Quote Originally Posted by Liam89 View Post
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Anyone have any tips for dealing with post night out anxiety? I know it's brought on myself and the answer should really be to not drink but when I do find myself having a night out or even enough wine at dinner with the family, the next morning my anxiety kicks into overdrive. Anyone experience similar or have any advice to lessen the severity?

I once found myself unexpectedly in a room with John Reid, the former Labour MP and Cabinet Minister. It was just prior to something that I was finding incredibly traumatic and my anxiety was in overdrive - and it was obvious.

He said to me that I should contemplate two things. Firstly the vast number of galaxies, stars and planets in the Universe. Secondly the almost infinite stretch of time and the generations and billions of human beings who had lived and died. Then he said I should think about the thing I was worrying about and my wider non-specific anxiety or depression and consider how much any of it really mattered in the more vast sweep of things. Really, he said, there are very, very few things that you can't find a way to cope with, recover from or use to strengthen you despite how fearful they may think they are making you.

I asked him what he meant by 'they may think they are making you'. He said that in many cases what people were anxious or depressed about was not ultimately the thing that they thought they were worried about or depressed by, it was their fearing it or being depressed about it that had come to be their focus and quite often the original source of the worry was quite manageable compared to the monster that their own fear had become. His answer was to place all of this in the context of a Universe spectacularly larger than ourselves and to accept that most things didn't ultimately matter and just weren't as important as we persuaded ourselves they were.

I found it helpful at the time and have ever since.