When you’re anxious, maybe let anxiousness have its time. And if it sticks around longer than is comfortable, maybe think about things that compliment each other. For instance, plants exhale the inhalations of animals and vice versa. But thinking about things that compliment each other should be done with caution, because you run the risk of encountering asymmetry, which would invite anxiety to unpack its bags again.

It’s probably easiest to illustrate my point using the plant/animal relationship that was initially thought of as complementary. Upon closer inspection, it’s clear that the gaseous exhalations of plants are only oxygen, whereas the inhalations of animals are composed mostly of nitrogen, as dictated by the composition of our atmosphere. What’s worse, some of the nitrogen inhaled is dissolved and actually used by the body, so it isn’t as if you can discount the inhalation of nitrogen as irrelevant on the grounds that it’s all exhaled. And so an asymmetry exists between the respiration requirements of plants and animals, and this asymmetry can be unnerving.

The moral of this story is that when mulling over complementary systems, you should either be very confident that the systems will remain complementary regardless of how closely you’re analyzing them, or you should observe them from afar. Luckily, you can often make an emergency call to a linguist for help, and they will assure you that since your name starts with ‘A’, you have only to stand on one side of a dividing line, with Asymmetry situated at an equal distance from the line, in order to generate symmetry and kick anxiety out.