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The thing with mental turmoil is that so many things that make you feel better in the short term make you feel worse in the long term. You distract yourself, when what you really need is to know yourself.
An hour later, in the car, Andrea glanced at me in the passenger seat. I wasn’t on my phone, but I had a tight hold of it, for security, like a nun clutching her rosary.
She stopped herself saying “when you had depression” but I knew what she meant. And besides, I could feel anxiety and depression around me. Not actually there but close.
I was scared. I couldn’t not be. Being scared is what anxiety is all about.
It didn’t matter that I had felt like this before. A sore throat doesn’t become less sore simply because you’ve felt it before. I
began to feel worse. And many of the “distractions” were doing nothing but driving me further to distraction. In T. S. Eliot’s phrase from his Four Quartets, I was “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
had always, since I was first suicidally ill in my twenties, understood that getting better involved a kind of life edit. A taking away.
The anxiety didn’t miraculously disappear. Of course not. Unlike my smartphone, there is no “slide to power off” function for anxiety. But I stopped feeling worse. I plateaued. And after a few days, things began to calm.
The reason is simple, and partly selfish. I am petrified of where my mind can go, because I know where it has already been.
So we need, more than ever, to know how to edit the world, so it can never break us down.
Anxiety, to quote the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, may be the “dizziness of freedom,” but all this freedom of choice really is a miracle.
Rather than being blocked by it, we need to edit the choice in front of us. We need to find out what is good for us, and leave the rest. We don’t need another world. Everything we need is here, if we give up thinking we need everything. Invisible sharks One frustration with anxiety is that it is often hard to find a reason behind it.
We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up sometimes thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.
And I’ve been like this for as long as I can remember. I have gone to the doctor many times, convinced of my imminent demise because of an illness I’ve googled myself into having.
I worry that I don’t check my privilege enough. I worry about people being in prison for crimes they didn’t do. I worry about human rights abuses. I worry about prejudice and politics and pollution and the world my children and their entire generation are inheriting from us. I worry about all the species going extinct because of humans. I worry about my carbon footprint. I worry about all the pain in the world that I am not actively able to stop. I worry about how much I’m wrapped up in myself, which makes me even more wrapped up in myself.
Years before I ever had actual sex I found it easy to imagine I had AIDS, so powerful were the British Government’s terrifying public awareness TV slots in the 1980s.
Every new lump or ulcer or mole is a potential cancer. Every memory lapse is early-onset Alzheimer’s. On and on and on. And all this is when I am feeling relatively okay. When I’m ill the catastrophizing goes into overdrive.
have worried about my hair—the substance of it, the potential loss of it. I
The whole of consumerism is based on us wanting the next thing rather than the present thing we already have. This is an almost perfect recipe for unhappiness.
To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity.
We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvelous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now.
You will be happy when you get good grades. You will be happy when you go to college. You will be happy when you go to the right college. You will be happy when you get a job. You will be happy when you get a pay raise. You will be happy when you get a promotion. You will be happy when you can work for yourself. You will be happy when you are rich. You will be happy when you own an olive grove in Sardinia.
Maybe the point of life is to give up certainty and to embrace life’s beautiful uncertainty.
I used to be the tallest boy in my school and skinny as a rake. I binge-ate and drank beer just to get bigger. I probably had a bit of body dysmorphia, I now realize.
I was unhappy in my own skin. And with my own skin. I used to do sets of 50 push-ups, wincing through the pain, trying to look like Jean-Claude Van Damme. Not just disliking my body, actively hating it.
As Hamlet said to Rosencrantz, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” He
If we are feeling bad about our looks, sometimes the thing we need to address is the feeling, not our actual physical appearance.
Professor Pamela Keel of Florida State University has spent her career studying eating disorders and issues around female and male body image, and concludes that changing the way you look is never going to solve unhappiness about your looks.
“In nature,” wrote Alice Walker, “nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they’re still beautiful.”
We are humans. Let’s not be ashamed to look like them.
And I have to tell you something else. Even the other people on the beach don’t care about your body. They don’t. They are staring at the sea, or they are obsessed with their own appearance. And if they are thinking about you, why do you care? Why do you humans worry so much about a stranger’s opinion?
Reframe your idea of beauty. Be a rebel against marketing. Look forward to being the wise elder. Be the complex elegance of a melting candle. Be a map with 10,000 roads. Be the orange at sunset that outclasses the pink of sunrise. Be the self that dares to be true. 4 NOTES ON TIME
Panic is a kind of overload. That is how my panic attacks used to feel. An excess of thought and fear. An overloaded mind reaches a breaking point and the panic floods in. Because that overload makes you feel trapped. Psychologically boxed in. That is why panic attacks often happen in overstimulating environments. Supermarkets and nightclubs and theaters and overcrowded trains.
A completely connected world has the potential to go mad, all at once.
When anger trawls the internet, Looking for a hook; It’s time to disconnect, And go and read a book.
By the way, “touched a raw nerve” is an irrelevant phrase if you have anxiety. Every nerve feels raw.
Remember no one really cares what you look like. They care what they look like. You are the only person in the world to have worried about your face.
Don’t spend your life worrying about what you are missing out on. Not to be Buddhist about it—okay, to be a little Buddhist about it—life isn’t about being pleased with what you are doing, but about what you are being.
Never delay a meal, or sleep, for the sake of the internet.
Ask anyone who has ever had a full-blown panic attack and they will tell you that it makes you think about nothing else but the fear. If you are shocked you are confused. You aren’t thinking straight. You become passive. You go where the people tell you to go.
At the bottom of the pit, I always had to force myself to find the beauty, the goodness, the love, however hard it was. It was hard to do. But I had to try. Change doesn’t just happen by focusing on the place you want to escape. It happens by focusing on where you want to reach. Boost the good guys, don’t just knock the bad guys. Find the hope that is already here and help it grow.
A billion unseen wonders of everyday life.
One thing mental illness taught me is that progress is a matter of acceptance. Only by accepting a situation can you change it. You have to learn not to be shocked by the shock.
Sleep is essential, and amazing. And yet, sleep has traditionally been an enemy of consumerism.
But largely, sleep remains a sacred space, away from distraction. Which is why seemingly no one can go to bed early.
And now, at this later stage of capitalism, sleep has become seen not just as something that slows work down, but as an actual business rival.
Even when the world is not overtly terrifying us, the speed and pace and distraction of modern existence can be a kind of mental assault that is hard to identify. Sometimes life just seems too complicated, too dehumanizing, and we lose sight of what matters.
When I have had depression, I have been lucky enough to have people who love me all around me. But I had never felt more alone.
She thought the cure to misery was to “decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there, glad to welcome anyone who wants to come and stay, but happy all the same when one is inevitably alone.”
