Worrying about the sky falling

A man in the state of Qi was so afraid the sky would fall and the earth would collapse that he couldn't sleep and couldn't eat.

A friend went to reason with him. The sky is only accumulated air, he said. There's no place without air. You breathe it, you walk around in it all day. Why fear it falling?

The man said: if the sky is air, what about the sun and moon and stars falling on me?

The friend said: they're made of light. Even if they came down, they couldn't hurt you.

And the earth? It's accumulated solid matter, packed full. There's no place without earth. You stand on it all day. Why fear it collapsing?

The man (finally) relaxed, and so did the friend.

This gets remembered as an anti-anxiety joke. I read it as a very old description of a very common cognitive pattern.

His fear wasn't irrational in the sense of being based on nothing. It was structurally correct and temporally wrong. The sky will fall, in about five billion years. He was paying today for something scheduled for a shift no human will work.

Most of what keeps people up is that: a real risk, moved into the present tense, with the volume turned up and the probability deleted.

The exercise that actually helps is arithmetic. What is the event. When would it happen. What is the evidence. What would I do on the day. Answers are boring, and boring defuses it.

MOJOWAY puts the fear on paper with a date attached. Naming when something would happen is often all the relief needed.