The Tchaikovsky Cure for Worry
If you have anxiety, or simply want a greater sense of well-being, getting creative is just about the best thing you can do.
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The 19th-century Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—still popular today for such works as The Nutcracker and the 1812 Overture—was not a happy man. In his 5,365 extant letters to friends and family, we find constant references to his sadness and unremitting anxiety. Over and over, he wrote versions of the line: “I suffered incredibly from depression and hatred for the human race.”
He had just one, temporary analgesic for his misery: “It would be in vain to try to put into words that immeasurable sense of bliss which comes over me,” he in 1878, to his
