The Fastest Way I Know Out of Anxiety
By Andy Petranek
A 325-mile race I didn’t finish taught me where fear goes when your hands are busy.
Picture this. You’ve been moving for days on almost no sleep. Steep ravines with no trail. Sheer dropoffs, hundreds of feet straight down, waiting for one lazy step. Icy rivers. Boulder fields. Ice axes strapped to your pack with no ice or snow in sight, which should have been a hint about what was coming.
At one point I pulled myself across a river on a rope, dangling over the water, hauling my gear behind me. Then a brutally steep 3,000-foot climb to the top of a peak, and a glacier field waiting on the other side.
This was the Eco-Challenge, 1996. British Columbia. A 325-mile expedition race across unmarked wilderness. Back then I was a Red Bull sponsored adventure racer, and this was the monster on the calendar.
No course markings anywhere. A checkpoint every 4 to 12 hours if you navigated well. Between checkpoints, just a map, a compass, and 5 exhausted people trusting whoever held the map.
I held the map.
And somewhere out there, I made a mistake. One navigational error that went unchecked for 6 brutal hours. Six hours the wrong way, in a race where every minute is on the clock. That single mistake knocked us out of the competition.
We never finished. And that race taught me more about anxiety than almost anything I’ve done since.
Here’s what racing like that is actually like. Uncertainty comes at you from every direction, around the clock. You’re deciding constantly: which ridge, which crossing, when to eat, when to push, when to stop. And every one of those calls gets made while you’re depleted, half-frozen, and behind.
If I’d stopped to calm my mind before each decision, we’d have been done by day one. If you succumb to the fear, the doubt, the hundreds of things that could go wrong, or you agonize over making the perfect call, you’re sunk.
You make the call. You keep moving. And you get really good at rolling with your mistakes, because you will make them. Mine cost us 6 hours and the whole race.
Churchill supposedly said success is going from failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. Out there, that’s the job description.
Now here’s the part that took me years to understand.
In a race like that, something breaks constantly. Gear fails. The route dead-ends. A teammate goes down. And each problem demands a creative solution right now: a workaround, an improvisation, something you’d never have considered doing back home. You revise your idea of what’s possible about 40 times a day.
And at that speed, I noticed something strange. There was no room for anxiety. Fear and doubt still showed up; they always do. But they never got air to breathe, because they never held my attention for long. The next problem had already arrived, and my hands were already working on it.
Anxiety lives in the future. Creative action lives in the present. And I was so flooded with the present that the future never got a vote.
So what does this have to do with your life? You’re probably not walking out your front door tomorrow for 325 miles of glacier travel. (Probably.)
But that state, where action replaces anxiety, is available to you every single day.
You already know anxiety can shut down your creativity. What changed things for me is learning it runs the other direction too: creativity shuts down anxiety.
There’s a catch. Sitting around thinking about being creative drops you right back into the worry loop. The state only shows up when you move, and move fast, before the fear catches up.
So grab a pen and start writing. Pick up the guitar. Sketch something ugly. Get your body moving. Give yourself a time limit tight enough that overthinking becomes impossible.
And when you’re stuck on a decision, make a quick call and figure it out as you go. Be messy. Messy means you’re in it.
I won’t promise this cures anxiety. Mine still shows up. But it shifts you into a different state: curiosity, wonder, a little adventure, even some playfulness.
And that beats fear every time.
With love, Andy