Picking Locks Is My Therapeutic Practice

After suffering from panic attacks, an anxious writer discovers a new hobby is her key to finding calm.

It was happening again. My back tooth started to twinge right after I had just canceled the dental insurance we could no longer afford. What if I had a cavity? Or even worse, another root canal? And what if that tooth cracked into pieces if I ate something the wrong way? What if I had to make a dentist’s appointment to fix it and be another few thousand dollars in debt when I was seven months pregnant? What if?

The pervasive questions became a loud cacophony in my brain. My pulse rose with it, and my knees trembled. If I didn’t do something soon, I knew what would come next: My heart flailing against my ribs. My lungs gasping for air even though I hadn’t moved from the couch. I was about to have a full-blown panic attack. Before it got to that point, I grabbed my padlock, turning tool, and pick splayed out next to the TV remotes on the coffee table. And I got to work.

This was a five-pin lock — a simple one if you were decent at lock-picking. I am not decent at lock-picking and have no innate talent for it, but the act of trying to set those pins in the proper order acts as a mute button on that noise in my brain. Some might consider learning how to pick locks to be a frustrating endeavor — and it is — but for me, it also creates a refuge from my own thoughts, leaving me with just those five pins to manipulate.

I first got into lock-picking like most people do: I thought it’d be cool to say I could do it. Five years ago, my professional magician husband supported my interest and bought me a set of picks, complete with a DVD tutorial and a lock that’s transparent so those learning the craft can see the device’s inner workings.

My initial curiosity soon turned into a discarded hobby. (I am, among other things, not a patient person.) The lock and set of picks gathered dust in a drawer. I became pregnant during the pandemic and — like everyone else — was trapped at home. Our apartment got crowded. Not only did it house me, my husband, and our dog, but it also contained my metastasizing anxiety.

Our income disappeared. As my daughter grew in my belly, so did my worries. One day when I was pummeled by so much anxiousness that I could barely breathe, I pulled that lock-picking set out of the drawer. I sat with them for almost an hour. When I got up to stretch, I realized the jittered nerves that had become the refrain of my life had ebbed.

I found something that forced me to be in the moment rather than trapped in the never-ending cyclone of “what ifs?” going on in my head. I reached out to clinical psychologist Drea Letamendi to understand why something like lock-picking could help quell my anxiety. “It’s an actual distraction from negative thoughts internally and also from an external perspective,” Letamendi explained to me. “[It’s] an avoidance of stimuli that might be anxiety provoking or stressful.”

When I become completely absorbed with picking the lock, Letamendi suggested that I might have entered what neuroscientists call a flow state, where my brain gets tunnel vision and becomes highly concentrated on the task in front of me. “You’re very active, but it’s also bringing your arousal down,” she says. “That’s what flow really is: You’re geared up and attentive, but you’re not overly aroused. When our bodies and our brains are overly aroused, we’re just not balanced. You found that happy medium.”

That happy medium doesn’t require me to actually be good at what I’m doing. I still stink at lock-picking, but it calms me. The clarity and immediacy of the goal and simple turning of the pins are in my control right in front of me. The act of trying to understand the lock becomes my focus rather than opening it. And through the fiddling and experimenting, I find a calm and sense of purpose: a moment of exhilaration when all that matters are those pins and that eventual, fulfilling click.

My approach to lock-picking is probably why the activity is stress-reducing rather than inducing. Bill Ragsdale, a lock-picking hobbyist who has taught more than 20 classes on the skill for the Academy of Magical Arts at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, shares the following mantra with his students: “I am not picking locks. I am learning to set pins. The rest will happen.”

Ragsdale believes the effort of picking a lock pin by pin provides a profound sense of accomplishment. “You need to develop the touch and technique where you can feel individual pin positions, then you have to remember the order in which they [are] set,” he explains, outlining the process of picking, which requires aligning a set of pins inside a lock to the same level to open it. “There’s a learning experience. As you get them into position, you realize that you’re getting closer and closer to the goal.”

That goal of getting the pins set in proper order grounds me. It’s a challenge that’s tangible, something I can tackle in the moment, unlike those perseverating thoughts wearing me raw. I’m not the only person who has found enjoyment in lock-picking for fun rather than for work (if you’re a professional locksmith) or for nefarious purposes (if you’re a criminal). Watching an expert confidently pick a lock is soothing for me, at least, and possibly the other folks who’ve watched lock-picking YouTube videos that have garnered millions of views.

One of those other folks who felt the “lure of the lock,” as he calls it, is Joe Fox. His fascination with Houdini as a kid in the 1960s turned him on to collecting handcuffs and, from there, to locks. As a child, he would sit in front of the TV with a lock and basic lock-picking kit and play around with them. “When that lock opens, and you get that spring — that audible sound — and you realize you just opened that lock without a key,” he says, “you will get [the] thrill of your life.”

My baby is now a toddler, and like most 2-year-olds, she is adept at getting her hands on every object imaginable. Things that were originally deemed off-limits because “mommy and daddy need them for work” — my laptop, my husband’s oversized playing cards and sponge rabbits — have suddenly become within her reach. That couldn’t happen with my lock-picking set. There are too many small pieces that she could impale herself or choke on. So, it’s been squirreled away on the highest shelf of our closet.

That’s okay. My panic attacks have subsided. The set is still there if I need it. I hope that one day when my girl is a little older, she might have the same fascination with lock-picking that I do. For her, maybe it will be the process that draws her to it, as it did for me. Or maybe she’ll want to follow in her dad’s footsteps, as she’s already proving to be a born performer.

Whatever the reason, I can tell her how I was attracted to lock-picking in the days before she was born, and how it was the act of working on the lock, the way it kept me mindful and grounded, that meant more to me than unlocking it. However, I must admit it does feel absolutely great when those pins line up and the lock clicks. I have opened the unopenable. For a moment, I am invincible.

Vanessa Armstrong is a Los Angeles-based writer who has contributed to The New York Times, Glamour, Self, Los Angeles Times, and Vulture.

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