فصل دوازدهم

chapter-12

pain is important

Anxiety is painful. There’s nothing quite like it. It’s extremely private and lonely and it comes with the overwhelming sense that no one on the planet could possibly relate to the intensity and the sharpness. The whirling thoughts are so uniquely you, in a ‘stale bed-sheets smell after a bout of the flu’ kind of way. It’s every thought you ever had, all at once. No one could ever understand so many thoughts. Which is why when someone asks me, ‘What’s going on? What are you anxious about?’ there is no way to explain.

And yet anxiety also feels like an original, human pain that we all just know. You sense this at its desperate depths. It can feel almost primordial. Edvard Munch’s The Scream is anxious pain in oils. He painted it during a panic attack, it turns out. ‘I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an endless scream passing through nature.’ Yep, anxiety feels just like this for me, too. It emerges from a primal core and surges forth violently to outward expression.

The pain of anxiety is also unique in that there seems to be no mechanism for its satiation built into our collective experi­ence.

The pain of hunger makes you eat.

Thirst makes you drink.

Garden-variety fear will see you flee or fend or act or fix.

They all have a rather pleasant end-point that makes the pain worthwhile. But anxiety doesn’t direct us to its solution. Instead, as we’ve covered already, anxiety only seems to make us … more anxious.

So, yeah, anxiety is painful in lots of different ways. Can we move on now?

74.

Just as I started writing this book I set off for a month to an Ayurvedic clinic in a muddy paddock in Coimbatore, India. (Ayurveda is an ancient Indian approach to wellness that makes profound, intuitive, sense. Yoga as we know it today, all meditation techniques and a lot of the dietary theory that I espouse come from this tradition which is more than 5000 years old (some say 10,000). Buddhism stemmed from it 3000 years ago.) My auto­immune disease kept flaring and I’d been told that the ancient Ayurvedic practice of panchakarma is a boon for Hashimoto’s. So I booked myself in.

If you want to learn more about Ayurveda, Deepak Chopra’s book Perfect Health is a good start.

Entirely predictably, I over-researched ‘the most authentic Ayurvedic clinics in the world’. I opted for the most austere route, rather than one of the more comfy ‘spa’ set-ups. This route involves living at the clinic with mostly very sick locals where you’re assigned a doctor and therapist who monitor you daily.

This kind of clinic doesn’t pretend to be anything but grim. And, for me, the experience almost seemed tailored to press every one of my buttons. I wasn’t allowed to bathe, move, internet toggle, or read. In the evening, a therapist bathed me in mung bean powder and tepid water as mosquitoes mauled me. There was no toilet paper or towels (we were given torn-up cloths to dab ourselves with). There’s no TV, air-con, or daiquiris by the pool. We were also told to not think about sex. On this occasion, I found myself decidedly untempted.

I’d been at the clinic three weeks and I was in all kinds of physical and psychic pain. A monsoon had hit. Mosquitoes continued to devour me. Mould was growing up the walls. I lay every day on my wooden single bed, my unwashed hair wrapped in an old rag, staring at the ceiling fan. I wailed into the humidity.

One morning Dr Ramadas, the specialist assigned to me, came and sat on my bed and we started discussing my tendency to flee pain, to ricochet into brash solutions and fixes when I get uncomfortable.

He smiled through his greasy glasses with his clear eyes. ‘Why do we all expect to be happy? We all came out of our mothers crying. Pain is what we do.’ It reminded me of a tweet from Alain de Botton several years back that sparked a Twitter chat between the two of us: ‘Happiness is generally impossible for longer than fifteen minutes. We are the descendants of creatures who, above all else, worried.’ Indeed. The great worriers of history were the ones who saw the charging rhinoceros first, had an action plan ready to go should a tiger invade camp, fretted that the basket of weeds collected that day may be poisonous. We carry this terror in our genes into our suburban lounge rooms, to our office water coolers, to our IKEA-issue bedrooms.

Worry is our default position.

I add to this: We humans are the only creatures on the planet who can’t sleep even when we need or want to.

I also add this: We are the only creatures with the capacity – nay, propensity – to ponder our inevitable deaths.

True and painful stuff.

I read an Existentialism 101 critique of Jean Paul Sartre’s book Nausea one night babysitting the neighbour’s kids back in my late teens. It was some kind of high school reader I think. The ideas were something of a revelation. It had never occurred to me that others found the contemplation of one’s existence painful. Years later I read the original book. I was further comforted (and went on to study French, then German, existentialism). The interesting thing is that back in the 1930s Nausea was celebrated as a wonderful expression of the essence of the human condition. Today the main character, Roquentin, a thirty-year-old loner who felt sickened by the realisation that he lived in a world devoid of meaning, would be diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder, and prescribed an antidepressant or invited to undergo a course of cognitive behavioural therapy.

75.

Synchronicity happened and I met Brené Brown. There were three strikes, funnily enough. (I think I’ve already mentioned my three-strikes-and-I-act-rule.) In one week, three people mentioned the University of Houston scientist who wrote The Gift of Imperfection. ‘You should read Brené Brown. And download her TED.com talk “The Power of Vulnerability”. More than 25 million others have. You’d love Brené Brown,’ they all said. Who was this damn Brené character? I Googled her and learned she’s best known for intensively researching the nature of vulnerability to the point of breakdown, emerging with a dead gutsy roadmap for living a ‘whole-hearted life’. My kind of fretter!

So I contacted her to see if I could interview her for the better life–searching column I wrote. She replied within 2.378 minutes to say she was due in Australia. In three days. Bam!

When we met in Sydney, in a suburban town hall where she was doing a public talk later in the day, I told her about my three-strikes introduction to her work. ‘I do the same thing!’ she cried. We found this very funny and then compared all the other weird stuff we do to comprehend life and anxiety. She says the Serenity Prayer a lot.

‘And I do this thing where I twist a special spinner ring when I’m uncomfortable and repeat a mantra: “Choose discomfort over resentment.” ‘ Freud believed anxiety attunes us not just to external threats (charging rhinos, dodgy people in alleyways, off milk) but to internal threats and the need for growth. The discomfort Brown mentions brings this growth perhaps. Anxiety is a sign we need to move and change our lives.

‘You’ve got to just sit in it, sit in it, sit in it,’ Brown told me. (She has also stopped eating sugar and given up caffeine to help her deal with her anxiety.) We stayed out the back of the hall, talking fast and holding each other’s hands when we got to intimate subjects. We both cried. You know those tears of recognition? It was a Saturday afternoon and everything felt out of time, like when you walk out of a cinema in daylight.

76.

How does one sit in anxious pain as a matter of course? I mean, we often hear this kind of thing said, but what does it actually look like on an average Tuesday when you have the life blahs and you really don’t have any tolerance for anything that sounds like it comes with a pack of angel cards.

We can sit with it by talking to it. Hello there, old friend, you’re a bit needy today. Tell me about it. Yep, you’re rage-y today. You’re lodged just under my solar plexus.

We can feel into the physical discomfort and find it interesting to observe. I watch the tension build in my jaw, in my neck (as though it wants to extend forward and bite at something) and in my right hip (my action leg that wants to jerk me away).

I let myself cry from the loneliness of it all.

We can watch ourselves as we try to drown out the discomfort with a handful of corn chips or chocolate or raw oats. We can acknowledge what we’re doing. I’m not a slovenly food addict. I’m just shoving food on top of my anxiety.

We can let ourselves be wrong. My weakness is an inability to be wrong. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m wrong often. But I’ve become really seductive at explaining it away before I can be seen in my wrongness.

This from my editor Miriam: ‘Oh darlin, we all do this! We’d always rather be right than happy (except maybe Jesus).’

I got pulled up on something (too personal to mention here, sorry) recently. It made me squirm a thousand squirms. Admitting guilt also meant letting a bunch of people down and looking a fool for doing so. A double shame-whack. I wanted desperately to bombard the confrontation with bombastic and diversionary reasoning. But I didn’t. I sat in the irkyness and eventually said, ‘I got that so wrong. I’m very sorry.’ Then a lovely thing happened. The other person softened and simply said, ‘That’s okay. I can see you’re sorry.’ We can waste a bit of time. Oh goodness, this is just the worst for us anxious folk – the feeling that anxiety is wasting our lives away. I should be doing productive things! I should be efficient! I shouldn’t be lolling about all numb and stunned on the bedroom floor in a foetal position! Life is slipping by! Friends’ kids are turning into full-grown humans and overtaking me! No. Stop. Let the time pass with seemingly nothing productive happening. The anxiety is important. It means something is in fact happening.

And it might mean coming off medication. To see what happens. Peter Kramer contends in Listening to Prozac, that when we take drugs we don’t just medicate away anxiety, we medicate away our souls. It’s a controversial call. But, again, I know anyone who’s been on anxiety medication has had that cringey feeling at some point (every day?) that their drugs might be masking something important that really wants to express itself. My friend Joseph told me he came off Lexapro when he realised this. ‘The stress and the anxiety were warning signals from my brain and body, like the pain that makes you move your hand back from a fire. They were doing just what they were supposed to do: telling me that something was wrong [in Joseph’s case, that he was pushing his work life too far, to the detriment of his wife and two sons], that I needed to change something. The meds were switching off the alarm.’ He came off medication, reduced his work hours and moved cities to have a better quality of life.

I checked at Christmas – he’s still off them.

77.

To sit in anxiety is to stay a little longer. A little longer. A little longer. And to see what happens. We experiment with it, curiously.

‘Let’s see what happens.’ My meditation teacher, Tim, says this. ‘Let’s, as in let us, as in you, me and the workings of the universe, simply observe what happens if you don’t fight it, if you just stay.’ I do this. I stay in the muck and the mire. I like the idea that it’s not just me on my own doing this. It’s all of ‘us’.

It’s not easy. I don’t think anyone ever said staying in your anxiety would be.

78.

I once found a torn, heavily underlined copy of Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at a bus stop in Andalucía. It had been stolen from a library in 1976 going by the faded purple stamps on the inside cover. It’s a glorious book. Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who spent three years in German concentration camps, some of it in hard labour. He wrote the small book in just nine days straight after being released from prison.

The book shares what Frankl observed to be the unique human quality that distinguished those who survived the camps from those who didn’t. He concluded that the prisoners who emerged (barely) alive were those who nourished their inner lives. In fact, the more sensitive men in the camps – those you’d expect to crumble in such extreme adversity – were the better survivors. Why? By nature they tended to not resist the pain and instead went inwards to draw on this ‘inner life’ when things got really bad. And this is precisely what saved them.

In contrast, those who perished tended to rail against the circumstances, clutching outwardly, expecting external factors to shift. They got sucked in by the suckyness of the circumstances. This clutching at the external exhausted their reserves and provided no salve, no nourishment.

Frankl also concluded that the purpose of life is to suffer. Actually, he went further. The purpose of life is to suffer well. By which he meant to go down into pain, own it, and not run from it. To sit in it. And in the process find meaning.

To be specific, Frankl maintained that finding the meaning of life is our ultimate purpose and suffering brings us to this purpose.

This is the most important thing a human can do, he said, regardless of whether you’re a prisoner in a concentration camp, a starving kid in Africa or a WASP despairing in banked-up traffic.

I read Man’s Search on a hike through the Sierra Nevada. I’d just handed the manuscript for my first I Quit Sugar book to my publisher. I was still living in my army shed in the forest but had increasingly been spending time in Sydney, public speaking and setting up my online business. An invite had come through to join National Geographic’s Blue Zone team in Ikaria, Greece, to take part in their study of the lifestyle habits of the world’s longest lived people. I’d e-met the chief explorer via the comments section on my blog. We became friends, debating life principles and sharing mountain biking stories. The invite was intriguing enough and I’d been itching for my next adventure. I stopped off in Spain – a last minute decision – en route.

It was a five-day hike through a rocky, barren landscape. I’d designed the trip such that each town was between six and nine hours apart on foot, with nothing in between. I set off on my own with a very worn Byron Bay Markets shopping satchel slung over my shoulder. I would eat two omelettes and coffee for breakfast in what was often the only taverna in town and carried in my little market bag a toothbrush and toothpaste, earplugs, a bottle of water, a cucumber and an orange or a few tomatoes, a topographical map and my phone (used as a compass). And Frankl.

I saw no one. Some days I’d encounter a donkey. I talked to myself the whole way, thoughts unfurling, ideas drifting across my path, not needing to be grasped and recorded. Or shared across social media. It was hot, 40 degrees Celsius hot. And I was wearing unsupported running shoes. I got hungry and thirsty and lost and scared.

It was a good backdrop for reading Frankl and every afternoon I’d find a shady spot and read a chapter or two. Clearly my hike shared little with Frankl’s experience in concentration camps. But the underlying message of his book, which he wanted to share beyond those who were imprisoned as barbarically as he was, is that suffering, no matter the degree, was something to sit in, not flee.

The grittiness of planting one foot in front of the other sank me down into a rarely experienced (in contemporary life) rawness. It was painful, and after about five hours, every bit of me wanted it to be over. You can resist this discomfort, find the flies unbearable, give in to the resentment, torture yourself with the impatient urge to get to water and the meal you’ve planned in your head. That bloody meal. You’ve repeated the components over and over and over.

Or you can bunker down and sit in it. And when you do, something happens. You enter a slipstream of movement and calm non-thinking. You have to. Or you’ll throw up. Or you’ll get a case of the ugghhhs. Seriously, have you been to this place, where any kind of conscious, unmindful, resistant thinking seriously makes you too nauseous to continue? Down into the is-ness of it all you must go if you want to make it to water and a meal.

When this happens on these long hikes that I do every six to twelve months I become part of the landscape. The thinking stops. Give it another hour or two and I become part of everything. A deep feeling of knowing, of fitting in to a flow, descends.

Hiking sees me realise the value of sitting in rather than resisting pain. So does anxiety. Both see me draw on my inner life and bring me in closer.

79.

‘Most people shoot for happiness but feel formed through suffering,’ wrote David Brooks in his recent book The Road to Character, which I happened to read (clandestinely) in my grim room in the clinic in Coimbatore.

Happy is fun, sure. But ‘rich’ and ‘deep’ light my fire so much more. I’ve never been a happy type. Personal pleasure as a primary pursuit has always seemed empty.

I feel awkward around happy things, like drumming circles and parties. Often it feels like something we seek in order to avoid suffering. If it’s a by-product of an experience that brings me closer to meaning, then that’s different.

It might seem ironic that all the studies on the matter wind up showing that those of us who prefer to delve into the meaning of life tend to be ‘happier’ than those who don’t. Seriously, there are countless studies to this effect. One University of Arizona psychologist who published one of the larger studies on the matter said: ‘We found this so interesting, because it could have as well gone the other way – in the sense of “Don’t worry, be happy”, we could have found that, as long as you surf on the shallow waters of life you’ll be happy, but if you dive into its existential depths, you’ll end up unhappy.’ He proposed that delving produced the deeper happiness because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

Australian social researcher and author of The Good Life Hugh Mackay is a vocal opponent of the pursuit of happiness as a life strategy.

The pursuit of happiness seems to me a really dangerous idea and has led to a contemporary disease in Western society, which is fear of sadness … I’d like just for a year to have a moratorium on the word ‘happiness’ and to replace it with the word ‘wholeness’. Ask yourself ‘is this contributing to my wholeness?’ and if you’re having a bad day, it is.

We need to remember this, we anxious types who find happiness a slippery sucker at times and often get accused of taking life too seriously. Delving and seeking our purpose – yes, that Something Else – is what cuts it for most of us.