L is for Leisure...but T is for Trigger!

Leisure is the first part of my 'Lesson Plan'. It's so important to relax and 'chill out'! I have also come to see that it is important to be disciplined about relaxation. That probably sounds like a contradiction in terms but what I mean to say is that it is important to ensure that relaxation takes place on a regular basis. It helps you unwind, it helps to resist spiralling anxiety (in my case) as tiredness can so often amplify a perceived difficulty and impair one's ability to maintain an appropriate sense of perspective.

The need for this has never been more evident to me than recently. I have written many times about the nature of what I call my 'symptomatic anxiety' and the triggers for them are coming thick and fast at the moment. It's all to do with the election and the differing, but on the face of it equally pessimistic, predictions about the United Kingdom's need to reduce its budget deficit. Simply put, at the moment most of my anxiety is triggered by news reports of what is likely to happen when the next occupant moves into Number 11 Downing Street.

On the face of it I ought not to worry. My employment is secure and relatively well paid, although I do have to do a lot with it. But when I hear, as I did today for example, that The Department of Fiscal Studies are arguing that none of the major political parties have it right my skills as an extrapolator are shown to be superb! What I mean by that is that any discussion in the news about possible financial cuts has me extrapolating problem after problem after problem and they are all going to land in my lap. When I next have to move (and my employer moves me every two or three years) my wife will no longer be able to secure similar employment; my sons will not find work on the completion of university studies (and my eldest son doesn't start his undergraduate studies until October!).

What does all of this detail demonstrate? I believe, in a nutshell, it demonstrates that whatever the nature of your anxiety (for me finances, for other their health, for others whether they have closed all the windows before leaving for work) there are times when, as much as you would wish it to be different, the triggers come thick and fast, it feels impossible to fend them all off, one extrapolates worst case scenarios from all of them (what therapists call 'catastrophising') and it feels an impossible task to challenge these imagined catastrophes with logic, common sense and contrary evidence. Constructing an alternative argument, in these circumstances, never felt so difficult.

Leisure remains important and never more so than when one feels so overburdened by anxiety that one knows all the terrible things extrapolated from 'anxiety triggers' are inevitable - even though those closest to us, and all the contrary evidence, suggests that to be highly unlikely. Under such working conditions leisure seems frivolous and distracting. Not so, I know I need to keep on with the 'discipline' of leisure activities in the hope and prayer that one day soon they will reintroduce a note of reason and appropriate perspective. Perhaps at some point the 'grounding' provided by such activities may even prove more powerful and persuasive than the 'triggers'.