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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
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January 25 - February 2, 2022
Paxil, approved to treat—you guessed it!—social anxiety disorder. Obsessive-compulsive disorder and bipolar disorder have similar drug-first histories.
24. I’ll say it dead straight, because this is how it was presented to me: when you’re an anxious type, meditation is non-negotiable.
I do, however, want to share this: I’m crap at meditation. But for the past seven years I’ve meditated in my crappy way, twice a day for twenty minutes. I rarely “go down” into the deep place that others speak of. My experience is mostly chaotic and noisy. But here’s the thing: You can be crap at meditation and it still works. The mere intention to sit with yourself is an act of self-care as far as our brains are concerned, which, voilà, triggers the comfort system. And, you know what? Even knowing it’s okay to be crap at meditation is comforting.
have to act. I guess it’s a three thing again. I learned the Vedic style, related to transcendental meditation, which originated more than 5,000 years ago in India and moved to China 2,000 years later morphing into the Buddhist tradition. It’s a technique with structured boundaries . . . but then it lets you loose. You can sit in a chair, or on the floor. You do it twice a day. And after a shower is best because meditating
You recite a mantra, faintly, in your head, for twenty minutes. That’s it. If your mind wanders, return to the mantra. Don’t worry about your breathing. Or your posture. Or your chakras. Return to the mantra. When thoughts bubble up, that’s cool.
It’s this sturdy vigilance, this steering toward stillness, that builds the relaxation response—or calm muscle—in your being. And slowly, slowly you notice this calmness playing out in real life. Not immediately, but with time.
The Beatles did this Vedic style. David Lynch has been practicing it for thirty-eight years and reckons his weirdest creations have emerged from his meditations.
“Keep meditating,” he says. He pours me turmeric tea and sits back. “It’s not really about what happens during the twenty minutes of meditation. It’s what happens after, out there in real life.”
The other thing I tell them is that the thing about meditation is that you always have it with you. You don’t have to rely on anyone or anything. You sit. With yourself. And just meditate. This is incredibly powerful in itself.
battle it out. Anxiety versus Me. Anxiety can sometimes still win. Then there’s this: The grimmer the environment,
feel majestic and magnificent and suspended in a duvet-like cloud. Sometimes I get what I call my Michelin Man experience. I’m entirely convinced, my eyes shut, that my body has expanded several feet beyond myself in soft billowing folds, and I feel my “consciousness” expand to meet it.
“Stop. And. Drop.”, she would say—by which she meant, stop your head and drop into your heart.
26. Sukshma [sook-shma]: 1. (adjective) subtle (Sanskrit); 2. (noun) the practice of being innocent, faint and effortless.
Please note that meditation is really really hard when you’re super anxious. It can be a bridge too far. The gearshift from a panic attack to a still mind is too dramatic. Know that this is cool. It truly is. So try some deep belly breathing instead at such times.
deep, controlled breathing communicates to the body that everything is okay, which down regulates the stress response, slowing heart rate, diverting blood back to the brain and the digestive system and promoting feelings of calm.
There are lots of ways people describe deep breathing, but I think the following is one of the simplest. 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.
In some ways it works like meditation. The focus away from the head slows down new-brain activity. It also activates the comfort system. By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can change the messages being sent to the brain. Also, by “massaging” our vagus nerve, which wraps our bellies, meandering its way around our organs and up to the brain, a variety of anti-stress enzymes and calming hormones such as acetylcholine, prolactin, vasopressin and oxytocin are released.
My ritual is based on Demartini’s, but a little less dazzling and sound-bitey. (And I’ve not trademarked it.) It goes like this: At night, after I climb into bed, I simply reflect for a few minutes on five things that pop into my mind that I’m grateful for. And say thank you for them.
Alex Korb writes in “The Grateful Brain,” “Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. 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.
Charles Darwin observed that due to their inability to conceptualize the future, animals don’t get anxious, at least not in the same way we do. Sure, frogs and ostriches experience fight-or-flight responses like us. But their trigger is plain and simple fear in that moment and this fear is proportionate to the tangible threat involved.
Human anxiety, on the other hand, stems from an existential awareness of what that fear means—ultimately our future annihilation.
Fear is a primal physical response; anxiety is both this fear and an awareness of the fear and what it means.
If 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.
To this extent I think anxiety and depression are different expressions of the same thing—a severe discomfort with what we can’t grasp, what we can’t know. In other words, t...
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Some of us have depressed anxiety. Others have anxious depression. Ninety percent of patients with anxiety have depression, while 85 percent of patients with depression have significant anxiety, with anxiety almost always the primary condition.
It’s always felt for me like a big heavy blanket hung over my head, muffling the buzz and holding back all my dreams and drive. I hate this feeling. Anxiety, for me, is more painful by a long shot, but I prefer the sharp pain to the muffling. It seems more productive. I get ego-boosting pats on the back for the things I produce when I’m in the early stages of anxiety, even if the toll on my spirit is so dire.
Novelist Matt Haig writes in his memoir about his experience with suicide Reasons to Stay Alive: Adding anxiety to depression is a bit like adding cocaine to alcohol. It presses fast-forward on the whole experience.
As part of writing this book I held forums at SANE and Black Dog to help me really poke into the issues.
“Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?”
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.
fact, I relish real, present-moment fear and actively seek it out. At the expense of sounding like a humble-bragging wanker .
Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads. Actually, they’re a relief. When the future does arrive, we’re always okay. And I think my tendency to seek out risky experiences is about wanting to be reminded of this.
49. 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. In essence most modern medicine and therapy has worked to the notion that the “fix” is out there in the world somewhere. I’m here. The pills and experts are over there. And in between is a chasm of despair and lack of self-esteem that I have to wade through.
I’ve met and, indeed, in her email she shared that healing herself from what was ultimately diagnosed as PTSD entailed separating herself from the self-help and esoteric industries. She wrote, “I noticed the industry is another system that tells you something is wrong with you and is about someone else giving you a ‘fix’ e.g. healing/happiness/peace/enlightenment as an end goal.”
That’s pride right there. Ugly pride. It occurs to me now that external grasping, even if it’s clearly dysfunctional, is mostly condoned as brave. Something to be ugly-proud about. On the weekend just
I 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.
There’s everyday beige buzzing or background anxiety, and there are full-blown anxiety attacks. I call my anxiety attacks “anxious spirals” because when they occur, they’re not so much an attack, which suggests they’re sudden and pounce upon me from out of nowhere. They’re more a gradual downward, suck-holey momentum. My anxious spirals culminate when anxiety’s beige buzz builds to a crescendo.
Personally, I’ve only really had this kind of attack once, when I was in law school in the middle of an exam. Since then 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.
asked around to find out why there are two such distinct experiences. SANE Australia’s Dr. Mark Cross explains that anxiety tends to play out on the body (somatically) when we haven’t yet come to understand how and why our anxiety happens. This kind of panic attack happens when our thoughts trigger the ancient fight-or-flight mechanisms and we succumb to the response, believing something truly fearful is happening. 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.
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.
Yes, I know such examples are ludicrously innocuous. And, yes, it all does make me think of the starving kids in Africa. But that’s yet another one of those cruel ironies with anxiety: The more banal the supposed trigger, the guiltier and more self-indulgent and pathetic we feel, thus adding to the anxious spiral. —cruel irony #6
Despite years of work to destigmatize my fear of not falling asleep, I still rigidly control my sleeping arrangements with a white-knuckled grip. I feel I have to, to ensure I sleep, to ensure my autoimmune disease doesn’t flare, to ensure I can function and run a business and write books and handle other humans and be a passable girlfriend. I wear earplugs, an eye mask and even tape my lips shut with surgical tape
“The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.” The Chinese proverb puts things in the imperative. I prefer to phrase it as a gentle invitation: Let’s make our beast 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.
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
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overresearch. Everything. When I bought my most recent car, after being car-less for almost five years, I overresearched the most environmentally sound option on the planet. I couldn’t help it.
took three years to buy my first couch. But rest assured it is, of course, the most functional, most toxin-free, most environmentally sound option on the planet. You might be interested to know Steve Jobs took eight years. His wife, Laurene, explained that they discussed the best design and philosophical principles of couches for close to a decade. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’” Yeah, me too.
I have to do dangerous, reckless things occasionally. I call it “putting a bomb under the situation.”
still climb trees. At forty-three.
