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

by Sarah Wilson

I’ve been anxious for a long, long time. I don’t know when or how it kicked in, but I don’t remember a time without it.

Recent research has shown that anxiety is more common in people with autoimmune (AI) diseases, illnesses that occur when the immune system gets deranged and attacks different parts of the body. I have Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid, a gland in the neck that controls everything that makes you a conscious, sentient being: metabolism, breathing, heart rate, the nervous system, menstrual cycles, body temperature, cholesterol, blood sugar, mood, sleep . . . No one can explain the connection between AI and anxiety, in part because the genesis of many autoimmune diseases is not known. Some suggest that the uncertainty of living with an autoimmune disease is a possible factor—simply not knowing what the hell is going on with your body would drive anyone to agitated despair. A more promising, and compelling (to me), explanation is that AI, like other inflammatory diseases, lead to high levels of circulating cytokines, which have been shown to affect how our neurotransmitters communicate.

Hashimotos

You know what else happened in 1980, just prior to anxiety being formally recognized and diagnosed? The first anti-anxiety drugs were manufactured. Which begs, was anxiety “invented” in 1980 to fit the drug? Just a question, just a question, people . . .

Prince Ea said (to a motivational beat) that we are not our anxiety or depression. No, we are the sky, and anxiety and depression are but clouds that pass through us. I see what he was getting at. I am not my sickness; I have a condition that can wander all lonely and cloudlike into view from time to time. I (the whole me) can choose to sit back and witness the clouds, let them be, let them pass. Pfft.

“Perhaps the problem, sometimes, is the notion that there’s a problem.”

We then try to cope by revving up the angst, don’t we? We use coffee and fast-speak and sugar and staying back at work longer. We grind harder. Try harder. Think harder. We should be able to work our way through this. We think this is what will fire us up out of our funk and get us back on our game. It’s a self-perpetuating pain—we use anxiety to fight our anxiety.

BRIEF NOTE ON HIGH-FUNCTIONING ANXIETY Many of us with anxiety don’t look like we’ve got a problem because outwardly we function ludicrously well. Or so the merry story goes. Our anxiety sees us make industrious lists and plans, run purposefully from one thing to the next, and move fast up stairs and across traffic intersections. We are a picture of efficiency and energy, always on the move, always doing.

we’d love everyone (someone?) to see that we absolutely do not have our shit together. And to come and tell us they’ve got this one. Even for five minutes.

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

Insomnia is anxiety’s spiteful bedfellow. Anxious people desperately need sleep, yet their condition ensures they are denied it. The less you sleep, the more anxious you get, the less you sleep . . . and so on. — cruel irony #3

You know how dogs do that thing where they circle and circle, unable to find the spot where they feel comfortable enough to settle? That’s us. Most of the time. We wander about, filling up our weekends, creating never-ending to-do lists.

Buddhist monk and author of The Miracle of Mindfulness Thich Nhat Hanh for the final word: You want to find something, but you don’t know what to search for. In everyone there’s a continuous desire and expectation; deep inside, you still expect something better to happen. That is why you check your email many times a day.

And, he adds, even our best attempts to avoid or combat or criticize our anxiety will only make it worse. Instead, self-compassion is the way forward.

One of the worst things we can do to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious about being anxious.

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. No need to think that things should be otherwise and that you’ve got it all wrong somehow. For this, too, will just make you more anxious. Maybe your hormones are out. Maybe the wind direction is all wrong. Maybe things are actually quite crappy right now. And, yeah, that presentation you have to give in two weeks is absolutely anxiety-inducing. Got it. But let’s just leave it there, and not fret that you’re fretting. Yeah?

It’s anxiety, for sure. But it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe with no endpoint. Even a panic attack only lasts 10–30 minutes.

The doctor told me I have Hashimoto’s, an autoimmune disease of the thyroid. The thyroid is a small butterfly-shaped gland in the neck responsible for producing thyroid hormones. When your body cops a constant avalanche of stress hormones, your thyroid can get damaged and stop the thyroid hormone-producing party. Now, every cell in your body is affected by thyroid hormones, so when this happens, pretty much your entire body is affected, or at least all the parts of you that make you feel human.

Here’s why Hashimoto’s is the perfect disease for people like me: it causes rapid weight gain (I put on 33 pounds in four weeks); your hair falls out in clumps; your nails peel off; you lose the outer third of your eyebrows (oddly); big angry pimples festoon your face; there’s extreme sweating, stomach bloating, water retention, constipation, sluggishness and an inability to exercise (when you try to exercise, all of the above symptoms worsen); you develop debilitating indecisiveness (this has been linked to faulty thyroid function); this weird thing happens where foundation turns white on your face and makeup goes fluorescent pink; noises and bright lights hurt; and you just want to be left alone.

But Hashimoto’s also serves a very important function. It stops us when we can’t do it ourselves. It’s like our bodies step in and say to us, “Well, if you won’t stop, I will. And I’ll collapse right here, in the middle of everything and prevent you from going any further down this path until you get a grip on yourself.” When I share this in my public talks, the front few rows always nod their heads vigorously. That’s another thing about autoimmune types—we’re particularly earnest (what comes first, the disease or the behavior, I don’t know) and tend to sit at the front, asking the questions, leaning forward, desperate to understand more.

What fixes it? What’s the only way to get back on track? The designated medications only do so much. They keep you ticking over. But to heal and thrive—both with autoimmune disease and anxiety—the only salve is slowing down, taking care of yourself, living cleanly and getting gentle and kind.

Lena Dunham, who’s gone public several times about her anxiety, says: “To those struggling with anxiety, OCD, depression: I know it’s mad annoying when people tell you to exercise, and it took me about sixteen medicated years to listen. I’m glad I did. It ain’t about the ass, it’s about the brain.”

Studies show any movement, but particularly walking, will ease anxiety when we’re in the middle of a stress hormone surge. Indeed, the studies show that a mere 20–30 minute walk, five times a week, will make people less anxious, as effectively as antidepressants. Even better, the effect is immediate—serotonin, dopamine and endorphins all increase as soon as you start moving.

Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Darwin did the same. They both hiked every single day, until old age. Both had anxiety. Both credit walking with taming their heads enough to be able to sort problems and bring their inspired ideas to fruition. “Only thoughts reached by walking have value,” wrote Nietzsche.

And then there’s sex. Sex helps anxiety.

The Germans have a word for this. Sehnsucht: (noun) An intense yearning for something far-off and indefinable.

There’s a bit in Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now that I’ve always loved. It’s a little trick that can bring you back in from the anxious surge outward in a palm-to-face instant. It helped me get all that “be in the present” stuff that my anxiety had previously stopped me from even being able to conceptualize, let alone feel. I went hunting for the exact passage just now so I could share it with you. You might like to try it, right now. Not in the future! “Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?” He asks you to try it right now with a problem. Try it with a bit of your particular brand of anxious buzz as you read this. Feel into the problem now; not in sixty seconds, not in two seconds. Now! Your head might jump fifteen minutes ahead. No. Now. Is the problem still there? Nope. It’s gone, right? As 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. Practice asking yourself “what’s the problem” often. See if you don’t start to feel the anxious cycle back away. See if those startled birds at sunset don’t begin to settle, softly, gently, at dusk. See if this gentleness is where you want to be.

When we’re thrust into it, we anxious folk can often deal with the present really rather well. It’s worth remembering this.

Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads.

Coffee and sugar to ricochet back up. Red wine at night to wind down. And so on and on.

. In Paris a little while back I noticed the locals don’t walk around shops on a Sunday afternoon and buy stuff they don’t need. Hyper-consumerism is deemed vulgar. Instead, they walk the streets merely to . . . wander and ponder. They call it a flânerie—a wandering walk. I once found a secondhand book with the cover ripped off called The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris, by Edmund White. To stroll in this way, White explained, is to be in real time with a city. Parisians might drop in for a coffee or an aperitif at cafés where the chairs face outward such that they can watch other flâneurs. They visit gardens and poke their heads into avenues and parks and galleries. Just to absorb and look and reflect. It’s a big part of the French psyche this simple observation of, and reflection upon, humanity.

The anxious tend to seek solitude, yet we simultaneously crave connection. — cruel irony #7

We cope with strangers better than our own mates when we’re anxious. — cruel irony #9

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.

Important

We mistake anxious-like symptoms for actual anxiety, which sees us get anxious about being anxious. Which can blow out into a separate syndrome called anxiety sensitivity, or AS, where sufferers become anxious about certain sensations associated with the experience of anxiety. It might be fear of vomiting or fear of shaking, or fear of having a panic attack in public. Oh, goodness!

Nietzsche said, “He who has a why can endure any how.”

psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, which details her own struggle with bipolar disorder. A passage stood out for me: “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.

To round things off, let’s indulge in a list of reasons why anxious people are not that bad to have around. Our anxiety does have some beautiful kickbacks for those in our orbit. Again, you might like to leave this lying around open to this page. Or Instagram it. With a #justsayin tag. Subtly and humbly, of course. Planning a picnic? Get an anxious mate on board—they’ll be able to provide you with a full itinerary of weather contingency plans. And better salad delegation techniques. Jerome Kagan, who spent sixty years studying anxiety, says fretters are “likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends.” This is nice to know, no?

When I was interviewing all those successful life-bettering folk I would always ask, at the end of the interview, for their favorite hack, the one they personally live by. In all but a few cases they’d reply, “I have a morning routine.” Having a morning routine is a certainty anchor with really sturdy stakes. Louise Hay told me when we met, “The first hour of your day is crucial.”

If you’re anxious, you have to have a morning routine. Again, no ifs or buts.

About six weeks into the pregnancy I realized I wasn’t anxious. There was no background buzzing. It was wonderfully odd and I reflected that this was the only time I could recall not feeling anxious in more than twenty years. It was the oxytocin; it was the progesterone; it was the flooding of resources to new life in my belly; it was pregnancy brain (for some it makes them forgetful, for me it brought my thoughts into line with everyone else’s); it was love.