Anxiety is’t the problem. Anxiety is just the alarm system letting people know things are off the rails…Anxiety is just a smoke alarm, letting you know that something in your house is on fire. The alarm is not the problem. The fire is. – John Delony
In November 2020, at the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Dr. John Delony wrote the book, Redefining Anxiety. The crux of that book is that it is time that we reconsider our belief that anxiety is itself something we experience. Perhaps, writes Delony, anxiety is something we experience as a result of what’s happening in our day to day lives.
In his follow-up book, Building a Non-Anxious Life, Delonyadvances his previous work by providing practical steps for designing and living a life that produces less anxiety. These steps are not easy. We may have to make a commitment to them on more than one occasion. Yet they are the practical steps towards a life that is not riddled by anxiety.
Ultimately, the key to Delony’s writings is the necessary step of making choices. We cannot live as spectators. We cannot allow ourselves to be passive victims. If we are going to move past the anxiety that plagues so many, we must be proactive. We must choose to go beyond just accepting reality. We must choose to develop the internal practices that will ultimately empower us to live above the anxiety that cripples so many. We must develop the habits that will produce non-anxious lives.
We’re buzzing, anxious, and stressed because we’ve created a world our bodies can’t exist in. – John Delony