First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety—A Personal Journey Through Anxiety and Self-Discovery

by Sarah Wilson

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

blogger Glennon Doyle Melton,

Now, please understand that it is important for me to appreciate humanity and all those lovely humans who make up humanity from a comfortable distance. Because, close up, they all tend to make me quite nervous and often, annoyed . . . I am tired and socially anxious, so going to parties and showers and things such as this where I might actually be forced to sit next to and talk to humanity is really out of the question. So, I learn about love and humanity through books.

We can talk coherently and rationally about our anxiety, even joke about it, yet we freak out on a regular basis. — cruel irony #11

We seem doggedly set in our ways, but we have no idea what we want. — cruel irony #12

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

It’s because doing the anxiety—and this is really weird—makes me feel safe. It keeps me in my frenetic doingness, which is just so damn familiar.

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.

Jodi Picoult says it pointedly: “Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.”

First, if I can extend this to anyone living in an anxious person’s orbit, take charge when we’re not good. I share this interaction with my mate Rick, who knew I was not good recently. And that I get Weekend Panic when I’m not good. It’s perfect. It helped. And was not particularly onerous or demanding on him, I don’t think.

Another simple thing you can do, dear-loved-one-of-someone-with-anxiety, is to just be there, patiently, when we wobble. Just stay. And be entirely certain and solid about doing so, even in the very convincing face of pushback and the frantic wobbliness from us. Your patience and calmness will exist in such stark contrast to our funk that we’ll start to feel silly and return to Earth. Our anxiety does pass.

TheMighty.com regularly posts things its anxious readers wished they could tell their friends and family when they’re spiraling.

Don’t give up on me when I isolate myself.— Jen Give me some space, but don’t forget me.— Vickie Get me to a quiet room where I can just be alone for a moment. My panic attacks normally happen because there’s too much noise or too many people. So getting away is the best. — Amber Help me to let time pass and let the panic attack run its course. Possibly, assist me in getting to a “safe” spot. — Kevin During a panic attack, ask if it’s OK if you come close. Getting in [my] face can make the attack worse. Sometimes holding my hand helps, sometimes it’s a trigger.— Ashly

Keep yourself calm. I will eventually feed off your calmness and I’ll be able to calm down.— Marissa I need you to reach out to me, even when I’m so anxious I’ve stopped leaving the house. I need to know someone still cares and wants to see me. — Hayley I understand you don’t get it, but your efforts mean the world to me. — Avery

And we’re very seductive in the art of pushing people away. I know I test others, to see if they can handle me. I think that’s it. Or perhaps I’m just testing for sturdiness.

The reason he was able to help me was because I took responsibility for helping him. To backtrack, I’d gone into a spiral because he was three hours late in ringing me to make plans for the day (hey, he’s laid-back!). Which was just a trigger. But the uncertainty of not knowing what was happening and if I should call (and all the other uncertain early-relationship stuff that goes on) and the Weekend Panic and my anxiety about being anxious saw me go down, down, down. But I didn’t say this at first. I just said I was in a panic. I was, simply, vulnerable. I didn’t plant the cause on him. I just admitted I was hurting. And when he waded in and pulled me out, I made sure I responded cooperatively with a “yes.” Later I was able to explain why I’d got worked up and to say that uncertainty and lateness and flakiness are triggers.

I emerged with this bit of advice to all the bewildered but caring partners out there: don’t confuse our need to control our environment with a need to control you.

When we fuss and fret about getting wrinkles out of the bed, and ask you to double-check that you turned off the taps when you get up to go to the bathroom in the night, and ask you to stick to plans and call when you say you will, we’re trying to control everything that we think might go wrong and that could trigger a spiral and ruin our time together. We’re truly not aiming to control you. And to all the partners out there, I get that it totally doesn’t look this way to you. It’s a massive stretch, I know. But I humbly invite you to perhaps try to see our intentions through this lens because maybe it will make you feel better about the very tough but noble situation you’re no doubt in.

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.

According to a study published in the International Journal of Neuroscience, massage therapy decreased cortisol levels in the study participants by as much as 31 percent and increased serotonin and dopamine levels by the same amount. Scalp massages, says the study, are particularly beneficial. They send blood circulation to the brain and reduce the muscle tension in the back of the head and neck.

“The best crisis leaders are either mentally ill or mentally abnormal [he points to Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and Gandhi]; the worst crisis leaders are mentally healthy.” He says eminently sane men like Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush made poor leaders. A lifetime without the cyclical torment of mood disorders, Ghaemi explains, left them ill-equipped to endure dire straits.

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.”

Glennon adds this: “Help us manage our fire, yes, but don’t try to extinguish us.”

Poets, for instance, are up to thirty times more likely to suffer from bipolar disorder than non-poets. A 2012 study published in Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience found that anxious folk tend to have higher IQs. Another study that year followed 1.2 million patients and their relatives and found that bipolar disorder is more common in individuals with artistic professions including dancers, photographers and authors. Scientists were also found to have the same link.

But he experienced a “small ray of light” when he started boning up on some French historians and reading poetry by Wordsworth. It got him more attuned to his emotions and more in touch with his inner emotional life. And this is what lifted his anxiety.

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

“The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.”

I believe with all my heart that just understanding the metapurpose of the anxious struggle helps to make it beautiful. Purposeful, creative, bold, rich, deep things are always beautiful.

In An Unquiet Mind Jamison comes around to thinking that acceptance, rather than transformation, is her endpoint,

I 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. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until . . . the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one’s work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.

I’ve learned that at a biological level, anxiety is a lot like excitement. Both anxiety and excitement make my heart quicken and my stomach flutter, and send a wave of “Ooh ooh ooh, This Is Serious Mom” over me. 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.

this thing that I do has a name—“anxiety reappraisal.”

In 2013 Harvard University researchers found that simply saying “I’m excited” out loud could reappraise anxiety as excitement, which in turn improve perf...

Tiger Woods once declared, “The day I’m not nervous is the day I quit. To me, nerves are great. That means you care.”

Jerome Kagan, who spent sixty years studying anxiety, says fretters are “likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends.”

They can spot a dickhead. Their heightened threat radar means they’re selective about who they befriend. If you’re one of their mates, you can rest easy knowing you’re not a dickhead.

They give a shit. About everything.

The pain of anxiety is also unique in that there seems to be no mechanism for its satiation built into our collective experience. The pain of hunger makes you eat. Thirst makes you drink.

“Why do we all expect to be happy? We all came out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do.”

“Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.”

To sit in anxiety is to stay a little longer. A little longer. A little longer. And to see what happens. We experiment with it, curiously. “Let’s see what happens.” My meditation teacher, Tim, says this. “Let’s, as in let us, as in you, me and the workings of the universe, simply observe what happens if you don’t fight it, if you just stay.” I do this. I stay in the muck and the mire. I like the idea that it’s not just me on my own doing this. It’s all of “us.”

Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning

Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who spent three years in German concentration camps, some of it in hard labor. He wrote the small book in just nine days straight after being released from prison.

“Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering,” wrote David Brooks in his recent book The Road to Character,

Happy is fun, sure. But “rich” and “deep” light my fire so much more.

Australian social researcher and author of The Good Life Hugh Mackay is a vocal opponent of the pursuit of happiness as a life strategy. 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 back quick enough, the sloshing gathers momentum and, well, you lose it. Right? And, just to really drag out this metaphor, this means you then have to return to the source and fill it back up again. Which is tiring. So tiring. And just to push it a touch further: to carry the bowl steadily means walking in a pretty straight line. Which means there will be scenarios and environments and people that simply are not conducive to your journey. They’re too bumpy or jarring or wobbly. Or crooked. Me, I can’t do late nights at bars and I struggle around people who live loud and fast. Don’t get me near people on cocaine—their frenetic energy drags me way out to the bumpiest of tracks. I say this with all kinds of clean-living piety—cocaine is antithetical to anyone on the path to truth. I don’t say the same about other drugs, apart from sugar.

Anxiety renders us delicate. Having your fight-or-flight response permanently switched to “on” triggers a whole stack of cortisol to circulate in your body which, among other things, down-regulates your digestive and reproductive systems. Hence, the high number of anxious women with PCOS and fertility issues, as well as gut-based complaints such as bloating, indigestion, heartburn, diarrhea and constipation . . . sometimes all at once. Elevated cortisol also causes poor absorption of key nutrients, particularly brain-essential ones such as the B-group vitamins, omega-3 fats, zinc, iron and magnesium. Plus, anxiety makes us fat. And reduces bone density, leading to osteoporosis. Oh, and the inflammation associated with anxiety has a dastardly flow-on effect. The so-called “modern” metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease are all about inflammation, which is why there’s a higher incidence of these kind of diseases among the anxious. Anxiety can cause all of these things. But it’s a two-way street—bad health habits also cause anxiety. How do you modulate all this? Meditation works. So does walking. So does getting your gut in order.