by Sarah Knight
Survey says: y’all are a bunch of freaks
As part of my research for Calm the Fuck Down, I conducted an anonymous online survey asking people to name their go-to freakout reaction. It revealed that most folks (38.6 percent) fall into the “Anxious/Panicky” category; 10.8 percent each cop to “I get angry” and “I avoid things”; and another 8.3 percent pledge allegiance to “Sad/Depressed.” As for the rest? Nearly one third of respondents (30.3 percent) said “I can’t pick just one. I do all of these things,” which was when I knew this book would be a hit. And a mere 1.2 percent said “I never do any of these things.” Sure you don’t.
Welcome to the Flipside
Okay, I was saving the nitty-gritty practical stuff for part II, but you’ve been so patient with all these parameters that I want to give you a sneak peek at how we’re going to flip the script on whichever Freakout Face you’re experiencing.
I’ve based my method on a little gem called Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which states that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”
You don’t have to have taken high school physics (which I didn’t, as may be obvious from my forthcoming interpretation of this law) to understand the idea that you can counteract a bad thing with a good thing. Laughing is the opposite of crying. Deep breaths are the opposite of lung-emptying screams. The pendulum swings both ways, et cetera, et cetera.
Ergo, one simple route to calming down pre-, mid-, or postfreakout is to—cue Gloria Estefan—turn the beat around.
FREAKOUT FACES: THE FLIPSIDES
Anxious and overthinking?
FOCUS: Which of these worries takes priority? Which can you actually control? Zero in on those and set the others aside. (A bit of a recurring theme throughout the book.)
Sad and exhausted?
REPAIR WITH SELF-CARE: Treat yourself the way you would treat a sad friend in need. Be kind. Naps, chocolate, baths, cocktails, a South Park marathon; whatever relieves your funk or puts a spring back in your step and a giggle in your wiggle.
Angry and making shit worse?
PEACE OUT WITH PERSPECTIVE: You can’t elbow yourself in the ribs like I did to my husband in the Mexico City airport (seriously, elbows don’t bend in that direction). But when you’re getting hot under the collar, you can imagine what it would be like to live out your days in a south-of-the-border airport holding pen. Visualize the consequences and adjust your attitude accordingly.
Avoiding and prolonging the agony?
ACT UP: Take one step, no matter how small, toward acknowledging your problem. Say it out loud. Write it in steam on the bathroom mirror. Fashion its likeness into a voodoo doll. If you can do that, you’re on your way to calming the fuck down.
So there you have it: a simple framework for acknowledging your worries, recognizing your unhealthy reactions, and beginning to reverse them.
I mean, I didn’t become an internationally bestselling anti-guru by making this shit hard for you guys.
Freakout funds
In The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck I introduced the concept of “fuck bucks,” which are the resources—time, energy, and money—that you spend on everything you care about, from activities and appointments to friends, family, and more. Conversely, you can choose to not spend those resources on things you don’t care about. Managing them is called “making a Fuck Budget,” a concept that is on track to become my most enduring legacy. A Lemonade for anti-gurus, if you will.
Since you don’t fix what ain’t broke, I carried fuck bucks and the budgeting thereof through the next book, Get Your Shit Together—the premise being that you also have to spend time, energy, and/or money on things you MUST do, even if you don’t really WANT to do them—like, say, going to work so you can earn money so you can pay your rent. In the epilogue, I warned (presciently, as it turns out) that “shit happens” and “you might want to reserve a little time, energy, and money for that scenario, just in case.”
Thus, in Calm the Fuck Down—because I am nothing if not a maker-upper of catchy names for commonsense concepts that we should all be employing even if we didn’t have catchy names for them—I give you freakout funds (FFs).
These are the fuck bucks you access when shit happens. You could spend them exacerbating all the delightful behavior I went over in the previous section. Or you could spend them calming the fuck down and dealing with the shit that caused said freakout.
Ideally, you’ve read Get Your Shit Together and saved up for this scenario. If not, you’re in even more need of the following tutorial. But any way you slice it, their quantities are limited and every freakout fund spent is time, energy, or money deducted from your day.
TIME
Time has been in finite supply since, well, since the beginning. They’re not making any more of it. Which means that eventually you’re going to run out of time to spend doing everything—including freaking out about or dealing with whatever is about to happen/is happening/just happened to you. Why waste it on the former when spending it on the latter would vastly improve the quality of your entire remaining supply of minutes?
ENERGY
You will also eventually run out of energy, because although Jeff Bezos is trying really hard, he has not yet programmed Alexa to suck out your mortal soul while you’re sleeping and recharge you on Wi-Fi. At some point, you have to eat, rest, and renew the old-fashioned way—and if the shit does hit the fan, you’ll wish you’d spent less energy freaking out about it and had more left in the tank to devote to dealing with it.
MONEY
This one’s more complex, since some people have a lot and some people have none, and everyone’s ability to replenish their coffers varies. But if you’re broke, then stress-shopping while you freak out about passing the bar exam is obviously poor form. Whereas if you’ve got a bottomless bank account, you might argue that cleaning out the J.Crew clearance rack is at least contributing to the improvement of your overall mood. I’m not one to pooh-pooh anyone’s version of self-care, but all that money you spent on khaki short-shorts and wicker belts is definitely not solving the underlying problem of your LSAT scores. Hiring a tutor would probably be a better use of funds. (And to all my billionaire doomsday preppers out there with money to burn: you do you, but I have a hunch neither your guns nor your bitcoin will be worth shit on the Zombie Exchange.)
In sum: Worrying is wasteful. It costs you time, energy, and/or money and gives you nothing useful in return. Whereas if you spend your freakout funds actually dealing with something, you’ve, you know—actually dealt with it.
My goal is to help you minimize your worrying and spend your FFs wisely along the way.
Nice try, Knight. If I could stop worrying and retain a viselike grip over my time, energy, and money, I’d BE Jeff Bezos by now.
Hey, calm the fuck down—I said “minimize.” I personally hold the Women’s World Record for Worrying Every Day About Dying of Cancer. Nobody’s perfect. But when you find yourself worrying to the point of freaking out, you should consider the resources you’re wasting on that futile pursuit.
3 ways in which overthinking wastes time, energy, and money
If you change your outfit seven times before you go out, you’ll be late.
If you spend more time fiddling with fonts than writing your term paper, you’ll never turn it in.
If you keep second-guessing him, your interior decorator will fire you and you’ll lose your deposit.
Anxious? Overthinking is overspending.
Sad? After you’ve spent all that energy on crying, wailing, beating your chest, and feeding the depressive beast, you’ve got nothing left with which to deal.
Angry? This might be the biggest misuse of freakout funds, since it usually adds to your debt. Like when you get so mad at the amount of time you’ve spent on hold with Home Depot Customer Service that you throw your iPhone at the wall, crack the screen, dent the Sheetrock, and drop the call—which means you haven’t solved your original problem (faulty
birdbath), AND you’ve added two new line items to your real and metaphorical bills.
Ostriching? Don’t think you guys are getting away with anything. Even by avoiding your shit, you’re depleting your FFs. You’ve wasted a lot of valuable time—a nonrenewable resource that could have been put toward solutions—doing a whole lot of nothing. You’ve also wasted energy contorting yourself into pretending EVERYTHINGISFINEJUSTFINE.
Remember that cartoon dog? He’s a pile of cartoon embers now.
No matter which type of freakout you’re experiencing or trying to avoid, there are wiser ways to deploy your funds. For example:
• Instead of wasting TIME worrying about failing your physics class, you could spend it mocking up some quantum flash cards.
• Instead of wasting ENERGY pacing around the apartment worrying about what’s going to happen when your roommate gets home and sees that the dog, Meatball, has had his way with someone’s favorite Air Jordans, you could spend that energy researching obedience schools for Meatball.
• And instead of spending MONEY on quacky products that will supposedly prevent you from going bald but don’t actually work, you could buy yourself a few really cool hats and become Really Cool Hat Guy.
Welcome to the Flipside, stranger. Fancy meeting you here.
(In other news, I’m pretty sure at least three readers and one dog have already gotten their money’s worth out of this book.)
The Fourth Fund
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson had The 50th Law. I have the Fourth Fund, an offshoot of fuck bucks that I developed exclusively for Calm the Fuck Down. This is HOT HOT ORIGINAL CONTENT right here, folks.
We all have that friend or family member or coworker or fellow volunteer at the food co-op who seems to be in Constant Crisis Mode, don’t we? I’ll call her Sherry. There isn’t a date that hasn’t stood Sherry up, an asshole that hasn’t rear-ended her in the parking lot, a deadline that hasn’t been COMPLETELY BLOWN by one of her clients, or a bucket of compost that hasn’t been upended on her lap by a careless stoner wearing those godawful TOMS shoes that make your feet look like mummified remains.
You want to be sympathetic when Sherry kvetches about her latest catastrophe or shows up to the morning meeting all sweaty and blinking rapidly and going on and on about Would you believe the shit I have to deal with?!
But the thing is, she does this all the time. So you also kind of want to be like, What’s your problem now, you freakshow? Just calm the fuck down and deal with it. Jesus. (If you can’t relate to this sentiment at all, you’re a better person than I am. Enjoy your priority seating in the Afterlife.)
This brings us to the Fourth Fund: Goodwill.
GOODWILL
Unlike time, energy, and money, the goodwill account is not held by you. It is funded by the sympathy and/or assistance of others, and is theirs to dole out or withhold as they see fit. Your job is to keep your account in good standing by not being a fucking freakshow all the time like Sherry.
What Sherry doesn’t realize is how much sympathy she erodes when she brings her constant crises to your front door. At some point you’ll start shutting it in her face like you do with Jehovah’s Witnesses or little kids looking for their ball.
What? They shouldn’t have kicked it in my yard. It’s my ball now.
Anyway, now let’s turn the tables and say you’re the one looking for sympathy from your fellow man. That’s cool. It’s human nature to commiserate. Like making conversation about the weather, we all do it—we bitch, we moan, we casually remark on how warm it’s gotten lately as though we don’t know a ninety-degree summer in Ireland foretells the death of our planet.
When you’re feeling overcome by the sheer magnitude of your personal misfortune, it’s understandable to cast about for and feel buoyed by the sympathy of others.
Sometimes you just want a friend to agree with you that you shouldn’t have had to wait around forty-five minutes for the cable guy to show up and then realize he didn’t have the part he needed to connect your box, causing you to get so mad that you broke a tooth chomping down in frustration on the complimentary pen he left behind. What good is a fucking pen going to do you when all you want is to be able to watch Bravo and now you have to go to the fucking dentist, which is undoubtedly going to ruin another entire day! Or maybe you just need to let someone—anyone—know that Jeremy the Assistant Marketing VP is the absolute, goddamn worst!
I hear ya. (So does everybody in a fifty-foot radius. You might want to tone it down just a touch.) And when your friends, family, and fellow volunteers see you in distress, their first reaction will probably be to sympathize with you. They wouldn’t be working at a food co-op if they weren’t bleeding-heart socialists.
But this is where the Fourth Fund comes into play: if you freak out all the time, about everything, you’re spending heavily against your account of goodwill. You’re in danger of overdrawing it faster than they drain the aquarium after a kid falls into the shark tank, resulting in the classic Boy Who Cried Shark conundrum:
When you need the help and sympathy for something worthy, it may no longer be there.
Hot take, coming right up!
If you’ll indulge me in a brief tangent, I have some real talk for my fellow Anxiety-with-a-capital-A sufferers who find themselves in Constant Crisis Mode more often than not.
Due to my then-undiagnosed Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I spent years treating my friends, family, colleagues, and husband to all of my mysterious stomachaches and last-minute cancellations and office crying and whirling-dervish-like propensity for reorganizing other people’s homes without permission.
Most of them couldn’t understand why I was freaking out all the time. To them, the majority of my worries didn’t seem worthy of such chaos and insanity.
What’s your problem now, you freakshow? Just calm the fuck down and deal with it. Jesus.
Sound familiar?
Some of these peeps began to withdraw, withholding their sympathy and support—and they weren’t always able to hide their annoyance or frustration with me, either. At the time, I was confused. A little bit hurt. Righteously indignant, even. But today, with the benefit of both hindsight and therapeutic intervention, you know what?
I DON’T BLAME THEM. It’s not the rest of the world’s job to deal with my shit.
Harsh? Maybe, but I get paid to tell it like it is.
As I’ve said, I know exactly how badly anxiety, the mental illness, can fuck with us—and it’s awesome when our family and friends can learn about it and help us through it. I’m eternally grateful to my husband for putting up with a few years of extreme unpleasantness before beginning to understand and accept my anxiety. It’s still unpleasant sometimes, but at least he knows that now I know what the underlying problem is, and that I’m trying to keep it in check—which deposits a lot more goodwill into my account than when I spent most of my time sleeping and crying and not doing anything to change my situation.
So if I may make a potentially controversial argument:
Some of us get dealt worse hands than others, and deserve a little overdraft protection, but the Bank of Goodwill shouldn’t extend lifetime credit just because you have some issues to work through.
If not a day goes by when you don’t don your Anxious Freakout Face—and consequently get all up in other people’s faces with your problems—then it may be time to consider that You. Are. Part. Of. Your. Problem.
Am I a monster? I don’t think so. A blunt-ass bitch maybe, but you already knew that. And this blunt-ass bitch thinks that we actually-clinically-anxious people need to take some personal responsibility. We need to acknowledge our tendencies, do some soul-searching, and maybe go to a doctor or therapist or Reiki healer or something and sort out our shit, lest we risk alienating our entire support system.
To put it another way: If you had chronic diarrhea, you’d be looking into ways to stop having chronic diarrhea,
right? And what if it was affecting your relationships because you couldn’t go to parties or you were always canceling dates at the last minute or when you were at other people’s houses you were so distracted by your own shit (literally) that you weren’t being very good company anyway? You wouldn’t want to continue shitting all over your friends (figuratively), would you?
I thought so. Moving on.
Mental decluttering and the One Question to Rule Them All
We’re getting down to the last of the brass tacks here in part I. We’ve gone over the importance of naming your problems, understanding your reaction to those problems, and valuing your response. It’s time to segue into how, exactly, you’re supposed to put all of those lessons into action and begin calming the fuck down.
Enter: mental decluttering.
If you’ve read any of the NFGGs or watched my TEDx Talk, you’re familiar with the concept; I’ll try to explain it succinctly enough to first-timers that it won’t send the rest of you flocking to Amazon to complain that “Knight repeats herself.”*
Here’s how it works:
Just like the physical decluttering made popular in recent years by Japanese tidying expert and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Marie Kondo, mental decluttering (made popular by anti-guru, sometime parodist, and author of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck Sarah Knight) has two steps:
DISCARDING and ORGANIZING
The difference is, my version of discarding and organizing happens entirely in your mind, not in your drawers or closets or garage.