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A Dread End: 5 Ways to Stay Sane in the Face of Worry
DREAD.
Yes capital, yes bold, yes big, because that’s how it feels in my head. Dread is something us anxious folk know a lot about.
I feel like I spent a lot of my August dreading. Some of my dread list were things I knew I had to do: taxes, chasing invoices, work. Others I just didn’t want to do. Having difficult confrontations, lifting weights, my damn physio exercises.
When I wasn’t dreading, I wondered whether I should be.
Dreading things is in itself stressful. So sometimes, drowning in my dread, I schedule the things that I know lift my mood. Meditation, long walks, yoga. But then I start to dread those too, to the extent that I cancel them. The result? More dread.
When dread starts to spiral, you’re in trouble. Dread feeds on dread, and the more it goes unchecked, the more it hopes to satisfy a growing appetite.
When that happens, I try to remind myself:
The dread in my head is never as bad as what’s out there waiting for me. Most of the time, when I face my dread, I find that the task at hand is:
- easier than I thought it would be
- takes far less time than I expected
