January 28, 2020 • 44 mins
Sarah Wilson is a New York Times Bestselling author, journalist and founder of iquitsugar.com. She has published 15 I Quit Sugar books in 46 countries and in 2017 and 2018, she was ranked as one of the Top 200 Most Influential Authors In The World. At 29, Sarah was the Editor and Chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia and she has also been the host of Master Chef Australia. Her newest book is, First, We Make the Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety and it is this that she and Eric discuss in this episode.
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In This Interview, Sarah Wilson and I Discuss Anxiety and…
- Her book, First, We Make The Beast Beautiful: A New Journey Through Anxiety
- Where the mind goes, energy flows
- The idea of disconnection and reconnection in mental health
- How to know when the line into disordered anxiety has been crossed
- Understanding the role of medicine for anxiety, depression and other mental illnesses as well as the role of struggle in our inner life.
- The importance and role of therapy while also taking medication for mental disorders
- The dynamic, changing nature of actively supporting mental wellness
- Stopping the cycle of getting anxious about being anxious
- Sitting in your suffering and ride it out rather than trying to beat or escape it
- The slow approach for dealing with Anxiety
- How walking can help Anxiety
- Ways handwriting can help Anxiety
- Ways space can help Anxiety
- Spiritual idea of contraction vs expansion
- Asking yourself “Will this enlarge or contract my life?”
Sarah Wilson Links:
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If you enjoyed this conversation with Sarah Wilson on Anxiety, you might also enjoy these other episodes:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
All throughout our history, we have always had a deep
appreciation of the role of struggle. Welcome to the one
you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
(00:22):
or you are what you think ring true. And yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
(00:44):
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
(01:12):
episode is Sarah Wilson, a New York Times best selling author, journalist,
and founder of I Quit Sugar dot Com. She has
published fifteen I Quit Sugar books in forty six countries
and was ranked as one of the top two hundred
most influential authors in the world in two thousand seventeen
and two thousand eighteen. Sarah was the editor in chief
(01:34):
of Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia at twenty nine. She was also
the host of Master Chef Australia and holds a record
in the Guinness Book of World Records. I'll let you
google y. Her new book is First We Make the
Beast Beautiful, A New Journey through Anxiety. Hi, Sarah, welcome
to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Eric.
(01:55):
It is a real pleasure to have you on. We
are going to talk about your book called First we
Make the Beast Beautiful, a New Journey through Anxiety. But
before we do that, we'll start in the way that
we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's
talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there
are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
(02:16):
What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,
and she looks up at her grandfather and she said, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
(02:37):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parawul means to you in your life and in
the work that you do well. I mean, Eric, it
plays perfectly into the title, and that the same of
my book. First, to make the beast beautiful because very much,
you know the way I've been living for so many
years with my anxiety, and I'm sure some of your
listeners would relate to this, I've been fed the story
(03:00):
that you know, what I had was a disorder. So
the medical model very much told me that it was,
you know, it was a beast that had to be fixed.
We had to get rid of it before I could
live a big, full life. And one of the things
that I explore in the book is, Um, I do
this pretty pretty early on, is that you know what
we can be both and we can be both anxious,
(03:21):
and we can also feed a better beast, you know,
the better beast, which is the more beautiful one, which
is to see anxiety as as a beautiful thing, something
that we don't have to get rid of. And you know,
as as you know, Eric, because I know you've you've
read the book, You're very well researched at all times. Um,
(03:42):
you know, it's a journey that takes us, UM, that
takes us through an understanding of anxiety through a philosophical
and spiritual lens. And I very much feed that story.
So yes, your parable speaks to me big time. And
also there's another there's another thought that occurred to me. UM.
I was a big mountain bike rider for many years.
(04:03):
I was twenty four hour mountain bike races and downhill races.
And when you're riding a bike, UM, you you know,
if you've got a gap between say two rocks, as
you're hurtling down a hill several miles an hour, UM,
you can't really steer your way there. You essentially passed
through that very narrow opening of only a few inches, say,
(04:25):
by by looking at it, by putting your full focus
on that small gap between the rocks. And I've always
had this adage, which I think is similar to your parable,
which is where the mind goes, the energy flows. And
I have lived by that with every business and you know,
sort of enterprise that I've entered into, but also with
the way I do my relationships, UM, and my also
(04:47):
my engagement with my mental disorder or my mental illness.
So I very much relate to that parable. Yeah, I
think it's wonderful, and I think the way you tied
that altogether was great. In addition to ans A, you
see early in the book that you know, you had
childhood anxiety, lots of insomnia, bulimia, and your late teens
O c D depression anxiety, and then bipolar disorder also,
(05:12):
and so those have all sort of been a part
of your path and your journey. Yeah, that's right, and
I and I also say that to me, in many ways,
it was all the same thing. It was the same itch,
it was the same buzz, it was the same There
were just different expressions of what I described as a
deeper yearning. You know, it always felt like a yearning.
(05:36):
It felt like something bigger and deeper than just an illness.
You know that that had a bunch of names and
and you know, kind of corresponding medications. And I still
to this day see that's the same kind of itch,
you know, that an internal itch that I think humanity
has had its call for eon since we got upright,
you know. Yeah, it's really interesting. It makes me think
(05:58):
of addiction. I'm a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic and
in the A A big book, there is a idea
that the disorder is related to a spiritual yearning. UM.
Carl Young often mentioned and in conversations with early a
A founders that you know, take the word alcohol spirit spiritus,
(06:20):
you know, and that the alcoholic was trying to find
that transcendence they felt cut off. I've always found that
to be very very plausible, UM. And I love that
you say that anxiety is a disconnection. UM. You call
it something else, and we'll get into what something else
is in a minute. But as I've looked at my
own depression, as I've looked at my own addiction and
(06:42):
all that, I do feel that this idea of disconnection
and reconnection is absolutely fundamental to the problem and the healing. Yeah. Absolutely,
and you've you've touched on something there as well. We
often say these various illnesses, whether it's addiction or or
a compulsive disorder or whatever it might be, as the problem,
(07:03):
but quite often they are an expression, There are a symptom,
there are coping mechanism, and I think you know, that's
something that we need to start to look at. That
the deeper issue is this disconnect and that's something that
is common and it's something whether you've got a diagnosed
disorder as such, or whether you're a human being who
(07:23):
has these lonely moments where you get home from a
loud party at night and you've got to go and
sit with yourself looking at the bathroom mirror under the
fluorescent lights, you know, and you suddenly get a sense
of what is all of this about? I mean, that
is common. And what was really interesting is that a
huge number of readers. The book's been out for a
(07:44):
while now, but readers from around the world commented on
the fact that, you know, some of them just didn't
even have anxiety as such, but they read the book
and very much related to that, that deep yearning. And
I feel that it's becoming louder and louder. I would
send the last eighteen to twenty four months. That yearning is.
(08:06):
It's palpable, it's everywhere. It's playing out at an individual level,
but it's playing out broadly in our society, in our politics,
in our communities. I just find it also just far
more nourishing to talk at that level, because it is
the deeper level, and it's the deepness and connection that
we that we are creating. Right, and you ask these
(08:29):
questions early on in the book, and I think they're
they're fundamental questions that I know I wrestle with and
anybody I know who has any sort of Again, I'll
use the word mental illness in a loose way, will say,
am I really mentally ill? Am I disordered? Am I defective?
Am I just weak of character and not trying? Just
taking medication? Alter? Who I am? Am I less authentic? For?
(08:52):
It is an unnatural Is it really a problem? I mean?
With me in depression, I often just wonder, like, am
I depressed? Or do I just have like what would
have been called a long time ago, a melancholy temperament?
Or could it be a very reasonable and appropriate response
to the world that we're living in at the moment?
I mean, that's the other thing, And that comes up
(09:13):
in particular with kind of conditions like a d h D,
where I often see children struggling with the toggling and
the frenetic life that they are having to now live in.
And I'm not surprised that some little brains are just
not you know, are just almost rebelling, you know. Um.
(09:35):
And that's something that I think a lot of people
with anxiety or depression, you know, you summed up really
well all of those questions like really, do I have
a problem here? Or is this is this my soul
calling out to me and going something is not right here?
And maybe this needs to be looked at more deeply,
(09:56):
and you know you mentioned the idea of that. Maybe
in the past it have been called different things. What
I find really interesting is how surprised people are to
learn that anxiety only entered the d s M, which
is the main diagnostic tool used by psychiatrists in both
the States and here in Australia. Prior to night anxiety
was something that probably you know, we described it as
(10:17):
different things, um, but it was something in some ways
I think that was part of life, and we did
very much talk about it in a in a different way. Also,
if you go to the next level, and if you
look at some of these more serious it's a diagnosable
conditions such as bipolar for instance, Bipolar has existed or
(10:39):
at least the symptoms of you have presented themselves throughout
history and in much the same percentages. So about one
point two to one point four percent of any given
population around the world throughout history of displayed these very
particular you know, sort of behaviors that correlate now to
what we call bipolar. And what I find and super
(11:01):
interesting is to just read about how they were treated
differently throughout history. They say now that shaman and sort
of kind of spiritual leaders, like really influential spiritual leaders,
tended to have bipolar because they had this incredible insight,
and political leaders, I mean Winston Churchill, particularly wartime leaders
(11:21):
tended to have bipolar, and there was an understanding that
there was sort of this incredible brilliance and insight and
ability to sort of work out work a community's way
through the quagmire of huge trauma went hand in hand
with sort of a darker side, a shadow side, but
it was considered a very important part of any culture.
(11:45):
I talked about this, as you know, all the way
through the book, and I personally found that incredibly comforting
to actually start to go back to your parable, to
feed that storyline, to feed that aspect of the beast,
that this is an incredibly important kind of quirk, evolutionary
quirk that humanity has, whether it's some anxiety depression or
(12:07):
so on, we have it there for a reason. It
exists for a reason, and that's where the beauty comes
into play, and that's sort of you know, I guess
why I've called called it. First, we make the best
beautiful first, we start to see the beauty of these conditions,
and from there we can start to modulate and refine
and use our condition and ensure that it doesn't take
(12:28):
over and ruin our lives. Right, And I think that's
such an important and subtle nuance there, which is, how
do we embrace these things as being a beautiful beast
to some extent? And how do we not glorify really
destructive conditions? Like I know I wrestled with this a
lot as an alcoholic in an addict, because there was
(12:50):
a cachet is not the right word, but it's the
one that's coming to mind. There was a cache, there
was a literary and artistic tradition and being the self
destructive artist, but it was truly self destructive? Right? How
do I twease those things apart? And what you said earlier,
I can't quite remember the quote, but like you said,
there's a lot of people say, like, is it considered
a sign of health to be well adjusted to a
(13:11):
truly warped world? I'll just read what you said in
the book, at one point you said, the interesting thing
is back in the nineteen thirties, Nausea, which was an
existentialist novel, was celebrated as a wonderful expression of the
essence of the human condition. Today. The main character, a
third year old loner who felt sickened by the realization
that he lived in a world devoid of meaning, would
be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed an antidepressant
(13:36):
or invited to undergo a course of cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah.
I mean that's how that kind of almost deviant thinking
um is treation these days, because we are deeply uncomfortable
with um thinking that goes beyond um what is considered
you know, a safe, normal, prescribed, etcetera. I think your point, though,
(13:58):
it is a very subtle distinction though, or subtle line
that you can easily cross where it can become glorified.
And with anxiety in particular, and I mentioned this in
the book, that we live in a culture where it
is really quite often to know where you cross the
line into disordered anxiety, because we do live in a
world where being busy, being frenetic is glorified. Right, This
(14:23):
is the flip side of all of that. So when
you say to someone, oh how are you, it's like,
I'm so busy. Oh gosh, I've got so much going on.
I've just got stress, you know, pouring out of me.
And that's almost a worn as a badge of honor,
even insomnia, even sort of boasting about how a little
sleep you had. And yet here I am functioning, turning
up to the board meeting. You know. Um that is
(14:44):
again it's sort of it's glorified and um, you know,
at some point we do cross a line and it's
so hard to tell a lot of people, and that's
where a lot of the self berating comes into play,
Like I should be able to cope with this, I
should be able to you know, my colleagues are only
getting four fight our of sleep at night, you know
what's wrong with me? And I think the big problem
(15:05):
is that we're not talking about it at a real level.
We slap a diagnosis onto somebody, We actually kind of
really poo poo their the questions, the deeper questions that
they're asking, and hand them some medication, and it's so
on satiating. So it's so boring, it's so unprogressive apart
from anything else. But I think we can have we
(15:27):
can have nuance, and we can have refinement around all
of this once we start talking openly. And I agree
with you, we shouldn't all become Ernest hamming away and
drink ourselves into a stupor to be able to access
our creative space and feel comfortable with our creativity or
our devins or our questioning. However, having some spirited, wild
(15:49):
thinking from time to time would be something that could
be of benefit to our culture right now. You know,
we need to have a more beautiful conversation around all
of this stuff. And I suppose that's that's the journey
that I went on, you know, seven years to write
that book, and it was very much about finding a
more beautiful, helpful, nourishing way to talk about this. Because
(16:11):
the friend said to me when I was part way
through the researching of the book, darling, why are you
doing this? Why are you writing this book? Because he
was watching me become so tortured by it all, And
I said, well, quite frankly, I am sick of being
alone in in the conversations I want to have. I
want to have more interesting conversations. I mean that was
(16:32):
the impetus to the book, and in fact, you know,
it brought me those interesting conversations I tell you what,
like this one we're having right now. Indeed, Yeah, and
I agree with you. I mean, I think the debate
becomes very often, not just in society but within the
person about medicine, right about taking medicine. And I've I've
been on this debate. You see somewhere in the book
(16:53):
that everybody who's been on these kinds of medicines at
one point or the other, tries to go off of
them or is always question genning whether they should be
on them. And I've I've been through that route multiple
times once not too long ago. I'm a big fan
of psychiatric medication because I think it saved my life
and lifted me out of a bunch of pits. I
do think that the idea that we just go to
(17:17):
a doctor and we're given this medicine and we go
take it and that's the end of it, as if
it's a cold or an infection that we want to
go away. That I think is all the things you said.
It's profoundly unsatisfying and boring and and it just for me,
it misses the point because there's something else going on here,
(17:37):
and my recovery from depression and alcoholism and all that
has been a very challenging but has probably brought nine
of the beautiful things that are in my life into
my life. Yeah. Absolutely, we don't have a discourse around
struggle and pain anymore. You know, if you haven't looked
at the way that technology has evolved, it hasn't evolved
(17:59):
to my life a grander experience. It's mostly about saving
us from discomfort, annoyances, delays, um, you know, and avoiding
struggle and pain. So we have a whole generation and
we are part of that generation because it was for
a big part of my adulthood. Um where you know,
(18:20):
it's the eradication of pain at all costs and yet
the spiritual traditions all throughout our history, we have always
had a deep appreciation of the role of struggle. It
is the thing that takes us to the next level
of our development and as you say, it brings the
most amount of beauty into into life. So that is
one of the things that really gets missed when you
(18:42):
chuck medication at a patient. I've always said, I mean,
I'm the same as you, and I'm very open about
it in the book, and I get asked this question
almost immediately when I do public talk, So I speak
to media, well, what are your thoughts on medication? And
I very openly go on and offer it um. Even
to this day, I know when I need to go
on it. Generally it's the look of terror in family
(19:05):
and friends spaces. You know, I probably get to a
point where I'm a little bit too much for the world,
and I start to pick up the signs and I
go back on my medication for a while and I pulse.
You know, I know how to manage it now. But
the only reason I can do that is because I've
always taken medication the context of psychiatric or in terms
(19:27):
of the therapeutic context, so I've done it in conjunction
with therapy. So I always see medication is getting to
you to a point where you're in a safe place,
You're in a stable place where you can start to
piece things out. But you must do the therapy at
the same time, because otherwise what's the point you don't
(19:47):
get to go to that you don't get to delve
into the struggle and the point of it and the
worth of it and the beauty of it, the philosophical
purpose of it um, and that's probably the missing peace.
Right medication is particularly good for young people, especially when
you don't have the skills, the knowledge, um, you know,
(20:08):
the wisdom to be able to have a conversation in
and around it. So it can be great for that
can be great when you've at a really hard point
and you're not going to need clarity, but it really
needs to be used so that you can then peace
out your thoughts and you can do helpful therapy. So
it's the therapy that's often missing. I have sort of
(20:48):
really lane, run of the mill depression, which is talking
about boring, Like when it comes, there's no like great,
you know, passionate sadness about it. It's just like being dead,
you know. It's just there's nothing there to feel anything about.
And so it's not as much fun for me to
come off of medicine. And I did it with the
(21:09):
help of a doctor. I was like, you know what,
I'm in a really great place in my life. I've
been on these things for a while. I know how
to take care of myself, and so I got off
all the medicines with help of a doctor. I did
everything I know that treats my depression, and at a
certain point I just went I feel like I am
rolling a five hundred pound rock up the side of
a hill every day for no good reason, and went
(21:30):
back on a small dose of the medicine, and boom,
I was like, oh, there I am again, you know.
And so I feel comfortable with where I'm at with
it because I went through that that process in a
really deep way. I would never have felt comfortable saying,
you know, I should or shouldn't be on it if
I wasn't doing everything else that I know is important
(21:51):
to my depression, my spiritual life, my meditation, my exercise,
my eating, well all that stuff. Like when I'm doing
all of that and I still feel terror able, and
I'm doing things like therapy and talking to people and
I do all that and I still feel terrible, then
I go, Okay, I'm okay with medicine in this case
because I've kind of exhausted the possibilities. Yeah, that comes
with being a little bit older as well, doesn't it.
(22:13):
I Mean, you've got to know that you can go
out on your own and exhaust a few possibilities before
you do the medication. As a young person, it's extremely terrifying,
especially when it's you know, it's your first time going
through one of the cycles, or whether it's professional mania
or combination of both. So there's not one size fits all,
and unfortunately, the medication based model works to that that
(22:36):
there's a one size fits all. One of the things
that I think always comes as a surprise is the
number of different types of medication and the number of
different therapists that the average depressed or manic person needs
to go through until they arrive at a solution. Now,
I will also argue, and I think it's something like
five therapists and seven different types of medication. You know,
(22:59):
I think it's something like that. I'd also argue that
throughout my life, I've also had to pulse that I
go through different types of therapists. They'll be appropriate for
a year, and then I then I have a gap
and then I have to go back to a different
type of therapist because I evolve. And same for medication.
You know, it's a constant dance. And when I can
(23:21):
frame it as something that is about modulation, and you
might remember this Eric from the book that I talk
about when you've got a mental condition of any type.
It's like being charged with carrying a shallow bowl of
water around for the rest of your life, and you've
got to walk carefully. You've got to get steadiness into
(23:42):
your life, because if you don't and you start to
get a bit wobbly, the water starts to slash backwards
and forwards, and it spills all over and around you,
and it bleeds through all the work that you're doing
and ruins it. And then you've got to keep going
back to source to fill up. And it's an exhausting process.
So it's a very rough, find artful thing to live with,
(24:03):
and I quite love it now. I know that sounds
really odd, but I find that in itself is quite beautiful.
Is to be able to read where I'm at and
to know when I need to go back to source,
when I need to make sure that I'm stable, when
to know that when the slashing is getting a little
bit out of hand, you know. And it was really
(24:24):
something I had to learn, and it was a conversation
I had to have um and people have been asked
me for different tricks and techniques and things that have
worked to get me to a place where I'm able
to talk like this, you know, with you for instance,
and your listeners. And one of the things I say
is actually reading. I'm working on my next book at
the moment, and it's been a three year research project.
(24:46):
First We Make the Best Beautiful took seven years of research.
And one of the terms that I've come across, which
I'm really enjoying is soul nerding nerd ing out on
the soul. And I discovered it actually when I was
research and First We The Beast Beautiful. That what really
helped was reading some of the texts and fiction non
fiction by people who had been diagnosed with a similar
(25:08):
disorder throughout history, whether it's Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath, whoever
it might be, and actually just realizing the commonality and
the thread that some of these people go on and
and that was incredible, And I now realize it's a
worthwhile pursuit because I know that some of their struggles
to maintain that shallow bowl of water, to keep it steady,
(25:29):
um informed some of their greatest work, like It's brought
some of the greatest joy to humanity. And so yeah,
it's it's that refract constant reframing that learning the richest
side of all of this, feeding the right beast, you know,
the right wolf that has brought me to this place,
you know, along with other techniques such as meditation and
(25:49):
walking and a bunch of other things I go into
in the book. But it's that real awareness, that that
kind of understanding of the meta the meta purpose behind
it all that's helped I agree on changing directions just
a little bit. I want to read something that you
write in the book because I think this is so important.
You say, one of the worst things we can do
to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious
(26:10):
about being anxious, and that learning to stop that sacle
is one of the biggest and most fundamental things that
we can do for ourselves. Yeah. Absolutely, people have tended
to really gravitate to that little line. It's only a
small section of the book, right, But what I'm trying
to say is that we can choose to do anxiety once.
(26:31):
Now what helps is to know that, yes, one of
the worst things about anxiety is that we get anxious
about being anxious, and then we get anxious about being
anxious about being anxious, and we go down this horrible spiral,
right where you know there's no clawing our way out
of it. One of the things that actually helps is
that as well is to learn and I learned this
on the journey, is that a panic attack, for instance,
(26:53):
only last minutes. So once you know that what's your
soul lurded your way to that truth, you realize that, oh, well,
I could do twenty five to thirty minutes of abject pain, right,
I can sit through it. And as we mentioned before,
you know, spiritual traditionals, traditions throughout history have talked about
(27:14):
the notion of sitting in your suffering, passing through it,
rather than trying to beat it. And that comes to
comes to fruition when you when you deal with a
panic attack, If you can sit in a really bad
moment of anxiety and just sit in it, right it
out and do it once instead of getting anxious about
the fact that you've being anxious, UM, you can actually
(27:37):
really admit things in the bud very very quickly. And
then what you do is you're not actually creating those
neural pathways, You're not strengthening these anxious neural pathways because
you're keeping it quite short and sistin. Do you know, um,
and moving onwards. And that's a really great technique. I mean,
it's as simple as that. Right. Sometimes just understanding some
(27:57):
of the brain chemistry that goes on that helps it helps,
you know, and that only comes about when we start
talking beyond the medical model and we stopped just talking
about throwing a pill at the situation, right right. I
often think with with a lot of this stuff, that
sometimes the best we can do in certain situations, particularly
when we're deep in it, the best we can do
(28:18):
is not make it worse. And that may sound trivial,
but it's not, because our capacity to make things worse
is is extraordinary. You know. We talked about on the
show a lot. It's that Buddhist parable of the second arrow,
you know, being anxious about being anxious is shooting yourself
with the second arrow, and then the third. I mean,
it just goes on and on and on and on,
(28:40):
and so I often think that, like, when it doesn't
seem like I can make it better, I'm like, well,
how can I make sure I don't make it worse? Yeah?
And it's a responsibility, don't you think, Eric, I mean,
I think that's something that um, I that's some a
bit of a part of that carrying the shallow bowl
of water. It is a responsibility. If you are somebody
who's being born with this condition or you've developed it
(29:02):
for whatever reason, it is a responsibility, and you've got
a responsibility to those around you, but also to yourself
to not make it worse, you know. And um, quite
often those of us who have some of these conditions,
we tend to be a types, don't we. You know
where we are. We're not laid back characters as a rule.
(29:24):
And so what I find is that when I'm speaking
to you know, a types, it actually really does help
to kind of add that extra layer, that notion of
a responsibility. Right, You've got a responsibility not to make
this worse fire up, you know. And I know that
that kind of that kind of mindset really works for
me when I'm in that moment, because if I'm doing
(29:45):
it for myself because I read it in a self
help book somewhere, like, it ain't going to cut through,
Like I will self indulge myself down a horrible anxiety spiral.
But if I say to myself, no, this is my role.
You know, I've got this condition and it comes with
a responsibility and first and foremost is I'm not going
to make this worse. I'm not going to add any
(30:06):
more fuel to this fire. Let's get sensible. You use
(30:47):
a few different words in the book to describe the
process of getting better or working with anxiety. One of
them is slow. Let's talk about slow. Yeah, I mean,
I think a lot of people talk about the benefits
of going slow. It's been, you know, a book. Various
people have written books, and there's a whole self help category.
(31:09):
I'm not great, it's slow. I've tended to have you know,
one speed and one speed only, which is you know,
surging forward. But you know, interestingly, I had an illness
UM which goes part and pass it with anxious conditions. UM.
I have hashymotos, which is an autoimmune disorder. And it's
incredible how many people tend to have bipolar and hashingmotos.
(31:32):
And it is a perfect disease for somebody like me. UM.
I needed to almost have my body tell me to
stop and go slow. UM. So when I got unwell,
I mean, it was a crazy exercise. As I say,
I was a mountain bike rider and I used to
do sand running races and I would run several miles
to work and back every day, and I actually was
(31:55):
forced to actually get very, very slow, and it was
one of the best things for me. And one of
the things that came out of that, and you probably
noted this in the book, is walking. I discovered the
absolute fundamental life saving benefits of walking, ice getting patient
with walking, why walk when you could run? And getting
unwell and and being forced to slow down was wonderful
(32:18):
because um, and this is the line that I use
in the book, and it's wonderful. It's walking goes at
the same pace as discerning thought. And I feel that
so much of what we suffer today is a lack
of space and time and the right environment for discerning good,
(32:38):
deep meaningful thinking. And when you walk, it actually literally
gets you into that speed, that pace where you start
to the thoughts to start to tumble in woods. Walking
has just been an absolute boon. I mentioned quite a
number of scientific studies that have been shown that connect
walking with really alleviating anxiety. The anxious part of the brain,
(33:00):
the flight or fight mechanism, is the same part of
the brain that modulates the left right motion when we're walking.
It's sort of like that part of the brain evolved
at the same point that we became upright, which is
also the same point that we developed an acute sense
of flight or fight. You know, you can understand why
all that would have developed together. And so the walking
mechanism can very much modulate and calm and almost shut
(33:23):
down the anxious part of the brain. Because it's such
an old part of the brain, it can only do
one thing at once. Various people call it the mono
tasker of you know, sort of like the fusty old
uncle that can only do one thing at once, you know,
And so when you walk, it is very very hard
to remain anxious. So yeah, that's sort of slow thing.
(33:45):
I came to very much appreciate it. And one other
thing that always makes people laugh is I hand wrote
that entire book. And again, handwriting goes at the same
pace as discerning thought. Um. Lot of people and I
don't know if you're the same, Eric, when they write books,
they often handwrite it because you can actually connect in
(34:07):
with your heart and your soul um far better than
when you're at a keyboard. And in many ways our
contemporary life goes at the opposite or way too fast
for discerning thought. So actually going back to some old
school techniques like walking in handwriting can really help. I
was definitely struck by that. I've always felt rescued by
(34:27):
the computer because my handwriting is so bad. But I
also have recognized that I'm not a good taper either,
and I find that to be a very distracting thing.
So I can at least rate by hand. No one
but me can probably read it, but I can do it.
But taping, I find myself having to stop and start,
and you know, it's just because I make so many mistakes,
(34:49):
whereas at least handwriting I kind of know how to
do it well. There's also the risk of toggling. While
you're on a computer. You're also toggling on screens. You
can check your mess buy messages, UM. You know you've
got your chat messages coming in UM, and it just
takes you into that vortex of destruction, which it sets
you up for the anxious experience like nothing else. Yes,
(35:13):
one of the things I have learned to do is
I don't do it as often as I should, but
I pretty much know how to shut all of it
off so it doesn't reach me. Like to do not
Disturb feature on my phone is like one of the
greatest things ever invented. Um, just because then nothing shows up.
People are always like, I'm trying to call you all
day and I'm like, well, oh well, yeah exactly. Let's
(35:34):
talk about another word that you use, which is space.
I think this is a really interesting concept. It's what
I've been thinking a lot about lately, this idea of space.
So tell me when when you were talking about space
in the book kind of what you mean? Yeah, well,
I found a really useful metaphor to describe my anxiety
as this sort of knotted ball of wool. And I
(35:58):
think in our culture we tend to this idea that
if we could just find the end of that knotted
ball of wool, which is all just gnarly and it's
sort of the threads of all kind of got knotted together,
and it's all fuzzy and it's the dense you know, um,
And we sort of feel that if we could just
find that end of the piece of wool and we
could just kind of, you know, pull tug at it
(36:19):
a bit, it'll all unravel into a nice, unified thread.
You know. Hopefully some drugs and some quick fixes out
there and a guru or two will get us there
and just ain't how it works, you know, And what
I try to do instead is talk about this idea
of loosening this ball of wool. That's our aim. We
loosen it up, so we kind of just massage it
(36:41):
out a bit and get some space in there. And
I really do think that that that is really important.
And you know, when you go and look at some
of the techniques that a lot of experts share in
this realm, it is about creating space. So you know
those breathing exercises where you you breathe in and you
hold your breath two, three, and then you release your
(37:02):
breath too three. You know, it's very much about trying
to find those spaces between the breaths. And it's something
that is not honored, it's not talked about, it's not practiced,
and we have to actually proactively go and do that.
It's not about finding, you know, the fix where everything
is laid out in a nice symmetrical kind of order.
(37:25):
Sometimes it's just about finding space. One thing that is
not actually I don't think it's in that chapter, but
it is somewhere in the book is another lesson that
relates to that when when I was the editor of Cosmopolitan,
we did a bunch of different stories on stress and
so on. I remember coming across the study that found
that that the most stressed and miserable person on the
(37:48):
planet where women in their forties who are lawyers, which
you know, I found interesting, having done half a law
degree myself and escaped escaped such misery in my early twenties. Particular.
You are sociologists, actually decided well, he was going to
go and research, and he wrote a piece for for
the magazine. He thought he'd go in research, well what
was it that was actually making the most happy and
(38:10):
balanced or you know, settled women in the world. So
and what he found was that most women are stressed.
They've got multiple stuff coming in that they're living. That
not a ball of wool life in so many ways.
And many of your female listeners know exactly what I'm
talking about. Um the habit all, the habit all means
do it all generation and Um. What he found is
(38:33):
that the women who were happiest were the ones that
didn't try to find perfect balance, you know, they didn't
try to find that thread and pull it out so
that everything fell into place where your yoga quotient matched
up perfectly to man of hours that you're working in
the office quotient with the number of hours you're spending
with your kids, soccer practice, whatever it might be. These
(38:53):
women weren't doing that. Instead, they were tilting. And that
word in itself, I think is just magical, this notion
if you tilt towards what matters, feed that the wolf
that matters. And I think that that plays into that
idea of space. It's not about rigidly finding you know,
um solutions and and right and wrong. It's it's tilting,
(39:13):
it's leaning, it's more nuanced, it's subtle. I like that
idea of tilting, and I think it speaks to I
always think about with balance, like is it something that
can be achieved maybe over a long period of time,
Like if you want to look at like, well, if
I look at the year, how did the year go?
You know, as far as as trying to allocate things
(39:35):
to the various parts of my life I care about.
But in real time, like you said, there's a lot
of tilting that goes on. My kid is sick. I'm
tilting that direction. We got a big work project. I'm
tilting that direction. I'm out of balance for a period
of time, and that's just the way it should be,
and that if we are intentional about what really matters
to us, those things come out in the wash if
(39:56):
we if we take the time to be intentional. But
this idea of base is really fascinating to me because
I've been thinking a lot lately about about the spiritual
idea of contraction versus expansion. And what I've really started
in notice for me is that like when I'm doing well,
there's this sense of outflowing and moving outwards and space
(40:20):
from me, not necessarily like my focus is all in
the outside world, but it feels like the movement is
this is an expansion, and when I struggle my depression,
it feels like complete contraction. And it made me think
about because one of the spiritual teachers I really has
meant a lot to me, his name is Audi A. Shanty,
has been on the show a few times and he
(40:40):
said once that ego is just a contraction, and that
hit me so strongly, And so that metaphor of contracting
versus expanding, or space versus tightness has really been away
for me. Without having to give a whole lot of
thought to like where am I, How am I? How? What?
What place am I living from right now? By just
(41:03):
checking into that feeling, Yeah, I I am very much
on the same page, Jerry. I've recently been reading a
fair bit of James Hollis. He's an American Unions psychotherapist,
and he has a wonderful phrase which is very similar.
He asks the question throughout his life will it enlarge
or contract my life? And It's become a wonderful lens
(41:28):
through which I'm able to navigate quite a lot of
my life these days. Um And I think at the
moment as well, I think it resonates, particularly in a
world where in many ways we are lacking a moral code.
It's so hard to find your true north, the true
north that will serve not just ourselves, but the broader community,
(41:49):
which is essentially at the heart of our yearning right
it has been throughout history we desire to be of
service to to help humanity. And the moment, I think
it's a really useful question to ask, you know, as
we face all the kind of climate crisis issues that
you know that that plaguing the planet is what we're
(42:11):
going to do, Is it going to be large? Or
is it going to constrict life or contract life? I
agree with you that space concept, that opening, that enlargening,
that loosening the ball of wool rather than rigidly trying
to find the end of it, you know, which invariably
makes the ball of wool even more knotted and constricted. Right. Um,
(42:32):
you know it's it's that kind of thinking that we
that is resonating right now. Yeah, I had forgotten that
quote by him, and that is one of my favorite lines.
I've I've wrote it down several times when I heard
it because it's good, such a great question, because I
do think it it helps answer for me a lot
of things that feel thorny um, and it it just
(42:53):
provides a clarity for me that you know, a lot
of other things don't. So when I when I read
that you know about space in your book, it really
spoke to me what we are at the end of
our time here. I think this is where we're going
to wrap up, which I think is a great place
to wrap up. I've had a ball talking to you.
You and I are going to talk a little bit
more in the post show conversation. We're going to talk
(43:15):
about indecision, about how when you're anxious, decisions can be
your undoing and I can speak to the same for depression.
We're gonna talk a little bit about that in some
ways to work with that in the post show. Listeners.
If you're interested and you want to get other great
things by being part of our community, go to one
you feed dot net slash support. Well, Sarah, thank you
(43:36):
so much for coming on. The book was beautifully written. Listeners.
I think you know you would absolutely love it. We'll
have links in the show notes and thanks so much.
I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, bye. Yeah.
(44:05):
If what you just heard was helpful to you, please
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Head over to one you Feed dot net slash Support.
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All throughout our history, we have always had a deep
appreciation of the role of struggle. Welcome to the one
you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance
of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out,
(00:22):
or you are what you think ring true. And yet
for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
see what we don't have instead of what we do.
We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
(00:44):
takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
(01:12):
episode is Sarah Wilson, a New York Times best selling author, journalist,
and founder of I Quit Sugar dot Com. She has
published fifteen I Quit Sugar books in forty six countries
and was ranked as one of the top two hundred
most influential authors in the world in two thousand seventeen
and two thousand eighteen. Sarah was the editor in chief
(01:34):
of Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia at twenty nine. She was also
the host of Master Chef Australia and holds a record
in the Guinness Book of World Records. I'll let you
google y. Her new book is First We Make the
Beast Beautiful, A New Journey through Anxiety. Hi, Sarah, welcome
to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Eric.
(01:55):
It is a real pleasure to have you on. We
are going to talk about your book called First we
Make the Beast Beautiful, a New Journey through Anxiety. But
before we do that, we'll start in the way that
we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's
talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there
are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
(02:16):
What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness
and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,
which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And
the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second,
and she looks up at her grandfather and she said, well, grandfather,
which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
(02:37):
So I'd like to start off by asking you what
that parawul means to you in your life and in
the work that you do well. I mean, Eric, it
plays perfectly into the title, and that the same of
my book. First, to make the beast beautiful because very much,
you know the way I've been living for so many
years with my anxiety, and I'm sure some of your
listeners would relate to this, I've been fed the story
(03:00):
that you know, what I had was a disorder. So
the medical model very much told me that it was,
you know, it was a beast that had to be fixed.
We had to get rid of it before I could
live a big, full life. And one of the things
that I explore in the book is, Um, I do
this pretty pretty early on, is that you know what
we can be both and we can be both anxious,
(03:21):
and we can also feed a better beast, you know,
the better beast, which is the more beautiful one, which
is to see anxiety as as a beautiful thing, something
that we don't have to get rid of. And you know,
as as you know, Eric, because I know you've you've
read the book, You're very well researched at all times. Um,
(03:42):
you know, it's a journey that takes us, UM, that
takes us through an understanding of anxiety through a philosophical
and spiritual lens. And I very much feed that story.
So yes, your parable speaks to me big time. And
also there's another there's another thought that occurred to me. UM.
I was a big mountain bike rider for many years.
(04:03):
I was twenty four hour mountain bike races and downhill races.
And when you're riding a bike, UM, you you know,
if you've got a gap between say two rocks, as
you're hurtling down a hill several miles an hour, UM,
you can't really steer your way there. You essentially passed
through that very narrow opening of only a few inches, say,
(04:25):
by by looking at it, by putting your full focus
on that small gap between the rocks. And I've always
had this adage, which I think is similar to your parable,
which is where the mind goes, the energy flows. And
I have lived by that with every business and you know,
sort of enterprise that I've entered into, but also with
the way I do my relationships, UM, and my also
(04:47):
my engagement with my mental disorder or my mental illness.
So I very much relate to that parable. Yeah, I
think it's wonderful, and I think the way you tied
that altogether was great. In addition to ans A, you
see early in the book that you know, you had
childhood anxiety, lots of insomnia, bulimia, and your late teens
O c D depression anxiety, and then bipolar disorder also,
(05:12):
and so those have all sort of been a part
of your path and your journey. Yeah, that's right, and
I and I also say that to me, in many ways,
it was all the same thing. It was the same itch,
it was the same buzz, it was the same There
were just different expressions of what I described as a
deeper yearning. You know, it always felt like a yearning.
(05:36):
It felt like something bigger and deeper than just an illness.
You know that that had a bunch of names and
and you know, kind of corresponding medications. And I still
to this day see that's the same kind of itch,
you know, that an internal itch that I think humanity
has had its call for eon since we got upright,
you know. Yeah, it's really interesting. It makes me think
(05:58):
of addiction. I'm a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic and
in the A A big book, there is a idea
that the disorder is related to a spiritual yearning. UM.
Carl Young often mentioned and in conversations with early a
A founders that you know, take the word alcohol spirit spiritus,
(06:20):
you know, and that the alcoholic was trying to find
that transcendence they felt cut off. I've always found that
to be very very plausible, UM. And I love that
you say that anxiety is a disconnection. UM. You call
it something else, and we'll get into what something else
is in a minute. But as I've looked at my
own depression, as I've looked at my own addiction and
(06:42):
all that, I do feel that this idea of disconnection
and reconnection is absolutely fundamental to the problem and the healing. Yeah. Absolutely,
and you've you've touched on something there as well. We
often say these various illnesses, whether it's addiction or or
a compulsive disorder or whatever it might be, as the problem,
(07:03):
but quite often they are an expression, There are a symptom,
there are coping mechanism, and I think you know, that's
something that we need to start to look at. That
the deeper issue is this disconnect and that's something that
is common and it's something whether you've got a diagnosed
disorder as such, or whether you're a human being who
(07:23):
has these lonely moments where you get home from a
loud party at night and you've got to go and
sit with yourself looking at the bathroom mirror under the
fluorescent lights, you know, and you suddenly get a sense
of what is all of this about? I mean, that
is common. And what was really interesting is that a
huge number of readers. The book's been out for a
(07:44):
while now, but readers from around the world commented on
the fact that, you know, some of them just didn't
even have anxiety as such, but they read the book
and very much related to that, that deep yearning. And
I feel that it's becoming louder and louder. I would
send the last eighteen to twenty four months. That yearning is.
(08:06):
It's palpable, it's everywhere. It's playing out at an individual level,
but it's playing out broadly in our society, in our politics,
in our communities. I just find it also just far
more nourishing to talk at that level, because it is
the deeper level, and it's the deepness and connection that
we that we are creating. Right, and you ask these
(08:29):
questions early on in the book, and I think they're
they're fundamental questions that I know I wrestle with and
anybody I know who has any sort of Again, I'll
use the word mental illness in a loose way, will say,
am I really mentally ill? Am I disordered? Am I defective?
Am I just weak of character and not trying? Just
taking medication? Alter? Who I am? Am I less authentic? For?
(08:52):
It is an unnatural Is it really a problem? I mean?
With me in depression, I often just wonder, like, am
I depressed? Or do I just have like what would
have been called a long time ago, a melancholy temperament?
Or could it be a very reasonable and appropriate response
to the world that we're living in at the moment?
I mean, that's the other thing, And that comes up
(09:13):
in particular with kind of conditions like a d h D,
where I often see children struggling with the toggling and
the frenetic life that they are having to now live in.
And I'm not surprised that some little brains are just
not you know, are just almost rebelling, you know. Um.
(09:35):
And that's something that I think a lot of people
with anxiety or depression, you know, you summed up really
well all of those questions like really, do I have
a problem here? Or is this is this my soul
calling out to me and going something is not right here?
And maybe this needs to be looked at more deeply,
(09:56):
and you know you mentioned the idea of that. Maybe
in the past it have been called different things. What
I find really interesting is how surprised people are to
learn that anxiety only entered the d s M, which
is the main diagnostic tool used by psychiatrists in both
the States and here in Australia. Prior to night anxiety
was something that probably you know, we described it as
(10:17):
different things, um, but it was something in some ways
I think that was part of life, and we did
very much talk about it in a in a different way. Also,
if you go to the next level, and if you
look at some of these more serious it's a diagnosable
conditions such as bipolar for instance, Bipolar has existed or
(10:39):
at least the symptoms of you have presented themselves throughout
history and in much the same percentages. So about one
point two to one point four percent of any given
population around the world throughout history of displayed these very
particular you know, sort of behaviors that correlate now to
what we call bipolar. And what I find and super
(11:01):
interesting is to just read about how they were treated
differently throughout history. They say now that shaman and sort
of kind of spiritual leaders, like really influential spiritual leaders,
tended to have bipolar because they had this incredible insight,
and political leaders, I mean Winston Churchill, particularly wartime leaders
(11:21):
tended to have bipolar, and there was an understanding that
there was sort of this incredible brilliance and insight and
ability to sort of work out work a community's way
through the quagmire of huge trauma went hand in hand
with sort of a darker side, a shadow side, but
it was considered a very important part of any culture.
(11:45):
I talked about this, as you know, all the way
through the book, and I personally found that incredibly comforting
to actually start to go back to your parable, to
feed that storyline, to feed that aspect of the beast,
that this is an incredibly important kind of quirk, evolutionary
quirk that humanity has, whether it's some anxiety depression or
(12:07):
so on, we have it there for a reason. It
exists for a reason, and that's where the beauty comes
into play, and that's sort of you know, I guess
why I've called called it. First, we make the best
beautiful first, we start to see the beauty of these conditions,
and from there we can start to modulate and refine
and use our condition and ensure that it doesn't take
(12:28):
over and ruin our lives. Right, And I think that's
such an important and subtle nuance there, which is, how
do we embrace these things as being a beautiful beast
to some extent? And how do we not glorify really
destructive conditions? Like I know I wrestled with this a
lot as an alcoholic in an addict, because there was
(12:50):
a cachet is not the right word, but it's the
one that's coming to mind. There was a cache, there
was a literary and artistic tradition and being the self
destructive artist, but it was truly self destructive? Right? How
do I twease those things apart? And what you said earlier,
I can't quite remember the quote, but like you said,
there's a lot of people say, like, is it considered
a sign of health to be well adjusted to a
(13:11):
truly warped world? I'll just read what you said in
the book, at one point you said, the interesting thing
is back in the nineteen thirties, Nausea, which was an
existentialist novel, was celebrated as a wonderful expression of the
essence of the human condition. Today. The main character, a
third year old loner who felt sickened by the realization
that he lived in a world devoid of meaning, would
be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed an antidepressant
(13:36):
or invited to undergo a course of cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah.
I mean that's how that kind of almost deviant thinking
um is treation these days, because we are deeply uncomfortable
with um thinking that goes beyond um what is considered
you know, a safe, normal, prescribed, etcetera. I think your point, though,
(13:58):
it is a very subtle distinction though, or subtle line
that you can easily cross where it can become glorified.
And with anxiety in particular, and I mentioned this in
the book, that we live in a culture where it
is really quite often to know where you cross the
line into disordered anxiety, because we do live in a
world where being busy, being frenetic is glorified. Right, This
(14:23):
is the flip side of all of that. So when
you say to someone, oh how are you, it's like,
I'm so busy. Oh gosh, I've got so much going on.
I've just got stress, you know, pouring out of me.
And that's almost a worn as a badge of honor,
even insomnia, even sort of boasting about how a little
sleep you had. And yet here I am functioning, turning
up to the board meeting. You know. Um that is
(14:44):
again it's sort of it's glorified and um, you know,
at some point we do cross a line and it's
so hard to tell a lot of people, and that's
where a lot of the self berating comes into play,
Like I should be able to cope with this, I
should be able to you know, my colleagues are only
getting four fight our of sleep at night, you know
what's wrong with me? And I think the big problem
(15:05):
is that we're not talking about it at a real level.
We slap a diagnosis onto somebody, We actually kind of
really poo poo their the questions, the deeper questions that
they're asking, and hand them some medication, and it's so
on satiating. So it's so boring, it's so unprogressive apart
from anything else. But I think we can have we
(15:27):
can have nuance, and we can have refinement around all
of this once we start talking openly. And I agree
with you, we shouldn't all become Ernest hamming away and
drink ourselves into a stupor to be able to access
our creative space and feel comfortable with our creativity or
our devins or our questioning. However, having some spirited, wild
(15:49):
thinking from time to time would be something that could
be of benefit to our culture right now. You know,
we need to have a more beautiful conversation around all
of this stuff. And I suppose that's that's the journey
that I went on, you know, seven years to write
that book, and it was very much about finding a
more beautiful, helpful, nourishing way to talk about this. Because
(16:11):
the friend said to me when I was part way
through the researching of the book, darling, why are you
doing this? Why are you writing this book? Because he
was watching me become so tortured by it all, And
I said, well, quite frankly, I am sick of being
alone in in the conversations I want to have. I
want to have more interesting conversations. I mean that was
(16:32):
the impetus to the book, and in fact, you know,
it brought me those interesting conversations I tell you what,
like this one we're having right now. Indeed, Yeah, and
I agree with you. I mean, I think the debate
becomes very often, not just in society but within the
person about medicine, right about taking medicine. And I've I've
been on this debate. You see somewhere in the book
(16:53):
that everybody who's been on these kinds of medicines at
one point or the other, tries to go off of
them or is always question genning whether they should be
on them. And I've I've been through that route multiple
times once not too long ago. I'm a big fan
of psychiatric medication because I think it saved my life
and lifted me out of a bunch of pits. I
do think that the idea that we just go to
(17:17):
a doctor and we're given this medicine and we go
take it and that's the end of it, as if
it's a cold or an infection that we want to
go away. That I think is all the things you said.
It's profoundly unsatisfying and boring and and it just for me,
it misses the point because there's something else going on here,
(17:37):
and my recovery from depression and alcoholism and all that
has been a very challenging but has probably brought nine
of the beautiful things that are in my life into
my life. Yeah. Absolutely, we don't have a discourse around
struggle and pain anymore. You know, if you haven't looked
at the way that technology has evolved, it hasn't evolved
(17:59):
to my life a grander experience. It's mostly about saving
us from discomfort, annoyances, delays, um, you know, and avoiding
struggle and pain. So we have a whole generation and
we are part of that generation because it was for
a big part of my adulthood. Um where you know,
(18:20):
it's the eradication of pain at all costs and yet
the spiritual traditions all throughout our history, we have always
had a deep appreciation of the role of struggle. It
is the thing that takes us to the next level
of our development and as you say, it brings the
most amount of beauty into into life. So that is
one of the things that really gets missed when you
(18:42):
chuck medication at a patient. I've always said, I mean,
I'm the same as you, and I'm very open about
it in the book, and I get asked this question
almost immediately when I do public talk, So I speak
to media, well, what are your thoughts on medication? And
I very openly go on and offer it um. Even
to this day, I know when I need to go
on it. Generally it's the look of terror in family
(19:05):
and friends spaces. You know, I probably get to a
point where I'm a little bit too much for the world,
and I start to pick up the signs and I
go back on my medication for a while and I pulse.
You know, I know how to manage it now. But
the only reason I can do that is because I've
always taken medication the context of psychiatric or in terms
(19:27):
of the therapeutic context, so I've done it in conjunction
with therapy. So I always see medication is getting to
you to a point where you're in a safe place,
You're in a stable place where you can start to
piece things out. But you must do the therapy at
the same time, because otherwise what's the point you don't
(19:47):
get to go to that you don't get to delve
into the struggle and the point of it and the
worth of it and the beauty of it, the philosophical
purpose of it um, and that's probably the missing peace.
Right medication is particularly good for young people, especially when
you don't have the skills, the knowledge, um, you know,
(20:08):
the wisdom to be able to have a conversation in
and around it. So it can be great for that
can be great when you've at a really hard point
and you're not going to need clarity, but it really
needs to be used so that you can then peace
out your thoughts and you can do helpful therapy. So
it's the therapy that's often missing. I have sort of
(20:48):
really lane, run of the mill depression, which is talking
about boring, Like when it comes, there's no like great,
you know, passionate sadness about it. It's just like being dead,
you know. It's just there's nothing there to feel anything about.
And so it's not as much fun for me to
come off of medicine. And I did it with the
(21:09):
help of a doctor. I was like, you know what,
I'm in a really great place in my life. I've
been on these things for a while. I know how
to take care of myself, and so I got off
all the medicines with help of a doctor. I did
everything I know that treats my depression, and at a
certain point I just went I feel like I am
rolling a five hundred pound rock up the side of
a hill every day for no good reason, and went
(21:30):
back on a small dose of the medicine, and boom,
I was like, oh, there I am again, you know.
And so I feel comfortable with where I'm at with
it because I went through that that process in a
really deep way. I would never have felt comfortable saying,
you know, I should or shouldn't be on it if
I wasn't doing everything else that I know is important
(21:51):
to my depression, my spiritual life, my meditation, my exercise,
my eating, well all that stuff. Like when I'm doing
all of that and I still feel terror able, and
I'm doing things like therapy and talking to people and
I do all that and I still feel terrible, then
I go, Okay, I'm okay with medicine in this case
because I've kind of exhausted the possibilities. Yeah, that comes
with being a little bit older as well, doesn't it.
(22:13):
I Mean, you've got to know that you can go
out on your own and exhaust a few possibilities before
you do the medication. As a young person, it's extremely terrifying,
especially when it's you know, it's your first time going
through one of the cycles, or whether it's professional mania
or combination of both. So there's not one size fits all,
and unfortunately, the medication based model works to that that
(22:36):
there's a one size fits all. One of the things
that I think always comes as a surprise is the
number of different types of medication and the number of
different therapists that the average depressed or manic person needs
to go through until they arrive at a solution. Now,
I will also argue, and I think it's something like
five therapists and seven different types of medication. You know,
(22:59):
I think it's something like that. I'd also argue that
throughout my life, I've also had to pulse that I
go through different types of therapists. They'll be appropriate for
a year, and then I then I have a gap
and then I have to go back to a different
type of therapist because I evolve. And same for medication.
You know, it's a constant dance. And when I can
(23:21):
frame it as something that is about modulation, and you
might remember this Eric from the book that I talk
about when you've got a mental condition of any type.
It's like being charged with carrying a shallow bowl of
water around for the rest of your life, and you've
got to walk carefully. You've got to get steadiness into
(23:42):
your life, because if you don't and you start to
get a bit wobbly, the water starts to slash backwards
and forwards, and it spills all over and around you,
and it bleeds through all the work that you're doing
and ruins it. And then you've got to keep going
back to source to fill up. And it's an exhausting process.
So it's a very rough, find artful thing to live with,
(24:03):
and I quite love it now. I know that sounds
really odd, but I find that in itself is quite beautiful.
Is to be able to read where I'm at and
to know when I need to go back to source,
when I need to make sure that I'm stable, when
to know that when the slashing is getting a little
bit out of hand, you know. And it was really
(24:24):
something I had to learn, and it was a conversation
I had to have um and people have been asked
me for different tricks and techniques and things that have
worked to get me to a place where I'm able
to talk like this, you know, with you for instance,
and your listeners. And one of the things I say
is actually reading. I'm working on my next book at
the moment, and it's been a three year research project.
(24:46):
First We Make the Best Beautiful took seven years of research.
And one of the terms that I've come across, which
I'm really enjoying is soul nerding nerd ing out on
the soul. And I discovered it actually when I was
research and First We The Beast Beautiful. That what really
helped was reading some of the texts and fiction non
fiction by people who had been diagnosed with a similar
(25:08):
disorder throughout history, whether it's Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath, whoever
it might be, and actually just realizing the commonality and
the thread that some of these people go on and
and that was incredible, And I now realize it's a
worthwhile pursuit because I know that some of their struggles
to maintain that shallow bowl of water, to keep it steady,
(25:29):
um informed some of their greatest work, like It's brought
some of the greatest joy to humanity. And so yeah,
it's it's that refract constant reframing that learning the richest
side of all of this, feeding the right beast, you know,
the right wolf that has brought me to this place,
you know, along with other techniques such as meditation and
(25:49):
walking and a bunch of other things I go into
in the book. But it's that real awareness, that that
kind of understanding of the meta the meta purpose behind
it all that's helped I agree on changing directions just
a little bit. I want to read something that you
write in the book because I think this is so important.
You say, one of the worst things we can do
to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious
(26:10):
about being anxious, and that learning to stop that sacle
is one of the biggest and most fundamental things that
we can do for ourselves. Yeah. Absolutely, people have tended
to really gravitate to that little line. It's only a
small section of the book, right, But what I'm trying
to say is that we can choose to do anxiety once.
(26:31):
Now what helps is to know that, yes, one of
the worst things about anxiety is that we get anxious
about being anxious, and then we get anxious about being
anxious about being anxious, and we go down this horrible spiral,
right where you know there's no clawing our way out
of it. One of the things that actually helps is
that as well is to learn and I learned this
on the journey, is that a panic attack, for instance,
(26:53):
only last minutes. So once you know that what's your
soul lurded your way to that truth, you realize that, oh, well,
I could do twenty five to thirty minutes of abject pain, right,
I can sit through it. And as we mentioned before,
you know, spiritual traditionals, traditions throughout history have talked about
(27:14):
the notion of sitting in your suffering, passing through it,
rather than trying to beat it. And that comes to
comes to fruition when you when you deal with a
panic attack, If you can sit in a really bad
moment of anxiety and just sit in it, right it
out and do it once instead of getting anxious about
the fact that you've being anxious, UM, you can actually
(27:37):
really admit things in the bud very very quickly. And
then what you do is you're not actually creating those
neural pathways, You're not strengthening these anxious neural pathways because
you're keeping it quite short and sistin. Do you know, um,
and moving onwards. And that's a really great technique. I mean,
it's as simple as that. Right. Sometimes just understanding some
(27:57):
of the brain chemistry that goes on that helps it helps,
you know, and that only comes about when we start
talking beyond the medical model and we stopped just talking
about throwing a pill at the situation, right right. I
often think with with a lot of this stuff, that
sometimes the best we can do in certain situations, particularly
when we're deep in it, the best we can do
(28:18):
is not make it worse. And that may sound trivial,
but it's not, because our capacity to make things worse
is is extraordinary. You know. We talked about on the
show a lot. It's that Buddhist parable of the second arrow,
you know, being anxious about being anxious is shooting yourself
with the second arrow, and then the third. I mean,
it just goes on and on and on and on,
(28:40):
and so I often think that, like, when it doesn't
seem like I can make it better, I'm like, well,
how can I make sure I don't make it worse? Yeah?
And it's a responsibility, don't you think, Eric, I mean,
I think that's something that um, I that's some a
bit of a part of that carrying the shallow bowl
of water. It is a responsibility. If you are somebody
who's being born with this condition or you've developed it
(29:02):
for whatever reason, it is a responsibility, and you've got
a responsibility to those around you, but also to yourself
to not make it worse, you know. And um, quite
often those of us who have some of these conditions,
we tend to be a types, don't we. You know
where we are. We're not laid back characters as a rule.
(29:24):
And so what I find is that when I'm speaking
to you know, a types, it actually really does help
to kind of add that extra layer, that notion of
a responsibility. Right, You've got a responsibility not to make
this worse fire up, you know. And I know that
that kind of that kind of mindset really works for
me when I'm in that moment, because if I'm doing
(29:45):
it for myself because I read it in a self
help book somewhere, like, it ain't going to cut through,
Like I will self indulge myself down a horrible anxiety spiral.
But if I say to myself, no, this is my role.
You know, I've got this condition and it comes with
a responsibility and first and foremost is I'm not going
to make this worse. I'm not going to add any
(30:06):
more fuel to this fire. Let's get sensible. You use
(30:47):
a few different words in the book to describe the
process of getting better or working with anxiety. One of
them is slow. Let's talk about slow. Yeah, I mean,
I think a lot of people talk about the benefits
of going slow. It's been, you know, a book. Various
people have written books, and there's a whole self help category.
(31:09):
I'm not great, it's slow. I've tended to have you know,
one speed and one speed only, which is you know,
surging forward. But you know, interestingly, I had an illness
UM which goes part and pass it with anxious conditions. UM.
I have hashymotos, which is an autoimmune disorder. And it's
incredible how many people tend to have bipolar and hashingmotos.
(31:32):
And it is a perfect disease for somebody like me. UM.
I needed to almost have my body tell me to
stop and go slow. UM. So when I got unwell,
I mean, it was a crazy exercise. As I say,
I was a mountain bike rider and I used to
do sand running races and I would run several miles
to work and back every day, and I actually was
(31:55):
forced to actually get very, very slow, and it was
one of the best things for me. And one of
the things that came out of that, and you probably
noted this in the book, is walking. I discovered the
absolute fundamental life saving benefits of walking, ice getting patient
with walking, why walk when you could run? And getting
unwell and and being forced to slow down was wonderful
(32:18):
because um, and this is the line that I use
in the book, and it's wonderful. It's walking goes at
the same pace as discerning thought. And I feel that
so much of what we suffer today is a lack
of space and time and the right environment for discerning good,
(32:38):
deep meaningful thinking. And when you walk, it actually literally
gets you into that speed, that pace where you start
to the thoughts to start to tumble in woods. Walking
has just been an absolute boon. I mentioned quite a
number of scientific studies that have been shown that connect
walking with really alleviating anxiety. The anxious part of the brain,
(33:00):
the flight or fight mechanism, is the same part of
the brain that modulates the left right motion when we're walking.
It's sort of like that part of the brain evolved
at the same point that we became upright, which is
also the same point that we developed an acute sense
of flight or fight. You know, you can understand why
all that would have developed together. And so the walking
mechanism can very much modulate and calm and almost shut
(33:23):
down the anxious part of the brain. Because it's such
an old part of the brain, it can only do
one thing at once. Various people call it the mono
tasker of you know, sort of like the fusty old
uncle that can only do one thing at once, you know,
And so when you walk, it is very very hard
to remain anxious. So yeah, that's sort of slow thing.
(33:45):
I came to very much appreciate it. And one other
thing that always makes people laugh is I hand wrote
that entire book. And again, handwriting goes at the same
pace as discerning thought. Um. Lot of people and I
don't know if you're the same, Eric, when they write books,
they often handwrite it because you can actually connect in
(34:07):
with your heart and your soul um far better than
when you're at a keyboard. And in many ways our
contemporary life goes at the opposite or way too fast
for discerning thought. So actually going back to some old
school techniques like walking in handwriting can really help. I
was definitely struck by that. I've always felt rescued by
(34:27):
the computer because my handwriting is so bad. But I
also have recognized that I'm not a good taper either,
and I find that to be a very distracting thing.
So I can at least rate by hand. No one
but me can probably read it, but I can do it.
But taping, I find myself having to stop and start,
and you know, it's just because I make so many mistakes,
(34:49):
whereas at least handwriting I kind of know how to
do it well. There's also the risk of toggling. While
you're on a computer. You're also toggling on screens. You
can check your mess buy messages, UM. You know you've
got your chat messages coming in UM, and it just
takes you into that vortex of destruction, which it sets
you up for the anxious experience like nothing else. Yes,
(35:13):
one of the things I have learned to do is
I don't do it as often as I should, but
I pretty much know how to shut all of it
off so it doesn't reach me. Like to do not
Disturb feature on my phone is like one of the
greatest things ever invented. Um, just because then nothing shows up.
People are always like, I'm trying to call you all
day and I'm like, well, oh well, yeah exactly. Let's
(35:34):
talk about another word that you use, which is space.
I think this is a really interesting concept. It's what
I've been thinking a lot about lately, this idea of space.
So tell me when when you were talking about space
in the book kind of what you mean? Yeah, well,
I found a really useful metaphor to describe my anxiety
as this sort of knotted ball of wool. And I
(35:58):
think in our culture we tend to this idea that
if we could just find the end of that knotted
ball of wool, which is all just gnarly and it's
sort of the threads of all kind of got knotted together,
and it's all fuzzy and it's the dense you know, um,
And we sort of feel that if we could just
find that end of the piece of wool and we
could just kind of, you know, pull tug at it
(36:19):
a bit, it'll all unravel into a nice, unified thread.
You know. Hopefully some drugs and some quick fixes out
there and a guru or two will get us there
and just ain't how it works, you know, And what
I try to do instead is talk about this idea
of loosening this ball of wool. That's our aim. We
loosen it up, so we kind of just massage it
(36:41):
out a bit and get some space in there. And
I really do think that that that is really important.
And you know, when you go and look at some
of the techniques that a lot of experts share in
this realm, it is about creating space. So you know
those breathing exercises where you you breathe in and you
hold your breath two, three, and then you release your
(37:02):
breath too three. You know, it's very much about trying
to find those spaces between the breaths. And it's something
that is not honored, it's not talked about, it's not practiced,
and we have to actually proactively go and do that.
It's not about finding, you know, the fix where everything
is laid out in a nice symmetrical kind of order.
(37:25):
Sometimes it's just about finding space. One thing that is
not actually I don't think it's in that chapter, but
it is somewhere in the book is another lesson that
relates to that when when I was the editor of Cosmopolitan,
we did a bunch of different stories on stress and
so on. I remember coming across the study that found
that that the most stressed and miserable person on the
(37:48):
planet where women in their forties who are lawyers, which
you know, I found interesting, having done half a law
degree myself and escaped escaped such misery in my early twenties. Particular.
You are sociologists, actually decided well, he was going to
go and research, and he wrote a piece for for
the magazine. He thought he'd go in research, well what
was it that was actually making the most happy and
(38:10):
balanced or you know, settled women in the world. So
and what he found was that most women are stressed.
They've got multiple stuff coming in that they're living. That
not a ball of wool life in so many ways.
And many of your female listeners know exactly what I'm
talking about. Um the habit all, the habit all means
do it all generation and Um. What he found is
(38:33):
that the women who were happiest were the ones that
didn't try to find perfect balance, you know, they didn't
try to find that thread and pull it out so
that everything fell into place where your yoga quotient matched
up perfectly to man of hours that you're working in
the office quotient with the number of hours you're spending
with your kids, soccer practice, whatever it might be. These
(38:53):
women weren't doing that. Instead, they were tilting. And that
word in itself, I think is just magical, this notion
if you tilt towards what matters, feed that the wolf
that matters. And I think that that plays into that
idea of space. It's not about rigidly finding you know,
um solutions and and right and wrong. It's it's tilting,
(39:13):
it's leaning, it's more nuanced, it's subtle. I like that
idea of tilting, and I think it speaks to I
always think about with balance, like is it something that
can be achieved maybe over a long period of time,
Like if you want to look at like, well, if
I look at the year, how did the year go?
You know, as far as as trying to allocate things
(39:35):
to the various parts of my life I care about.
But in real time, like you said, there's a lot
of tilting that goes on. My kid is sick. I'm
tilting that direction. We got a big work project. I'm
tilting that direction. I'm out of balance for a period
of time, and that's just the way it should be,
and that if we are intentional about what really matters
to us, those things come out in the wash if
(39:56):
we if we take the time to be intentional. But
this idea of base is really fascinating to me because
I've been thinking a lot lately about about the spiritual
idea of contraction versus expansion. And what I've really started
in notice for me is that like when I'm doing well,
there's this sense of outflowing and moving outwards and space
(40:20):
from me, not necessarily like my focus is all in
the outside world, but it feels like the movement is
this is an expansion, and when I struggle my depression,
it feels like complete contraction. And it made me think
about because one of the spiritual teachers I really has
meant a lot to me, his name is Audi A. Shanty,
has been on the show a few times and he
(40:40):
said once that ego is just a contraction, and that
hit me so strongly, And so that metaphor of contracting
versus expanding, or space versus tightness has really been away
for me. Without having to give a whole lot of
thought to like where am I, How am I? How? What?
What place am I living from right now? By just
(41:03):
checking into that feeling, Yeah, I I am very much
on the same page, Jerry. I've recently been reading a
fair bit of James Hollis. He's an American Unions psychotherapist,
and he has a wonderful phrase which is very similar.
He asks the question throughout his life will it enlarge
or contract my life? And It's become a wonderful lens
(41:28):
through which I'm able to navigate quite a lot of
my life these days. Um And I think at the
moment as well, I think it resonates, particularly in a
world where in many ways we are lacking a moral code.
It's so hard to find your true north, the true
north that will serve not just ourselves, but the broader community,
(41:49):
which is essentially at the heart of our yearning right
it has been throughout history we desire to be of
service to to help humanity. And the moment, I think
it's a really useful question to ask, you know, as
we face all the kind of climate crisis issues that
you know that that plaguing the planet is what we're
(42:11):
going to do, Is it going to be large? Or
is it going to constrict life or contract life? I
agree with you that space concept, that opening, that enlargening,
that loosening the ball of wool rather than rigidly trying
to find the end of it, you know, which invariably
makes the ball of wool even more knotted and constricted. Right. Um,
(42:32):
you know it's it's that kind of thinking that we
that is resonating right now. Yeah, I had forgotten that
quote by him, and that is one of my favorite lines.
I've I've wrote it down several times when I heard
it because it's good, such a great question, because I
do think it it helps answer for me a lot
of things that feel thorny um, and it it just
(42:53):
provides a clarity for me that you know, a lot
of other things don't. So when I when I read
that you know about space in your book, it really
spoke to me what we are at the end of
our time here. I think this is where we're going
to wrap up, which I think is a great place
to wrap up. I've had a ball talking to you.
You and I are going to talk a little bit
more in the post show conversation. We're going to talk
(43:15):
about indecision, about how when you're anxious, decisions can be
your undoing and I can speak to the same for depression.
We're gonna talk a little bit about that in some
ways to work with that in the post show. Listeners.
If you're interested and you want to get other great
things by being part of our community, go to one
you feed dot net slash support. Well, Sarah, thank you
(43:36):
so much for coming on. The book was beautifully written. Listeners.
I think you know you would absolutely love it. We'll
have links in the show notes and thanks so much.
I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, bye. Yeah.
(44:05):
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