in the middle of our minds and refuses to let anything else in or through. Though the

anxiety causes us great pain, it denies any attempts to be questioned, analysed, probed

or reconfigured. We are both terrified and unable to think beyond our terror. Our thoughts

become low, relentless, repetitive, stymied things: returning again and again to the issue

of whether the door is locked, the accounts were signed off or the social media account

is not under attack. Anxiety dominates over and excludes any other form of mental activity;

all that will be in our minds is terror. Impregnable and bullying, anxiety in effect shuts down

our central faculties. But there is one nimble way to try to outwit anxiety – and that

is with a question that recognises a fundamental feature of anxiety: that it is frequently

a smokescreen for something else, something beyond what we consciously think is worrying

us, that we're in fact concerned with or sad about. One of the peculiar facets of our

minds is that we may choose to feel anxious rather than to confront things that may be

yet more painful or emotionally awkward in our lives. It can be easier to fret than to

know ourselves properly. We might feel anxious about whether we're going to get to the

airport on time as an escape from the greater challenge of wondering whether this holiday

is even worth it and whether our spouse still loves us. Or we might get intensely anxious

about a financial issue in order to avoid a yet trickier acknowledgement of our confusion

at the course of our emotional lives. Or we may develop a sexual anxiety as an alternative

to thinking about our sense of self-worth and the childhood that destroyed it. Panic

may be invited to shield us from more profound sources of self-aware agony. And yet, of course,

we are always better off getting to the root cause of our troubles, rather than filling

our minds with diversionary panic – and in order to do so, we would be wise at points

to ask ourselves a simple but possibly highly revealing question: 'If your mind wasn't

currently filled with these particular anxious thoughts, what might you have to think about

right now?' The question, as simple in structure as it is acute in design, is liable to unlock

a moment of original insight. The answer might go like this: – I might realise how sad

and lonely I am… – I might realise how angry I feel towards my partner… – I might

realise how abandoned I feel… And that, of course, is precisely what we should be

doing now. Filling our minds with, and processing, all the stuff that our anxiety was trying

to keep at bay. Certain anxieties can be taken at face value, for they do clearly relate

to worrying things in the world. But there is another class of them, and a rather large

one at that, that is there for no better purpose than to distract us from understanding important

parts of ourselves. If we need to suffer, and often we will, the least we can do is

to ensure that we are suffering for the right reasons. At points, we should trade our anxiety

in for something far more important: a confrontation with the real ambivalence and complexity of

our lives – and we should do so thanks to a naively simple question: 'If your mind

wasn't currently filled with these particular anxious thoughts, what might you have to think

about right now?'

Our Wisdom Display Cards explore what it really means to be wise and how we can strive to become more enlightened in our everyday lives.