Anxiety has entered the chat.

Lately, I’ve been feeling anxious.

Should I sacrifice my morning coffee, or is this a bit deeper than caffeine? Frankly, giving up coffee feels like punishing the one innocent participant in the whole mess.

I can think of several reasons anxiety has chosen me as a comfortable place to breed and fester.

Agent Orange. Can I survive two more years of this hideously destructive sociopath?

Then there’s aging and the fear of running out of money while prices rise like Fourth of July fireworks.

Apparently, retirement planning now involves deciding whether one can afford both groceries and electricity in the same month.

Health is another cheerful subject. I hate doctors and nearly had a heart attack from the anticipation of my recent annual physical which would have been both tragic and deeply ironic.

How exactly do you stop aging? I exercise every day, eat healthily and rarely drink. I worry about dementia so I test myself daily with questions like: Who were the Giants’ defensive stars in 1972? (Big Jack Gregory and John Mendenhall, although Spider Lockhart was always my personal favorite).

Hopefully, if I can remember the Giants defense from half a century ago, I assume I am still okay.

Women’s rights? Will my daughter have fewer freedoms than I did growing up? That is not merely anxiety. That is fury wearing sensible shoes.

Still, over the past few years, I have survived my mother’s death, hurricanes, the Los Angeles fires, thievery in France, four Mohs surgeries, my husband’s fractured back, my doggie nearly dying, leaky roofs and the apparently permanent excavation of our New York City street.

I made it through all of that.

Who knows why anxiety arrives or why it chooses a perfectly ordinary morning to unpack its luggage and settle in?

Could it be the start of the NFL season this week, Yankee inconsistency, a new squamous cell detection…who the hell knows.

Perhaps I don’t need to give up coffee. Maybe I need to invest in a promising gummy company and negotiate my share of the profits in product.