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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sarah Wilson
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January 25 - February 2, 2022
I knew my answer. I told her I look back now and can see that every major step forward in my career has been driven by my anxiety. It leads me. It’s my internal traffic light system that tells me “go” and “stop.” When I feel the anxious choke at my throat, that urghhhh, I know something is not for me. Stop! it screams at me. In this way my relentless anxiety—and my awareness of it—has helped me make big important decisions along the way.
Then (I recall watching myself in slow motion) I punched the wall of the metal shipping container. I broke two knuckles. The big bosses were called in to have calm chats with me. I walked off set and went to see my meditation teacher, Tim, feeling deeply ashamed. I’d never behaved like this in my life. Tim laughed. “Perfect,” he said. “You lanced the pimple, you were the volcano that released the pressure valve. Let’s see what comes of it.”
My anxiety activates my muscles, my fire, my fight. It also sees me care about everything.
Also, if I didn’t know what it was like to go down deep and dark, as I have with anxiety, I wouldn’t know how to take creative risks.
69. Although, we mustn’t overly romanticize things. The Fault in our Stars author John Green warned at a conference not so long ago against thinking we should all be inducing our anxiety (by coming off medication that otherwise tempers the condition) to access “genius.”
TV series Homeland—the main character Carrie, played by Claire Danes, comes off her meds so that she can discover the identity of the terrorists and save America. Apparently, she needed her mania to do this.
Glennon Doyle Melton has a slightly different take. She goes on and off antidepressants because she needs the desperation of depression to fuel her creativity. On medication she says she loses the feeling “if I don’t write I will die. This is how I feel when I’m depressed.
Just a small thought. 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.
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.” Right on! Bill Russell, one of the best basketball players in history, anxious-vomited before 1,128 of his games. To his teammates it was a good sign—he was on fire.
Greg Norman blew a massive lead with a big fat choke once and wound up crying in the arms of his competitor. Thomas Jefferson and Gandhi both suffered social phobia.
Adele has extreme stage fright and suffers panic attacks. She has developed an alter ego to cope with her anxiety and also limits her touring. She says she’s scared of audiences and once used a fire exit to escape from fans. At another concert she projectile-vomited on an unfortunate audience member.
Actress Emma Stone says acting, funnily enough, is the thing that helps her. “There’s something about the immediacy of acting,” she said. “You can’t afford to think about a million other things. You have to think about the task at hand. Acting forces me to sort of be like a Zen master: What is happening right in this moment?”
Mike Tyson’s trainer once told journalists, “The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear . . . while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.” Yes, it’s what you do with it. And perhaps whether you treat it as beautiful.
Let anxiety be and it will be less so. And quite possibly beautiful and exciting, too.
71. Of course, when we’re anxious we’re mostly told to calm down, to turn the dial down, to . . . just relax!!!! Are you like me and find this possibly the least helpful advice ever?
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.
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.
If you’re about to be mugged in an alleyway, stick with the anxious person; they’ll have all possible escape routes mapped out upon entry.
They’re tough. As a functioning anxious person, they work hard as a matter of course. When the going gets tough, they naturally rise to the occasion. As I’ve said before, real-life threats are a cinch. Equally, they have tomes of great life advice when you’re going through a rough patch. Veritable oracles. They give a shit. About everything.
Emotional tension is held in the hips and groin according to yogic tradition.
100. When I was nineteen I was mugged in Nice after hitchhiking to the French border from Florence. I was left with no backpack, no passport, no identification, no money, no credit card and with “only the clothes on my back”—a pair of jeans, black boots and a navy Sportscraft turtleneck (which I still wear).
For two weeks I was itinerant and renegade and it was one of the few times in my life I’ve not been anxious.
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.
In a similar vein, studies have shown that Brits who had neurotic disorders prior to World War Two experienced a decline in anxiety in the wake of bombing raids. A German study in the 1950s found the same among concentration camp prisoners with the same disorders—their symptoms went into remission during the war. Like I’ve said before, emergencies put us into the present. And anxiety struggles to exist in the present. The hyper-attention required in a real-life upset flips us out of our funk. We can’t be focused on our grandmother dying or a loved one’s miscarriage and be anxious. They’re two
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The next day the poor little chicken excitedly told her mom, “Keep making me not do things, please.” Keep rendering me choiceless, was her desperate plea! Bind me! This story still sends a chill through me. A child of eight had worked out the strange machinations of her anxious mind in a way few doctors probably could. My own experience matches up. 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.
Basically, the science shows that unhappiness among women correlates with having more options. Which probably shouldn’t come as a massive surprise to you this far in. “Having it all”—career, kids, access to the rowing machine at the gym—has come with the pressure of feeling that we have to “do it all.” Women have got it into their heads that they should be able to do it all. And in perfect balance. And this has resulted in more stress and less happiness. (I speculate that men are feeling the same but it’s just not reflected in the research yet.)
I want to throw in here that the linguistic root of anxiety is the Greek word angho, which means “to squeeze.” Interesting, hey.
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.
Most of us cry out for more time, thinking that’s what we need (much like balance). But tell me when more time has helped anyone in a hot anxious mess? Time doesn’t release the pressure. Time doesn’t take the cap off the toothpaste. Time doesn’t loosen the knots. If we get time, we tend to just fill it with more thoughts. What we need is more space.
Inversely and just as randomly, a recent German study found that Botox injected into smile muscles interrupted the brain’s happiness circuitry. Numbing our smile muscles made us sadder, more anxious. Which is a lovely irony: Aging gracefully really is the more joyful route.
Today, anxiety is in our collective bones.
108. Yep, the world is getting more anxious. But it’s not just something that’s in the global waters. It’s specifically a “Modern Life” thing, or more accurately, a Western Modern Life thing.
Let’s take a look at how Modern Life goes. Mostly, it’s frenetic and at a pace that’s not conducive to reflective thought. Working on the fly from laptops. Weaving in and out of traffic. Eating on the run. Walking around with takeaway coffees. Keeping up with technology updates (the Anxiety of Being Three Updates Out of Date!). Being expected to turn around school projects overnight (what’s your problem? You have Google!). Ferrying children to violin lessons.
It’s all too fast for our human dimensions, as David Malouf put it.
While we are meant to have more time (all those time-saving devices were meant to deliver just this, no?), we have less space.
Shai once again: “Today we’re told to do more stuff that has no purpose, which makes us anxious.”
What if life really was about getting a secure footing on the conveyor belt and neatly passing from school to job to partner to holidays in Fiji for two weeks every year to bridge nights? And so on and so forth.
year in which I could be getting ahead? Our default position is safety. A desire to buck it gets messy.
has learned the lesson.” I wonder if sheer years on the planet is the ultimate balm for anxiety. In those letters to one’s younger self that magazines and chat forums like to do with famous or well-lived people, the advice handed down is always that “it gets better. It just does.”
I’ve arrived at an age where accepting this is “just my life” brings peace and, going through the motions of anxiety when it arises, strangely it helps. This too will pass. You fight it still, but it lessens over time. — Anthea
130. Jump first. A bit of an ask, hey. Does life realize what it’s asking of us? I think it does.
Many psychs today discuss managing anxiety in terms of having “negative capability.” Which is to say, having an ability to be okay with the uncertainty of life.
What an aim. To sit comfortably in mystery without grasping outward. To sit. To stay. And see what happens. It’s freedom, right? But how do we do it? Dare I say it, I think it takes patience and sheer years on the planet. Rilke writes in Letters to a Young Poet:
131. American Buddhist nun Pema ChÖdrÖn (who cites her two marriage breakdowns in her twenties as the catalysts to her own spiritual and anxious journey) defines anxiety as resisting joining the unknown.
Chodron argues that the journey we all need to do is the experiment with sitting in uncertainty. Ha! The ultimate endpoint, she writes, is growing up. The journey “offers no promise of happy endings.” Rather, the part of ourselves that keeps seeking security (when there isn’t any) and something to hold on to (when such a thing doesn’t exist) finally grows up.
