Notes on a Nervous Planet(30)
So, I either needed a new me. Or a new planet. And I didn’t yet know how to find either. Which is why I felt suicidal.
‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ I said at the time, wiping my eyes like a toddler lost in a supermarket.
The ‘here’ was broad enough to mean anything from ‘my head’ to ‘the planet’. More immediately, of course, the ‘here’ was the shopping centre.
‘Okay, okay, okay,’ Andrea said. She was right next to me. She was also thousands of miles away. She scanned around for the nearest exit. ‘This way.’
We got outside, into natural light. And we went back to Andrea’s parents’, and I lay on Andrea’s childhood bed and told her parents I had a bit of a headache, because a headache was easier for them to understand than this invisible cyclone. Anyway, I felt varying degrees of bad for many weeks and months, but eventually I began to recover. And, even better, to understand.
A wish I SO WISH I could explain something to my younger self. I wish I could tell myself that it wasn’t all me. I wish I could say that there were things I could do. Because my anxiety, my depression, wasn’t just there. Illness, like injury, often has context.
When I fall into a frantic or despairing state of mind, full of unwelcome thoughts that can’t slow down, it is often the result of a series, a sequence of things. When I do too much, think too much, absorb too much, eat too badly, sleep too little, work too hard, get too frazzled by life, there it is.
A repetitive strain injury of the mind.
How to exist in the 21st century and not have a panic attack
1.Keep an eye on yourself. Be your own friend. Be your own parent. Be kind to yourself. Check on what you are doing. Do you need to watch the last episode of the series when it is after midnight? Do you need that third or fourth glass of wine? Is that really in your best interests?
2.Declutter your mind. Panic is the product of overload. In an overloaded world we need to have a filter. We need to simplify things. We need to disconnect sometimes. We need to stop staring at our phones. To have moments of not thinking about work. A kind of mental feng shui.
3.Listen to calm noise. Things that aren’t as stimulating as music. Waves, your own breath, a breeze through the leaves, the purr of a cat, and best of all: rain.
4.Let it happen. If you feel panic rising the instinctive reaction is to panic some more. To panic about the panic. To meta-panic. The trick is to try to feel panic without panicking about it. This is nearly – but not quite – impossible. I had panic disorder – a condition defined not by the occasional panic attack but by frequent panic attacks and the continuous hellish fear of the next one. By the time I’d had hundreds of panic attacks I began to tell myself I wanted it. I didn’t, obviously. But I used to work hard at trying to invite the panic – as a test, to see how I could cope. The more I invited it, the less it wanted to stay around.
5.Accept feelings. And accept that they are just that: feelings.
6.Don’t grab life by the throat. ‘Life should be touched, not strangled,’ said the writer Ray Bradbury.
7.It is okay to release fear. The fear tries to tell you it is necessary, and that it is protecting you. Try to accept it as a feeling, rather than valid information. Bradbury also said: ‘Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get.’
8.Be aware of where you are. Are your surroundings over-stimulating? Is there somewhere you can go that is calmer? Is there some nature you can look at? Look up. In city centres, the tops of buildings are less intense than the shop fronts you see at head level. The sky helps, too.
9.Stretch and exercise. Panic is physical as well as mental. For me, running and yoga help more than anything. Yoga, especially. My body tightens, from hours of being hunched over a laptop, and yoga stretches it out again.
10.Breathe. Breathe deep and pure and smooth. Concentrate on it. Breathing is the pace you set your life at. It’s the rhythm of the song of you. It’s how to get back to the centre of things. The centre of yourself. When the world wants to take you in every other direction. It was the first thing you learned to do. The most essential and simple thing you do. To be aware of breath is to remember you are alive.
12
THE THINKING BODY
Four humours
ONCE UPON A time, in Ancient Greece, doctors explained the human body with reference to the ‘four humours’. Every health complaint could be assessed as an excess or deficiency of one of four distinct bodily fluids: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood.
In Roman times, the four humours evolved to correspond with four temperaments. For instance, if you had anger issues, you would be told you had too much yellow bile, the fire humour. Which means when you tell someone to ‘chill’ you are echoing official health advice from Ancient Rome.
If you were feeling depressed, or melancholic, that was down to an overload of black bile. In fact, the very word ‘melancholia’ stems via Latin from the ancient Greek words melas and kholé, which literally meant ‘black bile’.
This system seems ludicrously unscientific. But in one way, at least, it was advanced. Namely, it did not make a division between physical and mental health.
The philosopher René Descartes is largely to blame for this distinction. He believed minds and bodies were entirely separate. Back in the 1640s he suggested that the body works like an unthinking machine and that the mind, in contrast, is non-material.