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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
Read between
February 24 - May 17, 2021
think anxiety pushes us. It exists to do so—it helps us friggin’ fire up. Even when it makes us stall with terror, it eventually makes conditions so unbearable that we ricochet off to a new important direction. Eventually.
“You know that Lupe Fiasco song,” I say, “where he kicks and pushes (and coooasts) and it’s super smooth and heart lifting? That’s what I do. I kick and push from the grist. Then I work on coasting. Which is much more fun than trying to fight anxiety.”
So you know what I do now? I often choose to interpret anxiety as excitement whenever I can. Standing on the precipice, about to jump into something new, I often feel anxious. But if I pause and reflect, I realize it could equally be excitement that I’m feeling. When you see it as excitement it’s BLOODY FUN.
In 2013 Harvard University researchers found that simply saying “I’m excited” out loud could reappraise anxiety as excitement, which in turn improve performance during anxiety-inducing activities.
Tiger Woods once declared, “The day I’m not nervous is the day I quit. To me, nerves are great. That means you care.”
Let anxiety be and it will be less so. And quite possibly beautiful and exciting, too.
Turns out, in the 2013 Harvard University study, researchers concluded that for most people it takes less effort for the brain to jump from anxious feelings to excited ones, than it does to get from anxious to calm. In other words, it’s easier to convince yourself to be excited than to bloody well just relax when you’re anxious.
Anxiety is painful. There’s nothing quite like it. It’s extremely private and lonely and it comes with the overwhelming sense that no one on the planet could possibly relate to the intensity and the sharpness.
It’s every thought you ever had, all at once. No one could ever understand so many thoughts.
“Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who,
Worry is our default position. I add to this: We humans are the only creatures on the planet who can’t sleep even when we need or want to. I also add this: We are the only creatures with the capacity—nay, propensity—to ponder our inevitable deaths. True and painful stuff.
“And I do this thing where I twist a special spinner ring when I’m uncomfortable and repeat a mantra: ‘Choose discomfort over resentment.’”
Anxiety is a sign we need to move and change our lives.
The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness . . . I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word “happiness” and to replace it with the word “wholeness.” Ask yourself “is this contributing to my wholeness?” and if you’re having a bad day, it is.
In my experience, living with a wobbly mind is akin to being charged with carrying around a large, shallow bowl filled to the brim with water for the rest of your life. You have to tread super carefully so as not to slosh it all out. So you must learn to walk steadily and gently. And be super aware of every movement around you, ready to correct a little bit of off-balance-ness here, a tilt to the left there. This is just the way it is. Living this way requires vigilance and is about constant refinement. If you waiver and get unsteady, the water starts to slosh. And if you don’t bring yourself
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And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulnerable and raw and open. And oh so real.
We automatically think if there are lots of options presented that a choice must really matter, even if it doesn’t.”
When you’re anxious, decisions can be your undoing. Anxious people are shocking decision makers. Plus, the process of making decisions heightens anxiety. Plus, any kind of indecision or faffing or vagueness around us tends to trigger anxiety.
Again, I don’t think I’m making too drastic a leap when I say I think anxious folk are not unlike creatives (if they’re not already both) in needing to reduce the number of choices they have to make so that they can fly free.
“What good shall I do this day?”
I say yes. I play this game “I say yes” to anyone who comes to me with a solid, certain, already-decided preference.
An anxious person’s gut is a fluttery mess; we don’t know what we want.
What’s important about making a decision is the “just deciding” bit. Because once you choose one—say, the black dress—you make it the best choice.
There is never a perfect decision. They become perfect when we make them.
If a decision—about a thing or a person—feels 70 percent right, he just goes with it; 70 percent is enough: ’Cause here’s what happens. The fact that other options go away immediately brings your choice to 80. Because the pain of deciding is over. And when you get to 80 percent, you work. You apply your knowledge, and that gets you to 85 percent! And the thing itself, especially if it’s a human being, will always reveal itself—100 percent of the time!—to be more than you thought. And that will get you to 90 percent. After that, you’re stuck at 90, but who the fuck do you think you are, a god?
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share all of this, mostly, to lessen the potency of one choice over another. If we’ve investigated the options enough, it doesn’t matter.
said earlier that making decisions is a key anxiety trigger. If we drill down a bit we can see that this happens because we work to the belief there’s a perfect decision out there to be made. But such a thing doesn’t exist.
Unfamiliar surroundings can buck me out of my anxious rut, again because the usual stuff I grip on to isn’t immediately apparent or available.
control. I love this idea. Tilting. It’s when you have so much to do and you could list it all out and try to prioritize. Or you could just sit in the everythingness and lean toward stuff as it arises that feels right.
If you’re anxious, part of the healing journey is to create space. To soften and expand and back off from this drive to “fill” the space (in our guts, our diaries, our weekends, our wardrobes).
Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. — cruel irony #16
learned that anxiety widens personal space—we need more than the standard 8–16 inches that the average person requires to feel comfortable.
In psychology circles this kind of experimenting is called “distress tolerance” and entails working with your specialist to remain in anxiety-provoking situations until your fear capacity becomes exhausted. Which it does.
The problem is that if you’re anxious, you tend to flee (or fight or freeze) before you give the distress tolerance mechanism time to play out. I find this an enthralling idea. I mean, what if our inability to deal with our triggers came down to the simple fact we’re unable to sit long enough? Actually, that’s (pretty much exactly) what I’m trying to say here.
Back at the focaccia café that morning, I sat longer. And longer. By now twenty minutes had passed. And I felt the feedback loop that connects my anxiety to fleeing and fixing and grasping weaken with every additional minute that I stayed. I’m serious, I felt a distinct release inside my brain. It’s all really crap, but I’m coping. And you know what this does? It gives me the confidence to settle even further.
The pressure releases, the potency lessens. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. And if it all can matter less, the anxiety abates.
Sitting in grim is also a defiant two-fingered up yours to your anxiety.
For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will lead him where he wishes to go.”
man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety . . . the greater the anxiety, the greater the man,”
“He therefore who has learned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.”
We can practice finding beauty in imperfection. We can be a bit whimsical and playful with the messiness of life so that we can get closer and closer to it. Whimsy drags us from our purpose-mad existence, it presses “pause” long enough for us to get a taste of life lived in “the now” and freefall for a bit. To see what happens.
that ruts are best broken with small moments in whimsy,
can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness.
generally find that anxious people spend a lot of their lives trying to have fun doing stuff that other people find enjoyable.
The point is to recognize that we do this—defer to others’ notions of fun. And that this is probably because we struggle with choice (how do you decide what your preference is amid all the things to do in the world?). And to then try to play around with finding stuff that floats your boat. And, no doubt, to then realize that your stuff could be a little weird or unique.
“Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.”
Our default position is safety. A desire to buck it gets messy.
“The thing about life, sweetheart, is this, when we leap into the unknown, we always land safely. We just do.
planet is the ultimate balm for anxiety.
I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
