I've never been able to completely rid myself of anxiety.

Despite developing various coping mechanisms throughout my life, banishing anxiety entirely has been impossible for me.

There have been periods of time where it recedes to the nose bleeds, but it’s still in the stadium, lurking in the background.

Then inevitably it rises up like a phoenix and comes roaring back like it never left. That’s what strikes me most about anxiety—it feels the exact same at 37 as it did when I was 7.

Shortly after 10pm on a fall evening in 2022, my wife and daughter were already asleep.

The intrusive knocking abruptly diverted my attention from the audiobook I was listening to. Then a second knock even louder than the first, followed by the doorbell.

I jumped out of bed and hurried to the window overlooking my front steps. Just as I got there, a large, burly figure stumbled behind the garage wall and disappeared out of sight.

My pulse quickened and I felt a pit in my stomach. Suddenly, I was right back in my childhood bedroom. The sensation was eerily familiar, as if I had never left.

I’ve lived with anxiety my whole life so I know the feeling inside and out.

My childhood anxiety centered mostly around safety. Irrational fears of a home break-in, robbery, or kidnapping kept me up at night wondering if I would survive the night.

So this present day situation—mimicking my childhood worst nightmare was, to say the least, scary.

For a split second, I paused in awe at how I was feeling identically to how I did in childhood, as if time had stood still.

Lucky for me, I didn't end up being murdered or kidnapped that night. Turns out, it was a drunk neighbor who thought my house was his.

But the experience was eye opening for me and showed me how, with anxiety, time is a meaningless variable.

Anxiety can go dormant for years or even decades. But that doesn't mean it's gone.

Without diligent work and meaningful shifts in our approach, simply evading the external circumstance that provokes anxiety is a lost cause.

Hoping anxiety won't show up if we jump through enough hoops is like trying to outrun a thunderstorm to avoid rain.

My approach? Get comfortable with the rain.

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Where I live, it's cicada season. These bug eyed, noisy, prehistoric looking insects are everywhere and don't seem to mind humans one bit.

A 2004 article from the Indiana Academy of Science estimates that over a billion of these insects emerge at once—and I can vouch for the staggering numbers.

Cicadas are a curious species. Evolution has blessed them with a unique adaptation to avoid predators—underground habituating for most of their lives.

Cicadas can stay underground for up to 17 years in a "nymph" stage (basically incubating), only emerging to mate before dying shortly thereafter.

The theory is that by emerging all at once in massive numbers, cicadas ensure the survival of their species. Potential predators are overwhelmed by the numbers and cannot kill them all, despite the all you can eat buffet.

It just so happens that my anxiety has the cicada like quality of spontaneous emergence after prolonged dormancy.

This, I believe, is a quality of anxiety everyone shares—the tendency to return to a deeply ingrained, emotionally charged, biologically encouraged, habit no matter how much time has passed.

Here is what's interesting about the cicada analogy to me and how we can use it to inform our handling of anxiety.

If we imagine our anxiety as a cicada, patiently waiting dormant underground until the right conditions present themselves, we know three basic facts:

1. The anxiety is there or at least has the potential to be there
2. It will emerge at some point unknown to us, but only when the right external circumstances present themselves
3. When it does emerge it will be overwhelming, intense, and attempt to catch us off guard

Instead of trying to control every situation or burying our head in the sand (numbing, distracting, or medicating ourselves) as the sole means of "handling" our anxiety, we have another choice. A braver choice. A better choice.

That choice is becoming an anxiety practitioner, continuously vigilant, curious to explore our own experience. And willing to bravely face anxiety whenever it arises.

When we become curious about our anxiety, we remove the opaque web of fearful stories that our mind creates and clearly see things as they are. We stop running away and start taking our power back.

Once we've made that commitment, we can then start to understand our triggers, remove the fearful thoughts fueling our anxious tendencies, and then develop processes and tools to combat anxiety when it inevitably arises.

This gives us the best chance at not being overwhelmed by the spontaneous, cicada-like emergence of anxiety when faced with an intense trigger.

I can't overemphasize how important developing our own unique anxiety tool-kit is.

Out of the box solutions don’t work to solve complex problems. If they did, the problems wouldn’t be complex.

Similarly, every individual’s anxiety is a unique manifestation for that person. Which means every individual’s practice regimen should be customized based on a personalized feedback loop.

For example, let’s imagine you heard a theory about anxiety from a professor at a prestigious university. The next step would be to take what you heard and try it in an actual situation that causes you anxiety.

If it helps, continue to iterate and make minor adjustments until it’s a dialed in process that you can recall subconsciously.

If you realize it doesn’t work at all, discard it and try something else.

In my personal experience, the tools that have helped me the most with anxiety are all 100% created by me then tested time after time in the heat of battle.

After all, watching hours of game film doesn’t mean shit if you never use what you learn in a game.

The importance of individualized methods is not limited to just facing our anxiety.

A universal prescription for success doesn't exist for things that are hard.

In one of Dan Koe's recent videos, he explains the importance of developing a unique method for creators looking to differentiate and create digital products.

The lesson?

While we can learn from other people, ultimately we have to eat the cake to taste it.

Ironically, cicadas don't seem to have any anxiety. I would even go so far as to say that anxious cicadas are extinct.

The biological adaptation of sacrificing the many for a few must have weeded out anxiety from the cicada gene pool. I guess if you're expecting to die, how you die doesn't matter so much.

It's estimated that only 1-5% of cicadas survive to complete their life cycle and reproduce.

I estimate (with no evidence to back this claim) that only 1-5% of people will become practitioners and transform their relationship with anxiety from pain to power.

The rest will be constantly searching for magic pills, distracting or numbing themselves, or running away.

Living like that is the equivalent to being dormant underground for 17 years and popping up only briefly to experience the beauty of the world.

And I would know. I was buried by anxiety for a lot longer than 17 years.

I hope you'll choose the opposite.

To encourage you, here's how choosing the opposite has played out for me in the form of an example:

As I've shared before, there will never be a time I don't get anxious if my daughter is having an allergic reaction.

I may handle the situation differently, you could even say "improve" on my handling of it, but the underlying anxiety will always come up.

The worst case scenario thoughts will take center stage in my mind no matter how calm I feel prior.

But my tools are sharp.

The massive amount of work I have done has shifted the experience from breaking down into a panic, to a controlled systematic response based on facts, taking action, and accepting the situation for what it is.

I have proven tools that work for me—not because someone else told me they work, but because I have evidence from my own life.

I didn't come up with these overnight. It took decades of drowning before I could even conceive of treading water.

Then several more years after that before I could stay afloat in anxiety’s icy waters. The water never gets any warmer, but at least now I can swim.