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

by Sarah Wilson

I’ve come to believe that you can be fretty and chattery in the head and awake at 4am and trying really hard at everything. And you can get on with having a great life. Hey, the Dalai Lama told me so.

One of the dear, dear things about getting older, is that it does eventually dawn on you that there is no guidebook. One day it suddenly emerges: No one bloody gets it! None of us knows what we’re doing.

philosopher Alain de Botton’s 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 . . .’”

You choose. You might not even know why, but you do. You commit. Then you do the work. Oh, yeah. Then you falter. And fuck up. And go back to the beginning.

anxiety is the sixth leading cause of disability in the world.

Even today, truth be told, I’m not entirely sure I have an anxiety disorder. As such. Or if I’m just terribly deficient at coping with everyday living.

The curious nature of anxiety is such that it defies its own diagnosis and treatment — cruel irony #1

the more anxious we are, the more we have to convince ourselves we don’t have a problem.

Depression is stigmatized, anxiety is sanctified as propping up modern life, which ironically sees depression treated as a legitimate illness, and the anxious left in a cesspool of self-doubt and self-flagellation for not being better at coping with life.

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 remain single for decades. And everyone just assumes we’re too busy and high-functioning for such things.

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

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

I remember reading Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner describing this sad spiral in some journal or other a few years back. He gave it a name: 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.

We are on our own. We feel this acutely and, oh, it hurts.

Rather than feeling I have a hopeless, helpless affliction, I can see I just need to find a way to feel held.

Insomnia is a cry from our core to spend reflective time with ourselves. As British philosopher Alain de Botton puts it, “It’s an inarticulate, maddening but ultimately healthy plea released by our core self that we confront the issues we’ve put off for too long. Insomnia isn’t really to do with not being able to sleep; it’s about not having given ourselves a chance to think.”

Anxiety and existential curiosity are connected.

a flower. And find it beautiful. That’s it. They don’t wonder if they’re liking it enough, or if the whole experience is a waste because today they’re too stressed to appreciate lovely things like flowers. Nor do they fear that the flower won’t last. And they don’t try to draw on that Zen proverb about how a flower doesn’t try to bloom, it just blooms on its own. And then despair that they’re failing to do the same. They simply grasp the is-ness as a matter of course.

“the expectations of how happy you should be are so high, you always feel you are falling short.”

Whippman refers to stacks of studies that show that the more relentlessly we value and pursue happiness, the more likely we are to be depressed, anxious and lonely.

The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Overcoming Anxiety by cognitive therapist Dennis D. Tirch,

We anxious folk have particularly active new-brain stuff going on. We think a lot. We’re extremely self-aware.

“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.

It wasn’t about changing myself. It was about creating ease and gentleness around who I was, which allowed me to make better choices.

Vedic

the only salve is slowing down, taking care of yourself, living cleanly and getting gentle and kind.

I wished I wasn’t sane, I really did. When you’re sane you have to witness the whole bloody unraveling with your eyes wide open.

“If you’re not anxious, you’re not paying attention.”

“The flaring energy of mania craves expenditure.”

If you’re truly going to live fully and honestly you have to learn to be your own Miss Jane to your jumpy Mr. Squiggle. That’s just the deal.

A major University of Cambridge systematic review published in 2016 found anxiety has increased dramatically around the world—by about 3.8 to 25 percent. The largest increase was found among women, young people, and in Western countries. The report concluded that anxiety has emerged as a bigger problem than depression, with the U.S. scoring the highest number of people affected by anxiety—8 in 100. That’s an estimated 3.4 percent of the population.

It’s like I’m running from the me that exists right now. This me, as I currently am, is not good enough. A good life and the “right” me and the answers I seek are ahead in the future . . . and I rush like buggery to get there.

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

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.

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.

Some literature suggests depression is a natural coping mechanism deployed in such cases to stop us from self-combusting from anxiety that’s out of control.

I liken my battle with depression and anxiety to being on a see-saw. If I manage to get some level of control over my depression, my anxiety bubbles to the surface.

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

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.

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

Because we’re told the answer’s out there, somewhere.

I’m looking for something or waiting for something. But it never turns up.

When I ask what anxious people get wrong, he’s emphatic. “They don’t give themselves time with their Inside People!”

“Are we good? Are we comfortable? Is this where we should be? Is it making sense?” “Don’t think or plan in this space, just check in,” he says.

I’m not unaware of what’s going on. Quite the opposite, I’m hyperaware.

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.

My anxious spirals are mostly triggered by uncertainty and the lack of control such uncertainty entails.

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