Don’t Panic A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Panicking by Caleb Nichols

Buy it from Abe Books  

I was always going to buy a book with 'DON'T PANIC' in large, friendly letters on the cover.

But in fact Caleb Nichols does not tell us not to Panic – but not to Panic about Panicking. It you suffer from anxiety it is likely that anxiety will always be a part of your life – what you need to learn is ways of reducing anxiety and ways of not suffering from it when it does happen.

This is a long quote, but worth it …

“A former therapist of mine, who was into both mindfulness and somatic or body-oriented therapy, would talk about the zone of tolerance and the zone of stimulation, which is basically the idea that we all have set levels of how much stress and anxiety we can tolerate, and then we have upper limits, and outer limits. He said it can be effective to widen our zone of tolerance through confronting and “being with” the feelings that live outside the zone. For me, this is re-envisioning my own anxiety, not as an external threat, but as an essential part of my being. This makes it easier to sit with, and grow more comfortable with. This knowledge is an olive branch: I’m inviting anxiety into my home and asking it to stay a while. What new, bizarre things can it show me? What might it help me create next?” (p52)

This is not a glib, pull your socks up message, it does not down play the distress anxiety can bring – but to find ways to sit with it – to ride the waves, to know that it will pass, that anxiety is not failure – these are things we need to practice on our non-anxious days so that we begin to remember them on the days anxiety has become us.