How to reduce overthinking and anxiety || With IIT Bombay (2020)
Questioner: How should one reduce overthinking about situations or the future? There is so much unnecessary anxiety in students everywhere.
Acharya Prashant: Work! To be anxious you need to be blessed with a lot of spare time. How do you manage the time to indulge in anxiety? I have chosen the word with care—it is an indulgence to be anxious, to be worried, no? There is a subtle enjoyment in all this, right? “I am worried. Something great is about to happen!” One is subtly sipping some juice. It is a covert kind of fun—anxiety, worry. May I say it is related to narcissism?
When you say, “Something bad can happen to me, either right now or in the future,” aren’t you saying you are very important, at least to yourself? “Some really big misfortune is going to fall on me.” Indirectly you are asserting that you are so big that you can attract a big misfortune. Are you that big? Has anything really big ever happened to you? Then how can even a big boulder fall on your head? But there is pleasure in worry. This would sound strange to many, but stay with it. There is a subtle pleasure in worrying.
The opposite of this self-centered worry is immersion in action. Immerse yourself in the right action, and then where is the space and the time to worry? Surely, you are stealing time away from work so that you can indulge in worries and anxieties and fantasies of all kinds. Young people fantasize, don’t they? Some fantasize about beautiful, pretty, exciting things; others fantasize of scary demons. But fundamentally it is much the same thing, is it not? You are using your faculty of imagination to gratify yourself in some way.
