I thought I needed anxiety for my job. I was wrong.
I recently took a personality test and decided I needed to change some things; some aspects of my personality seemed to be responsible for making me unhappy. A high level of neurotic anxiety was one of them. To help adopt a new mindset, I took intensive meditation class; the 'homework' involved meditating for 45 minutes a day.
This was challenging because, as I confessed to my meditation teacher, I hated meditating. As an ultra-productive efficiency lover, I didn't like doing nothing for long stretches of time. But also, and more important, I wasn't sure I really wanted my anxiety to go away.
I saw anxiety as my secret weapon, the edge that an immigrant kid like me had on my more privileged, pedigreed peers. Sure, they went to Yale, but I could have a huge panic attack about my career that would fuel me to work through the weekend like it was nothing.
I didn't know how I'd live without anxiety, which I saw as a useful net for my high-wire life as a journalist. I'd proudly recall times when my hair-trigger Spidey sense jolted me awake at 3 a.m., to correct a factual error before a story went live in the morning. I still cringe at the time in college when my lack of anxiety had let classmates down: In true senioritis style, I slacked off on an assignment and left our team with a mediocre grade. Our professor, a journalist of some renown, said our project 'didn't even make sense.' The lesson I took was that I had been laid-back and anxiety-free, and it showed.
A pillar of the meditation method of the class that I took, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, is the concept of 'not-striving.' People who come to it are told not to chase specific outcomes. In his book 'Full Catastrophe Living,' founder Jon Kabat-Zinn writes how, in meditation, 'the best way to achieve your goals is to back off from striving for results and instead to start focusing carefully on seeing and accepting things as they are, moment by moment.'
But stripped of my meditation headset, I was still an anxious little immigrant who thought you should, in fact, be striving. If you're not careful, some deeply buried shtetl gene told me, you can mindfulness yourself into so little drive for success that you end up sleeping on a park bench.
Ultimately I got over this anxiety reliance through advice I encountered from another guru of sorts, the Democratic operative David Axelrod. According to Dan Harris, author of 'Ten Percent Happier,' Axelrod has a secret for staying calm during political campaigns, which involve striving furiously for months and then, come Election Day, letting go. He tells himself, 'All we can do is everything we can do.' In other words, you can do your best, but you can't do more than that.
I found this a useful mantra for so much of my life. It's OK to get amped, to work hard, and to strive for success. It's OK to do everything you can do—triple-check the story before you go home for the night, send one more email for work, research a better school for your child. But once you've done all you can do, it's time to let go.
I realized my hard work and intensive planning—not my unending anxiety over outcomes—were helping me achieve. Sometimes things will happen the way they are going to happen, 3 a.m. wakeups notwithstanding. I could tilt the course of events in my direction, but I couldn't control the future—and certainly not by worrying more about it.
Now, I avoid rechecking assignments that I've already reviewed. I don't reread emails to my boss after I've sent them. I only peek at my bank account balance once a month, and my 401K even less frequently. After I've gotten my work done, I make time for guilt-free fun with my family. Or by myself.
For modern-day go-getters, mindfulness can mean striving to do things well, but it also means acknowledging when the results are out of your hands. There's no need to be anxious when I've done all I can do—including meditating.
Olga Khazan is a journalist and the author, most recently, of 'Me, but Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change.'
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