A Short List Of Things To Do On A ‘Bad Anxiety Day’

1. Stalk a crazy amount of strangers on social media and wonder if they’re happier than you. Wonder how they can be so happy. Decide they’re mediocre and don’t deserve their unabashed happiness. End up feeling incredibly shitty about the fact that you don’t want people you don’t even know to be happy.

2. Do vertical push-ups to try to tire yourself out and also maybe if you get a natural endorphin rush going, it will cancel out the insane amount of adrenaline that’s coursing through your body.

3. But then just end up laying on the couch unable to focus on anything in particular because your mind is racing back and forth between way too many things.

4. So turn on things like “Get Ready With Me!!!” videos on YouTube and only sort-of watch them. And in the moments where you’re not sort-of watching them, you’re actually watching them, feel really pissed off that this person is happy and not an anxious disaster.

5. Become fully convinced your leggings are cutting off your circulation and hurting the overall health of your appendages.

6. Go through the last four years of your life and meticulously dissect all of your choices and try to decide exactly where you went wrong to end up in a place where you still get anxious for absolutely no reason. Look at all of the different places you could’ve ended up and wonder what your anxious level would be at if you were there, and not here.

7. Fill online shopping carts with things like eye cream, bodysuits, new glasses, hair products, makeup, and even dumb little pins from Etsy. Anyone who looks amazing on the outside can’t feel like a tornado on the inside, right? That’s how this works, right?

8. Avoid phone calls. Avoid text messages. Avoid everything.

9. And then immediately read into it when people, in turn, take too long to text you back. Don’t answer when you call. When it feels like they’re avoiding you.

10. Get irrationally upset when bicyclists don’t use the bike lane and craft very dramatic speeches in your head for what you would say to tell them off if they weren’t speeding away from you on their fucking bike on the sidewalk.

11. Buy a $4 water drink thing called “Calm.” Be, embarrassingly, more than a little annoyed when it doesn’t work at all and tastes the way lemon candles meant to deter bugs smell.

12. Contemplate just…screaming. What would reasonably happen if you just started fucking screaming about everything and just got it all out? Would you feel better?

13. Decide not to scream anywhere but internally.

14. Completely bite down all of your nails and once they are all little sore and aching stubs, turn your attention to the enamel and your cuticles. Might as well fuck your entire fingers up while you’re at it!!

15. Let the recycling, the dishes, the cleaning, the laundry all pile up. Feel like you’re one step closer to understanding a subject of Hoarders. And then, decide maybe that might be a nice way to live. Completely encased by your things until it’s so overwhelming the only solution is to burn it all to the ground.

16. Go for a run.

17. Even though you’re begrudgingly, a little glad you went for the run, feel no less anxious afterward.

18. Get into bed. Put on the same episode of 30 Rock you’ve seen probably 74 times and hope that being able to quote it from start to finish will lull you to sleep.

19. Watch the hours on the clock change from 11 to 12 to 1 to almost 2.

20. Sweat through your clothes when you do eventually manage to get some sleep despite the fact that you’ve set the AC to 66 degrees and why do you have to pay for AC if it doesn’t fucking WORK?!?!

21. Start again tomorrow when you wake up and immediately feel that pulse in your chest that says, “I’m going to be anxious today.”