"There's something in my head, and it's not me." - Pink Floyd

It's early morning right now, and I can't sleep any more. I woke up to find an intense clenching in my chest, and a heavy pit of tightly coiled energy in my solar plexus, signs I've learned to associate with intense anxiety, bordering on panic.

It didn't take long to realize there was a war going on inside of me - a familiar war, between longstanding narratives. "We have to get more done today!" says one. "No, you can't do anything well unless you downregulate yourself!" shouts the other. I tried to ground myself in the present moment, to let go of expectations of how the day was "supposed" to go. And for a moment, things are a little quieter. Then my attention slips, and the voices rush back: "You have to spend some time with your wife today, you haven't been connecting enough!"

Half an hour later, and here I am, doing my best to express the truth of what is running through me, knowing that doing so is often the only way I have of putting it to rest.

It's like a team of advisors are fighting inside, each trying to express and argue for the best way to put me at peace, and all of them contributing to the panic they claim to want to resolve. Then other voice jump in to try and quiet the advisors, and things get even more chaotic.

I know this. It's my rational brain trying to analyze itself out of something it can't solve, because the source of the problem is emotional, not rational.

That's a hard pill to swallow. For years, I saw emotions as the enemy, tried repeatedly to push them down and hope they died away in university, spent uncountable nights in cycles of shame, rage, and self-hatred before that. Now I'm 41, and while I have many more tools and a much deeper understanding of what is happening, it still overwhelms me sometimes.

Letting go of the need for control is for me one of the hardest things a person can do. There's terror in the unknown, a blank that is quickly filled by my worst fears and imaginings. What if my wife and I are falling apart? What if I'm in the wrong job? What if this panic never goes away, and then I make mistakes and let down the people I care about? The narratives, and the emotions they produce, each represent different learned strategies my body uses to impose an artificial illusion of control:

My anger rages against the circumstances and people it can't control, so it feels like I am "doing" something about it through knee-jerk reaction.

My worrying analyzes and reanalyzes the potential consequences of past actions and future events, in a desperate attempt to avoid anything ever catching me off-guard.

My sadness ironically pretends to embrace the lack of control in my life, but it's really just trying to steal it back sneakily, using a sense of helplessness to keep me wrapped up in a safe and cozy bubble.

And then the numbing starts, as I attempt to silence the wall of chaos in a flood of dopamine (my user name is no coincidence): Video games, fantasy books, mindless tv, YouTube, busy work, junk food, even daydreaming - literally anything that blocked out all the screaming was fine with me. In the past you could have added porn, drinking and weed to the list as well, but after my marriage almost imploded I finally found the strength to separate myself from those.

Of course, and as many of you know, the numbing only last for so long, and then the narratives and emotions come crashing back in, stronger than before. And the cycle continues.

In the end, I see no alternative to finding a way to breathing into what's happening in this moment, letting go of all the attempts to grasp and push away. It goes against all of our instincts, but when the day charges at us, we have to let it carry us away. Anything else is like trying to steer a river, or redirect an avalanche. It means looking at all the worst fears in your mind and simply saying in response: "If it happens, it happens." And that's f**king terrifying.

But on the other side of that letting go, is the peace we are looking for. I still don't see it often, but I'm close enough enough to see it's the direction I want to go. And if the voices start to rage in impatience that I'm not there already, I remind myself, hey, I've got decades of conditioning I'm unlearning here. Even the unlearning process has it's own value, because it's taking back the only thing I truly have control over - the attitude by which I greet what comes into my day.

If it happens, it happens.