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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
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February 21 - March 23, 2024
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
This, dear friends, is what I am talking about. Yes, yes, yes. This is anxiety. 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.
It’s never surprised me that sugar addiction goes hand in hand with anxiety, and that anxious folk hide the vice so protectively. We’re dopamine junkies, and we don’t like people removing our “fix.”
Don’t fear the fear. Instead, see it for what it is. You’re feeling anxious. You just are. No need to berate yourself for this; it will only make you more anxious.
Do the anxiety. Then leave it there.
I used to keep a Post-it note affixed to my computer at the Cosmo office with “Stop. And. Drop” written on it. Several times a day I’d look at it and drop into my heart for a little moment. 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.
It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli.” Literally, you can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. Once again, the threat system in our amygdala is overridden.
On top of this, research shows gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates anxiety.
Japanese scientists call the phenomenon Shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing.”
“we are still bone-heavy creatures tied to the gravitational pull of the Earth.”
We yearn for something even if we don’t know what it looks like or if it actually exists. — cruel irony #4
I guess that, as I’ve learned to not operate on autopilot with it, notice it, and make better choices around managing it, it has become a friend.”
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.
We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more. —cruel irony #5
Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads. Actually, they’re a relief.
know
Matt Haig shares in Reasons to Stay Alive what goes on for the anxious when they attempt suicide. “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. — cruel irony #7
When I’m anxious every part of me wants to extract myself from other humans. I don’t show up to things. I move to remote areas, away from everyone I know. I pack up and leave states, continents, relationships. I want to save them from the drama that is “me.” But the irony is, few things fuel my anxiety like being left alone with the buzz. If a friend cancels because she can’t get a babysitter, I take this as social rejection. To me it’s a sign that I’m a cosmic pain in the ass and that everyone is fed up with me and I don’t fit and nothing makes sense. The very gist of why I jitter is the need
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We need easy-going people, but they can be our undoing. —cruel irony #8
We cope with strangers better than our own mates when we’re anxious. — cruel irony #9
We may come across as extroverted, but we have social anxiety. — cruel irony #10
This is a cruel irony that affects our loved ones heavily. This explanation might explain the apparent contradiction. 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.
We look strong and controlling. But we actually need others’ help more than most. — cruel irony #13
We’re always thinking about everyone (and everything), but we’re so damn selfish. — cruel irony #14
We anxious folk are fierce in our self-protection. We don’t want our “fix” to be taken away. And we’re very seductive in the art of pushing people away. I know I test others, to see if they can handle me.
My anxiety spiral lifted because a whole heap of firmness happened.
Later I was able to explain why I’d got worked up and to say that uncertainty and lateness and flakiness are triggers.
I rock back and forth in my rocking chair. Eventually I calm down and the rocking goes down to almost nothing.
I also read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s era-defining Prozac Nation. In it she wrote, of her depression, “That is all I want in life: for this pain to seem purposeful.”
New York Times bestseller and former addict Glennon Doyle Melton describes in a post how she was able to step out of the world of addiction by stepping “into worlds of purpose.” “Yes, I’ve got these conditions—anxiety, depression, addiction—and they almost killed me. But they are also my superpowers. I’m the canary in the mine and you need my sensitivity because I can smell toxins in the air that you can’t smell, see trouble you don’t see and sense danger you don’t feel. My sensitivity could save us all. And so instead of letting me fall silent and die—why don’t we work together to clear some
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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.
None of it matters. And if it all can matter less, the anxiety abates.
What we resist persists.
Next, you release your grip. You have to. You have to give in. You can see now that you are not the captain of your life. Goddamn, it’s hard. But it’s the inevitable truth. And with time you do experience it as sweet relief.
Just as a flower doesn’t try to bloom. It just does.
“Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different.”
“When a baby comes into the world, its hands are clenched, because a baby, not knowing any better, wants to grab everything, to say, ‘The whole world is mine.’ But when an old person dies [it’s] with his hands open. Why? Because he has learned the lesson.”
That if I want to let go, to truly let go and trust life, I first have to let go of the idea that someone else must hold me while I do it. No one else can tell me that life has this one. I have to do this for myself.
Since childhood I have cried out to know where I fit, for life to make sense, to learn how to sit comfortably with myself on that bench in the sun.
I don’t sit here healed. I sit here simply knowing I’m on a better journey. And this is enough. This is everything.
I can say “I love you” and I know that I love loving.
Now, mostly my joy comes from knowing I can do both. I can be neurotic and imperfect.
