’Tis the Season to Be Melancholy – Enduring a Bout of Christmas Depression

Pic: Mike McCune

I have been suffering Christmas depression since I first became an adult. It was a long time coming because if truth be told my parents were as reluctant as I and my four sisters to give up the old rituals – we still put out our Santa sacks even in our late teens, although by that stage they were thankfully left under the tree rather than at the end of our beds. Perhaps it was after the last year of the Santa sacks that the Christmas depression first showed itself?

Here, for the record, are the symptoms: weeping uncontrollably at one’s desk; regretting the entire life course one has taken; and a pall covering everything as if one is living in a fake, Truman-style world that can offer nothing that is authentic or remotely interesting.

And perhaps the most clichéd of all, wishing fervently that Christmas could take place every second year instead of annually. Wouldn’t that be more sensible?

These kinds of seasonal depressions follow their sufferers around like drones. They seem to find us. We do not choose them. Anyone who, like me, suffers anxiety and depression throughout the year is a prime candidate.

Each year the scale of the attack is completely unpredictable. One year, swept up in a pre-Christmas deadline frenzy, the whole shemozzle completely passes me by; another year there might be faint twinges a few days before Christmas, while the following year I will be swamped by dark ruminations as soon as December hits its stride.

More than anything, their weapon of choice is the past. Reels and reels of negatives (the word having two meanings here) of all that is irretrievably lost. By a certain age we have all sustained many losses and regrets, but at Christmas some regrets seem to be more equal than others.

Namely not having a family of one’s own. Reading stories about families is a big no-no for me at this time. In fact you would think Monica Dux’s Things I Didn’t Expect (When I Was Expecting) would be a fine book for a single, child-free woman to read around Christmas, with its tales of collapsing vaginas, stigmatic nipples and psychopathic mothers’ groups. You’d expect someone like me to be sighing with relief and thanking Fortune I’d somehow wiggled my way out of that. And on one level I am. As a feminist, I certainly don’t feel a woman’s worth and identity depend on her status as a mother. It is the whole family orientation of Christmas that sinks the (Santa) boot in. When I found myself envying Dux despite (or perhaps because of) what she’d been through, I knew it was going to be a bad bout this year.

You’d also think getting into the thick of the shopping scrum would help, and it can for short periods. But if you stay too long you’ll be hit by a percolation of hissing irritation that threatens to bubble over into a bad case of mall rage. All these people with lines of children attached to them like charm bracelets, throwing money around like they’ve just had a big win at the races, are not fun or edifying for a single person to witness for long periods.

And if you’ve made a decision not to buy a lot of presents at Christmas, as I have this year, that leaves you without an important compensation for the Christmas frenzy – spending money on other people. Research suggests that no matter how much or how little you spend, it actually feels better to buy for others than to buy for yourself. As someone with ten nephews and nieces I’ve given up trying to pick a present for each one of them at Christmas; and while that saves me time and effort and helps the planet a tiny bit, it also robs me of a chance to leaven my Christmas depression with a dose of therapeutic giving.

Just because other people go through similar torment doesn’t mean you get to join a fellowship of sufferers. This is because there is something deeply personal about how we celebrate (or don’t celebrate) Christmas, demonstrating how individualistic our society has become. At this time, whether or not we are Christian, we are forced to withdraw from the social world and into the bosom of our family networks. And whether those connections are firm, fragile or merely frazzled, we are stuck with them like never before. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ we ask each other. We rarely say, for example, ‘Can I catch up with you on Christmas Day?’

This Christmas, I will play my usual role as black sheep in the Christmas nativity of my birth family. And I will be grateful to do so. I know a friend who is spending Christmas Day alone, and another friend who hosts a small gathering of fellow Christmas ‘orphans’ each year. I have decided not to extend an invitation to these friends, simply because I don’t want to impose the tricky-at-best family dynamics on them.

This reluctance to meddle with tradition also suggests that my own Christmas depression has become for me an inextricable part of the annual ritual, along with feeling left out because I can’t join my champagne-quaffing sisters on Christmas morning (dietary reasons), eating a kilo of roasted cashews before lunch to compensate, goading my father into political  arguments by making extreme left-wing comments while he tries to eat his Christmas pudding, and falling asleep in the spare bedroom at 5 pm precisely.

Despite the above, wishing all my blog readers a safe, peaceful and stress-free festive season.

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Secular Churches: A Bibliophile's Paean to the Library

Photo: Glyn Lowe

When psychotherapist Thomas Mann writes about the need to incorporate soul into daily life, he distinguishes soul from spirit. The latter is transcendent, visionary, concerned with going forward; soul, in contrast, is grounded: concerned with the past, with memory, with the earth. Libraries nurture both my soul and my spirit. They are about the familiar, the comfortable, the known, but also the unexpected leap of intellectual and literary adventure, and the very anticipation of those adventures.

Every time I enter my local library I relive one of my most pleasant early memories: my father taking me to Malvern Library in High Street when I was about four. Surely I must have accompanied one or other of my parents to the library before this, but on this memorable occasion he signed me up as a borrower with her very own library card. I have never lost my reverence for libraries since.

Church was another early experience of soul. It held a quantum of familiar faces, school mates and their parents, choir members, a community of sorts; but it dictated the hushing of the voice, the quelling of the body’s tongue and momentum while grumpy Father Riley droned on to a God who was depicted on the cross as, well, dead. Every five minutes I turned around and checked the clock that hung over the back door. Pacing myself through each segment, the lion’s share endured once communion swung into gear. That was always a change at least, watching people shuffling obediently up to the alter like prisoners queuing for lunch.

The library was different. Just as hushed, just as respectful, but this time there was a point to the quiet, enabling a very different kind of communion with an equally absent presence. It was the sound of a hundred minds encountering the bright imagination of an author via the words on the page. A hundred small adventures, a hundred serendipitous discoveries, a hundred love affairs with the written word being carried on silently in this homely, local place that nevertheless offered many windows to the wider world, like the magic windows of Play School.

But discovering books was as sensual as it was abstracted. When you pulled the covers of the books back, their spines cracked and the opaque plastic on the covers broke free with a squishing noise. When you took the books to be checked out, the librarian pressed each one against a grey metal machine that recorded the date of issue. The deep clunky sound this made expressed the most complete satisfaction, and seemed to deliver each book to me alone with a unique authority.

I soon became addicted to books. This was my weakness and my strength. I did not always attend to the present book closely enough; I was thinking of the next one. While we were still at the house in Manning Road, after a visit to the library I would sit on the step between the kitchen and the tiny sunroom and go through my stash. It had to be at least five at a time. I swallowed them like Tic Tacs. At first they were picture books but it didn’t take me long to graduate to the proper books with chapters that belonged on the freestanding shelving in the middle of the children’s book section, a large sunny room with child-sized reading benches set at the perfect angle for comfortable perusing.

It was the serendipitous find I craved. I still go into nostalgic reveries when I recall some of these discoveries. Most were English, probably some American, very few Australian.

I was especially drawn to books that had a poignant, nostalgic edge or tipped over into the darkness of the occult. Charley by Joan G. Robinson (now called The Girl Who Ran Away) is the wistful tale of a runaway who moves into a chicken coop near the aunt she is convinced does not want her, and gets to know the local community while playing a series of fictional roles. A Candle in Her Room was the darkest of Ruth M. Arthur’s haunting tales. It’s about several generations of an ancient Welsh family, all haunted by an evil doll called Dido; the spare illustrations by Margery Gill were as important as the text. It’s out of print now, yet so sought after that hardback copies in good condition sell online for as much as two hundred and sixty five dollars.

It’s heartening – and very soulful in Thomas Mann’s sense – to see the way the internet links older readers like me with the past by making new and old editions of these books available, offering Goodreads reviews and helping to jog our memories on titles and author names, with a little help from Google. Just yesterday I tracked down the name of another book I had loved, All About the Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren.

It's no surprise that there's now a forum where members can post requests for information about books they revered as children but have forgotten the titles of. This is perfect for those books whose titles and authors have fled from the memory forever, while the stories themselves, with their themes of loss and longing, linger in the heart.

I remember being transfixed by the tale of a young girl who accidentally left her favourite doll in the park one sunny afternoon. When she realised what she’d done she and her nurse rushed back to search for it, but the doll was nowhere to be found. The months passed and the seasons turned, and yet the little girl always kept a lookout. The more time that passed, the more beautiful the doll became in the child’s mind, the grander her outfit, the brighter her eyes, the lusher her hair, until she was the very model of the perfect doll.

And then one day, in the middle of a heavy winter, on a familiar walk in the park, the dog nosed out something under the snow – a wrecked, sorry thing that might once have been a doll, its clothes in rags, its shoes gone, wisps of hair and perhaps an eye missing. It was the little girl’s doll. Could there be a harsher lesson than this, for both the heroine and the reader, about the dangers of excessive imagination and the hard thud of reality (if anyone by chance has any knowledge of this book please let me know)? And doesn't this story resonate, making us think of old flames whose recent photos convey a distressing physical deterioration compared with the idealised image the mind has created.

The enduring charm of the library

Libraries are unique environments because they represent the communal spirit that made so much social progress possible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but is now under threat. If council-funded libraries had never been thought of up to now, and someone suggested them, the idea would be labelled bolshie, radical and socialist by the loony right. Libraries represent what we can achieve when we pool our resources for a common good.

When the conservative Coalition fought its successful election campaign in the state of Victoria in 2010, it failed to mention that it planned to slash funding to local libraries. In 2011 councils were left reeling when they were told that recurrent funding for public library operating costs would be cut by up to $7.1 million over four years. There was so much outcry that the government quickly backtracked, providing assurances that the funding would be maintained while it undertook a review of Victorian library services and funding arrangements; the fight is not over yet. (In the meantime it took an axe to TAFE colleges, but that’s another story.)

I’m always heartened by the sight of people kicking back in libraries and reading the paper at the communal tables, or poring over a novel in a secluded corner. I find this very hard to do myself. For some reason I can only relax to that extent at home, but for me, these communal readers are part of what makes the library worth going to. Because my local library is currently closed for renovations I go to a newly built one in Camberwell. It’s spacious and tall-ceilinged, and there are cushy beanbags arranged against one of the walls, inviting you to plump down and wile away an hour with the printed word. I haven’t seen anyone on those beanbags as yet; I’d like to think that when the nearby primary school finishes up every afternoon the local kids come streaming in and head for the beanbags, but if they do I bet they use them to play on their tablets and smart phones.

I still believe in serendipity, still comb the shelves for new discoveries; one of my recent browses yielded This Is How by M.J. Hyland and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the '60s and Beyond, by Jane Haas. But I understand I can't rely on chance alone for my book thrills; I reserve books I've read about on the review pages of the weekend papers. I’ve just finished my library copy of Kate Atkinson's excellent Life after Life and I’ll be reading Christos Tsiolkas’s latest book Barracuda that way too, but I think I’ll be in for a long wait.

I am as hopelessly addicted to the mixed-lollies potential of libraries as I ever was as a child, and after all these years I do not have the willpower to  borrow only as many books as I have the time to read (I will often borrow new books while there are others sitting at home unread from last time). There are always a few that I have to return without having read them, having gone through the two renewals that are usually permitted. 

Memories of libraries past

I actually worked in a council library service for a year, in 1985. I lived with my parents and saved up for a five-month trip to Europe. I am glad I did this because it satisfied my curiosity – I decided I didn’t want to become a librarian, it was too dull. I did little else but shelve books, mend them, and check them in and out. However, although I was a library assistant only, because I had an arts degree I was allowed to do the occasional reference query; this was the 1985 version of googling and made a nice change from the endless wielding of the computer wand.

Now I curse my lack of imagination – this was an era before libraries had started holding the book discussions, author talks, adult storytimes and competitions that now pepper their calendars. If I’d thought about it I could have livened up ‘sleepy hollow’, our fond name for our branch library, which was surrounded by a vibrant Jewish community and not far away from the arty grunginess of St Kilda.

But I was only 22 after all. It took all my willpower to stay in the job because I had a bad case of love shyness (love avoidance would be more accurate) powered by OCD, panic and social anxiety. My fears centred on the young gay man whose job it was to transfer the books from one library branch to the next. He always did his rounds in the early afternoon and I would blush furiously when the glass doors swung open and he waltzed in. He ended up thinking I hated him, as I bristled if he approached me; the opposite was the case, I was a little in love with him, everybody was, but I couldn't and still find it hard to distinguish sexual feelings from feelings of love. He had so much life force in him, I could see it in the challenge of his liquid dark eyes, which reflected both a sense of anarchy and a narcissism that was forgivable – he resembled a short, slightly built version of James Dean, but was better looking. My fantasies of him were fairly chaste; we played hide-and-seek in a huge mansion with sweeping staircase and enormous chintz curtains of pale gold. When this clip for the new Tears for Fears single ‘Head over heels’ first played on Countdown while both of us were still slaves to the library service, I felt as if the yearnings of my soul had been bared for the entire world to see. Needless to say such tumultous emotions have done nothing to reduce the charm of libraries for me (he was only the first of a short series of male library workers I had crushes on; the women were unexciting). 

With the arrival of ebooks I refuse to fear the loss of the local library. I think it will stay around in some form or another as a gathering place for those who value the life of the mind, whether they’re two or eighty-two. Libraries are both a place of refuge from neoliberal madness, and the secular world’s answer to churches, and long may they remain so.

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Book News

Here’s an update of my publishing adventures ...

I’ve now published a book about Birthday Depression! It makes no claims to cure it, doesn’t tell readers to just get over it. Instead it offers some keys to understanding, and perhaps even benefiting from it – looking beyond the balloons and streamers of the ‘celebration’ to what’s really going on underneath.

The book is available to US readers,  UK readers and now there is a separate Amazon Australia site.  (There are also several other country sites but too many to list.) 

Unfortunately at the moment if you’re buying in Australia, you can’t click to see the book on the Australian site – have a look inside on the US or the UK sites.

My memoir now has a review! The reviewer gave it five stars which is extremely gratifying.

Of course this is exciting but I want to reiterate that I am interested in getting a wide range of feedback about the book. I do not expect every reader to have the same reaction to it.

I’ve also updated the memoir – it now has a new title and blurb.

If you don’t have an ereader, don’t despair. You can download free Kindle apps for your tablet, smart phone or computer (PC or Mac).

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Memoirs of Madness: Five of the Best

The memoir of madness has been with us far longer than Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar or William Styron’s Darkness Visible. Firsthand accounts of life beyond the limits of sanity have been around from at least the early nineteenth century, as this alluring bibliography attests. 

Below I’ve picked five of my favourites, all dealing with illness that includes elements of psychosis. I’ve chosen these memoirs because they are all vividly written and because they provide vital insights into the treatment and lifestyle needs of people with mental illness. Each and every one of these memoirs makes the loud and clear declaration that it is never more important to view the mentally ill person as a complete human being with human needs and emotions than when they are most acutely ill.

Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher

Already a classic in the field, Hornbacher’s riveting immediacy, hold-onto-your-hat style and liquid prose make this memoir un-put-down-able, even as the reader squirms. She ignores her bipolar diagnosis, ditches her medication and descends into alcoholism, destructive relationships and psychosis before colliding with the consequences of her illness and making a slow journey back to sanity. Meeting her husband Jeff, finding meaningful work and suffering extended stays in a psychiatric ward are all part of the fabric of this painful and visceral but ultimately uplifting memoir.

Madness: A Memoir by Kate Richards

This memoir is written in the tradition of Hornbacher’s but Richards has a talent and voice that are hers alone. Richards’s seductive prose demonstrates that great pain and suffering can actually amplify the sensory perceptions that make life rich and meaningful. At the start of the memoir the narrator’s psychotic depression has left her an emotional adolescent, addicted to sleeping pills, dependent on alcohol and lacking in life skills. But sustained by music, literature, philosophy and the outdoors, meaningful work as a medical researcher, strong friendships and the support of a wise psychologist, Kate and the reader emerge into the daylight – with all the down sides as well as the joys and possibilities that stem from coming to terms with life and chronic illness.

One of the key strengths of this memoir is the passages written while the narrator is in psychosis, seemingly drawn from Richards’s diaries. They explore the limits of meaning, collapsing the difference between subject and object and demonstrating the dangers and lure of madness. At the same time the memoir encompasses vivid accounts of episodes in psychiatric hospitals and a grounded critique of Australia’s mental health system.

Flying with Paper Wings: Reflections on Living with Madness by Sandy Jeffs

Sandy Jeffs is a popular Melbourne poet and an acclaimed community educator on mental illness (in her own words ‘professional lunatic’). In this honest and moving memoir she reflects on a life lived with the chronic illness of schizophrenia following a semi-rural childhood riven by constant battles between her alcoholic mother and violent, controlling father.

Jeffs’s experiences in Melbourne mental hospitals from the 70s onwards, mostly harrowing but occasionally affirming, the stubborn viciousness of her inner voices, the sustaining support of her alternative family, and the world of literature and philosophy that feed her intellect and spirit all enrich this narrative. Entirely lacking in self-pity, this is a document imbued with the wisdom and clarity of a well-lived and nurturing life despite mental health that is at times precarious, with plenty of useful lessons for carers, professionals, policy makers and the general reader.

Hurry Down Sunshine: A Father’s Story of Love and Madness by Michael Greenberg

Photograph: Marion Ettlinger

This is a poignant and beautifully written memoir about bipolar disorder from the perspective of fatherhood. Greenberg narrates the horror of watching his beloved daughter Sally switch suddenly into bipolar psychosis at the age of 15 and eke out a slow, shaky recovery in a no-frills Manhattan psychiatric hospital during a sweltering summer. It is meticulously and delicately written in a realist style that conveys the heaviness and various losses that result from watching a loved child disintegrate, as well as the financial stresses of living in New York, and of dealing with an inflexible, privatised health care system.

Greenberg describes madness as something that takes his daughter far away from him, and vividly conveys his fears that she will never return. The awkward encounters between his current and his ex-wife, the eccentricities of the other patients, as well as the burden he already bears of supporting a mentally ill brother, ground this memoir in a complex and challenging context.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness by Elyn Saks

Elyn Saks is a tenured professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California with degrees from Oxford, Yale and Vanderbilt, and an expert in mental health law. She has also had the experience of being forcibly restrained for hours on end in psychiatric wards and forcefed medication while suffering acute psychosis. This memoir describes Saks’s struggle to accept and manage a diagnosis of schizophrenia, while forging a stellar academic career.

Saks first experienced full-blown psychosis as a young postgraduate on a philosophy scholarship at Oxford. In The Center Cannot Hold she documents her torturous journey towards accepting the severity of her illness and the need to take medication. During this period she was able to avail herself of skilled psychoanalysts who understood the emotional content of her delusions and enabled her to maintain some degree of equilibrium.

Saks gives important insights into her state of mind during her most acute episodes and how traumatised she was by the dehumanising treatment she experienced after suffering a breakdown at Yale. Key here are the human aspects of the illness – the way it is affected by stress, Saks’s struggles to maintain her academic career, and the shocking attitudes of psychiatric staff who valued compliance over healing. ‘While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that had helped me find a life worth living’, Saks asserts. The support and intellectual engagement that her career and her academic colleagues provide, her ultimate acceptance of the need for ongoing medication and her fulfilling marriage in her mid-forties together enable a life that is ‘rich and satisfying’.

Narratives of madness

These memoirs are riveting yet educational reads for the general public, as well as important guideposts for sufferers. But they are also vital documents for mental health practitioners, akin to qualitative research about the experiences of users of mental health services.

Three of them, Madness: A Bipolar Life, Madness: A Memoir and The Center Cannot Hold, contain a similar trajectory – after experiencing the extremes of the illness, sometimes worsened by addiction, the sufferer eventually comes to accept the need to take medication and to manage addictions and stresses, and learns how to maintain a balanced, fulfilling life. 

This trajectory suggests that if the right level of support and skill were offered early enough, sufferers might be able achieve recovery without the self-destruction and descent into addiction that are so commonly represented as necessary stages on the journey.

All five of them reflect on the human elements that make the long-term management of illness – and just as important a fulfilling life – possible.

In The Center Cannot Hold and Madness: A Memoir, what makes this journey possible is the loving, sustained attention of therapists who provide a safe psychic space in which the patient can explore emotional defences and gradually embrace maturity.

In Hornbacher’s case it is her ever-patient psychiatrist, the hospital she lives in for months on end, where staff are unendingly accepting and supportive, and the unconditional love and fortitude of her husband that together create a safety net in which she is harboured until the illness is tamed.

In Flying with Paper Wings, it is Jeffs’s ‘two Demeters’ – the female friends with whom she has lived in a peaceful setting on the rural fringes of Melbourne for 30 years.

In Hurry Down Sunshine, it is the sustained love and attention of Sally’s family, including the father–narrator, that eases Sally's transition to precarious sanity.

Creativity, purposeful work and strong friendships also play vital roles. Secure housing is vital and the fact that most of the stories feature middle class sufferers is no accident. Kate Richards expresses how lucky she is to be able to afford to choose her own therapist, and to buy a home that offers not just long-term security but a haven.

One of the reasons for the importance of these memoirs is their various critiques of the psychiatric profession and the mental health sector.

The memoir of Richards, a medical researcher, has not one decent psychiatrist throughout its 200-plus pages. Not one. They are helpful in dispensing medication, but the healing she receives comes from a psychologist. The implication is that the problem is systemic, due to faulty training – Richards is ‘sacked’ by one psychiatrist, while others demonstrate various levels of boredom and disengagement.

Sandy Jeffs also questions psychiatry, having left her long-term therapist, Dr Y, after 27 years. She is critical of what she calls ‘Fastpsychiatry’ and ponders the dangers and possibilities of investigating the psychic content of her delusions with a new therapist, Dr K, who is willing to explore with her the darkest underpinnings of her hostile voices: ‘If I could heal that little girl, would the persecutory content of my delusions and voices diminish, and allow me to embrace her?’

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The Secret and the Law of Attraction are Bad for Your Mental Health – Here’s Why

In my twenties I had two undiagnosed mental illnesses – social anxiety and pure OCD. I lurched from one crisis to the next, underperforming at work, leaving jobs when they got too hard and moving into dodgy share houses. My judgement was poor and my thinking was immature. I was incapable of an intimate relationship. I knew I had some kind of ‘neurosis’, but if asked what it was I would have launched into a convoluted description of my hang-ups that would have left you open-mouthed with equal parts of boredom and bewilderment.

After reading Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, I was convinced positive thinking was the answer. If I repeated enough affirmations I would be healthy, rich and nestled in a secure long-term relationship – all things that were singularly lacking in my life.

For three years I was a cadet journalist with the Hastings Sun. On the weekends I stayed with my parents in Melbourne, and on Sunday nights I would drive down to the Mornington Peninsula, to the brick veneer house I shared with a fellow cadet with anger management problems. She had thrown a coffee cup onto the floor in front of me once during an argument; as it crashed into pieces on the vinyl, I knew our friendship was over.

When I left my parents’ suburban home on Sunday nights my father would come out and wave goodbye to me as I drove off in my white Mazda 1500, which was chronically on the verge of collapse. Filled with numb desolation, I’d drive through sea squalls and lashing rain to the semi-wildness where no friend waited. How brave and foolhardy I was in those days, crossing the rural railway lines with a dodgy engine, a clutch that was about to fail.

Positive thinking kept me going on those Sunday night drives home. I remember the bloody-mindedness with which I set off in that lonely car, its interior a minimalist desert of brown vinyl and radio, which smelt of petrol. Every week as I commenced the journey I set my teeth and wheeled out my tray of positive thinking maxims. Carefully I recited all the things I was manifesting right now – a great job in a groovy workplace close to the city, supportive colleagues, a wonderful partner, a new car that never broke down, an interesting group of feminist friends. The list was Homeric in scope and grew longer every week. Reciting it probably got me along Springvale Road and as far as the entrance to the Mornington Peninsula Freeway. It no doubt included extended spells in exotic European locations, a year living in a great share house in Sydney, enough money to buy my own house in Fitzroy or Carlton, and an interesting left-wing cause to get my teeth into.

At the time I used positive thinking as a way of just carrying on. On the pathetic wage of a cadet journalist working for a rural newspaper, I was wretchedly poor. I had only a small number of friends in Melbourne, but I was too insecure to let go and explore life in Mornington. I felt unmoored and feared my youth was disappearing before my eyes, but I put my head down and stuck at the journalism, as there wasn’t really an alternative. But at least I had a job.

Fast forward to 1992, when there was a serious economic downturn in Australia. I was now working three days a week as information officer for a small community group. I’d fled from journalism the year before, when the panic attacks had started again; I figured that if I was too scared to talk to the CEO of the council I was covering at the time, I couldn’t do my job.

I was now in a more functional share house arrangement, living in a tiny house in inner city Richmond with a playwright who was doing a Masters in philosophy. Eventually her example would lead to the completion of my own Masters degree but in the meantime I was still in thrall to the promises of the New Age.

Then the community group that employed me lost their funding, and I lost my job. With no savings to back me up, I was forced to eke out an existence on unemployment benefit. I used to make vegetable patties from the okara – a waste product in the making of tofu – that I got free from the Tofu Shop up the road.

Positive thinking came in to fill the breach, but this time it wasn’t a willpower thing, but a flight into fantasy. Whenever I walked home from a train station or tram stop along the narrow footpaths of Richmond, past the rows of renovated workers cottages and Victorian terraces, I kept my eyes on the ground in case God or providence chose to put a two-dollar coin in my path among the trodden-over dead leaves and gold bottle tops. Small, thick and gold-coloured, two-dollar coins seemed to embody the fairytale idea of the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. This myth is more fitting than I realised at the time, because you can never reach the rainbow – it appears to move further away when you walk towards it.

The memory of this time makes me sad. Could I really have set my sights so low? With so little understanding of the world and my place in it, this faith in the slim abundance of stray two-dollar coins seems disempowered, child-like, embarrassingly unambitious.

The lure of the positive

The positive thinking that I sought refuge in has been thoroughly denigrated by science, and many of the people who espouse it have been exposed as shysters or even criminals. Yet in the individualistic, materialistic climate of the digital age it’s as popular as ever. The astonishing success of The Secret, the 2006 bestseller by Rhonda Byrnes, was due to Byrnes’s brilliant repackaging of the Law of Attraction, the idea that your thoughts alone can bring you unlimited health, wealth and happiness – and their opposite, if you’re not careful.

In 2009, Forbes estimated that the book and accompanying film had made $300 million. According to Wikipedia the book has sold 19 million copies and been translated into 46 languages; the DVD has sold more than 2 million copies. The book stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for 146 consecutive weeks and was named by USA Today as one of the top 20 bestselling books of the past 15 years. The Secret is above all a triumph of marketing.

Not everything that positive thinking promotes is harmful. The realisation that your thoughts are not you, and that they are spitting out a constant static of negative commentary, is actually a valuable discovery. It’s the antidote that positive-thinking-based books like The Secret get wrong. There are plenty of thought-based treatments that don’t require you to make believe everything’s fine when it’s not, including mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, and acceptance and commitment therapy. Below are just some of the reasons why The Secret, the Law of Attraction and positive thinking in general may be harmful to your mental health.

Repression of emotions

Books such as The Secret scare readers about the effects of negative thoughts. One of its many precursors, a bestseller in the 1990s, was actually titled You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative Thought. The suggestion is that negative thoughts will attract illness, bad luck in work and relationships, and ultimately death. The Secret counsels: ‘Your life right now is a reflection of your past thoughts’ and ‘Your thoughts become things’. Louise Hay insists that ‘You are the power in your world! You get to have whatever you choose to think!’

This kind of advice is tantamount to emotional fascism. If you become scared of your negative thoughts, you’ll naturally try to repress them, and the emotions that go with them. Your psyche will start to rebel, and you’ll feel angry and unbalanced.

Carl Jung developed a concept of the shadow – everything that we consign to our unconscious mind because it’s inappropriate, not socially sanctioned or just childish. The shadow is the naughty self, which will not submit to culture or socialisation. It’s a very loose concept and it changes along with shifting cultural mores, but it can easily be applied to affirmations. If you recite positive affirmations all day long, your Jungian shadow will feel ignored and repressed and will try to get your attention!

If you have OCD or anxiety, you might develop an obsessive fear of negative thoughts and the consequences they could bring.

Narcissism

Books like The Secret tell people that their thoughts have a vibrational energy that the universe will respond to, magically delivering whatever they use their thoughts to envisage. This encourages a reversion to the childhood stage of narcissism, to the mentality of two-year-olds who believe they are omniscient and can have whatever they want.

While narcissism is a natural stage for children, it is a destructive worldview when carried through to adulthood. In fact, the very definition of maturity might be the understanding that we do not have ultimate control over anything except our own behaviour. The world may respond to a change in our attitude and behaviour, or it may not. We can’t control other people and we can’t control the ultimate consequences of what we think and do.

Learned helplessness

Back in the early nineties, as I wandered along the footpath in search of two dollar coins, I was wasting time I could have spent dreaming up ways to make money in a depressed economy. From this vantage point I am astounded by my lack of imagination. I see now that the abundant universe of the positive thinking books was actually a kind of parent figure and a substitute for the Christian god that I no longer believed in. My vivid imagination had gotten married to my learned helplessness, and together they made a formidable pair.

The need for challenge

In recent years neuroscientists have discovered that the brain actually thrives on challenges and novelty rather than pleasure alone. Our brains enjoy solving problems and achieving mastery of a skill. A world in which we could have whatever we wanted just by wishing for it would have been bad in an evolutionary sense; perhaps this is why the mythical Adam and Eve had to leave the Garden of Eden. Positive thinking doesn’t take these needs into account, instead preaching that the brain has to merely imagine something and it will appear.

Conclusion

All of the above doesn’t mean that motivation, optimism and idealism are bad things. Not at all. What could be called realistic or natural positive thinking has been around as long as cliches such as ‘Look on the bright side’. However, optimism should not be used to avoid rigorous planning. When embarking on a large project, you have more chance of success if you take into account the potential obstacles and work out how you will deal with them.

Nor should optimism be used as a way to avoid reality. There are times when sitting with unpleasant emotions and accepting unpleasant truths is the only sane response to a situation.

With all its mixed emotions, its difficulties and challenges, the real world is infinitely more compelling and worth exploring than a universe in which we manifest whatever our childish egos dream up.

If you’d like to read more on this theme, I’ve published a book on the subject, Why The Secret Is Wrong. You can sample the book here, or on Amazon UK here.

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Slightly Nutty Uploads New Book Cover

Exciting news - I've given my blog compilation a new cover!

These blog entries have all been lovingly edited and cleaned up and handpicked for your delectation.

Okay, well perhaps more exciting things have happened in the world. But I did the cover all by myself, and with a photo sourced from the creative commons, no less.

Oh I hate selling. I am not good at it. It goes against the very fibre of my being, unless I am selling for someone else.

You can buy it here. Or here if you're in the UK. Find out more about it here. Okay I'm out of here.

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Things that Go Bump in the Daytime: The Spooky Fun of Ghost Videos

Some people consume amateur porn on line. I am a sucker for amateur fright night videos.

I only properly discovered YouTube a couple of years ago. It wasn’t till then that I fully understood the power of the internet to effortlessly dispose of time. Here you’ll find every pleasant television memory, every edgy advertisement that didn’t get aired on TV, every pop song that held special meaning and that you had previously thought could only be called up from your own internal hard drive, every possible interview featuring your favourite celebrity and every single amateur video, however lacking in basic intellectual or artistic merit, ever uploaded by Josephine or Joe Average.

The amateur ghost vids are a genre unto themselves. The first question we lovers of the paranormal are supposed to ask ourselves is: ‘Is it real?’ This question is often unintentionally answered in the negative by the makers themselves: the urge to go overboard is just too tempting. The orbs are pleasantly spooky (orbs are surely the ecotoplasm of the twenty-first century), but then the light of the bathroom turns on by itself, followed soon after by the faucet doing the same. Sleeper ‘wakes up’ to investigate. I didn’t come down in the last shower, along with the restless spirits of the dead.

Other times, as in the imaginatively titled Ghost Children in Our Basement Caught on Tape, the video looks genuine at first. These ghost kiddies slowly move toy cars around, rock chairs, gently throw a doll to the ground and then turn the tele on. They seem slightly sedated, and one commenter notes that she would much rather have these polite ghost children than her own brats who would probably trash the joint. The greenish tinge of the infrared light adds to the understated air of authenticity.

But this impression is soon spoilt by onscreen messages like ‘subscribe for more ghost children videos’. Would someone who was genuinely under assault by a poltergeist have the emotional fortitude to create a YouTube channel with 112 videos? And once you start reading the comments, which pick the video apart, you lose the forlorn hope that, despite your misgivings, perhaps this really  is a genuine depiction.

While the majority of these videos reveal themselves to be fake, for would-be believers like me it is the liminal area between the likelihood of fakery and the dim hope of authenticity that makes these tapes so compelling. Perhaps that’s why the comments calling out the fakes are sometimes so vitriolic. We’d rather remain uncertain than know for sure that someone's trying to pull our collective leg.

This one, which is obviously faked if you look carefully, shows a speeded-up version of the reason a couple supposedly argue about whether he makes the bed every day after she leaves for work. Delightful shivers up my spine before the trick became obvious.

And here is a ghost that does the vacuumming. I wish I had this type of ghost.

I found this one very creepy at first, not because it couldn’t be doctored – anything can be doctored – but because imaginatively this seems unlikely. If you were going to create a ghostly effect, would you do it like this? But then too many commenters declared that this was a speck of dust moving over the lens, and I reluctantly conceded they were probably right.

Even if the trick isn’t obvious, a sure warning sign of fakery in the majority of examples is that so much of the poltergeist action takes place squarely in the vision of the time lapse camera that the makers supposedly leave on for hours at a time.

Sometimes there is a dog involved, barking anxiously and staring at something the video maker can’t see. The makers always seem compelled to ask their dogs over and over again ‘What is it, Fluffy?’ (or Sid or whoever), perhaps expecting their dog to be shocked into speech by the drama of the moment: ‘Dog speaks for the first time after being asked “What is it?” twenty times during poltergeist episode’.

Dog See's [sic] a Ghost! is a good example of the ghost-and-dog subgenre. Featuring  a creepy attic ghost, it attracted no accusations of fakery, and the dog is genuinely terrified. If the authenticity of these videos should be judged purely by the comments, this one could be authentic (she says hopefully).

What scared me most in this video, though, was the terrible use of apostrophes and unnecessary commas. ‘See’s’? What’s that about? Can a verb possess something? Perhaps the apostrophe indicates that the verb is itself possessed by the ghost of bad punctuation.

The videos recorded on security cameras  seem by their very nature to be more authentic because of  the low pixel rate and the fact that they're often in black and white. What do readers think of this one, which is set in a video store? The person putting the videos away seems genuinely startled, but perhaps he’s just a good actor?

But in the final analysis, for genuine lovers of thrillers it doesn’t matter whether these are real or not, any more than it matters whether the people in amateur porn movies are really into each other. Because this is really a replica of an existing genre – the thriller that apes reality, pioneered by the brilliant Blair Witch Project, and carried further in the Paranormal Activity series – the first of which was pretty good, with the quality dwindling further with each sequel. We knew Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity weren’t real but it was the similitude that made them scary, not a mistaken belief that one was watching a doco.

The same goes for these amateur videos. When they don’t overreach themselves and you avoid reading the comments, they provide great cheap thrills. It’s the carefully timed depiction of boring domestic reality, with its combination of natural and technogical sounds, followed by sudden, inexplicable events at unpredictable intervals that produces the delightful eeriness. And of course the overly serious intertitles, which are usually white text on a black background, feature lots of full stops and are often accompanied by nothing but an ominous silence.

A decent supernatural thriller comes out only once every couple of years, so I am chronically thriller deprived. Amateur fright videos fill the gap in the meantime.

Ghost videos and the uncanny

Wikipedia tells us that the state known as the uncanny was first identified by Ernst Jentsch in his 1906 essay, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny’. According to Jentsch, the uncanny is the result of ‘intellectual uncertainty’; it is always ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’. He goes on to say:

... one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately.

This explains why splatter porn is horrifying but not thrilling, and why its consumers require increasing amounts of gore to get their kicks. Good supernatural thrillers play on this uncertainty rather than revealing the source of the fear, or at least putting off the revelation until late in the day.

Freud goes further, arguing that the uncanny is basically about taboos like sex and death. Because these taboos are traditionally not dealt with directly, we end up projecting all our ‘stuff’ onto them; the uncanny thus reminds us of our own repressed desires. It doesn’t bust the taboos, though – it plays on them. A decent thriller uses all this psychic possibility while not spoiling the effect by exposing the taboo. Thus ghosts should be either invisible or indistinguishable from humans, and gore should be kept to a minimum.

But for someone with anxiety there is another dimension. Anxiety means a constant fear of chimeras – the next social event, the next work assignment, and even stretches of time ranging from the next five minutes to the future itself. Watching a scary video is a way of controlling the way one is exposed to fear of the unknown, enabling the viewer to mediate their fear in a safe environment.

But as well as immediate fears, perhaps the uncanny also helps us mediate those unnamed fears that supercapitalism and the threat of climate change cultivate in the most balanced personalities. Given the Russian roulette we are playing with finance, people and environment, the future is terrifying. Much safer to be terrified by chimeras that we know probably aren’t real.

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Slightly Nutty and the Election of Doom

Australia has an election coming up this Saturday.

As a progressive and Greens voter as well as an anxiety sufferer, I am feeling a creeping, lonely, doom-laden dread of the future. I could be on the rotor, a funfair ride in which the floor drops away and you’re left clinging to the sides, pinned there by the furious spinning of the barrel.

It is fascinating how this vertiginous feeling replicates what my father must have felt when the Australian Labor Party achieved power in 1972, even though the objects of our dread could not be more different. The apple never does fall far from the tree (damn that silly tree!)

Dad, a Catholic of Irish descent, was and is terrified of communists, whom he believed at the time had overrun the ALP. While I was growing up he was active in the DLP, a right-wing Catholic party whose fear of reds, single parents, the pro-abortion lobby and environmentalists was only slightly ameliorated by its contradictory rejection of large corporations and poverty. Up until Whitlam was elected, the DLP had held the balance of power in the Senate, keeping Australia in conservative hands for over two decades.

Now there is a new threat on the horizon. Tony Abbott, leader of the Coalition, will almost certainly achieve power on Saturday, booting the ALP out of power. Although he is a member of the Liberal Party – the conservative party in Australia – Abbott is part of the landed Catholic gentry and culturally close to the DLP.

Abbott’s misogyny

As far as personality goes, Abbott has little traction. It is fascinating that, with all the stuff-ups and musical-chairs-style leadership changes in the ALP, along with the fact that Murdoch is using his media empire to boot Kevin Rudd out of power, Abbott is not slated to win by a landslide. In fact most people don’t like him much – they just find him less reprehensible than Rudd. If Rudd finds it hard to keep his temper, Abbott is a long-time bovver boy, still haunted by his own violent tactics as student politician at Sydney University.

Abbott is also a right-wing Catholic who until recently was widely seen as a committed misogynist and opposer of women’s rights, most importantly abortion rights. His remarks about women have returned to damn him again and again – they include such gems as ‘abortion is the easy way out’, ‘[virginity] is the greatest gift you can give someone’, the idea that women do not have an absolute right to withhold sex, and, on the carbon tax, ‘What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing is that if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price’. It’s no surprise that there is a recurring theme in the media about women not trusting him.

Abbott was health minister in the Howard Coalition government from 2003 to 2007; during this time he opposed the abortion drug RU486, and tried to restructure Medicare so as to ban funding for abortion.

A DLP member, John Madigan, is now in the Senate and there is a possibility that after the election he might share the balance of power in the Senate with other conservatives – he has openly expressed his desire to restrict abortion (he rang up here once, wanting to speak to Dad!)

Abbott’s team have moved heaven and earth in recent years to change his entrenched image. ‘Do you want to know how God turns a man into a feminist? He gives him three daughters’, was wife Margie Abbott’s challenge when she threw down the gauntlet at her first political function, a business lunch in western Sydney in October last year.

I have to laugh at this – my dad has five daughters and no sons, and Dad and the word feminist don’t sit comfortably in the same sentence.

It’s not women per se that men like Abbott and my own dad fear, I realise now – it’s powerful women.

The conservative agenda

But my fears for women’s rights under Abbott sit alongside more well-defined concerns. Abbott has pledged to ditch a price on carbon and will make things even more nightmarish for asylum seekers than the sociopathic policies of the ALP are currently doing. There is also the possibility – albeit probably not in a first term – that he would work behind the scenes to reduce penalty rates and increase the consumption tax. He is also touting a paid parental leave scheme that would pay some wealthy women the equivalent of their wages up to $75,000.

The ALP hasn’t been a progressive party since the late eighties, but despite its egregious sins the question of whether life for all but the wealthy will be worse under a Coalition government has to be a qualified ‘yes.’

I can still remember the shock that Howard’s ascension to power in 1996 had on progressives; I recall bumping into someone I knew in the car park of the local shopping mall the day after the election and commiserating with them about our fears for the future. Things were quiet at first, but once Howard had grasped that he could win over the battlers by generating fear and gagging charities, he never looked back.

My fears about coalition rule are partly based on selfishness about how bad I’ll feel about the plight of others. With my excessive identification with the powerless I will ache every time I hear of some new cut to services or welfare payments.

But I am also frightened for myself, and for my own security. What will Abbott do to me and my life? Will the conservatives come for me in the dark, stealing the tiny bit of financial certainty the government metes out to me? If I am one of the unfortunates who takes a hit to pay for the Coalition’s seventy-five-thousand-dollar gifts to rich pregnant women, how will I cope emotionally, let alone financially?

And I am scared and saddened for my country. During this election campaign the major parties have all but ignored aged care funding, homelessness and the plight of the poor – only the Greens have focused on these issues. Yet there is a small chance that if Rudd were to be elected he would finally get around to increasing Australia’s shamefully low dole rate, and reverse Gillard’s disastrous decision to move around 800,000 single parents, mostly women, onto the dole. In other areas such as asylum seeker policy the ALP has become an appalling imitation of far right parties such as One Nation, and the ALP’s ‘commitment’ to climate change policy is greenwash at best.

My one comfort? The Greens’ approval rating seems to have risen slightly, proving the pundits wrong.

Enough for now. I’m off to throw some Greens brochures into the letterboxes of the rich and self-focused of Toorak. Exercise, you see, is an excellent antidote to Politically Induced Depression.

BTW I have done absolutely no doctoring to the photo above - it's just naturally weird, and all part of the attempt to show the public what a powerful woman Margie Abbott is!

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Four Free Relaxation Exercises that Can Improve Your Mental Health

I never thought I would be writing these kinds of blog entries for Slightly Nutty. Next thing it will be ‘Ten herbs that can change your life’ and ‘Four questions to ask before choosing a therapist’. (I have also considered writing a joke book called How to Write a Best Selling Self-Help Book – I bet there are people out there who would consider buying it.)

But please bear in mind but I’m really addressing myself here. Because what I’ve noticed over the years – and only recently been able to put into effect as much as I want to – is that everything in our culture teaches that we shouldn’t use our own resources, and that you have to pay for things to make your life better.

Now this is often the case. Other people have skills that are different from ours, and to pay them for those skills can improve our lives while keeping the economy ticking over. A good physio can do wonders for a sore lower back. A skilled therapist provides the objectivity that we cannot bring to our own lives. I get all that, but I still think that we are subtly discouraged by the culture to do the simple things that can enhance quality of life, and that don’t cost a penny.

So here are four things you can do yourself, that don’t cost anything. Two can be done in front of TV, and two probably not. You probably know about them already but a reminder won’t do any harm.

Please note this isn’t medical advice – please see a physio if you have serious muscular or spinal problems.

Self-massage

This is a great thing to do in front of tele to ease sore, aching muscles. This Wikihowguide gives excellent suggestions – not just for obvious things like a sore neck but also massaging tummy, arms, feet and even your back if you have a basketball handy. It recommends showering first and using massage oil but you don’t need to prepare in this way to benefit.

There’s no reason to wait until your muscles are sore. If you do self-massage regularly, sore muscles would probably reduce over time.

Progressive relaxation

No, this isn’t time out for left-wingers. It basically involves tensing and relaxing one muscle at a time from the top of the head down to the toes. It is best to do this either sitting in a chair or lying down. In theory you could do it while sitting and watching tele, but listening to relaxing music will be more effective.

You can also do this just before going to sleep.

The extent of the exercise is up to you. The longer you take in tensing and relaxing each muscle, and the more muscles you include, the more effective the treatment will be – but it doesn’t have to be long, or involve every single muscle. There are plenty of relaxation CDs, and they can certainly help you let go, but the point is you don’t need a CD; you can run through the muscles yourself.

The trouble with progressive relaxation is that so many claims are attached to it, such as its ability to cure insomnia and anxiety. Rather than focusing on grand claims, what seem more relevant to me are its immediate benefits. It simply makes you feel more relaxed, and after doing it for a while you will get better at letting the muscles go. I always think of a floppy rag doll when I do this exercise, focusing on letting go of the muscle when I relax it.

Meditation

Many people run a mile when they see the word meditation. They think that adopting it involves joining an ashram and sitting still for hours, or they go to a website that tells them they should meditate for at least ten minutes every night as well as every morning as a bare minimum. More than anything, I believe, we associate meditation with failure. We are not good enough for it; we fail before we even start because we know our brains are too chattery, too noisy.

The best way of approaching it is to clear your brain of preconceptions and the need for achievement. You are not going to move to a cave. You are just trying to change your brainwaves to achieve a greater mental serenity and stamina.

The important thing about meditation is that the trying – the early stages, which are so trying – are already doing some good, and that even five minutes in the morning has some benefit. Sure, once you start you may get completely enthused and build a little altar, or go on a retreat. But you don't have to do any of that. And even if you don’t keep it up, your brain will remember the degree of inner quietness you achieved. I have taken meditation up and dropped it again throughout my adult life, and every time I take it up again I don’t have to go back to the beginning. The learning from last time is still there.

Mindfulness meditation is a great form because it doesn’t just accept that the brain will chatter, or that you’ll lose concentration; it incorporates that assumption into the process. Every time your brain strays you simply bring it back to your breathing, and perhaps note mentally what’s happening. Through the mental chatter you continue to take note of the steady in and out of the breath. After a while the brain does tend to slow down, but the point is you will receive benefits before that. And there will be days when you slip into that effortlessly and days when the brain chatters throughout, and this is all okay.

Since getting back to mediation for all of a month, I’m already noting more stamina, more mental energy and calmness. I now meditate between five and ten minutes six days a week.

I meditate sitting cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the side of my bed, with a blanket around my shoulders. To stop myself from putting it off, it’s the first thing I do when I get out of bed after going to the loo. If I turn my computer on first, my meditation practice probably won’t happen that day as once I’m in ‘doing’ mode, I’m a-goner.

Here is a simple, uncomplicated description of simple mindfulness meditation. 

Deep breathing

Deep breathing, sometimes called abdominal breathing, is great if you are prone to panic attacks because it retrains the breath so that even when you are nervous you have a greater sense of control. But I imagine it would be useful for any form of anxiety and especially useful before public speaking or a scary social event.

Practising deep breathing is great to do in front of teeve, because it’s a wonderful rationalisation for blobbing, something I love to do (another blog entry I am planning is – seriously – ten things to do in front of tele).

Here’s a good description of the process.

Hope you have fun with these exercises, and get something out of trying them.

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‘Is That All There Is?’ Anxiety, Exposure and the Adrenalin Crash

I was quietly, morbidly terrified. The cream walls pressed in on me. I sat on a swivel chair behind the clunky reception desk as if it offered protection from the ordeal to come.

To my right, the shopfront-style window showcased the darkening sky and the wide, bare street. On my left, visible through glass panels in the radio booth, my friend Melissa moved dials up and down, put discs into a console and spoke into a fat black mike. I could hear her voice on the speaker broadcasting into the room.

Melissa hosts a Sunday afternoon radio program on a community radio station, and I was about to read out a film review on it. Melissa had been suggesting for years that I start a regular review segment on her program, an informal arrangement every two or three weeks. I’d always refused, but now, thanks to taking half a Luvox a day, I thought it was worth a try. And I was suffering for my decision.

Sure, the radio station is a local one with a limited audience. But ‘stuffing up’ would be a definite setback. And anyone coming into the reception area would hear me stumble on that huge speaker, including the two late-middle-aged men who were due to come in any minute for the program running after Melissa’s show.

I had my review printed out, the sheet already damp from my sweaty fingers. I was too scared to do anything but glance over it, as sustained attention would remind me of the ordeal to come.

Finally Melissa summoned me. This was actually a step forward as the lonely anticipation was worse than being in the booth with Melissa, ready to roll as the last bars of the music track played themselves out. Truth to tell it wasn’t my first time in the booth: a couple of years ago Melissa had interviewed me about my self-published book The Inspired Shopper. That had been hard, but as an interviewee I had far less responsibility.

To cut a long story short, I sailed through it. I started with the high point of the film and went from there. Melissa and my on-air rapport helped. We often discuss films over the phone, so this was familiar territory in some ways. And she knew I was nervous, so could take over if I started to panic. It went so well that a friend who listened said he had been expecting me to sound okay with room for improvement, but that I had sounded much better than that – his only criticism being that I talked too fast.

Afterwards we went out for a drink at a large noisy cafe on a nearby corner. Walking to the cafe with Melissa in the hostile cold of mid-June, I didn’t feel the rush of victory and mastery that I’d been expecting; instead I felt empty. There was a sense of anticlimax. I had made a major breakthrough, yet nothing had changed.

I’ve had this feeling often when I’ve done something that caused what is called ‘anticipatory anxiety’. Instead of a sense of pride in having made it through a feared event in one piece, there is a feeling of flatness and disappointment.

Part of it is surely psychological. If you anticipate something perfectly ordinary, and then you achieve it without all the imagined catastrophes occurring, you realise that all the energy you expended on the anxiety was a waste of time. Not only that, but given that the feared event is probably something you were able to do with ease as a child, or even a few years earlier, you are confronted with the essential mundaneness of much of life. Your achievement doesn’t feel like an achievement at all, just a big let-down. The song that sums up this ennui perfectly is the 1970 Peggy Lee hit ‘Is that all there is?’

But there may also be a physical aspect. Anxiety produces the fight-or-flight syndrome. The sympathetic nervous system causes the body to produce stress hormones that include adrenalin (also known as epinephrine) and dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is associated with feelings of pleasure and plays a role in addiction.

If you’re a nervous person like me, adrenalin can seem like a sadistic enemy. It makes your hands shake, your legs turn to water, your heart thump madly and your digestive system melt, while it spitefully steals your ability to breathe. But it also sends energy surging through your bloodstream. It helps you to complete the challenge that has called it up in the first place, among other things by elevating blood sugar and  increasing blood pressure and the flow of blood to the muscles. 

After the challenge is completed, the body goes into recovery mode. The parasympathetic nervous system kicks in. Blood pressure and breathing return to normal, and the heartbeat slows down. Levels of adrenalin drop and remain low for a period that depends on the severity of the stress. It’s common to feel tired and listless.

But that's not the whole story. While adrenalin is released instantly and has a short-term effect, another stress hormone, cortisol, works differently. Cortisol levels start rising just as your adrenalin levels start to drop. Just as it takes longer for cortisol to build up in your system than adrenalin, it also takes longer for cortisol levels to drop. Wikibooks has this to say about it:

Together with the rise of cortisol and the decrease of adrenaline, come the nasty side-effects of the stress hormones. It is at this moment that you feel bad, anxious, and having [sic] lots of negative thoughts. And this is perhaps one of the critical features of stress which flies against common sense: you only feel its bad aspects when your body is stressing down and progressing towards a more relaxed state. When you are building up on adrenaline, in effect stressing up, you might even be feeling good! This explains what is popularly known as the adrenaline rush and the consequent adrenaline crash.

Perhaps the feeling of 'blah' afterwards is a combination of a lowering of blood sugar and blood pressure, a drop in dopamine and adrenalin, and the continuing presence of cortisol? For some people cortisol levels remain high after a stressful event is over, contributing to chronic stress. (There is also a link between elevated cortisol and depression, but it is disputed.)

The post-event blues I've described here aren't confined to the anxious. Google is filled with mentions of ‘post-event depression’. If you attend a fantastic concert, a dream vacation or even your own wedding, there is a flatness afterwards as you return to normal life. I suspect most people put this down to the boredom of daily life, but perhaps there is that physical element as well.

This article on the Psychology Today website talks specifically about post-wedding depression. One of the antidotes it recommends is focusing on life after the wedding, rather than seeing the wedding as an end goal. This suggests that seeing any kind of social or psychological challenge as the be-all and the end-all may be part of the problem. Perhaps it would be better to keep in mind that life will go on afterwards much as before, apart from the subtle internal change of meeting that particular challenge; and, once the challenge has been met, to look ahead to the next challenge.

But I think the most important way to cope with post-event let-down is to keep the bigger picture in mind. In my case speaking on the radio doesn’t necessarily translate to, say, being able to talk comfortably with my relatives at the next family do. It should, but it doesn’t. Nevertheless it is still a victory. As long as I am willing to stay in my discomfort zone, and to build up my tolerance of unpleasant feelings, I can gradually increase the scale of the challenge. A feeling of short-term victory would be nice, but more important to keep in mind is my larger plan for a greater involvement in life – that’s the hope, anyway.

Have you experienced a feeling of let-down after achieving a social or other goal? Please let us know.

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