فصل سیزدهم

chapter-13

do the work

Louise Hay has in front of her three sausages that she’s placed alongside a generous mound of scrambled eggs from the hotel buffet. Plus precisely three prunes. She eats this ensemble bite for bite. Sausage, egg, prune. Sausage, egg, prune. She holds my hand between mouthfuls as we chat. I like all of this.

I’d emailed Louise direct and asked if I could meet with her during her Australian speaking tour. I was living up north in the forest, scraping by doing these interviews with Big Name thinkers about how to make life better. It’s funny. I spoke to dozens of these Big Names over the years. I’d email cold. Not one ever said no.

Hay is almost eighty-five when we meet. She had healed herself of cancer more than half her life ago, going on to live an extraordinary life working with AIDS sufferers in the ’80s then writing You Can Heal Your Life in 1984. The defining self-help book went on to sell more than 50 million copies. She also owns Hay House Publishing, which represents most of the gurus in this realm: Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Doreen Virtue, Gabby Bernstein et al.

She’s had her fair share of tough times. But her success and recovery from cancer didn’t entail anything particularly out of the ordinary, she tells me. She just made a lot of little ‘right moves’. I tell her about my build-the-muscle mantra and how I was healing myself by building up healthier and more satisfying life habits one small trick, or change, at a time. She pats my hand, all grandmotherly. ‘Yes, I just answer the phone and open the mail.’ Which is to say, she gets up each day and does the work. She chooses. Then she puts her head down and plugs away. With time, life takes her to where she needs to be.

‘You’re a forty-year overnight success story,’ I say.

Hay laughs. ‘Anyone who thinks they can heal without doing the work is missing the point,’ she tells me.

81.

Now, we can all sit around and talk about this crazy journey. Yep, we can even read this book and get fired up by the idea of making our anxious beasts beautiful. Or we can roll up our sleeves and do the work.

Frankly, if you’ve got this far into the book, you have little choice. You’ve sold the farm and you’re on your way. You have to do the work. And, this far in, you know there are no shortcuts. No one else can do it for you. To heal, we have to weave our own unique path through it all. Because it’s a responsibility.

I explored this as far back as 2013 in a blog post:

In my experience, living with a wobbly mind is akin to being charged with carrying around a large, shallow bowl filled to the brim with water for the rest of your life. You have to tread super carefully so as not to slosh it all out.

So you must learn to walk steadily and gently. And be super aware of every movement around you, ready to correct a little bit of off-balanceness here, a tilt to the left there. This is just the way it is. Living this way requires vigilance and is about constant refinement. If you waiver and get unsteady, the water starts to slosh. And if you don’t bring yourself back quick enough, the sloshing gathers momentum and, well, you lose it. Right? And, just to really drag out this metaphor, this means you then have to return to the source and fill it back up again. Which is tiring. So tiring.

And just to push it a touch further: to carry the bowl steadily means walking in a pretty straight line. Which means there will be scenarios and environments and people that simply are not conducive to your journey. They’re too bumpy or jarring or wobbly. Or crooked. Me, I can’t do late nights at bars and I struggle around people who live loud and fast. Don’t get me near people on cocaine – their frenetic energy drags me way out to the bumpiest of tracks. I say this with all kinds of clean-­leaving piety – cocaine is antithetical to anyone on the path to truth. I don’t say the same about other drugs, apart from sugar.

I point out that keeping our bowl steady is a responsibility. We must work at it. We must vigilantly build our stability so that we can carry our full bowl without sloshing all over ourselves and, perhaps more importantly, our loved ones.

Clearly reflecting where I was at the time, I finished the post with:

Yes, I’m tired of spilling on my loved ones.

If you’re like me (hyper-vigilant, overly responsible, responsive to a cause), you’ll no doubt find this a purposeful call to arms. And, if you’re like me, anything geared at helping others rather than ourselves is generally very energising and clarifying. Yes? For you, too? Good. Now go do the work.

82.

When there’s a fire, we don’t decide to dig around, ask a few questions of onlookers, to understand how it started. We call in the fire brigade. Quick sticks. We can apply this to anxiety. When we’re in anxiety, particularly an anxiety spiral or panic attack, we must focus on coping. Once it’s abated, though, that’s when we have to do the work. We have to ask the questions. Plus, we have to build the resilience and courage and muscle with a whole lot of little right moves to ward off further fires. As Canadian spiritual author Danielle LaPorte shared with me over the phone just now in a chat we were having about this very notion, ‘You’ve got to get in front of it, be prepared.’ Of course, it’s hard to do this when the fire’s under control and the emergency has abated. We’d rather just get on with life. But as I often say in such instances, it’s only hard; not impossible. Roll up your sleeves, focus, and ‘hard’ is entirely do-able. Besides, it’s a responsibility to do the hard work if you’re someone whose anxiety ignites regularly.

83.

Gabby Bernstein is one of Louise Hay’s authors. We met through a London friend, Louise, who’d done my 8-Week Program. Gabby quit sugar on her own three years ago with the goal of healing candida. Her mind got incredibly clear. This helped with her own healing work – both professional and personal – and she shared her story online. We became e-mates. Lou and I did too, meeting up in Primrose Hill a year after the multi-e-intros.

When I went to the US to launch my first book I Quit Sugar, Gabby and I arranged (via a series of rapid-fire emails) to meet for dinner. On arrival in New York I went to do the first of a dozen or so TV interviews. Suddenly I hear a high-pitched, ‘Oh my God, Sarah Wilson is in the building!’ In blew Gabby, all bangles and bejewelled silk. She was launching her book on the same day, on the same show, in the same timeslot, and on the same day we were meeting for dinner. She’d just seen the show’s call sheet with my name on it. Gab just luuuuurved the synchronicity. I did, too.

We get to Angelika Kitchen, the vegan joint in the East Village she’d booked, our TV hair and makeup very out of place. She tells me that she’s a control freak who can burn herself out. She’s not outwardly Zen, but she keeps her keel aligned in her own way … with little right moves it would seem. She shares a bunch of her lifestyle habits, including praying and doing yoga. Foremost for her is ‘just showing up’.

Ninety per cent of success is about just turning up, she reckons. She feels crap some days, but she’ll commit to showing up at her yoga class, turning on her computer in the morning, saying ‘yes’ to a request. When you get that far (to the yoga mat, to the desk), you’re most of the way there.

I totally agreed. I still do. Facing my anxiety in the way that I’ve chosen to has not been the easy path. Going my own way has been daunting at every step. I’m constantly tempted to reach outwards again, to a new fix, a new guru. Gabby’s New Yorker Jewish forthrightness lured me in, for instance. But I’ve found all I need to do is take the first step – commit, show up. And my path unfurls from there.

It’s like when I have to motivate myself to do exercise when my inflammation, or my anxiety, flares and it hurts to even think about leaving the house. Gentle movement has been shown to help both. I know this. I have to do the work on this one, despite the pain entailed. I simply tie on my shoes and walk out the door and commit … albeit to a mere fifteen minutes around the block. But once I start walking, you see, I’ll mostly – actually, always – find the pain and fogginess backs off and I want to go further. And with a bit more spring in my step. Showing up provides me with enough forward flow to keep things moving. You know, that’s how it goes with most things.

I don’t really get stressed about how I’ll fare after a sleepless night, even when I have to do morning TV the next (or the same) day. I now know that so long as I turn up, it will work out from there. A twenty-minute meditation in the park on the way to the studio will get me into roughly the right mindset.

It was the same with quitting sugar for me. Back in January 2011, I merely committed to ‘giving it a go’ for two weeks, rather than ‘forever’. The low aim helped me to just show up. Once I got it into it, though, I found it felt good and my skin changed – both my pimples and wrinkles faded (this happens in 10–14 days for most people). Perfectly and flowingly, this vain feedback loop compelled me to keep going and going. I would have baulked, as would the millions who’ve since followed the same program, if I’d set out to just-goddamn-stop-eating-the-stuff-forever.

Simply show up. Start. Things will flow.

84.

And yes it’s hard. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald – a bloke who loved to self-torture – put it, ‘Nothing any good isn’t hard.’

And yes going out on your own and doing this kind of work takes time. But nothing any good happens overnight, either. I emphasise this because I know that the time required to establish your own unique brand of healthy habits that allow you to live beautifully with your anxiety may put you off. A pill, or a new self-help book, promise to be so much quicker. And I get it. I’m incredibly impatient. I vibrate with impatience and so my own journey has entailed looking into the worth of taking a loooong time to do things. Must it? Are there shortcuts?

My research uncovered that Bruce Springsteen spent six months recording ‘Born to Run’. Leonard Cohen took more than five years to write ‘Hallelujah’, possibly one of the most perfect lyrical creations ever. Australian musician Paul Kelly spent seven years fiddling with ‘To Her Door’. I spoke to multi-­award-winning Australian author Kate Grenville recently. Her beautiful work The Secret River took eighteen drafts to complete.

As I learned about these creative tortoises, I realised that I, too, take way longer than most people to do pretty much anything that matters to me. It took me seven-and-a-half years to get an arts degree, two attempts to write this book (I got 60,000 words into the first one, four years ago, and tossed the lot), two years in the career wilderness after the magazine and TV experiences in my mid-thirties to feel right about what I was going to do next, and about eighteen months of running my sugar quitting program for free before I felt comfortable about charging money for it. And this anxious journey? It’s taken somewhere between fifteen and thirty years (depending on what starting point I take) of showing up, day after day, for me to arrive at a point where I can say I find it a beautiful thing.

85.

When I lived up north in the forest, I used to drive to my friend Annie’s house in the hills for dinner on Sundays. I timed it to be able to listen to Ira Glass on This American Life on the radio. If you haven’t listened to one of Ira’s meandering, whimsical interviews about life, you truly should. He’s a cerebral and emotional creative who takes the collective to places in our shared experience that we tend to avoid, or struggle to comprehend and articulate. Of course, I dug deeper into the guy’s story and came upon this quote of his, shared in an interview. It’s about creative work. I do feel, however, that the struggles that creativity presents are not dissimilar to those we, the anxious, face: Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work … It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

86.

Anaïs Nin writes that anxiety can kill love. ‘It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.’ Ain’t that the truth. I see that look on others’ faces when I’m drowning in one of my spirals. I know that many of the loved ones I’ve turned to, or allowed in to witness me in this state, have had to swim away from me and look after themselves, leaving me to drown. I’ve always feared that they think I’m going to strangle them emotionally with my complexity. So I usually send them on myself.

Sometimes, though, when I put in the work, my anxiety has seen love grow, not die. And so, anxiety can be the very thing that pushes us to become our best person. When worked through, dug through, sat through, anxiety can get us vulner­able and raw and open. And oh so real.

My self-destructive inclination when anxious has been to distance myself from the world. I’m really very good at extracting myself from those around me and hiding out until I think I’m a more bearable person to be around. After my first panic attack in my late teens, and in response to my bulimia that had blown out of control, I took off to Europe and didn’t surface again for a year. Living in that shed in the forest for eighteen months was a lot about removing myself from everyone. I’ve left new relationships, avoided relationships for years at a time and regularly announce I’ll be working from home when I feel I’m too much for my staff. I convince myself I’m doing it for them.

But part of my journey has been to resist this fleeing. I’ve trained myself to tell partners and close friends and even rela­tive strangers about my ‘stuff’. At the time it’s like standing naked in gale-force sleet. I tell new partners my ridiculous sleep routine, upfront. I feel so exposed and vulnerable – I mean, who tapes their lips together every night? But this is the point. Being vulnerable is the greatest gift you can give a loved one. Brené Brown tells us this. Being vulnerable is saying ‘I love you’ first, it’s doing something where there are no guarantees. It’s being willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. And it’s staying to tell your truth. When you do, it provides a glorious space for a loved one – or a potential loved one – to step in and be their best person.

I tell my younger brothers and sister now about my various neuroses. I’m the capable big sister who always sorted out others’ issues. But in recent years this dynamic has shifted. At Christmas now, when we pitch in to rent a daggy pine veneer shack down the coast instead of buying presents for each other, they wait until I arrive so I can choose the bedroom that will suit me best, the one with the least noise and with the least vibrations from the kitchen and the hot water tank. They don’t make a fuss of it. And I adore them for it.

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GET YOUR GUTS GOOD

Anxiety renders us delicate. Having your fight or flight response permanently switched to ‘on’ triggers a whole stack of cortisol to circulate in your body which, among other things, down-regulates your digestive and reproductive systems. Hence, the high number of anxious women with PCOS and fertility issues, as well as gut-based complaints such as bloating, indigestion, heartburn, diarrhoea and constipation … sometimes all at once. Elevated cortisol also causes poor absorption of key nutrients, particularly brain-essential ones such as the B-group vitamins, omega-3 fats, zinc, iron and magnesium.

Plus, anxiety makes us fat. And reduces bone density, leading to osteoporosis. Oh, and the inflammation associated with anxiety has a dastardly flow-on effect. The so-called ‘modern’ metabolic diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease are all about inflammation, which is why there’s a higher incidence of these kind of diseases among the anxious.

Anxiety can cause all of these things. But it’s a two-way street – bad health habits also cause anxiety. How do you modulate all this? Meditation works. So does walking. So does getting your gut in order. Specifically: Quit sugar. When we’re stressed we crave sugar (glucose is our body’s preferred energy source), but consuming too much of it triggers a cascade of chemical reactions that promote chronic inflammation. Sugar also mucks terribly with gut bacteria balance which, as we have seen, plays a huge role in the health of our immune system and can directly affect mental health.

So.

You really must reduce sugar in your diet – preferably down to the World Health Organization’s recommended 6–9 teaspoons a day. I did, to combat my Hashimoto’s disease.

Very recently, bipolar disorder has been linked to elevated uric acid levels. Sugar – specifically fructose – inhibits uric acid excretion and research by the University of Basel in Switzerland has found that a low-sugar diet improves symptoms in sufferers.

Just Eat Real Food (JERF). This means pretty much anything that doesn’t come in a packet. Which is much the same as saying ‘quit sugar’ (when you quit sugar, you essentially quit processed food, since more than 80 per cent of the processed stuff contains added sugar). A study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry found that a diet consisting of vegetables, fruit, meat, fish and whole grains correlated with less anxiety. Another study found that combining junk food and stress (a pretty popular combo) was particularly explosive, particularly among women. When low-stress women ate junk food the health impact – across all markers – was a fraction of that for anxious women.

Eat 5–9 serves of vegetables and fruit a day. Some boffin some time back did an experiment that found anxious teens who ate extra serves of green vegetables saw a reduction in their anxiety levels. It’s entirely possible to get to nine serves by starting every meal with a good three serves of veggies and fruit and adding protein and fat and carbs from there. I eat veggies for breakfast to hit the nine serves goal.

For more of this kind of nutritional guff, head to iquitsugar.com

Eat yoghurt and fermented stuff. I don’t make and consume sauerkraut because it looks all quaint on social media. I do so because pretty conclusive evidence suggests that probiotic foods improve gut health.

Take some supplements. I’m not going to wade too heavily into this realm, except to say that you might want to see a good integrative doctor, nutritionist or naturopath with a sound understanding of endocrinology to get some tests done and advice on where you might need support. Many of us are deficient in magnesium, since our food is grown in magnesium-­depleted soil. But evidence also shows it’s a boon for calming us. Take an Epsom salt bath or try magnesium citrate or a topical magnesium gel. Vitamin D is worth looking into, ditto vitamin B6 and vitamin C. And zinc. And having your thyroid levels tested. I could go on. But it’s best you go on this journey with someone qualified.