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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
Read between
February 24 - May 17, 2021
Thinkers from Darwin to Freud describe anxiety as a grasping forward to fixes that make us feel safer about the unknown ahead of us.
anxiety surges forward, depression is a clinging to the past. Depression is being mired in regrets, remorse and obsessing over what should have been.
If you are depressed you are living in the past. If you are anxious you are living in the future. If you are at peace you are living in the present.
Depressed or anxious, it’s the unknown that we are most petrified of, so we grasp and cling to the certainty of what’s already happened or to the false security of micromanaging in our heads what comes next. Or both.
Depression kicks in as an exhausted response when my anxiety goes way too far. Some literature suggests depression is a natural coping mechanism deployed in such cases to stop us from self-combusting from anxiety that’s out of control.
Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience.
“Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?”
As Tolle tells it, worries don’t exist in the now. Worries about the future or the past don’t exist either—they’re just narratives we create in the present. Practice asking yourself “what’s the problem” often. See if you don’t start to feel the anxious cycle back away. See if those startled birds at sunset don’t begin to settle, softly, gently, at dusk. See if this gentleness is where you want to be.
Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads. Actually, they’re a relief.
I think when you kind of get settled with the idea that anxiety happens when we go out beyond ourselves then you really start to feel miffed about the current way we deal with anxiety.
Plus, of course, to pills, doctors, gurus, self-help books and motivational wellness blogs. All of them. I’m looking for something or waiting for something. But it never turns up.
get Weekend Panic, although less and less these days. Weekend Panic is when you think you should be doing bigger things, farther out of town, all perfectly planned ahead. And the fact that it’s Saturday morning and a whole heap of nothing is ahead of you sends you into a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) spin.
When I ask what anxious people get wrong, he’s emphatic. “They don’t give themselves time with their Inside People!”
Uge tells me that we then feel where our inside peeps are at. Try saying to yourself, as he does, “Are we good? Are we comfortable? Is this where we should be? Is it making sense?”
I’ve instead had the pleasure of what I’ve been told are referred to as “intellectual anxiety attacks” (what I call anxiety spirals). These spirals are head-y. To the external observer I may look perfectly normal, but inside I’m a whirly-whirly of thoughts and nervousness. I’m not unaware of what’s going on. Quite the opposite, I’m hyperaware.
In intellectual anxiety attacks (one of my spirals) we do the fight-or-flight response while simultaneously being able to understand what it’s about. Not that this helps, because our overawareness of how and why anxiety happens and a thorough and genuine absorption in this feeds the spiral.
My anxious spirals are mostly triggered by uncertainty and the lack of control such uncertainty entails. You might want to break yours down. Dig back the layers. What does it come back to? See if it ain’t a fluttery, empty, unsupported belief that you just don’t know what the hell to do, or what the hell is going on, or what the hell is right.
The more banal the supposed trigger, the guiltier and more self-indulgent and pathetic we feel, thus adding to the anxious spiral.
What do I do now? What’s the right emotional or rational response? Where’s the certainty? What do I grasp?
You can’t force or micromanage sleep. Attempts to do so only push sleep further into the abyss.
If something appears in my mind’s eye in black and white, it signals I’m being too rigid. I think anxious people tend to do this because when we’re in anxiety it’s very hard to access our intuition. For years I’d be told to “trust your gut” and “go with what you feel.” But when you’re in anxiety—particularly in an anxious spiral—you’re all head.
It’s all I want—the thoughts to stop.
don’t know why I can’t stop the spiral. I’m smart enough to know better. But. It’s almost like a short circuit occurs. Something very primal switches into gear. Everything tells me I. Must. Stop. The. Thoughts.
“They could not care less about the luxury of happiness. They just want to feel an absence of pain. To escape a mind on fire, where thoughts blaze . . . to be empty.” The only way he could escape his burning thoughts was to stop living.
The anxious tend to seek solitude, yet we simultaneously crave connection.
We cope with strangers better than our own mates when we’re anxious.
because around loved ones we feel so bloody responsible and guilty and hyperaware of our inconsistencies and neurotic needs. It’s exhausting being that apologetic. In contrast, being polite and attentive with the old lady at the bus stop is like a job we must attend to. We busy ourselves with it. And this can distract us.
We may come across as extroverted, but we have social anxiety.
We can talk coherently and rationally about our anxiety, even joke about it, yet we freak out on a regular basis.
Anxious thoughts, apparently, have more pull in the brain than knowledge thoughts, so sensible facts and data go out the window when we’re panicking.
our anxiety leaves us totally unable to decide between competing preferences.
We’re always thinking about everyone (and everything), but we’re so damn selfish.
I wish I could explain that in my anxious moments I actually care more about the welfare of others than myself.
should say that sometimes the 387,462 competing, frantic thoughts tug at me from all directions until the net result inside my head is zero movement.
A smallish study on teens a few years back found that anxious brains were hyperconnected, which means that both sides of the brain “communicated” a bit too much. This led to overrumination, whereby a kid constantly thinks about a problem without actively attempting to find a solution, as though the rumination hits a pause on our having to dive into a commitment.
the brain is basically a problem-solving machine—it looks for what is wrong, and then tries to think of ways to fix it. Unfortunately for anxious folk, the problems are not in the present moment—they’re projected in the future—so we can’t physically solve them.
Rumination, then, feels like we’re doing something, at least. Anything is better than the nothingness of not knowing . . . and, I guess, ultimately, of having to sit quietly with ourselves.
“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.”
My anxiety spiral lifted because a whole heap of firmness happened.
In such frantic, spiraling moments, I find it’s best to come in closer via the body. The body is solid enough, but not too “out there.” It’s close enough. I find my cells take over from there.
No pressure, but don’t hesitate either if you find yourself needing to step very slightly to the left to break a spiral. A little bit of crazy might freshen things up.
In this light it could be said that panic attacks are a misinterpretation of symptoms. We mistake anxious-like symptoms for actual anxiety, which sees us get anxious about being anxious.
“What’s the problem? Am I just experiencing the physical symptoms of anxiety? Am I?”
absolutely believe it helps to see anxiety as having a metapurpose beyond the arbitrary torture of our little souls. Pain is lessened when there is a point to it.
find the seemingly all-consuming, cruelly ironic, palpable pointlessness of anxiety unbearable.
it was in those weird hours, out of sync with the rest of the world, that a singular creativity flourished, going as far as declaring, “What rich or strange idea was ever the work of a sleeper?”
Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
“To be anxious wasn’t shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be . . . more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be the person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin.”
acceptance, rather than transformation, is her endpoint,
long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces.
