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chapter-16

space

I noticed some themes emerge when I asked people in the forums and roundtables I conducted what anxiety actually feels like. I also dug around to find what other writers on anxiety reported. It all revealed quite a lot.

First, the feedback was that it feels like a flood of thoughts:

Picture a bunch of people loudly talking to you about everything you don’t want to hear – that’s how it feels in my head. — Anon Thoughts flood and for me paranoia sets in and I try to grasp onto at least one thought I can be rational about. — Pepperoni [It’s] like there are a hundred things needing my immedi­ate attention and knowing that I can’t attend to it all at once, including racing thoughts. — Lisa Jane Anxiety is like having new tabs opening very quickly [on your computer] one after another and not being able to close them or stop new ones from opening – but in your head. — Anon Then the flooding thoughts build, with nowhere to go:

Anxiety feels like being the passenger of a racecar driver while pleading to be let out. I close my eyes and take deep breaths at every endless turn. — Anon For me it’s like a boa constrictor around my body, getting tighter and tighter as more thoughts come into my head. — Pepperoni Everything, all of life, is crammed into a tube of toothpaste which has a caked-over nozzle. — KT Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (and transfixing TED.com speaker), described it as ‘like wanting to vomit but not having a mouth’.

I want to throw in here that the linguistic root of anxiety is the Greek word angho, which means ‘to squeeze’. Interesting, hey.

Then the pressure causes the thoughts to get overcooked – mushy and all mixed in together: I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels. — David, Psalm 22 A very tangled up spider web and all the web is mixed up with lots of emotions and tangled all together. The more I try to untangle these webs I get caught up in another web. — Sadgirl MY BALL OF WOOL THEORY

For me, anxiety feels like a knotted ball of wool inside my being. The thoughts and commitments and competing considerations twist and entwine and ‘moosh’ into a mess. The tiny fibres of each thought weave together and it all turns into a convoluted, frayed, knotted ball of wool – useless for knitting.

Recently, I learned Franz Kafka also had a ball of wool theory. For him, anxiety was ‘the feeling of having in the middle of my body a ball of wool that quickly winds itself up, its innumerable threads pulling from the surface of my body to itself’.

It’s impossible to know where all the knots start. Yet, we still try to find the original thread, somehow believing that once we find it, this one unifying explanation for everything, we can tug at it and have the ball unravel cleanly. We think the fix is linear like that. That one motivational philosophy or one successful relationship or one perfect job will straighten out the mess.

But I put it to you that messy balls of wool don’t work like this. Nope. Our filthy-mitted meddling and tugging only tighten the knots more.

Instead, the only salve is to gently take the messy ball in both hands and tenderly loosen it, a bit at a time. The ball starts to unfurl and expand. It is still knotted, but not as tightly now.

After a while a whole section unfurls. And then another. Then, after much careful tending, one end of the string floats loose. Maybe the rest of the ball fully unfurls. Maybe it doesn’t.

But the point is, the whole bloody knotted mess is looser now. There’s more space.

105.

If you’re anxious, part of the healing journey is to create space. To soften and expand and back off from this drive to ‘fill’ the space (in our guts, our diaries, our weekends, our wardrobes).

Studies have shown that particularly creative and anxious minds need a lot of space – or downtime – for what is called our Default Mode Network to make sense of things.

‘Deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets,’ essayist Tim Kreider wrote in The New York Times. ‘[Space] is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.’ Someone with bipolar once told me they need to be alone a lot so that they have space to play out the conversations in their head. They didn’t say they needed time. I know it might sound like semantics, or seem metaphysical. It’s not. It’s an attitude. A feeling. Space implies gentle unfurling. Time speaks to pressure.

Most of us cry out for more time, thinking that’s what we need (much like balance). But tell me when more time has helped anyone in a hot anxious mess? Time doesn’t release the pressure. Time doesn’t take the cap off the toothpaste. Time doesn’t loosen the knots. If we get time, we tend to just fill it with more thoughts.

What we need is more space.

106.

I used to see a highly-strung Chinese doctor during my Mid-thirties Meltdown. Dr L would bustle in and yell at me that my spleen was stuck, ‘Very, very stuck!’ and stick needles in my ovaries to ‘wake them up’. Her pace was frenetic and high-pitched. I asked her how she did it. How she maintained her own health with such a frazzled energy (she also had Hashimoto’s). Frazzle and Hashimoto’s come in the same package. Anxiety is the special icing on top.

Dr L told me she books out an hour every day to lie on the floor in her consult room to pause. She does nothing. She just lies there. Yes, it’s ‘time’ that she books out. But it becomes ‘space’ when it’s kept empty, as a vessel in which to simply stretch out a little. ‘Only fifteen minutes needed. Sometimes five,’ she yells at me. ‘Just the dark room is enough.’ I remember also chatting to a straight-laced CEO mate of mine who has her PA book out fifteen minutes either side of every one of her appointments. ‘I use it to reflect on what just happened,’ she says. ‘It gives me the space to view what I need to do next.’ I drove to visit family in Canberra recently. That’s four hours of bleak nothingness that I’d normally fill with returning calls and listening to podcasts. This time I did nothing. Not even music. Just large expanses of sheep-ridden, dusty space. I didn’t ‘use’ the time. I just sat into the space. And fresh thoughts bubbled up from the nothingness.

And this is the beauty of space. It’s a nothingness that surrounds and sits between all the somethingness in our lives. It might be a little stint in a dark room. A walk around the block between chapters. A quiet moment on the loo when the kids are watching Play School. A visit to an empty church on a lunchbreak. It’s only in the nothingness that we can see the somethingness. Without space, it’s like watching a movie a metre from the cinema screen. We can’t see the whole picture. And we lose ourselves in the noise and the fuzzy pixilation.

When we have space we have a chance at having a better anxious journey.

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FIND THE SPACE BETWEEN BREATHS

Flick back to page 74.

Try this. Just now. As you read this bit. Might as well. It builds on the previous breathing trick I shared earlier.

Breathe in for a count of four.

At the top of your breath, hold for a count of three.

Gently, evenly, breathe out for four.

At the bottom, hold for three.

When I hold for three, I don’t so much hold as pause gently in the space between breaths. I don’t force the hold. I just suspend my breath. Try it.

Then let the energy swirl around in this space, filling it, expanding. Repeat for a minute or two with your eyes shut.

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SMILE WITH YOUR EYES

Yes, try this one, too. It provides instant spaciousness.

Sit. Close your eyes. Now start to meditate in whichever way suits you. Or just sit and breathe in and out, doing the pause thing, as per above.

When the thoughts start to tumble in, and you start thinking of the tricky email you have to send later, and you give yourself a hard time for pretending not to see your annoying, but lonely, neighbour in the supermarket earlier … gently smile with your eyes.

Gently and softly.

Perhaps notice the way it releases the muscles in your jaw and at your brow. And the way it kind of makes your temples spread apart, making it feel like your mind is boundless, floating, with no skull trying to keep everything in. Notice the space in your skull. Notice the way it makes you see things with kindness and expansiveness and the way that little commentary voice that likes to judge things and have an opinion on everything goes back in its box for a bit.

In one famous 1993 experiment, researchers asked a bunch of people to smile forcibly for twenty seconds while tensing facial muscles around the eyes. They found that this simple, brief action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions. If you’re still reading this, you might like to know that in the UK some boffins bothered to tally the mood-­boosting value of receiving one smile. If the smile is from a friend, it’s equal to the feel-good brain stimulation of 200 chocolate bars; if it comes from a baby it equates to 2000 bars! There you go.

Inversely and just as randomly, a recent German study found that Botox injected into smile muscles interrupted the brain’s happiness circuitry. Numbing our smile muscles made us sadder, more anxious. Which is a lovely irony: aging gracefully really is the more joyful route.

And with that, let some sweet spaciousness pour over you. Just for a little moment.