As human beings, we are biologically hardwired for survival. Our brains have evolved over millennia to detect threats, anticipate danger, and prepare for the worst. This ancient wiring—known as the fight-or-flight response—once kept us alive on the savannah. Today, it often misfires in conference rooms, over emails, or in the middle of the night when everything is quiet but our minds are not.
Some of us feel this survival mechanism more acutely than others. For those with anxiety, this internal alarm system is overactive, constantly alerting us to danger where there may be none. It’s as if the brain is stuck in a loop, scanning for threats, conjuring them if it must, and preparing us—emotionally and physically—for impact. Even when there is no real impact coming.
Ball and Chain: More Than Just an Expression
"Ball and Chain" has become an American idiom, often used with a laugh or a wink—typically by someone joking about a partner, a job, or a responsibility that feels burdensome. But before it became a casual turn of phrase, it was a very real device: heavy iron shackles, designed to prevent escape, limit movement, and enforce control.
I carry my own version of this burden. Not forged from metal, not visible to the eye, but heavy nonetheless. It doesn’t slow my steps in the literal sense, but its grip is just as real. My ball and chain is Anxiety—a mental and emotional weight that follows me everywhere, tethering me to fear, hesitation, and imagined failure.
The Quiet Weight We Don’t Talk About
Anxiety is not a loud adversary. It doesn’t scream; it whispers. It slips into quiet moments, distorting them. It turns routine decisions into crisis management and elevates minor setbacks into personal catastrophes.
For me, anxiety was never about panic attacks or dramatic episodes. It was more insidious, like background static that made every action feel heavier. It kept me on the sidelines when I should have stepped up. It turned possibilities into risks, and risks into reasons not to try.
It sat with me in job interviews, in important meetings, in personal relationships—nudging me with doubt, whispering about worst-case scenarios. It anchored me in place, not because I couldn’t move, but because I couldn’t see a safe direction in which to go.
Reframing the Narrative
For years, I lived as if every moment was the prelude to disaster. My mind played out every challenge like a scene from a 1970s disaster film—Titanic, The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure. I was both the screenwriter and the lead actor in scenarios where everything that could go wrong, did.
But here’s the insight I wish I’d learned earlier: those movies never came true. The disasters I envisioned never happened. The catastrophes didn’t materialize. Time after time, what seemed like the end of the world unfolded more like The Sound of Music—not without difficulty, but with resolution, resilience, and often a positive outcome I never anticipated.
What changed? I began to focus on facts over fear. When I felt that familiar spiral beginning, I stopped and asked: What do I know to be true right now? Not what I fear, not what might happen, but what is actually in front of me. Emotions are real, but they aren’t always reliable guides. Facts, however, are stable ground.
Learning to Carry the Weight Differently
Anxiety may never fully disappear. I accept that now. But I’ve learned how to carry it differently. It no longer anchors me in place. Instead, I move with it—step by step, decision by decision. Some days I outpace it. Other days it catches up. But the difference is this: I’m in motion. I’m writing the script, not just reacting to it.
And if you find yourself caught in your own cycle of fear, of catastrophic thinking, of scripting disaster where none exists—you are not alone. So many of us are carrying our own invisible ball and chain. It feels heavy, it feels unique, but the truth is, this weight is shared. Others have walked this path, others are walking it now.
And if there’s one thing I can offer, it’s this: look at the facts, not the fear. Most of the time, the end of the story isn’t what you think it will be. More often than not, it turns out better. And in that truth, there is freedom.
Where your story goes from here? That’s yours to decide.