Anxiety even after achievement || Acharya Prashant, with IIT Delhi (2022)

Questioner (Q): Hello Sir. I am very happy with my life, I have achieved everything I wanted, even more than that. But you know, many times my anxiety levels go high for unknown reasons. I do meditations, I go on morning walks, and I do everything. But when any late call comes from the home, I feel highly disturbed, thinking something wrong is there. Or wondering what is happening. So, I just want to know what reason could be for it, and what should I do to improve it.

Acharya Prashant (AP): You see, there are things that could actually go wrong in life. There are insecurities, there are threats, and there are a few things that can actually go bust or fail. But the probability of such things happening is minuscule, no? Emergencies don’t happen every day. But we live in the fear of those emergencies every day.

So, on one hand, we cannot just have a blanket statement that all our fears are totally unfounded. No, that’s not true. What we are fearing is actually something that might become the reality one day. For example, our own death, or the loss of a loved one. Irrespective of how it sounds, the fact is that all that we are attached to, and all that we love, are bound to be separated one day.

But that one day is one among several thousand days that we are going to live, no? Several, several thousand days. Why live in fear every day? If something has a certain probability, then the importance that thing deserves must have some proportion to that probability, no? If something has a probability of one in ten thousand or one in a million, then we cannot be extremely unduly worried about it. For example, an air crash. It’s not that planes won’t crash; Irrespective of how advanced we are, and how many redundancies we put in. The fact is – planes do crash. And we know that there exists a probability of, let’s say, one in ten million of a plane crash. But if you are all the time worried while on the flight that your plane is going to crash, then there is a problem.