If you haven’t seen the clip from Inside Out 2, watch this now. It’s painfully accurate. Anxiety is doing her thing—chaotically trying to keep it together for Riley, yelling “WE NEED TO FIX EVERYTHING!” Joy eventually steps in and says, “Anxiety, you’re putting too much pressure on her.” Oooooooof! That line hit like a therapy session I didn’t schedule, but needed.
Shortly after, Riley breathes. She doesn’t magically solve anything—she just recenters. Regulates. And later, when she’s anxious again while waiting to find out if she made the hockey team (because, real life), the team inside her brain does something different:
“We can’t control whether Riley makes the team, but what can we control?”
Exactly. It’s not denial. It’s discernment. What’s mine to carry… and what can I gently set down? She breathes, realizes she has a Spanish test tomorrow, and she can study for it.
After applying this new mindset, I noticed something surprising: my matcha tasted really good. The breeze was nice. It was, dare I say, a perfect day for a walk. That invisible doomsday weight I’d been dragging around? I started to let it go.
Here’s what changed: every time a huge, anxiety-riddled thought tried to sabotage my peace—like “what if the rug gets pulled out from under me, what if it all implodes?”—I imagined it as a big, crashing ocean wave. But instead of letting it knock me down, I pictured it rolling back out to sea. What stayed on the shore were only the things I could actually do something about. Everything else? Back to the ocean, babe.
