Let’s call this friend Felix. Now that we both knew why we were there, Felix came out with it.
“I have a beautiful wife and child. I have the job I’ve worked my whole career to achieve and get to travel around the world doing what I love to do. And yet…something’s wrong. I can’t feel things all the way. I don’t sleep well…I think I might have anxiety too.”
I asked the question I always ask: “Have you had any physical symptoms?” I explained: “For me, this was migraines, nausea, and crazy strong neck and shoulder pain. Do you have anything like that?”
He said, “I’ve had a knot in my throat for as long as I can remember, and my stomach feels like it’s being punched all the time.”
With those words, I knew that my friend was arriving at the same place I had in the middle of 2015. Hello, fellow beautiful voyager.
Since Felix didn’t know anything about my project for overthinkers, I gave him the rundown of Tell Tale Signs of an Overthinker to gauge his reaction:
People who think deeply about the world around them. Often researchers, they’re always looking for the answers. Perhaps their friends and family have said to them “you think too much” ever since they were little kids. They’re sensitive and aware of the suffering of others. At times they obsessively want to “figure it all out,” neglecting their other priorities.
Felix: “This is frighteningly accurate.”
He then asked the same questions that nearly everyone does in this situation: “How can I fix this? Can the fix happen quickly?”
I’m starting to be asked these questions frequently enough that I’m forming a consistent response to them. My answer isn’t super simple, but neither is anxiety. My response comes in 3 basic chunks of information. I elaborate depending on time and bandwidth of the person I’m speaking with.
Chunk #1: My timeline and my first steps
I describe being diagnosed by a neurologist with Generalized Anxiety, and then going to UCSF’s Gateway office for a comprehensive diagnosis. Before working on The Beautiful Voyager, I used to tell people that what worked for me in terms of GAD (realizing that anxiety is a spectrum and not everyone with anxiety has GAD) was medication, meditation, and communication.
