For all my Lexapro peeps! Or those thinking about it.

Once again, O, the Oprah Magazine, is here to help.

I saw the following article which can help everyone prone to a freakout every day. What I wish the author did a little bit better is go into chronic anxiety - imagine what the author describes as a snafu or a fubar, but every day, over every little thing - this is how I felt before I finally took control and got on a pill.

It's not something I hope to take forever - but during this crazy time that seems to be called "My Twenties" it is helping me slow down and figure things out in a normal, healthy way. Freaking out to the point of tears, not sleeping, waking up groggy and nervous and constantly trying to calm and talk myself down - was not working and taking a toll on my quality of life. So I encourage you to read this article and take its advice, but if you find yourself constantly working to maintain some level of sanity, make an appointment with your doctor to explore your options.

(Oprah.com) -- The military has given the English language two words that brilliantly articulate different types of crises: The first is snafu, an acronym for "situation normal, all f***ed up." The second is fubar, which stands for "f***ed up beyond all recognition." As we travel the bumpy road of life, we must prepare to deal with both.

Fubar situations are huge disasters, the kind that come with an implicit "get out of normal obligations free" card and often require a rethinking of where your future is headed.

Smaller snafu crises -- the broken toe, the stolen wallet, the babysitter quitting on short notice -- can be incredibly disruptive, but usually they're not life changing; they're more likely month changing or 10-weeks-of-Vicodin disruptive.

But a short-term crisis is still a crisis, so here's how to weather your next snafu:

Go ahead and freak out

One fine day in 2006, a wild deer wandered into a Target store in West Des Moines. He skidded around like Bambi on ice for 20 minutes, until employees herded him through the automatic doors to freedom.

On surveillance videos, the deer is wearing an expression I've seen on many human faces during minor crises -- a look that says, "I feel fine, but what the ... ?"

I mention this because there's one way in which deer handle crises better than humans -- at least according to "Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma" author Peter Levine, Ph.D., who holds two doctorates, one in psychology, one in medical and biological physics. Early in his research, Levine noticed that when animals are traumatized -- even a little bit -- they react by trembling, running, kicking, and thrashing around, which is what that deer did.

Meanwhile, human Target shoppers reacted with stiffness and consternation, because we generally try to subdue physical "emergency" reactions.

After falling down stairs or arguing with a co-worker, we make every effort to keep our eyes, voices, and hands steady, determined to show through our physical motionlessness that we're in complete control of our bodies, moods, and lives (no matter how many Xanax this requires).

Levine noted that people who have physical emergency reactions often cope better with crisis, and show fewer symptoms of trauma afterward, than people who hold still. Stress compels action; in snafu situations, Mother Nature gives just one instruction to all her children, and that instruction is, "Move!"

When the unexpected strikes, find a private space and let your body do whatever it wants. Heave, kick, shake your head like a wet cat. Then let that energy flow into constructive action, whether it's contesting a credit card charge, yanking cactus spines out of your child, or slapping duct tape on a broken pipe.

I got a chance to test this advice when one of my car tires blew out. After regaining control of the fishtailing vehicle, then coaxing it over to the freeway shoulder, I went a little crazy, shuddering and shouting incoherently for about 10 seconds.

Sure enough, this seemed to open up a channel to calm. Feeling very alert, I got out and changed that tire with my own profoundly nonmechanical hands. I drove away feeling so empowered, so conscious of life's fragility, that even the disruption of my schedule hardly bothered me. I do believe letting myself have those initial 10 seconds of physical freak-out cleared my mind and body for positive action. Thank you, Dr. Levine.

Release your expectations

Not all problems are this quickly resolved. My flat tire rearranged my day, but you may have a disaster that lingers for weeks or months, such as your brother-in-law. The situation, whatever or whoever it is, will eventually be resolved, but in the meantime it requires accommodation.

Realizing this is like being turned upside down. We hear our plans falling out of our pockets and smashing into countless questions: "How will I meet my deadline?" "Who'll walk the dogs?" "Can I even tie my shoes with this cast on my arm?" Our knee-jerk reaction is often defiant refusal to let go of expectations: Somehow, we insist, we will stick to our schedule.

I've heard you can trap a monkey by putting a banana in a jar, then punching a hole in the lid just wide enough for the animal's hand -- not wide enough, that is, for the hand plus a banana. The monkey's refusal to release the banana is what keeps it stuck.

This is what happens when we hang on to expectations in the face of crisis, and it can turn a snafu into an utterly fubar situation. Working when you're sick, you end up in the hospital. Rushing tasks after a slowdown, you drop or break or miscalculate something crucial. Pushing yourself beyond emotional limits, you lash out and damage a relationship.

Conversely, learning to let go of expectations is a ticket to peace. It allows us to ride over every crisis -- small or large, brother-in-law or end-of-quarter office lockdown -- like a beach ball on water. The next time a problem arises in your life, take a deep breath, let out a sigh, and replace the thought Oh no! with the thought Okay. If it's hard to sustain this perspective, go immediately to step 3.

Narrow your time aperture

It took me decades to learn how to surrender expectations. I wanted to let go; I just didn't know the procedure. Then a meditation teacher put it in terms I could understand. Imagine, he said, that your life is going badly -- you're underpaid, and you've just discovered that your spouse has started smoking. You go for a walk in the woods, trying to clear your head. Anxiety eats at you: Should you demand a raise? What if your spouse gets lung cancer? Troubling scenarios spin out in your mind. You can't stop worrying.

span style="font-weight:bold;">Then you walk around a rock, and there it is: a bear.

At that moment, it becomes almost magically easy to stop obsessing about your lousy job and your spouse's lungs. You have no trouble surrendering your worries -- in fact, as you sprint back to the safety of your SUV, you let go of verbal thought altogether. You've attained the enviable clarity meditators call one-pointed attention.

This is how you let go of expectations: by giving full attention to the snafu at hand. Forget about finishing your errands and focus on holding this bandage to this cut, right here, right now, until the bleeding stops. Do what is needed with full concentration: Find the spare tire, turn off the water valve, call your therapist. Be here now, and you'll realize there's nowhere else you ever need to be.

Make loosey-goosey plans

As you focus on the present, you'll find the next step arises almost automatically, and then the one after that. Your thought as you run from the bear is to reach the car. Your aim as you press on a wound is to stop the bleeding. Unlike plans made in calmer circumstances, which may be detailed, researched, and rigid, the ones you make when facing snafus should be so loose that they're almost floppy.

One year, when I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I decided to run the Boston marathon. On a snowy afternoon, I took a bus to Wellesley, which lies at the halfway point of the marathon route. The idea was to run home, both training and familiarizing myself with the terrain.

I overlooked only one thing: I have absolutely no sense of direction. After running for an hour, I noticed that Boston was not where I thought it was. After two hours, I was jogging past eerie, deserted factories. After three hours, my world was empty country roads in a pitch-dark blizzard.

Peter Levine would have been proud of the way I eventually freaked out, stomping, kicking, and, yes, using strong language. My tantrum freed me to release my expectations of knocking this off in a few hours and accept that I was well and truly lost. This allowed me to narrow my focus to the immediate situation, and I immediately formulated a plan: Retrace my route by following my own footprints.

It worked for a half hour, until the falling snow obscured my tracks. By then I could hear the rumbling of motors, so my approach changed: Follow the noise. This took me to a freeway, from which I could see a distant glow of city lights. I followed them to downtown Boston, where, switching strategies one last time, I caught the subway home. Staying loose and flexible not only got me through a snafu but proved I could run for six straight hours. After that the marathon was a cakewalk.

The plans that take us out of short-term crises almost always proceed like this. A strategy that works well one moment is useless the next. That's okay. Keep moving. Keep letting go of expectations. Keep your attention on the here and now, and keep adjusting.

And finally, refuse to contemplate the distant future until the snafu is over. Cancel lunch, obsess later about the social fallout. Look in the yellow pages under "flood repair" without wondering how much it will eventually cost to replace your carpet.

The difference between unthinkable disasters and short-term crises is that if you follow these instructions, life snaps back to being surprisingly normal surprisingly quickly. Think what that deer must have felt as he roamed the aisles of Target, wondering why the humans were forcing him toward a wall of glass and metal. Imagine his gratification when he finally triggered the door sensor.

That's the way a minor crisis ends. It's almost anticlimactic: You look up from the one step that has your full attention and realize you're out of the woods. Or, if you're a deer, back in the woods. Back, in any case, to the world you're used to, where snafus are typical and things occasionally get fubar, but where you feel in your DNA that things are exactly as they should be.

California Dreamin'

So last Thursday I got word that I'd be traveling last minute to LA for business. It's been a good, long while since I traveled for business so I was pumped, in addition to the fact that this business travel actually was going to be fun. We had been planning for months to do an event at the LA Galaxy game and when all was said and done at the end of the day, I got my David Beckham sighting. Is there really any more to tell to this story? Probably not. i saw David Beckham in the flesh. So..yeah, that's really all I have to say about my trip to LA!

I'm also, sadly, still without DVR, tho cable is still very much up and running. The cable guy forgot to bring the converter and so I told him I'd bring it to exchange myself. I'm DYING to see the new shows, specifically the one on WE about the woman who talks to the dead. I need to check out that show. I'm all caught up on Heroes, so that's all good. I also think I'm going to like The Bionic Woman and I discovered John Edwards still shows Crossing Over on Lifetime. Right now, I'm all about sci-fi and cable news channels. Because I'm so cool!

But nothing proved how cool I was like last Thursday night, when finally, three years into my time in NYC, I finally, FINALLY! fell in the subway. And it was a good fall.

I was rushing down to my clients office to grab some things that I'd need for the LA business trip and inexplicably, I wore flip-flops to work even though it was clearly going to rain that day. Not only did I wear flips, but I chose a pair that I've seriously had since junior year of college - a red pair of Old Navy ones that I just can't throw away because they've defied the odds and lasted so long - they deserve to still walk the streets. But not in the rain, because the bottoms are completely smooth.

So I'm doing my best to get down there relatively quickly, carrying a big heavy bag of stuff from the office while simultaneously trying to stay somewhat dry. I started to go down the subway steps when I thought to myself, there is no tread on these sandals, and literally, not 1 second later, I feel my feet slide completely forward in front of me, and I'm going down.

The wierdest part was, I was really not embarrased. I was more annoyed than anything. The subway was flooded, so I fell in a puddle of god knows what water, at least three inches deep. I made a splash as I fell. My hair came out the pontytail, and some guy had to help me up. I got to the bottom of the stairs and realized what had happened. I felt my soaking wet butt and realized that I had finally broke the streak of non-falls. Hopefully it's the last, I'll make sure to bring out my trusty rainboots if I even see a cloud, but I have to admit, it felt kind of nice to finally get this one NYC must-do out of the way.

Gracias, Adj

The Gators may have lost on Saturday (sigh, and I talked a lot of smack before halftime, which all came back full force by the end of the evening) but I had a great heart-to-heart with one my dear friends here and it really made my weekend. And really, my week.

I've been thinking (probably too much)about the direction of life again and had it not been for GC last Friday night being his usual, rational, calming self, I would have probably come home, drank a bottle of wine on an empty stomach and sulked around the apartment, crying, or worse, wanting to cry but feeling bad that I wanted to.

But then Adrienne and I talked, and I realized, once again, that I'm not alone. That just become some people feel comfortable with this or that aspect of their life, that no one really feels totally complete. Not quite yet. And maybe, for most people, not quite ever - and that is more normal than people who do seem to have it all figured out. I finally realized - people who have it all figured out are the wierdos. And those weirdos...are probably lying anyways.

So with that my mind, and dove headfirst into this crazy week, confident that whatever is going to happen, will..and that I will just roll with the punches (yes, once again I had to remind myself to do this) and deal with it. Because I'm hardly alone.

oh yeahh...f* you wierdos! stop ruining it for the rest of us!

A Little Something to Get You Going

As we toil away at our less than six-figure (but not for long, hopefully, am I right millionaire-hood?) jobs this a.m., here's a little jumpstart for all the ladies out there:

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2007/fortune/0709/gallery.women_mostpowerful.fortune/index.html