How to Stop Feeling Scared All the Time

Every human worries on occasion, but for some of us, the suffering is on a quite different and more life-destroying scale: we are, without wishing to be ungrateful or absurd, more or less permanently anxious.

每个人都有烦恼的时候，但对我们当中的一些人来说，痛苦的程度是完全不同的，而且更能毁灭生命:我们不希望忘恩负义或荒唐可笑，而是或多或少地永远感到焦虑。

What makes matters so hard for us, the anxious, is that we are unable to maintain a distinction between what objectively deserves terror and what automatically and unthinkingly provokes terror. The quintessential calming question – ‘Is there actually anything to be scared of here?’ – can’t even enter consciousness: there’s no sense that a benign response could even be possible.

对我们来说，焦虑之所以如此重要，是因为我们无法区分什么是客观值得恐惧的，什么是自动地、不假思索地引发恐惧的。最典型的镇定问题——“这里真的有什么可怕的吗?”——甚至不能进入意识:甚至没有意识到良性反应是可能的。

Easily terrified people aren’t stupid; they may even be among the brightest. It’s just that somewhere in their history, the mental equipment designed to distinguish logically between relative dangers has been destroyed. They have – somewhere along the line – received such a very big fright that pretty much everything has now grown frightening. Every slightly daunting challenge becomes a harbinger of the end; there are no more gradations. The party where one knows no one, the speech to delegates, the tricky conversation at work…these can put the whole of existence into question. Pretty much every day is a crisis.

容易受惊的人并不愚蠢;他们甚至可能是最聪明的。只是在他们历史上的某个地方，用来从逻辑上区分相对危险的心理设备被摧毁了。他们——在这条路上的某个地方——受到了如此巨大的惊吓，以至于现在几乎所有的事情都变得可怕起来。每一个稍微令人畏惧的挑战都是末日的先兆;没有更多的区分。在一个谁都不认识的聚会上，对代表们的演讲，工作中棘手的谈话……这些都可能使整个存在成为问题。几乎每天都是一场危机。

Let’s go in for a metaphor. Imagine that at a formative moment, when the anxious would have been profoundly unprepared and without the resources to cope, they had an encounter with a bear. The bear was beyond terrifying. It raged, it stamped, it crushed. It threatened to destroy everything: it was incomprehensibly mind-defyingly（抵抗地） awful. As a result, the anxious person’s inner alarm jammed into the on-position and has stayed stuck there ever since. There is no use casually telling this person that there aren’t any bears around at the moment or that this isn’t the season or that most bears are kind or that campers rarely encounter them: that’s easy for you to say, you who’s never woken up with a giant grizzly staring at you with incisors showing and giant paws clasped open for the kill.

我们来打个比方。想象一下，在一个形成的时刻，当焦虑的人毫无准备，没有足够的资源来应对时，他们遇到了一只熊。这熊太可怕了。它愤怒，它跺脚，它粉碎。它威胁着要毁灭一切:它令人难以理解，可怕得让人难以置信。结果，焦虑的人内心的警报被卡住了，从那以后就一直在那里。随便告诉这个人现在附近没有熊，或者现在不是季节，或者大多数熊都很善良，或者露营者很少遇到它们，这些都是没有用的。这对你来说很容易，你从来没有醒来时看到一只巨大的灰熊瞪着你，露出门牙，张开巨大的爪子准备杀戮。

The result of this bear encounter is an unconscious commitment to catastrophic generalisation; the anxious fear of all bears but also all dogs, rabbits, mice and squirrels, and all campsites and all sunny days, and even associated things, like trees rustling in the wind, or prairie grass, or the smell of coffee that was being made shortly before the bear showed up. The anxious can’t do logical distinctions: they can’t arrange threats into separate boxes.

这次遭遇熊的结果是无意识地进行灾难性的概括;所有的熊，还有所有的狗、兔子、老鼠和松鼠，所有的露营地和所有的晴天，甚至还有相关的东西，比如在风里沙沙作响的树，或者草原上的草，或者熊出现前不久刚煮好的咖啡的味道。焦虑的人无法做出逻辑上的区分:他们无法区分威胁。

To start to dig ourselves out of the quicksand of worry, we – the anxious – need to do something that’s likely to feel very artificial and probably a bit patronizing, too. We need to learn – on occasion – to distrust our senses completely. These senses, that are mostly terrific guides to life, have to be seen for what they also are: profoundly unreliable instruments, capable of throwing out faulty readings and destroying our lives. We need to erect a firm distinction between feelings and reality; to grasp that an impression is not a prognosis; and a fear is not a fact.

要开始把自己从焦虑的流沙中挖出来，我们——焦虑者——需要做一些很可能让人觉得很做作，也可能有点居高临下的事情。有时，我们需要学会完全不信任自己的感官。这些感觉，大多是对生活的极好的指导，我们必须看到它们的本质:极其不可靠的仪器，能够抛出错误的读数，摧毁我们的生活。我们需要在感情和现实之间建立起牢固的区别;要明白印象并不是一种预测;恐惧不是事实。

One side of the mind has to treat the other with a robust kindly scepticism: I know you’re sure there’s a bear out there (at that party, or in that newspaper article, or in that office meeting). But is there one really? Really, really? Emotion will be screaming yes, like one’s life depends on it. But we’ve been here before and we need – with infinite forbearance – to let the screaming go on a little – and ignore it entirely. The cure lies in watching the panic unfold and refusing to get involved in its seeming certainties.

头脑的一边必须以一种强烈而善意的怀疑态度对待另一边:我知道你肯定有一只熊(在那个派对上，或在那篇报纸文章上，或在那个办公室会议上)。但真的有吗?真的,真的吗?情感会尖叫，是的，就像一个人的生命取决于它。但我们以前也遇到过这种情况，我们需要——以无限的忍耐力——让这种尖叫继续下去——完全忽略它。解决之道在于观察恐慌的展开，并拒绝卷入看似确定的恐慌之中。

We need to be like a pilot of a sophisticated aircraft coming into land in deep fog on autopilot: the pilot’s senses may tell them that a dreadful collision is imminent, but their reason knows that the sums have been done correctly and that a smooth landing is, despite the darkness and the awful vibrations, definitely about to unfold.

我们需要成为一名像一个复杂飞机的飞行员，在深雾中行驶一架自动驾驶仪落地:飞行员的感觉可能会告诉他们,一个可怕的撞击可能迫在眉睫,但他们的理智知道所有工作已经准确无误地完成了,尽管有黑暗和可怕的震动,但是一场顺利的着陆肯定即将上演。

To get better, which really means, to stop dreading bears everywhere, we need to spend more time thinking about the specific bear that we once saw. The impulse is to focus always on the fear of the future. But we need instead to direct our minds back to the past – and revisit the damaging scenes with compassion and in kindly company. A consequence of not knowing the details of what once scared us is a fear of everything into the future. So, we should ask: What sort of bear was it, what did it do to us, how did we feel? We need to relocalise and repatriate the bear, to get to know it as a spectre that happened at one point in one place, so that it can stop haunting us everywhere for all time.

为了变得更好，也就是说，停止对熊的恐惧，我们需要花更多的时间去思考我们曾经见过的熊。人们的冲动总是集中在对未来的恐惧上。但相反，我们需要把我们的思绪引回到过去——带着同情和善意的陪伴重新审视那些破坏性的场景。不知道曾经让我们害怕的事情的细节，导致我们对未来的一切都感到恐惧。所以，我们应该问:这是一种什么样的熊，它对我们做了什么，我们感觉如何?我们需要重新定位并遣返这只熊，让它成为一个发生在某个地方的幽灵，这样它就不会一直萦绕在我们周围。

That we were once very scared is our historical tragedy; the challenge from now on is to stop giving ourselves ever new reasons to ruin the rest of our lives with fear.

我们曾经非常害怕，这是我们的历史悲剧;从现在开始，我们所面临的挑战是，不要再给自己任何新的理由去恐惧地毁掉我们的余生。