فصل چهارم

chapter-4

gentle and small

For the past six years, when distressed sugar quitters have contacted me worried that they’ve ‘fallen off the wagon’ and that, henceforth, their entire life is going to fall to pieces, I tell them to eat a pork chop. With some sweet potato. And some steamed zucchini doused in olive oil.

The anti-sugar crusade that I’m told I’m largely responsible for, and that now sees me travel the world for five months of the year, publishing books and running a business with twenty-­three staff from a converted warehouse (with a worm farm on the roof-top balcony and all manner of clichéd internet start-up accoutrements), began not long after my anxiety flared in my Mid-thirties Meltdown (the one I mentioned earlier) and I fled to an army shed on seven acres of forest in the Byron Bay hinterland. Because that’s what you’d do, right, when the proverbial hits a fan? Some might say this move marked the turning of a new leaf. I wouldn’t. The leaves have never stopped turning.

I made the decision to up and leave and within a week I was on the road with what I could fit in the back of my Holden Astra hatchback: a slow cooker, a blender, a few changes of clothing, basic toiletries and my bike. I gave everything else away at a garage sale where you could name your price, the money going to the public school up the road. It was easier than haggling. I didn’t want to bargain or hustle, or deal with humans IRL (in real life) for a long while. I stayed in my shed, alone, for eighteen months, supporting myself by writing that magazine column I mentioned where I investigated ways to live a better, more well life.

The shed was one room with a pot-belly stove in the middle. You climbed outdoor stairs to a bedroom in the roof and the bathroom was outside, too. From the bath I had a view of every moon that the cashed-up kids with their unicorn tatts down on the beach would bang drums to each month. There were no locks and lots of bush turkeys.

One week I was short of a topic and so I quit sugar. It was all very convenient. I’d been told I should quit my seductively gnarly habit by several doctors and naturopaths; an editorial deadline provided the impetus. Seductively gnarly? I was one of those types who ate ‘healthy sugar’ – honey in my chai tea, dates and banana on my maple-frosted granola, gluten-free muffins, and so on. I convinced myself, and everyone around me, that I didn’t have a problem. I was, in fact, eating almost 30 teaspoons a day. It’s never surprised me that sugar addiction goes hand in hand with anxiety, and that anxious folk hide the vice so protectively. We’re dopamine junkies, and we don’t like people removing our ‘fix’.

That was January 2011. I tried the no-sugar thing for two weeks. It felt good – I felt calmer and my skin glowed – so I kept going and going. The experiment turned into a series of blog posts in which I shared my research and recipes, which turned into an ebook (I taught myself how to make such a thing, squirreled away in my shed), which turned into a bunch of print books, which turned into an online cooking program, which has seen two million people ditch the white stuff.

Anyway … when I put together the program, I was heavily influenced by the Buddhist notion of compassion.

You might have done the 8-Week Program? If so, you’d know how much I bang on about being ‘gentle and kind’ in the process.

Draconian, self-flagellating diets don’t work. This is because they’re anchored in the not doing of something. We humans, I feel, are far better at doing something. Show me a ‘Wet Paint: Do Not Touch’ sign and all I want to do is touch it. So to make change, it’s best to ditch the self-flagellation. I invite people to simply give quitting sugar a go. No big deal. I suggest you just commit to two weeks and see how it goes. ‘Suck it and see,’ I say to really back the pressure off. I focus on all the abundant food you can eat (haloumi cheese! red wine! macadamia nuts! butter! cauliflower pizza!), rather than ranting on about ‘bad’ foods. I work to an eight-week timeframe that allows for lapses because the latest addiction theory shows that allowing sixty days is more effective than the previous twenty-one-day edict, which didn’t leave any room for ‘failure’. If you fell off the wagon, back to the beginning you’d go.

So, as I tell readers when I proffer my pork chop solution, a sugary lapse is not a problem. In fact, it’s a good thing: the resulting frazzled, unstable, foggy feeling reinforces why you quit in the first place. And why the pork chop? From a nutrition perspective, porcine protein is a boon for recalibrating your appetite hormones and blood sugar levels, a theory which pivots from work I did with the National Geographic team that studied the lifestyle factors common to the longest-lived popu­lations around the world (hearty ingestion of pork and red wine are among them).

Plus, the notion of solving a problem with such comforting food tapped into the gentle and kind vibe I was feeling so strongly about.

While all of this was happening the treatment of anxiety was undergoing a massive shift, one that I followed and reflected on via my personal sarahwilson.com blog. It was getting gentler and kinder. If you’re someone who’s taken even a few steps on the anxious journey any time since the late 1990s, you’ve probably encountered a bunch of cognitive behavioural therapies (CBT) and been bludgeoned with various positive psychology and self-­improvement theories. Apart from being gratingly annoying (sand play! yellow smiley faces! Bobby McFerrin!), these approaches were about changing yourself and reversing your behaviours (turn that frown upside down!). As a result, I and many others developed a visceral wariness of them.

But now, CBT and neuro-linguistic programming are being surpassed by acceptance and commitment therapy (which focuses on accepting your thoughts and emotions and living to your core values) and compassion focused therapy (which incorporates Buddhist mindfulness practices to increase your psychological flexibility). Similarly, positive psychology has mercifully given way to what’s being referred to as a ‘second wave’ and instead of being told to have a ‘Happiness Makeover’ and to ‘Change Your Thinking’, we’re being asked to ‘Lament the Loss of Sadness’ and to ‘Go Against Happiness, In Praise of Sadness’ and get on with ‘Embracing the Dark Side of Life’. And, most recently, to try out the ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck’ (the title of a book by US marketeer Mark Manson who advocates giving up on trying to sidestep pain).

These approaches are rooted in working with what ‘is’ and easing our way into the life we want, gently, kindly. Instead of building a bridge (with happy-clappy language and unicorn emoticons) and getting over it, we make the most of the river we find ourselves in, even if it might be a little dank and overgrown with reeds at times. By doing so we may find happiness, among other different, rich emotions available to us. Happiness is a lovely by-product of the process. Not the (mostly unattainable) end goal.

Ruth Whippman, author of The Pursuit of Happiness and Why It’s Making Us Anxious, reckons the search for happiness is making anxiety worse because ‘the expectations of how happy you should be are so high, you always feel you are falling short’. Whippman, somewhat acerbically, argues that our pursuit of happiness – including the recently fashionable route via mindfulness – is particularly privileged. ‘It is a philosophy likely to be more rewarding for those whose lives contain more privileged moments than grinding, humiliating or exhausting ones. Those for whom a given moment is more likely to be “sun-­dappled yoga pose” than “hour 11 manning the deep-fat fryer”.’ (I’ve previously wondered if it’s a privilege to even be able to question your anxiety as I do here – whether anxiety is a bourgeois affliction. I don’t any more. I think the issue has gone rogue – more on this to come – and while not everyone can book themselves into a meditation retreat in Sri Lanka for two weeks at a time, or flee to a shed in the Byron Bay hinter­land, most of us really do benefit from knowing we’re not alone and from trying out each other’s simple techniques for accessing some stillness and peace. But I digress … ) And here’s another issue with the ‘just be happy’ approach of the past fifteen years: happiness is put forward as a choice, not a matter of luck. Yet happiness literally derives from the Middle English word ‘hap’, meaning chance or good luck (thus ‘happenstance’ or ‘perhaps’). We’ve twisted the meaning in recent times such that it’s now something we just have to work hard to get to the bottom of. As though it’s an endpoint that exists. We just have to sift through various options and decisions and choices. But, of course, getting to the bottom of options is anxiety-inducing. Whippman refers to stacks of studies that show that the more relentlessly we value and pursue happiness, the more likely we are to be depressed, anxious and lonely.

Up in my army shed in the forest, I was learning to apply kindness and gentleness to my health. I was too exhausted to flog myself with restrictive eating or hardcore exercise. And all the wisdom I was learning from my research reinforced the efficacy of this softer way. So did the online conversations I was having with all the vulnerable sugar-addled strangers out there who I’d come to feel so deeply for. We were all wanting a kinder, gentler way. We were all tired and sad.

Wonderfully, perfectly, this kindness and gentleness seeped into my anxious journey, too.

21.

It is not our fault that we’re addicted to sugar and getting fatter. Obesity is not an issue of self-control, or lack thereof. Every reasonable and respected voice in the debate now acknowledges that the way in which we’re force-fed sugar by the food giants deranges our metabolisms to such an extent that for many no amount of willpower, hardcore workouts or dietary commitment can make a difference. Children today are being born with type 2 diabetes. Low-fat ‘plain’ yoghurt can contain up to 6 teaspoons of sugar per serve. We can no longer point the finger at individuals caught up in the unfortunate metabolic cycle.

Just as we can’t blame those of us with a highly sensitive amygdala for being anxious.

22.

While writing this book, I read The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Overcoming Anxiety by cognitive therapist Dennis D. Tirch, a founding voice in the compassion-focused therapy movement. Tirch tells us that our ‘flight or fight’ threat detection system evolved as an essential part of our survival and that some of us are born with more sensitive detection switches than others. It’s not our fault if we drew this straw; it’s simply where the evolutionary tide landed us.

And, he adds, even our best attempts to avoid or combat or criticise our anxiety will only make it worse. Instead, self-compassion is the way forward.

Tirch and others explain that we have an old brain (the one that evolved first) and a new brain. The former takes information drawn from our senses and when it perceives danger it stimulates a very ‘old’ gnarly part of the brain called the amygdala, which activates the stress response, releasing the stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol. In an instant we’re ready for action – to fight or to flee. This part of the brain doesn’t distinguish between real and perceived threat. It just reacts, fast.

Our ‘new’ brain, crudely put, imagines, plans, thinks and is responsible for our self-awareness and our sense of mortality. It’s the bit that defines us as humans. We anxious folk have particularly active new brain stuff going on. We think a lot. We’re extremely self-aware.

Our old and new brains collide frequently, and problemati­cally, so if your new brain is particularly sensitive, as they are for anxious folk, your sensitive reflections and thoughts may trigger your gnarly old ‘threat’ system into believing a sabre-toothed tiger is about to pounce, with all the accompanying hormone surges and their physical side-effects.

But you might be interested to know that in addition to the threat system, Tirch explains that we have another protective mechanism – the comfort system. As a species without horns or venom, we’ve relied on strong communal bonds to survive, bonds that are created and reinforced with soothing and comforting behaviours. To survive as children we needed our parents to comfort and soothe us as we learned skills and developed strength. This system activates the feel-good hormones oxytocin and endorphin, which effectively shut down the threat system.

Like the fight or flight response, the comfort system is also automatic and will do its job in toning down anxiety … if we learn to trigger it. Studies show that one of the best ways to trigger the comfort system is to practise self-­compassion. Which is all very well in theory. I don’t know about you, but when I’m in one of my self-loathing whirly-­whirlies I’m not feeling a great deal of soft-eyed, open-armed love for myself. Fortunately the new-wave behaviouralists have this one covered. They acknowledge that it’s easier for self-­flagellators like myself to activate compassion for another than it is to activate it for ourselves and conveniently supply studies that have found showing compassion for others will have the same comfort system activating response in the brain, thus dampening the anxiety-riddled threat system.

Of course it’s another theory in a long line-up. But it’s one that makes intuitive sense to me. It has for a while.

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TALK TO A KID

Here’s a good way to trick yourself into some self-compassion when you tend to be more of a self-loathing type.

I’m not a big fan of imagination exercises. But this one is effortless and switches me into the right gear really quickly.

I don’t plan on filling this book with too many exercises that people like me skim over to get to the meaty theory. I’ll just include the ones that suit people like me and you.

Picture a child, preferably you as a child, or another child in your life you rather like. This kid is upset and anxious because they haven’t finished their homework, or they’re distressed about being picked on, or they’re feeling lonely or abandoned or confused. Then imagine the compassion you’d feel for them. Now tell the little kid this: that you get it, that you can see what’s going on. Tell them they can’t be blamed for feeling as they do, and that they won’t feel this way forever (or whatever it is you feel for this funny little lost child in your mind’s eye).

I dug up a kindergarten photo of myself not so long ago. Having a photo in front of me helped me do this exercise. In the picture I’m wearing my hair in pigtails and I have a scab under my lip where my bottom teeth had cut all the way through when I fell down my grandmother’s stairs. I still bite the scar when I’m nervous today. I see in my eyes the most intense earnestness. I remember the photo shoot. I remember wondering how to smile for the photographer. I’m able to feel compassion for the mini-me. My heart goes out to her. I want to hold her while she works it all out (while not denying her the process of doing so). I tell her that she’s all good, that she’s on the right track. That she’s a really cool, interesting kid for wondering about all these things and that as she gets older it’s going to make her an amazing person to be friends with, and a beaut big sister. I tell her I’ll be there with her the whole way, so she has nothing to worry about. When I’m done I just sit in this teary-eyed feeling for a bit.

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WRITE A ‘NO BLOODY WONDER’

LETTER TO YOUR ANXIETY

This is another fool-yourself-into-self-compassion-and-thus-activate-your-comfort-valve exercise. I like it because it connects me to my anxiety and gets me real about what’s going on. I start, Dear Anxiety, you funny little thing … I like seeing my anxiety as cute and endearing in its earnestness, much like the kid at the sport carnival who busts his foof-foof valve in the 200 metre race, all red in the face, about to explode. I go on to acknowledge what it’s up to, what it’s feeling. I continue with ‘No bloody wonder …’ and validate why it’s got itself worked up. No bloody wonder you’re wobbly – you’ve been left in limbo for three days over a work outcome yet again. Plus you feel like you’re in a rut, unable to get a clear view of why you’re living.

Then I might get a just little bit ‘walk down the hall of mirrors’ with it. Yes, yes, I know it feels like it’s too hard. But you deal this up every time we land here. Let’s just look back on it all for twenty-­seven seconds. The shittiest days have always led somewhere. Haven’t they?

Last week we fretted all Saturday morning and it was a glorious day and we got paralysed on the lounge-room floor and it was all such a waste of a glorious day. I know. I was there. And the fretting got worse and tighter. Until we cried. And it all felt good. And we realised we hadn’t cried for the bigness of life for too long. We had to fret to cry to release the pressure.

So let’s just sit in this for a bit and see what happens. Let’s be totally grim together. Might as well. We’re here anyway. Cool. Okay then.

As I do this I’m also able to offer my funny little anxiety some helpful ways forward. You know what? I think you just need to go for a hike this weekend. Get into the bush. As I sign off, Love, Sarah, I smile at my anxiety.

23.

When I was twenty-three, a 92-year-old Russian–Chinese hypnotist introduced me to the idea of mental muscle building.

Eugene Veshner was a former civil engineer who’d been told he’d die at forty from a congenital disease; he’d already turned partially blind. To deal with the pain of such news he used his scientific brain to develop what became an internationally recognised self-hypnosis trick to shift his outlook which, to everyone’s surprise, saw the guy keep on living and living. And regain much of his eyesight.

I was Eugene’s last patient. He’d retired the year before, but he took me on because, in his softly spoken words, ‘You’re messy.’ I’d just returned from the US where I’d been studying on a scholarship. But I’d had to come home early due to illness. It was a perfect storm of manic depression (as it was still being called back then) on top of the obsessive-compulsive disorder, insomnia and a roaring case of Grave’s disease, an auto­immune disease of the thyroid that preceded the Hashimoto’s disease I developed later, in my thirties. I’d been reduced to a size 6 from a size 12 and I gasped for breath.

‘Let’s start with the insomnia,’ he suggested.

I loved Eugene. I loved visiting his modest brick veneer home liberally snowflaked with doilies and little vases of violets. I loved his woollen vests and his long fingers. ‘Bad habits [and insomnia, he told me, is a bad habit] can’t be reversed or elimi­nated. It’s not how the brain works,’ he explained. He drew a line on his notepad with his fountain pen. ‘This is a habit, a series of thoughts. They clump together to form a neural pathway and the more thoughts you add to this the thicker it gets.’ He draws more lines over the top of the first.

‘You don’t delete a bad habit, you build a new, better one. You feed this new habit, over and over,’ he tells me. He draws a new line, this time parallel to the first clump of lines and thickens it with more and more strokes of his pen. The new thoughts clump, layer by layer, and eventually create a habit that is stronger than the old one. You build habits that trigger the comfort system, instead of the threat system.

My old habit was thinking I had to check under the bed for something nebulously dangerous (mostly that ankle-­grabbing beast) … again and again. Which obviously strengthens all that fighty, flighty stuff. My new habit was getting the urge, and resisting it calmly. I visualised this in a calm, meditative state of self-hypnosis, the best state for drawing new lines. I pictured lying in bed and being cool with not checking. I created this picture, over and over, in my mind. After about three weeks of doing this every night, it played out in real life, in bed one night. I went to bed and I lay there. I reproduced the calm of the imagined scenario. I stayed. I stayed. I kept breathing. I was aware of the visceral urge to check. But I stayed. To see what happened. As I waited, I drifted off to sleep. In the morning I grabbed one hand in the other and shook myself in congratulation. My goodness I was proud of myself.

Slowly, patiently, I’ve worked through years of anxious habits like this, one clumpy neural pathway at a time, strengthening my comfort system. It wasn’t about changing myself. It was about creating ease and gentleness around who I was, which allowed me to make better choices.

Many say it takes sixty-six days of continuous work to create a new habit (I like to think of it as building a new muscle). To be any good at anything, whether it’s archery or writing novels, they say it takes 10,000 hours of work, or building mental muscle. I’d suggest you triple that if you’re wanting to manage your anxiety effectively.

Heck, make it a lifetime.

Neuroscience now tells us that our brains are not rigid entities. They’re more like plastic (or a muscle!), and we can reshape them with small movements over a period of time. Anyone who’s read Oliver Sacks, or any neuroscientific work, knows that with continuous practice you can re-shape, or re-wire, your neural pathways according to the habit you want to form. Pathways that are not used weaken and wear off in due time, making room for new neural pathways to form. If you don’t use it, you lose it. This is why it is easier to form a new habit than maintain an old one.

When I look back on my bumpy journey I’m forced to note that, underwhelmingly, it’s been made up of a hodge-podge of simple small tricks which have slowly – oh so slowly – added up to a new way. I share most of them in this book.

Prefer a faster fix? Oh, goodness I did, too. I still do a lot of the time. But to the ‘me’ that hangs on to this notion, I say GET OVER YOURSELF.

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MAKE YOUR BED. EVERY DAY.

This is what I mean by small and underwhelming. I’ve chatted to The Happiness Project’s Gretchen Rubin a few times on this journey. Her book had hung around in the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years after it was published in 2009 and we’d reach out to each other every now and then to share ideas on how to make life better. I rang her one day to ask for the stupidly simple trick she employs to quash her anxiety. She was previously a New Yorker lawyer. She knows anxiety.

This was her tip: ‘Make your bed. Every day.’

It struck me as ludicrous. Like ‘42’ being the Ultimate Answer to Everything.

Gretchen explained that such simple, outer order creates inner calm. But it was the ‘every day’ bit of her edict that she wanted to stress.

‘It’s easier to do something every day, without exception, than to do something “most days”,’ she said. ‘When you say “I’ll walk four days a week”, you debate which four days, and wake up debating whether you can skip Tuesday.’ True. True. It sets us up for decision overload. And so we baulk. And don’t do any exercise and have unkempt beds for weeks.

This trick, of course, activates the comfort system. Over and over.

I’m not a bed maker. But I made mine for over a year after chatting to Gretchen. Not because I see intrinsic worth in having a neat bed (I prefer to air mine with the doona pulled back during the day and make it up just before sleeping). But because it was building something.

And in case you’re left in any doubt, there’s always this from Andy Warhol: ‘Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it … almost every day, it’s not good any more.’ A SINGULAR PAGE ON BEING ANXIOUS ABOUT BEING ANXIOUS ABOUT BEING ANXIOUS …

I’ll probably flag this a few times. But let’s raise it here nice and boldly on a clean page. One of the worst things we can do to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious about being anxious. I think that a good, ooooh, 80 per cent of my anxiety comes from being anxious about being anxious. And 80 per cent of that secondary anxiety is compounded by being anxious-slash-pissed off that I’m anxious about being anxious. And on it goes compounding on itself ad infinitum. It’s a peculiarity of being human; we are the only animals on the planet capable of being aware we’re anxious. Our non-human friends just do the fear, or anxiety, and it stops there.

So, one gentle and small thing we can do (actually it’s pretty big and fundamental) is to work on stopping the anxious-about-being-­anxious cycle. Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed there is nothing to fear but fear itself. I’m kind of saying the inverse. Don’t fear the fear. Instead, see it for what it is. You’re feeling anxious. You just are. No need to berate yourself for this; it will only make you more anxious. No need to think that things should be otherwise and that you’ve got it all wrong somehow. For this, too, will just make you more anxious. Maybe your hormones are out. Maybe the wind direction is all wrong. Maybe things are actually quite crappy right now. And, yeah, that presentation you have to give in two weeks is absolutely anxiety-inducing. Got it. But let’s just leave it there, and not fret that you’re fretting. Yeah?

Because we’re human we have to watch ourselves go through this pain. But because we’re human we can also choose to watch it and see it for what it is. It’s anxiety, for sure. But it doesn’t have to be a catastrophe with no endpoint. Even a panic attack only lasts 10–30 minutes.

Do the anxiety. Then leave it there. This is our challenge.

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JUST SAY IT: ‘I’M ANXIOUS’

This sounds dumb, I know, but just saying, ‘I’m anxious’ can make you less anxious. A recent study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to map the electrical activity in the brains of subjects who were shown a series of pictures of people with different emotional facial expressions. When subjects were shown the pictures only, their amygdalae were activated. But when they were shown the pictures and asked to name the emotions being expressed, the prefrontal cortex was activated and the activity in the amygdala reduced. Also note, the researchers found the less words used the better. ‘I’m anxious’ should do the trick.

This is something that comes up a lot: our fusty old amygdala, which steers anxiety, struggles to fire up when other stuff is going on. It’s good to know; it means we can take advantage of such limitations.

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DO CORE EXERCISES

A study published in 2016 found that the area in the primary motor cortex linked to the axial body muscles (our core) is directly connected to the adrenal glands. Work your core, decrease the stress response. Yoga, Pilates, planking … it will all build the right muscles – physical and mental.

It makes sense when you think that we’ve always known the inverse: that a stooped posture from poor core strength is a sign of angst in a person.