictatorships will fall!"
Yeah, right.
Same in life: problems never disappear.
They transform, they renew themselves.
Not to mention the ultimate problem we're all heading toward.
So if you're waiting until everything's solved to feel better... you'll be waiting a long time.
The game, then, is to find peace despite the problems.
Without looking for the one action that will fix everything. It doesn't exist.
2. Emotions are manufactured inside. Then projected outside.
"He's annoying me!"
"She's wearing me out!"
"This situation is stressing me out."
We talk as if emotions were created by the people and events around us.
Yes: the outside world can act as a trigger.
But the emotion itself is always manufactured inside.
It comes from us, it's created within us.
But we don't want it, so we project.
"It's their fault! It's society! It's the system! It's my ex! It's the corner of this table!"
But by externalizing the emotion, by pinning it on someone else, we deprive ourselves of the main lever we have to manage it.
Because we can manage the inside. Not the outside.
3. The body is the notebook of thought
Thoughts are immaterial. They pass. They slip away.
It's the famous "train of thought" racing ahead through association.
Cheese. Milk. Cow. Normandy. The D-Day landings. Saving Private Ryan. Spielberg. E.T. Planet... Wait, what?
Emotions, on the other hand, are felt in the body.
The knot in your stomach. The throat tightening. The short breath.
They have a longer half-life than thoughts. An emotion isn't instantly replaced by the next one. It lasts.
That's why our brain, when it perceives an important, worrying, dangerous idea... attaches an emotion to it.
Thoughts scroll by at full speed when suddenly... you feel a knot in your stomach. That stays.
"Oh, right... I haven't solved that problem."
The emotion anchors the thought that was about to slip away.
But sometimes the opposite happens: the emotion creates the thought.
The knot in your stomach is already there – because you ate too much fat the night before – and the brain looks for the problematic thought.
When it can't find one: it takes the first one it finds. Or it simply invents one.
Anxiety is created out of nothing.
4. What matters is never intellectual. The trap of logic.
The first reflex might be to manage emotions through thought.
In my experience, that's rarely a good lead.
Because despite the credit we give it, reasoned thought is often a poor decision-making tool.
For plenty of reasons:
- Logic is common to everyone. It doesn't account for what makes you specific.
- It relies on the very narrow context you give it. If you forget a key element from your childhood, or an unspoken preference, the reasoning falls apart.
- It handles the exponential nature of certain factors poorly. In a pros-and-cons column, you don't realize the third line is 100,000 times more important than the others and counts as much as the whole table.
That's why we sometimes resist ideas that look good "on paper."
The logic is infallible, the answer is clear, and yet...
We pull back. We delay. We can't bring ourselves to it.
Because the body knows.
It remembers – even unconsciously – every significant element of our life. It knows the weight of each one.
It weighs all these factors at every decision.
Which doesn't always make it right, of course.
But its input must be taken into account.
5. The body, source of creation
That's why, recently, I changed my decision-making process.
I no longer think through problems intellectually.
I no longer weigh the pros and cons in two columns.
I no longer weight my options for the next action.
I expose myself to the facts. I feel the emotions. I absorb.
Then, when the moment comes, when it's time to choose...
I act.
The way you grab a glass off a table. The way you catch a ball.
No thinking. No anticipation. No regret.
The decision was made elsewhere, earlier.
In some corner I don't know about.
It's final.
And creates no anxiety.