فصل هجدهم

chapter-18

the wobbliest table at the café

My word, I’m irritable. Not just now. Often. Many of my anxious friends are, too.

Heavy breathers in yoga kill me. So do hmph-ers and nose whistlers.

When dinner companions do that thing they do in American movies where they shovel food in their gobs as they talk and wave their fork wildly, their head flung back, making schmucking noises with their gums … yeah, that, THAT sends me mad.

Don’t get me started on foot tapping, leg jigging, and finger drumming on communal tables. I’m not alone. I put these afflictions into Google along with ‘anxiety’ and it spits back a raft of forums, studies and blog posts on the matter. I learned that anxiety widens personal space – we need more than the standard 20–40 centimetres that the average person requires to feel comfortable. I also learned that those of us who veer into mania and hypomania generally find most aspects of sharing the planet with others irritating because, as Jay Griffiths in her manic depression memoir Tristimania (tristimania is an eighteenth century term for bipolar) writes, ‘when you’re racing and over-­capable and wildly energetic, any ordinary human speed looks like lethargy and … feeds the irritability’.

Fans and breezes send my peripheral nerve endings into an agitated spin.

Stereo speakers that doof the bass in such a way that a tangible vibration overlays the whole experience wholly distract me.

As do all vibrations, audible or tangible. Air-conditioning units at night will reduce me to tears. I hear it and feel it in my viscera. Industrial-strength earplugs can’t protect me. And, as I’ve flagged already, even just someone’s heartbeat felt through the mattress when they lie next to me at night can leave me awake all night.

Anxiety, as we know, activates the stress response which immediately causes a heightening of our senses and stimulates the nervous system so we are keenly aware of, and have enhanced ability to defend ourselves against, danger. So all of the above makes biological sense. This is vaguely comforting.

I don’t know about you, but my irritation is amplified when I’m anxious. These sensory triggers, however, can also send me into anxiety. And around and around we go. I often feel like a bundle of nerves that’s been scrubbed with steel wool until thoroughly raw and exposed. And that to step out into the day is to be dipped in a drum of acid.

My friend Kerry said this to me once: ‘It’s not stress that makes you stressed. The experience of being human is what makes you stressed.’ She told me this over the phone as I sat in a share car in a service station car park, paralysed in one of my anxious spirals with the car due back in its pod fifteen minutes ago. Kerry’s someone who can pull back and see the forest when I’m tangled in the trees.

I can’t recall what humanoidy reality had tipped me on this particular occasion. No doubt it was something inversely trifling to the panic it had caused. But I remember her words hit a special spot that afternoon.

‘That’s exactly it,’ I said breathlessly.

Some of the most anxious people I know do public speaking for a living. Others are actors on big stages, or balance three businesses or compete in international sporting events. But a dripping tap late at night or a crease in their sheets or the sound of a work colleague’s ring tone will send them over the edge.

And then there’s smells. Artificial fragrances – in perfume, washing powders on hotel sheets, in the shampoo in the hair of the person swimming past me in the ocean pool and in those scented sticks people have in their loos – leave me physi­cally ill. I’ll get hugged by someone who sprayed perfume on themselves five hours earlier and the smell will leave me dizzy and agitated until I wash it off. I stand back when people go in for the hug. And when I’m anxious I can’t go to dinner or movie theatres with perfumed friends.

I’ve looked into why this happens, and why smell can so readily trigger anxiety, for me and many others. Apparently, when we emerged from the primordial soup our gnarly old amygdala evolved from our olfactory bulb and both sit in the deep core of our noggins. Anxiety, then, can see our emotional system get intertwined with the olfactory processing system. So smells easily – and instantly – are associated with certain fears. University of Wisconsin-Madison research shows that the olfactory bulb also has direct access to the hippocampus, which is responsible for associative learning, which explains why a smell can then trigger anxiety. Yep, around and around we go.

But I wonder how much of our tedious sensory ‘special­ness’ is a legitimate intolerance to the 800,000-odd, unregulated toxic smells that we’re smacked in the face with. We anxious folk are the canaries down the mine, performing a community duty, perhaps. Our hyper-sensitivity once warned others in the community against being poisoned by dangerous mushrooms and attacks in the night by stampeding rhinos. It does much the same today, tirelessly flagging modern toxins that are making us unwell.

Performing this duty, however, makes me feel like a prisoner in my own body. I’m often forced to isolate myself when my sensitivity flares. Not just because the world hurts too much. I’m also self-conscious of how precious I seem to those around me. And so I spare everyone the pain of it all by dis­appearing for a bit.

Know what I mean?

114.

Monachopsis: (noun) The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place, as maladapted to your surroundings as a seal on a beach – lumbering, clumsy, easily distracted, huddled in the company of other misfits, unable to recognise the ambient roar of your intended habitat, in which you’d be fluidly, brilliantly, effortlessly at home.

— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

115.

How to make peace with all this? I’ve toyed with this conundrum. I have to live on this planet with other humans; I want to live on this planet with other humans! And I can’t keep running. Wherever I go, there I am. So, too, the humming air-con units. And the other humans.

Let’s go back to my deeply uncomfortable month in the ashram in India. On my third day I asked to change rooms. The mould and the mosquitoes had got to me. I was convinced the room I’d been allocated was in the swampiest corner of the clinic. The hum of the generator two fields away that no one but me could hear kept me awake, even through earplugs. It tormented like a mosquito in a tent. In my new room, the insects were just as bad and the winds carried the rattling generator hum in a beeline to my room. Oh, and the old man in the room next to me snored every night.

Dr Ramadas visited me on my fifth day. I was in tears, exhausted, feeling trapped. Why do I get into this position? Why don’t other people get like this? Why can they sleep through humming? What will rescue me from this torture? ‘Our dear Sarah, stop asking why,’ he said. ‘You have learned all the knowledge, you have enough knowledge. And no answer comes, yes? You have to sit.’ I had run 10,000 kilometres from my apartment in Sydney where I hadn’t slept in years (the heavy-footed neighbours upstairs and the rattling hum of the navy ships a block away had tortured me). Before that I’d run from another house where the clang of the water pipes kept me alert all night.

He told me that I could move again. Or I could even fly home and give up on the treatment. But he pointed out the obvious. I’d run out of places to run to. ‘You keep moving. But it hasn’t worked for you. The irritation has just followed you. The problem has to be healed and can only be done when it’s in front of you.’ He was telling me I had to stay. For a while there, I’d forgotten the importance of this. As we all tend to, I think.

So I stayed. I sat in the grimness.

116.

I acknowledge this idea – of sitting for ages in grimness – is not overly appealing to most. Simply reverting back to our Facebook feed or heading to the mall to buy a moisturiser seems a far sexier fix.

Previously, despite all my talking about dealing with my fears and anxieties, I’d eventually run. I sat in the Hare Krishna camp. I sat with my Hashimoto’s diagnosis. But only for so long. Then I’d ricochet off again. This time, in India, I ran the full experiment.

In my dank little room, staring at the ceiling fan, there was nothing to check, nothing that was going to happen, nothing to distract myself with. I had to pass through the waves of anxiety, one after another. I jerked away from it every 8.5 seconds or so, wanting to fight it, ask more questions and tell someone it was unfair. I watched the tussle going on inside me. But there was nowhere to run and no one to hear me. I stayed and I stayed and I stayed. I didn’t like it one bit. My head got itchier, the drone louder, the thoughts faster.

But a few things were different this time. First, I was clearly rendered choiceless. Or, rather, I’d rendered myself choiceless (by choosing the strictest clinic I could find on the internet in the most unglamorous locale on Earth). Second, I kept on saying to myself, ‘Let’s just see what happens.’ Third, I was strangely motivated by being around others doing the same experiment. We’d all signed up and committed, and in this context I realised that sitting in grimness made profound sense. Of course we have to go through the struggle. In the context of Modern Life, fuelled as it is by distractions, such a notion is ludicrous, unpalatable, seemingly ineffective.

I heard about one woman who didn’t emerge, not even for group meditation for three months. She barely even got off her bed. I was inspired and stayed an additional week.

Finally, in my last week at the clinic, the sun came out and I was allowed to sit outside in the quadrangle on a plastic chair, with a rag wrapped around my head so the breeze didn’t aggravate my vata.

I was still by now. I was also not loving it. I was both. The irritations were still there, but I was coping. The anxiety was far duller. It would appear my experiment was paying off.

I stared into nothingness, sitting there in the warmth. And then, I kid you not, I saw a dog turd rolling up the path. I looked closer. A beetle not much bigger than a ladybird was pushing the dried shit uphill. With his hind legs. I watched it for an hour, laughing on my own, resisting the urge to pick the damn thing up and put it at the top of the path for the poor beetle. That would have ruined the perfect metaphor.

117.

During that time when my autoimmune disease slammed me to a halt and I was struggling to sit in the grimness of it all, I went to a close friend’s three-year-old’s birthday party. Mercifully there was no hired fairy or Miley Cyrus impersonator to entertain the kids. It was an organic, simple affair. In one corner of the park one of the toddlers had found a boggy patch of lawn – the only boggy patch of lawn in the park – and had plonked herself down in the mud. The sludge was oozing up through the sides of her nappy. But she was oblivious to any discomfort, happily playing with two sticks, engaged in some imaginary stick dialogue. Actually, to me and the two dads standing with me watching her, she seemed to be happy in spite of the mud. Actually, she’d elevated the situation further than that for herself – she was happy because of the mud. Like all kids, with much of what they do, they have a knack, or wisdom, for pushing through the annoyance (a fly in their eye, snot running down their face, a too-high step) to the happiness. It’s the stuff we adults marvel at.

I remember reflecting that sitting in discomfort isn’t just about lessening its impact through exposure. It can also bring about a very particular joy.

118.

Which reminded me of the time I fell asleep on an ants’ nest in the dirt on the edge of a cliff.

Back in my magazine days, I used to do this thing every other weekend or so, mostly in a gallant, agitated attempt to buck me out of an anxious rut. I’d head off on the train with my mountain bike to ride through the Blue Mountains just north-west of Sydney. I would eat a muffin on the train and drink a tragically burnt coffee from one of the kiosks at Central Station sitting in a seat in the sun. And I’d read the Saturday papers. I wore an old pair of bike shorts that were stretched out of shape and my hair plaited. I hopped off at stations along the way and rode for hours back down trails through forests and creek beds, along cliff edges, out of mobile range, alone. It all beat my anxiety into the background.

I’d ride for hours like this, train stop to train stop, jumping on the train back up the hill to start another ride before heading to a pub at the top of the mountain range. My bed dipped in the middle and – gloriously – had a Chenille bedspread with a Country Life soap in a packet placed on a face-washer at the foot. I had a pair of clean undies, a T-shirt and a toothbrush stuffed in my camel pack. In front of the open fire I ordered nachos, and the steak (always overcooked) and a glass of red cask wine. And the apple crumble.

On this hot early autumn morning I’d been riding a thrilling single trail for two hours and emerged into a sunny clearing and it grabbed me that I should stop right there and lie down for a bit. My head rested against a log at a jaw-locking angle and my legs stretched out over the rocky soil. My body sank. Ants crawled up the inside of my legs and sweat was starting to congeal with the dirt in my hair and run in muddy rivulets down my neck.

It was imperfect. Messy. Wrong. And wonderfully so.

A whip-bird cracked far off in the cool of the tea trees. But there on my log in the hot sun everything was still. I looked up at the sky. Rocks were poking through the wad of padding in my shorts. I was happy. Quenched. My anxious buzz from a week of magazine world frustrations and frenzy backed off. And I snoozed in happy delirium for fifteen minutes.

When we choose to go grim and lo-fi like this we lower our usual expectations, so that simple joys – sunlight, the stillness, the glow of the open fire, a turd being pushed uphill – become wonderfully apparent. With lower expectations there’s less imperative to make things perfect. We can release our grip. We are in life, in its flow. We’re sitting with ourselves. We let out a sigh.

119.

I also have a ‘wobbliest table in the café’ theory. It helps explain how we can apply this notion of sitting in discomfort to our anxiety on an everyday basis. We don’t all have opportunities to be locked down in an ashram. We have to work with where we are.

I developed this theory when I finally got fed up with the horribly bourgeois perfect café experience indecision dilemma I mentioned several chapters back. I cringe to raise it again with you.

However …

After months of stalling outside cafés, unable to decide if it was the right one for me, I. Finally. Just. Walk. In. To. A. Café. It was a cafe I’d never noticed before. I choose it for this reason. Commercial FM plays on the radio – Enya’s ‘Orinoco Flow’ – and there are five flavours of focaccia on the menu all involving some form of jarred vinegary antipasto. I stride over to the first table. It wobbles. It wobbles from the stem and can’t even be fixed with a folded-up bit of the racing section of the paper under the foot. The speaker above me crackles as Enya hits her crescendo. I don’t move. I wait to see what happens. It’s an experiment. I can do this.

The tea arrives lukewarm, but because this is an experi­ment it doesn’t matter so much. I smile and the pubescent kid in his grotty apron smiles at me and asks if I’d like to try one of the savoury muffins that broke coming out of the oven. You know, for free. And I say I’d love that and it arrives hot and buttery. And, in that very instant, I’m overwhelmed with joy.

You can spend a lot of energy avoiding wobbly tables. And you can fuss about with folded up bits of newspaper. But then, once the table is stabilised, you notice that smoke from the smokers at the next table is blowing right into your face. So you switch seats. Now you’re in the path of the gale-force fan blowing in the corner. And your toast arrives burnt. And on and on it can go.

Or you can go straight to grim and low-fi. That is, straight to what makes you anxious – in my case, choices, uncertainty, finding perfect moments and sensory irritations. When I sat at that wobbly table my irritation mounted as the table wobbled each time I put down my teacup. But I sat longer. It felt crappy and wrong and my body got prickly with anxiety as I sat there. But I sat longer in the grimness. You might try tackling an imperfect sleeping arrangement (noisy, no blinds) in this way. You might drop into a party, last minute (lots of people you don’t know). In psychology circles this kind of experimenting is called ‘distress tolerance’ and entails working with your specialist to remain in anxiety-provoking situations until your fear capacity becomes exhausted. Which it does.

The problem is that if you’re anxious, you tend to flee (or fight or freeze) before you give the distress tolerance mechanism time to play out. I find this an enthralling idea. I mean, what if our inability to deal with our triggers came down to the simple fact we’re unable to sit long enough? Actually, that’s (pretty much exactly) what I’m trying to say here.

Long-standing, highly reactive or gnarly triggers are best dealt with alongside a counsellor or doctor. But you can work the experiment on a few less intense anxiety-provoking scenarios and see how it goes.

You keep it casual, with few expectations, so you don’t have to extend yourself too far. But the point is to actively seek out the discomfort so that you can choose to sit in it and do the experiment. Because you’ve chosen to do it, you’re that bit more empowered. Also remember, it’s just an experiment, to see what happens. Nothing more. You’re just going to see what happens.

If you have claustrophobia, you can practise distress tolerance on a long-haul flight. You can do a bunch of things that first distract you (movies, podcasts, wearing an eye mask so you don’t see the perceived small space), then soothe with sensations that effectively tell your prefrontal cortex that there is no emergency to get worked up over. If you are sipping hot tea under a soft blanket, then there must be no reason to run at full speed to the nearest cave!

For me, the fact it’s a little experiment makes the grimness and the frustration of resisting my need to grasp and fix things a little more bearable. My meta-mission is simply to stay. And see what happens. So the quality of the tea, the comfort of my perch and the wobbliness of the table almost doesn’t matter. I back the fuck off.

Back at the focaccia café that morning, I sat longer. And longer. By now twenty minutes had passed. And I felt the feedback loop that connects my anxiety to fleeing and fixing and grasping weaken with every additional minute that I stayed. I’m serious, I felt a distinct release inside my brain. It’s all really crap, but I’m coping. And you know what this does? It gives me the confidence to settle even further. I get a jolt of satisfaction from this.

The pressure releases, the potency lessens. It doesn’t matter. None of it matters. And if it all can matter less, the anxiety abates.

I remember as I ate my buttery muffin that the decades of gripping-at-perfection I was so used to seemed, well, boring. And kind of comical. And when something is a bit boring and kind of comical, it’s no longer very potent. It’s the same with recovering from a breakup. One day your clinging to your ex becomes – suddenly, overwhelmingly – boring. You hit saturation point on your obsessing and whining to friends. In fact, you realise that you were also bored in the relationship and so you see the funny side of being so attached to someone who was clearly not at your level. Phew. Of course, you only get to this point by sitting in the grim. Time, as they say, is the only cure for a broken heart.

Sitting in grim is also a defiant two-fingered up yours to your anxiety. I think this is great. For an added bonus, the practice simultaneously forces you to stop the grasping and come in close and to connect with where life is. The simplicity, the inevitability, the flow, the truth of life. In other words, that Something Else I’ve gone on about since the outset.

When you’ve been running scared for a long time this idea may come as a relief. You mean that’s all I have to do?

Yep, just sit in the grim.

120.

Before I go further, I’ll bring in our mate Kierkegaard. He used to say much the same, explaining that we spend a lot of our energy running from anxiety. But when we can learn to stay with anxiety, ‘then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will lead him where he wishes to go.’ Poet Rainer Maria Rilke extolled the soul-expanding power of difficulty and urged us to ‘arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult’.

What we resist persists.

What we sit in eventually fades to a manageable and liveable volume.

When we go low, we come in close and it leads us to the truth of it all.

That’s what I reckon.

Kierkegaard also sees anxiety as the very human condition that moves us forward from being mere animals. Worrying about the future has seen us form contingencies and improve our place on the planet. ‘If man were a beast or an angel, he would not be able to be in anxiety … the greater the anxiety, the greater the man,’ he famously wrote. Charles Darwin, who suffered crippling panic attacks, similarly – and conveni­ently – claimed that to fret about the future (that is, to be anxious) is to be highly evolved. Kierkegaard, however, adds this clincher to his bold claim, which makes my fluttery heart settle a little as I read it: ‘He therefore who has learned rightly to be in anxiety has learned the most important thing.’ The most important thing? Well, yes. It’s to connect with what our anxiety is trying to tell us, it’s to go through anxiety to the joy of what just is.

Says David Brooks, not at all in contrast, ‘The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.’ Ask yourself, are you? Are you cool to stop running from it, and have the better journey?

121.

Some time in the 15th century Zen priest Murata Shuko of Nara turned the tea ceremony on its head. He ditched the fancy porcelain and jade and got ‘wabi-sabi’ with it. Wabi-sabi has no direct translation in English. But the gist is the finding of beauty in imperfection and impermanence, as well as the cycles of messy growth and crumbling decay. This is because that’s the way life just goes. And non-resistance IS beautiful. Although the beauty absolutely comes from our non-resistant reaction.

Tea was now poured from clumsy clay and wooden cups with chips of glazing that changed colour over time as hot water was repeatedly poured into them.

Through wabi-sabi we learn to embrace our uneven eyebrows, wobbly tables and a nervous need to tap the bathroom door sixteen times (four sets of four) after shutting it.

Because it is what it is.

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GET WABI-SABI WITH IT

We can practise finding beauty in imperfection. We can be a bit whimsical and playful with the messiness of life so that we can get closer and closer to it. Whimsy drags us from our purpose-mad existence, it presses ‘pause’ long enough for us to get a taste of life lived in ‘the now’ and freefall for a bit. To see what happens.

Innovation consultant Chris Barez-Brown writes in How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas that ruts are best broken with small moments in whimsy, not seismic changes in behaviour. Which is mental muscle building writ differently. Counting men with moustaches on the way to the bus stop is enough to shift perspective, he says.

Candice commented on my blog when I wrote about the topic: ‘Leave the kids’ fingerprints on the wall. I’m choosing to see them instead as a tale of my son’s climb up to bed each night.’ On forums you find tips like this one: Pick some weeds and play with them until you find a nicely discordant arrangement. Stick them in a jam jar.

Similarly, you might like to cook fridge surprise for dinner. Place random ingredients from the fridge that need to be eaten on a plate. Eat them in different combinations, to see how the flavours mix. Anchovies and silverbeet. A mound of leftover pumpkin mash with roast cashews.

Don’t clean up the kids’ toys before sitting down to dinner with your partner. Have a floor picnic in the middle of it all.

And then just see what happens.

122.

This is rather related. It can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness.

It’s also an extension of Kay Redfield Jamison’s ‘individual moments’, which we covered on page 170.

When I lived up at the beaches north of Sydney there was this old guy, Bill, who came down to the beach every morning with a butter knife and a plastic bag. He’d sit cross-legged on the grass between the beach and the carpark where the well-heeled locals left their black Range Rovers and Ferraris. Bill was not of the well-heeled set. Nor was he someone you’d describe as intellectually compromised. At all. I stopped one day and asked what he was doing. Sitting in the glorious morning sun, he looked up with a big gentle smile and explained he was methodically extracting a particular weed not local to the area, root by root. It seemed a thankless and endless task. Why did he do it, I asked. ‘It makes me happy,’ he said, like it should be obvious.

Bill remains an inspiration for me. I refer to him often. He pays no heed to what ‘other people’ find meaningful or joy-creating. He’s worked out what takes him to that place. It’s whimsical. It’s free.

I generally find that anxious people spend a lot of their lives trying to have fun doing stuff that other people find enjoyable. Things like hens’ days, doing big group brunches on Sundays with way too much Hollandaise sauce involved, lying by swimming pools, Yum Cha, the races … actually this is a list of the things that I struggle with. Your list is no doubt different. The point is to recognise that we do this – defer to others’ notions of fun. And that this is probably because we struggle with choice (how do you decide what your preference is amid all the things to do in the world?). And to then try to play around with finding stuff that floats your boat. And, no doubt, to then realise that your stuff could be a little weird or unique.

I realise this is a bit weird, but I started working on this – finding out what I liked doing – by signing up to RSVP.com about five years ago for the express purpose of going through the process of filling out the questionnaires that ask you what you like to read, how you like spending weekends and what kind of person you’d like to love you. Knowing you’re about to be judged by thousands of strangers gets you really quite focused on getting to the truth.

This is what I came up with: I like talking in tents, catching ferries for an afternoon, sitting at a bar and doing the cryptic crossword, reading 1950s crime fiction and hiking on my own – none of which, I can see now, would be likely to get me a date.

But it did get me focused on acknowledging that I simply don’t like doing a lot of what other people like doing. And over time, I got more and more okay with, and less and less anxious about, this.

(PS. Another thing I like doing: noticing and studying weird and unique stuff fellow anxious folk like doing.)

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MEDITATE IN GRIMNESS

Off the back of my India visit I started experimenting with meditating in grimmer and grimmer settings. I meditated on planes with kids screaming next to me during take-off. In my office with the team just outside holding a loud meeting. In my car in a Bunnings car park in stifling heat. In a gutter in the sun in central London because I had fifteen minutes to kill and that’s where I found myself. In the walk-in wardrobe in the Channel 7 studios, waiting for my turn in hair and makeup before going on to do morning TV.

What happened? I stayed. I didn’t try to attend to the ambient conditions – get up to turn down the lights, adjust my underpants and the like – so that I could have the perfect meditation. My only mission was to see what happened if I sat for the full twenty minutes I assign to my daily practice and didn’t move. At first the noises, the heat, the smell and even the antici­pation of someone walking in to the wardrobe and seeing me in such a ridiculous situation distracted me. But each time my mind wandered I simply came back to my mantra, effortlessly, gently. And, you know what, it was almost like the worse the discomfort or distraction, the stronger my focus got. It had to. And what did that do? Well, it saw me go further down into the meditation.

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DON’T CHANGE HOTEL ROOMS

It’s a thing among anxious types – a need to change hotel rooms. French poet Charles Baudelaire, who was notorious for not being able to sit for long, noted somewhat similarly, ‘Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds.’ We’re uptight before we get to the room. Heck, before we even book the flights and hotel. We know there will be something not right. For me, it will be a hum I can hear from the elevator shaft. Or it will be overlooking a shopping mall’s worth of air-conditioning units piled on top of a sprawling rooftop, a cacophony of vibrations that will only worsen throughout the night. I used to change rooms. At least once. Until I worked out that whenever I did, the subsequent room would have worse hums and vibrations, comically so. Wherever I go, there I am … My publisher includes a note at this point in her editing mark-ups – ‘I experience it often. Once I made [my husband]drive round Port Fairy for two hours with three small children and a dog in the car, trying to find the “best” place to stay.’ A few days after she wrote this we’re in Melbourne together for a conference. ‘Did you do it?’ I ask her. She laughs, knowing instantly what I’m referring to. ‘Yep. And the room I’m in now is overlooking the construction site with the jack-hammers.’ What helps me? I tell myself to try one night in the first room, as an experiment, to see what happens. Again, the meta-purpose of the ‘experiment’ gives me focus. So, too, does the fact that I have an out-clause (I can always swap tomorrow night). When I wake up the next day having slept, I have the courage to do another night in the same room.

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SLEEP WITH YOUR PARTNER

Alright, this is a challenge very particular to me. But feel free to confront your own unique one and apply a similar tack. As I mentioned, I avoided sleeping in the same bed with the Life Natural for many months. One night he rendered me choiceless and gave me his most disappointed stare when I was about to run off once again as bedtime approached. I drove away in what I thought was a justified huff. But I got a grip on myself a few hundred metres down the road, turned around and committed to the grimness and seeing what happened. I climbed into his bed and sank into the situation. His Brazilian housemates were having a late-night barbecue outside. He’d not cleared the half-empty beer cans from the bedside table (did I not flag the Life Natural was next-level Australian-surf-­culture-laidback?). I was anxious. I didn’t resist it. He twitched. And snuffled for a bit. I tossed and turned. I watched it all in the not-perfectly-blacked-out room. I didn’t expect to look refreshed in the morning. I warned him I might be grumpy.

I got five hours’ sleep, as it turned out. And then used the confidence gleaned from having completed the experiment to give it another crack the following week.

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ACTIVELY PRACTISE MISSING OUT

My little sister once told me (over Facebook; her preferred family communication medium) that I had the worst case of FOMO she’d seen. Hashtag touché, Jane. It prompted me to experiment a bit. I started to actively plan nights in on my own. I went straight to the grimness of a Friday night with a bowl of fridge surprise (leftovers mashed together in a pan with an egg or some cheese) and Doc Martin on the ABC. It sent a massive ‘up yours’ to the ceaseless pressure to be doing and taking part. This emboldened me. A week later I worked all the way through a public holiday. I grimmed it up a treat – I worked from a café that featured Coke-sponsored plastic tables and was frequented only by taxi drivers while everyone else attended Instagrammable barbecues in the sun. It brought on that special feeling of loftiness – not ugly pride, it’s more expansive and selfless – that comes from facing and diffusing yet another anxious pocket. High five me!