One afternoon we were in Pennsylvania with our friends, and began our drive back home to New Jersey. On the way, we needed to buy some groceries from the Whole Foods Market, so we stopped there. We were exactly halfway through our car ride.  I picked up the groceries with my dad, and went to pick up my mom from a store right next to Whole Foods Market, called Nordstrom Rack. She was buying some clothes. Just before we went outside, we realized that it was raining cats and dogs! My dad and I had only one umbrella – his umbrella. Since it was big enough, both of us could fit inside it. We started walking towards our car, planning to open the trunk to put the groceries in. We weren’t walking so fast that we would slip and fall on the wet road, but also not too slow, that we would be caught in the rain for a longer duration. We walked to our car, and my dad opened the trunk. I was standing there worrying if there is going to be a flood in Pennsylvania. 

We got my umbrella from the car, so we both had our own umbrellas. We then went back into Whole Foods Market, got some ice cream. After waiting for what seemed like the passage of time since the days of Pharaoh Tutankhaman, we walked through the raindrops that sounded like a hundred clocks ticking loudly in my ears, to Nordstrom Rack, holding our umbrellas above our heads. I was wearing peach orange-pink bike shorts, and a purple shirt that said, “π 3.141592653”.  On the bottom it said, “insπre” as in “inspire”. My orange-pink shorts were wet like a hand-wiping towel that had just wiped 100 hands, and my shirt was very moist. We then left Nordstrom Rack with my mom, got into our white car, with raindrops sticking up and dancing all over the sunroof, and started to head back to our home. I took my computer out, and started to play some games and watched some TV. 

I could see the raindrops rickety-racketing down like airplanes, helicopters and spacecraft trying to crash-land on our car roof! Luckily, the glass was shut so tight that not an atom of air could get in. I could see the raindrops falling rapidly onto the sunroof through the lightly black tinted glass. After all the chaos came to an end, something seemed to be bothering me. Was it the fact that the raindrops falling on the sunroof was more cacophonic than pleasant? There were a few other sounds blending in with the raindrops, such as the games on my computer, the car was making noise as well and my parents were talking to each other. I hadn’t thought so. It was something else that was bothering me. 

It was my anxiety. 

I felt anxious that there would be a flood, since the rain was so heavy. My brain was right there, worrying like a supernova blasting inside my head. There was something else too. There was lightning, that made me more anxious. That’s because I thought lightning could strike our car. I expressed how I felt in words to my parents, and my mom and dad gave me one explanation each. 

My mom said that we are headed towards clearer skies in New Jersey.  My dad gave me another explanation. He didn’t just give any explanation, he gave an explanation that I’ll understand much better. He gave me an explanation that involved Physics. Yes, Physics! 

He said that lightning is nothing but electricity, and that I’m not scared of electricity generally. The probability of lightning striking our car is very low, because lightning hardly gets past the clouds. Even if it gets past the clouds, there is an even lower chance of it getting past the extremely tall trees. There is an even lower chance of it striking the moving cars on the road. Since the moving cars are always accelerating, or at least containing velocity at all times, it makes an even lower chance of it striking cars. That makes it an even lower chance of striking humans inside the cars, since they are already protected, even if their sunroof glass is open. That was my dad’s long physics explanation. 

After all that, I felt much better, and started to enjoy myself the rest of the way on the road trip, with my computer. I even wrote a poem about the rain! That was my opportunity to overcome the anxiety for that specific thought,  although it is impossible to prevent it from coming back and bothering again, just like if you throw a brand new boomerang in perfect shape, it is impossible to prevent it from coming back to you. 

An explanation that involves more science would be Sir Isaac Newton’s third law, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. In simpler words, that means that if force is applied to an object and it had kinetic energy, it would come back the same way it went before. For example, if you throw a tennis ball onto a wall, it will bounce back to you, which is the equal, but opposite reaction. I have some other ways of overcoming anxiety for such thoughts, here are some ways:

Sidewalk Method: The Sidewalk method represents you driving a car, noticing some activity happening on the sidewalk next to the road lane you are driving in. Let’s say you keep paying attention to the activity, instead of looking at it for a second and then going back to the road. You will then crash into something, and that is not going to be good. Just like that, if you are doing something useful, and you get anxious, and if you keep paying attention to the anxiety, not focusing on the task that you were doing before, then you will just keep worrying, and that won’t be good either.

Leaf Method: The Leaf method represents you looking out the window, and you see a tree, with leaves on it. You see the leaves move. You become so worried that the leaves move, even though that is just natural. Just like that, if you are getting a thought that makes you feel anxious, even if it is just a normal thing, that would mean you are just overthinking it. If you wasted even one minute of your life overthinking or letting anxiety spike up, that one minute is precious. It will never come back the same way, so you lost that precious moment that you could have been doing useful things or having fun, forever. 

Art of Ignoring: The Art of Ignoring is when you get anxiety, and you get stuck on that one thought. You can practice the Art of Ignoring, which means to ignore the thoughts that bother you, and make you anxious. It will take months to learn to ignore everything, or maybe even years. Even though you cannot prevent anxiety, you can learn to ignore anxiety. 

Heavy Cone on the Road: The Heavy Cone on the Road method represents you driving on the road, and you see a heavy cone right in the middle of the road. If you keep going the same direction, you will bump into the cone, and you can’t get past it, because it is so heavy. If you keep pushing and fighting it as would a Giganatosaurus against an Albertosaurus, the cone will break your car, so the cone would’ve won the battle. You need to maneuver the cone, so that you can just keep on driving. Similarly, if you come across a thought that makes you anxious, but you keep going towards the thought, you will get stuck in the thought, and if you just worry and worry constantly, that’s what the thought wants you to do, so the thought will win the battle against you. Instead, you have to ignore the thought, which will make you win the battle to get past it, and just get back to doing whatever you were doing before, just like you can keep on driving after maneuvering the cone in the example!

Those are some methods that I learned over the past couple of years or so, to ignore anxiety and overthinking. For me, the Leaf Method and Sidewalk Method (with a dollop of Physics) teamed up to help me, and now I hardly get those kinds of thoughts. I just learned the Art of Ignoring a couple of weeks ago, so I’m still working on it. Nature was so nice, to create YOU. Be thankful that nature made you. And be smart, in your own way.

A version of this article was originally published in the summer issue of Young Mensan magazine.