The Anxiety Algorithm

Adil Khan was once the kind of man who could solve algorithms in his sleep. A senior developer at one of Pakistan’s rising tech startups, his mind had always been a sharp instrument, capable of dissecting patterns, writing clean code, and debugging the most stubborn errors. But now, his brain felt like a server crashing under invisible pressure.

It started subtly. Missed deadlines. A racing heart before meetings. Restless sleep. Then came the overthinking—what-if scenarios stacked like nested loops in his mind. No matter how rationally he tried to debug the issue, he couldn’t explain the paralyzing fear that washed over him even while sitting at his safe, air-conditioned desk.

At first, Adil treated his anxiety like any other coding problem. He downloaded meditation apps, set reminders to breathe, even created a “Mental Health Dashboard” on Notion to track his moods. But mental illness isn’t a glitch to be fixed by an update.

One evening, after a panic attack left him breathless on his kitchen floor, he knew something had to change. The system was failing. And he wasn’t sure if he could restart it.

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His first breakthrough came not through logic, but through surrender.

At the urging of his best friend Zara—who had noticed his social withdrawal and tired eyes—Adil agreed to attend a local mental health workshop. The irony wasn't lost on him: a man who wrote machine learning models was now sitting cross-legged in a circle, trying to make sense of his own.

The counselor, a warm woman named Dr. Noreen, asked the group, “If your mind were a computer, what process is consuming the most memory?”

Adil chuckled quietly. “Anxiety.exe,” he mumbled.

Dr. Noreen smiled. “Then we need to learn how to close that process, or at least reduce its priority.”

It was the first time someone had spoken his language—emotional struggles described in computing terms. That single analogy opened something inside him.

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Adil began therapy. Slowly, he learned that anxiety wasn't a flaw in his character. It wasn’t something to debug or eliminate. It was data—raw, messy, valuable data—trying to tell him something deeper.

He traced the roots of his worry to perfectionism. He’d grown up as the “golden boy,” always topping exams, always making his parents proud. Failure wasn’t just avoided—it was forbidden. As an adult, that belief turned every mistake into a threat, every criticism into an alarm bell.

Through therapy, journaling, and even voice notes he recorded on late-night walks, Adil began mapping the internal logic of his fear.

He also began making space for his human code.

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One night, he wrote a program—not for work, but for himself. It was a simple Python script. You entered a fear, and it responded with three questions:

1. Is this thought 100% true?

2. What evidence do I have for and against it?

3. What would I tell a friend who felt this way?

He called it “Calm.py.”

It wasn’t sophisticated. But it was real. Just like him—flawed, learning, adapting.

Soon, Calm.py evolved into a full web tool he released open-source. Other coders struggling with anxiety found comfort in using it. For once, his obsession with control had given birth to something healing—not just for himself, but for others.

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But real healing came in the quiet moments.

In the way he allowed himself to say no to projects without guilt.

In the way he admitted to his team that he was struggling—and was met not with judgment, but with compassion.

In the morning walks before logging on, where he simply breathed and let the sunlight hit his face.

He realized life isn’t meant to be optimized. It’s meant to be lived.

And that some of the best algorithms are the ones that help us be still.

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Adil’s story didn’t end with some dramatic epiphany. It continued in a gentle loop: try, fall, reflect, grow. He wasn’t cured of anxiety. But he no longer feared it.

He understood now that anxiety wasn’t the enemy.

It was a signal. A blinking cursor reminding him to pause, to reprogram his expectations, to prioritize self-compassion over productivity.

And maybe, just maybe, that was the most powerful code he had ever written.