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

by Sarah Wilson

“How do I get my mind to shut up?” You know,

Thing is, we all put a lot of effort into looking like we did get the guide, that of course we know how to do this caper called life. We put on a smile rather than tell friends we are desperately lonely. And we make loud, verbose claims at dinner parties to make everyone certain of our certainty. We’re funny like that.

IT’S THE MOST INCREDIBLE RELIEF TO KNOW THAT WE’RE ALL WEARING masks . . . and to see them slip on others. Oh, sweet Jesus, we’re not alone! We’re in this together! It’s not a mean-spirited schadenfreude; it’s the ultimate connection.

The Book of Life: “We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbors, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: ‘I know . . .’”

THE JOURNEY One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began, though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice— though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. “Mend my life!” each voice cried. But you didn’t stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations, though their melancholy was terrible. It was already late enough, and a wild night, and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voices behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do— determined to save the only life you could save. — Mary Oliver

Anxious behavior is rewarded in our culture. Being high-strung, wound up, frenetic and soooo busy has cachet. I ask someone, “How are you?” and even if they’re kicking back in a caravan park in the outback with a beer watching the sunset, their default response is, “Gosh, so busy, out of control, crazy times.” And they wear it as a badge of honor.

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’re Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh, always flitting about convinced everyone depends on us to make things happen and to be there when they do. And to generally attend to happenings. But beneath the veneer we’re being pushed by fear and doubt and a voice that tells us we’re a bad husband, an insufficient sister, we’re wasting time, we’re not producing enough, that we turn everything into a clusterfuck. Sure, we look busy, but mostly we’re busy avoiding things. So we tie ourselves up in stupid paper-shuffling-like tasks that shield us from ever getting around to the important stuff. Or the tough stuff.

The more anxious we are, the more we’d really love someone to come and take the load off us and help us cope for a bit. This presents us with another cruel anxious irony, doesn’t it: 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

Anxiety . . . it’s befuddling and clusterfucky for everyone involved.

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

Neuroscientists at University of California Berkeley have found that sleep deprivation fires up the same abnormal neural activity seen in anxiety disorders. Worse, the already-anxious are more affected by this mimicking pattern.

Ironic Process Theory. He said that trying to sleep by attempting to eliminate negative thoughts upon hitting the pillow, or trying not to panic about how you haven’t slept in three days, or whatever mind control you’ve been told to try, only succeeds in triggering an internal monitoring process that watches to see if you’re succeeding. Which keeps you awake.

At night, we simply can’t shut down our thoughts and fears. We can’t rest easy and trust that the stove is off, that the noisy neighbors will eventually quiet down, that work stresses can be put on a shelf for eight hours. We have to stay “on.” We are on our own. We feel this acutely and, oh, it hurts.

anxiety is a feeling that you’ve “not finished something . . . that one has to look for something or . . . come into the clear about something.”

It’s this lack of connection and clarity that leaves us fretting and checking and spinning around in our heads and needing to compensate with irrational, painful behaviors, whether it be OCD, phobias or panic attacks. It’s this sense of missing . . . something . . . that leaves us feeling lonely and incomplete and fluttery. Something is not right. We haven’t landed.

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.

“You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,” he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines, and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You build habits that trigger the comfort system, instead of the threat system.

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.

“My doctor calls it positive, neurotic behavior: you do it compulsively because you are neurotic but the net benefit is positive. In my case it’s swimming.” Positive neurotic behavior! I love that there’s such a thing.

We rush to escape what makes us anxious, which makes us anxious, and so we rush some more. —cruel irony #5

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.

“Ask yourself what ‘problem’ you have right now, not next year, tomorrow, or five minutes from now. What is wrong with this moment?”

Real disasters are a cinch compared to the shit we make up in our heads. Actually, they’re a relief.

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. To the external observer I may look perfectly normal, but inside I’m a whirly-whirly of thoughts and nervousness. I’m not unaware of what’s going on. Quite the opposite, I’m hyperaware.

We don’t have time to adjust, to work out our priorities, and to reflect on whether what we’re doing when we’re running around madly is actually meaningful to us.

Don’t be Google. People can get lazy with emails, firing off a question that can easily be Googled or nutted out with a little time and care. Anxious people tend to be overly earnest in their desire to reply and to help others. Create a boundary around this.

Just write less emails. Every email sent begets another three, filling up your inbox. See how it feels to pull back a little. Observe how many issues sort themselves out without your vigilance.