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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
Read between
May 16 - May 25, 2021
Quit sugar. When we’re stressed we crave sugar (glucose is our body’s preferred energy source), but consuming too much of it triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that promote chronic inflammation. Sugar also mucks terribly with gut bacteria balance which, as we have seen, plays a huge role in the health of our immune system and can directly affect mental health.
Zerrissenheit: (noun) disunity, separateness, inner conflict; an internal fragmenting or “torn-to-pieces-hood” from toggling so many choices.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote: “Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify.”
Uncertainty, Jonathan Fields
“Happy, successful entrepreneurs ritualize everything in their lives but their creative work,” he wrote.
Much of how we’re living feels untethered and wobbly. What a wonderful thing to be on a bit of solid ground amid the flapping.
Louise Hay told me when we met, “The first hour of your day is crucial.” She starts by thanking her bed for the sleep (!), stretches, has tea, then goes back to bed to read. Because she likes it. She even made a great headboard so she can be at the best angle to read.
Benjamin Franklin always woke at 5am to “rise, wash and address ‘powerful goodness’ contrive the day’s business and take the resolution of the day; prosecute the present study; and breakfast.” Each morning he’d ask himself: “What good shall I do this day?” Which is an adage I’ve adopted at the end of my meditation practice.
If you’re anxious, you have to have a morning routine. Again, no ifs or buts.
As William Blake wrote, “Think in the morning, act in the noon.”
Once the certainty anchors are in place, the day starts and all kinds of chaotic decision-making can then ensue.
In a TED Talk titled “Why we make bad decisions,” psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains that cognitive biases mean we are actually really bad at making decisions for ourselves and that even a complete stranger will increase the likelihood of making the “happiest” decision for you by a factor of two.
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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I convince myself that controlling my life and aiming for perfection will cocoon me from anxiety. But it only causes more of the dreaded thing. — cruel irony #15
Verschlimmbessern: (verb) To make something worse in the very act of trying to improve it.
Simone de Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others
“I wanted all human life to be pure, transparent freedom; and I found myself existing in other people’s lives as a solid obstacle.”
At the end of the yoga class we would sit cross-legged in meditation for a few minutes. After five minutes the teacher invited us, gently, to fold forward from our hips over our legs and “surrender to the day,” our arms outstretched in front. That’s it. Please do try it. For there’s something about collapsing into the earth like this that truly sees one “give in.” It’s not a novel idea. Supplication to the feet of the sublime has been doing the rounds for a long time.
I had no control. No agency. I was a passenger for two weeks. My anxiety had nothing to grip on to. Plane turbulence can produce the same sense of lightness in me. I’m not in charge, there’s nothing I can do. So I sit back and enjoy witnessing the ride. Ditto my few stints in the hospital for various surgeries. I’m aware I can’t do anything to help the situation and that my filthy mitts can’t grasp at anything and so my anxiety goes on a little holiday.
emergencies put us into the present. And anxiety struggles to exist in the present.
“The best way to beat a monster is to find a scarier one,” he writes.
Instead, Buckingham found these chilled, happy women “tilted” toward activities and commitments that they liked and found meaningful. Amid the chaos. They didn’t wait for the chaos and the commitments to get under control.
When you tilt you grab a log that looks about right and jump on.
Indian philosopher Guru Dev says the same: “Do the opposite of what you’d normally do.” Why? It injects freshness. The jolt of going against the grain gets you to look at things differently.
Doing a few things back-to-front helps, too. Like putting your head where your feet normally go when you climb into bed. This tiny change is like a holiday. Everything looks different in the morning. Fresh and lighter. I read recently that business and creativity coaches have caught on to this concept and are calling it “vu déjà.” Which is the inverse of seeing something in the same way. It’s seeing what you always see, but in a different way. Or in Zen parlance it’s to have “fresh eyes.”
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. — David, Psalm 22
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).
Studies have shown that particularly creative and anxious minds need a lot of space—or downtime—for what is called our Default Mode Network to make sense of things. “Deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets,” essayist Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times. “[Space] is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.”
Someone with bipolar once told me they need to be alone a lot so that they have space to play out the conversations in their head. They didn’t say they needed time. I know it might sound like semantics, or seem metaphysical. It’s not. It’s an attitude. ...
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CEO mate of mine who has her PA book out fifteen minutes either side of every one of her appointments. “I use it to reflect on what just happened,” she says. “It gives me the space to view what I need to do next.”
I drove to visit family in Canberra recently. That’s four hours of bleak nothingness that I’d normally fill with returning calls and listening to podcasts. This time I did nothing. Not even music. Just large expanses of sheep-ridden, dusty space. I didn’t “use” the time. I just sat into the space. And fresh thoughts bubbled up from the nothingness.
It’s only in the nothingness that we can see the somethingness. Without space, it’s like watching a movie three feet from the cinema screen. We can’t see the whole picture. And we lose ourselves in the noise and the fuzzy pixilation.
When we have space we have a chance at having a better anxious journey.
you might like to know that in the U.K. some scientists bothered to tally the mood-boosting value of receiving one smile. If the smile is from a friend, it’s equal to the feel-good brain stimulation of 200 chocolate bars; if it comes from a baby it equates to 2,000 bars!
German study found that Botox injected into smile muscles interrupted the brain’s happiness circuitry. Numbing our smile muscles made us sadder, more anxious.
“I’m okay with dealing with my PTSD stuff . . . but it’s the other kind of anxiety, the constant feeling of hypervigilance that’s not linked to anything tangible or anxiety-inducing, that’s hardest.”
According to Ayurveda, anxiety is not a disease. It’s not an unhealable disorder. It’s merely a symptom of having got a bit off balance. We don’t fix anxiety. It doesn’t need a fix. It just requires a bit of rebalancing.
We all possess a mix of all three doshas, but tend to have one that dominates. Our dominant dosha can get out of balance, which causes us different digestion/weight, health and emotional issues.
Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries. — cruel irony #16
it’s an ingrained addiction to “something about to happen.”
from the way I’d phrased my email. She described me as “leaning so far forward it’s not right.”
Even before meeting me she could tell that I was hypervigilant and overtoggled and leaned into life with a ferocity that frightens most people and that I try to tame, but also know is a beast worthy of being called beautiful at times.
“A wiser orientation would be to appreciate (and investigate) calm states when they do arise and to treat anxious ones with great kindness and respect. The radical encouragement of the practice is to sit with the most disagreeable of states for as long as they last. Sooner or later, they exhaust themselves of energy.”
Create a mercenary Out-of-Office notification. When I travel or am in writing shutdown, I set an Out-of-Office reply advising that I will not be following up on emails. I invite people to resend their request after my return date if the matter is still important. Which effectively pushes the onus back on the sender to reconnect. Which is smart. I mean, how do I know if they’ve resolved the matter in my absence? And, after all, they are the ones needing a piece of me. We forget this. We forget that email is not a summons.
Further, another study published in Psychological Science found that more possessions—“an embarrassment of riches”—reduces our ability to enjoy simple things, like sunsets and chocolate. The awareness of having stuff distracts us from basic pleasure.
I learned that anxiety widens personal space—we need more than the standard 8–16 inches that the average person requires to feel comfortable. I also learned that those of us who veer into mania and hypomania generally find most aspects of sharing the planet with others irritating because, as Jay Griffiths writes in her manic depression memoir Tristimania (tristimania is an eighteenth-century term for bipolar), “when you’re racing and overcapable and wildly energetic, any ordinary human speed looks like lethargy and . . . feeds the irritability.”
Monachopsis: (noun) The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach—lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognize the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home. — The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
Like all kids, with much of what they do, they have a knack, or wisdom, for pushing through the annoyance (a fly in their eye, snot running down their face, a too-high step) to the happiness. It’s the stuff we adults marvel at.
Or you can go straight to grim and lo-fi. That is, straight to what makes you anxious—in my case, choices, uncertainty, finding perfect moments and sensory irritations. When I sat at that wobbly table my irritation mounted as the table wobbled each time I put down my teacup. But I sat longer. It felt crappy and wrong and my body got prickly with anxiety as I sat there. But I sat longer in the grimness.
