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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