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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
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February 24 - May 17, 2021
Now, a strange thing happens when you realize that some gargantuan, all-looming issue you’d been fretting over no longer needs to be fixed. You take a deep, free breath, expand a little, release your grip and get on with better things.
One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we’re doing.
“We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbors, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: ‘I know . .
When you realize there’s no guidebook, an opportunity suddenly presents itself. If no one knows what they’re doing, if there’s no “right” way to do life, then we can surely choose our own way. Yes?
But, dear reader, I ask you, do you feel, in your heart of hearts, that fixing your anxiety is the answer? I ask this of anyone with the kind of low-to-medium anxious buzz we’re all feeling, as well as those of you with a diagnosed anxious condition. Because the question is equally relevant. Do you think it might be lovelier if we bundle up our uncertainty, fear, late-night overthinking and kooky coping habits, tuck them gently under
anxiety is the sixth leading cause of disability in the world.
Am I really mentally ill? Disordered? Defective? Or am I just weak of character and just not trying hard enough? Does taking medication alter who I am? Am I less authentic for it? Is it “unnatural”? And am I clinging to the “chemical imbalance” theory because it absolves me of blame and the science-y-ness promises a neat fix? Or are my neuroses fair enough given the state of the world today? Is my fear of crowds, confined spaces, financial ruin, being touched, etc., a reasonable evolutionary response, albeit one that has got a little bit off kilter?
It’s a self-perpetuating pain—we use anxiety to fight our anxiety.
We also need to recognize—which many doctors don’t—our anxious behaviors are so often the solution to our problem, not our problem.
The more anxious we are, the more high-functioning we will make ourselves appear, which just encourages the world to lean on us more. — cruel irony #2
Insomnia is anxiety’s spiteful bedfellow. Anxious people desperately need sleep, yet their condition ensures they are denied it.
Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”
But gravel churned in my brain. Try doing kid things and smiling for photos and being simple and innocent with those little rocks grinding relentlessly. It’s distracting.
Anxiety and existential curiosity are connected. Yes, absolutely, it can become medical when it spirals out too far.
It feels like when I climb into my own bed after being away traveling for a week. The smells and the warm hug at my being. It’s also spacious and expansive, open-chested to the world. I feel spacious. I feel the world is spacious. It’s magnificent and elevated.
Anxiety is a disconnection with this Something Else. As I say, the doctors and scientists can call it all kinds of things, but I believe it all comes down to this disconnect.
anxiety is a feeling that you’ve “not finished something . . . that one has to look for something or . . . come into the clear about something.”
It’s this lack of connection and clarity that leaves us fretting and checking and spinning around in our heads and needing to compensate with irrational, painful behaviors, whether it be OCD, phobias or panic attacks. It’s this sense of missing . . . something . . . that leaves us feeling lonely and incomplete and fluttery. Something is not right. We haven’t landed.
“Anxiety is all about a lack of connection and a need for spiritual answers,”
You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.
Whippman refers to stacks of studies that show that the more relentlessly we value and pursue happiness, the more likely we are to be depressed, anxious and lonely.
We anxious folk have particularly active new-brain stuff going on. We think a lot. We’re extremely self-aware.
“You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,” he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines, and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You build habits that trigger the comfort system, instead of the threat system.
It wasn’t about changing myself. It was about creating ease and gentleness around who I was, which allowed me to make better choices.
“Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it . . . almost every day, it’s not good any more.”
One of the worst things we can do to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious about being anxious. I think that a good, ooooh, 80 percent of my anxiety comes from being anxious about being anxious. And 80 percent of that secondary anxiety is compounded by being anxious-slash-pissed off that I’m anxious about being anxious. And on it goes compounding on itself ad infinitum.
Do the anxiety. Then leave it there. This is our challenge.
Work your core, decrease the stress response. Yoga, Pilates, planking . . . it will all build the right muscles—physical and mental.
when you’re an anxious type, meditation is non-negotiable.
You can be crap at meditation and it still works.
Even knowing it’s okay to be crap at meditation is comforting.
Meditation draws energy down from the head. It works to still the mind. It turns the volume down on the thoughts.
You recite a mantra, faintly, in your head, for twenty minutes. That’s it. If your mind wanders, return to the mantra. Don’t worry about your breathing. Or your posture. Or your chakras. Return to the mantra. When thoughts bubble up, that’s cool. Actually, it’s better than cool. Thoughts are little pockets of stress that your consciousness encounters as it descends into calm.
“It’s not really about what happens during the twenty minutes of meditation. It’s what happens after, out there in real life.” “Right. This changes things. So meditation is like a little forum for airing grievances, purging the crap. So we can move on.”
You only have to hold the feeling for a few seconds to “get it.” Try pausing your thinking for a minute and drawing your focus down into the space just behind your sternum. Do you feel the shift? Does a “knowing” ooze over you? You only have to touch it briefly for it to work.
Sitting upright or lying down, place your hands on your belly. Slowly breathe in, expanding your belly, to the count of five. Pause. Slowly breathe out to the count of six. Repeat for 10–20 minutes a day.
For me, they are the same thing, both a symptom and trigger of each other.
“To those struggling with anxiety, OCD, depression: I know it’s mad annoying when people tell you to exercise, and it took me about sixteen medicated years to listen. I’m glad I did. It ain’t about the ass, it’s about the brain.”
“My doctor calls it positive, neurotic behavior: you do it compulsively because you are neurotic but the net benefit is positive.
We may be able to cross countries in mere hours, and catapult ourselves through space, but ultimately, he says, “we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth.”
This is at the heart of my anxiety. Actually, more specifically, the fact that I can’t grasp it, connect with it, live it, is at the heart of it. It always has been. I hope you know what I mean.
we crave to touch this Something Else, to know it, to be connected, why do we also flee from it, from our selves, into busy-ness and distraction and, well, all the things that make us anxious?” Whyte’s take is this: “Because there’s a silence and aloneness that accompanies a strong relationship with yourself. In that silence we see the truth of our existence and the shortness of life. And this is painful. “Also, when we come in close, we become larger . . . and this requires change. We become more visible, and thus more open to being touched by life, and thus more likely to be hurt.”
Or perhaps the question is, if anxiety is unavoidable, which anxiety will produce the better life, the bigger life, the more meaningful life? The better journey?
The hum of the sunlight on the concrete streets, the smell of people’s emotions around me. I could feel it all, loudly and brightly. I could smell everyone, I could see their sadness—or their stillness, or their emptiness—as they walked past me. I could feel the energy of a grain of washing powder at the Laundromat. Everything. What do you do with so much stimulation? Where do you put it? I couldn’t process it all fast enough.
The cruel irony of high-functioning anxiety, yeah?
“If you’re not anxious, you’re not paying attention.”
I now know that my anxiety doesn’t have to be caused by anything particularly fear-inducing. At least not to the normal eye. After more than three decades of it coursing through my veins, anxiety is sometimes simply in my bones.
When you have anxiety, you do learn to give up on all the perfectly Instagrammable notions of how life should be done. You just have to attend to survival sometimes.
And I see quite clearly that when I’m anxious all my rushing, competing, frenzied thoughts are either a) plans or b) contingencies for what could happen. It’s like I’m running from the me that exists right now.
We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more.
