The One You Feed - How to Find Peace and Balance in Managing Anxiety with Sarah Wilson

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

In this episode, Sarah Wilson expounds on how we can learn to create space, go slow, and appreciate the beauty of one’s struggles, rather than aiming for a quick fix. Coupled with the proper use of medication and therapy, these strategies can offer a comprehensive approach to learning how to find peace and balance in managing anxiety. In this episode, you will be able to: Understand the impact of anxiety on mental health and well-being Learn about the benefits and limitations of medication and therapy in managing mental health challenges Engage in a nuanced conversation about mental health, exploring its complexities and varied experiences Take responsibility for anxiety by exploring practical strategies such as slowing down Create space in anxiety management by discovering techniques for finding peace and balance in everyday life To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All throughout our history, we have always had a deep appreciation of the role of struggle. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, And does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We hope you'll enjoy this episode from the archive. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Wilson, a New York Times bestselling author, journalist, and founder of I Quit Sugar.com. She has published 15 I Quit Sugar books in 46 countries and was ranked as one of the top 200 most influential authors in the world in 2017 and 2018. Sarah was the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia at 29. She was also the host of MasterChef Australia

and holds a record in the Guinness Book of World Records. I'll let you Google why. Her new book is First We Make the Beast Beautiful, A New Journey Through Anxiety. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Eric. It is a real pleasure to have you on. We are going to talk about your book called First We Make the Beast Beautiful, A New Journey Through Anxiety. But before we do that, we'll start in the way that we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter, and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at

battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery, and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second and she looks up at her grandfather and she says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, I mean, Eric, it plays perfectly into the title and the theme of my book, Firstly Make the Beast Beautiful, because very much, you know, the way I'd been living for so many years with my anxiety, and I'm sure some of your

listeners would relate to this, I'd been fed the story that, you know, what I had was a disorder. So the medical model very much told me that it was, you know, it was a beast that had to be fixed. We had to get rid of it before I could live a big full life. And one of the themes that I explore in the book is, and I do this pretty early on, is that, you know what, we can be both and we can be both anxious and we can also feed a better beast, you know, the better beast, which is the more beautiful one, which is to see anxiety as a beautiful thing, something that we don't have to get rid of. And, you know, as you know, Eric, because I know you've read the book, you're very well researched at all times. You know, it's a journey that takes us

through an understanding of anxiety through a philosophical and spiritual lens. And I very much feed that story. So yes, your parable speaks to me big time. And also there's another thought that occurred to me. I was a big mountain bike rider for many years. I used to do 24-hour mountain bike races and downhill races. And when you're riding a bike, you know, if you've got a gap between, say, two rocks as you're hurtling downhill several miles an hour, you can't really steer your way there. You essentially pass through that very narrow opening of only a few inches, say, by looking at it, by putting your full focus on that small gap between the rocks. And I've always had

this adage, which I think is similar to your parable, which is where the mind goes, the energy flows. And I have lived by that with every business and enterprise that I've entered into, but also with the way I do my relationships and also my engagement with my mental disorder or my mental illness. So I very much relate to that parable. Yeah, I think it's wonderful. And I think the way you tied that all together was great. In addition to anxiety, you say early in the book that you had childhood anxiety, lots of insomnia, bulimia in your late teens, OCD, depression, anxiety, and then bipolar disorder also. And so those have all sort of been a part of your path and your journey. Yeah, that's right. And I also say that to me,

in many ways, it was all the same thing. It was the same itch. It was the same buzz. It was the same. They were just different expressions of what I describe as a deeper yearning. It always felt like a yearning. It felt like something bigger and deeper than just an illness that had a bunch of names and corresponding medications. I still, to this day, see it as the same kind of itch, you know, an internal itch that I think humanity has had at its core for eons since we got upright, you know. Yeah, it's really interesting. It makes me think of addiction.

I'm a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic. And in the AA big book, there is a idea that the disorder is related to a spiritual yearning. that the disorder is related to a spiritual yearning. Carl Jung often mentioned in conversations with early AA founders that, you know, take the word alcohol spirit, spiritus, you know, and that the alcoholic was trying to find that transcendence. They felt cut off. I've always found that to be very, very plausible. And I love that you say that anxiety is a disconnection. You call it something else. And we'll get into what something else is in a minute. But as I've looked at my own depression, as I've looked at my own addiction and all that, I do feel that this idea of disconnection and reconnection is absolutely fundamental to

the problem and the healing. Yeah, absolutely. And you've touched on something there as well. We often see these various illnesses, whether it's addiction or obsessive-compulsive disorder or whatever it might be, as the problem. But quite often, they are an expression. They're a symptom. They're a coping mechanism.

And I think that's something that we need to start to look at that the deeper issue is this disconnect and that's something that is common and it's something whether you've got a diagnosed disorder as such or whether you're a human being who has these lonely moments where you get home from a loud party at night and you've got to go and sit with yourself looking at the bathroom mirror under the fluorescent lights you know and you suddenly get a sense of what is all of this about I mean that is common and what was really interesting Eric is that a huge number of readers the book's been out for a while now but readers from around the world commented on the fact that

you know some of them just didn't even have anxiety as such, but they read the book and very much related to that deep yearning. And I feel that it's becoming louder and louder. I would say in the last 18 to 24 months, that yearning is palpable. It's everywhere. It's playing out at an individual level, but it's playing out broadly in our society, in our politics, in our communities. I just find it also just far more nourishing to talk at that level because it is the deeper level and it's the deepness and connection that we are craving. Right. And you ask these questions early on in the book, craving. Right. And you ask these questions early on in the book. And I think they're fundamental questions that I know I wrestle with. And anybody I know who has any sort of, again, I'll use the word mental illness in a loose way, will say, am I really mentally ill? Am I disordered? Am I

defective? Am I just weak of character and not trying? Does taking medication alter who I am? Am I less authentic for it? Is it unnatural? Is it really a problem? I mean, with me and depression, I often just wonder, like, am I depressed? Or do I just have like what would have been called a long time ago a melancholy temperament? Or could it be a very reasonable and appropriate response to the world that we're living in at the moment? very reasonable and appropriate response to the world that we're living in at the moment. I mean, that's the other thing. And that comes up in particular with kind of conditions like ADHD,

where I often see children struggling with the toggling and the frenetic life that they are having to now live in. And I'm not surprised that some little brains are just not, you know, are just almost rebelling. And that's something that I think a lot of people with anxiety or depression, you know, you sum it up really well. All of those questions like, really, do I have a problem here? Or is this my soul calling out to me and going, something is not right here. And maybe this needs to be looked at more deeply. And you mentioned the idea that maybe in the past, it would have been called different things. What I find really interesting is how surprised people are to learn that anxiety only entered the DSM, which is the main diagnostic tool used by psychiatrists in both the States and here in

Australia. Prior to 1980, anxiety was something that probably, you know, we described it as different things. But it was something in some ways, I think, that was part of life. And we did very much talk about it in a different way. Also, if you go to the next level and if you look at some of these more serious, you know, sort of diagnosable conditions such as bipolar, for instance, bipolar has existed, or at least the symptoms have, you know, have presented themselves throughout history and in much the same percentages. So, about 1.2 to 1.4% of any given population around the world throughout history have displayed these very particular, you know, sort of behaviours that correlate now to what we call bipolar.

And what I find super interesting is to just read about how they were treated differently throughout history. They say now that shaman and sort of kind of spiritual leaders, like really influential spiritual leaders tended to have bipolar because they had this incredible insight. And political leaders, I mean Winston Churchill, particularly wartime leaders tended to have bipolar. And there was an understanding that there was sort of this incredible brilliance and insight and ability to sort of work out, work a community's way through the quagmire of huge trauma, went hand in hand with sort of a darker side, a shadow side. But it was considered a very important part of any culture. I talk about this, as you know,

all the way through the book. And I personally found that incredibly comforting to actually start to go back to your parable, to feed that storyline, to feed that aspect of the beast, that this is an incredibly important kind of quirk, evolutionary quirk that humanity has, whether it's anxiety, depression, or so on. We have it there for a reason. It exists for a reason. And that's where the beauty for a reason. And that's where the beauty comes into play. And that's sort of, you know, I guess why I've called it, first we make the beast beautiful. First, we start to see the beauty of these conditions. And from there, we can start to modulate and refine and use our condition and ensure that it doesn't take over and ruin our lives. Right. And I think that's such an important and subtle nuance there, which is how do we

embrace these things as being a beautiful beast to some extent? And how do we not glorify really destructive conditions? Like I know I wrestled with this a lot as an alcoholic and an addict, because there was a cachet is not the right word, but it's the one that's coming to mind. It was a cachet. There was a literary and artistic tradition of being the self-destructive artist, but it was truly self-destructive, right? How do I tweeze those things apart? And what you said earlier, I can't quite remember the quote, but like you said, there's a lot of people say like, is it considered a sign of health to be well-adjusted to a truly warped world? I'll just read what you said in the book at one point. You said, the interesting thing is back in the 1930s, nausea, which was an existentialist novel, was celebrated as a wonderful expression of the essence of the human condition.

A 30-year-old loner who felt sickened by the realization that he lived in a world devoid of meaning would be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed an antidepressant or invited to undergo a course of cognitive behavioral therapy. these days, because we are deeply uncomfortable with thinking that goes beyond what is considered, you know, safe, normal, prescribed, etc. I think your point, though, it is a very subtle distinction, though, or subtle line that you can easily cross where it can become glorified. And with anxiety in particular, and I mentioned this in the book, that we live in a culture where it is really quite often to know where you cross the line into disordered anxiety because we do live in a world where being busy, being frenetic is glorified, right? Right. This is the flip side of all of that. So when you say to someone, oh, how are you? It's like, oh, I'm so busy. Oh, gosh, I've got so much going on.

I've just got stress, you know, pouring out of me. And that's almost worn as a badge of honor. Even insomnia, even, you know, sort of boasting about how little sleep you had and yet here I am functioning, turning up to the board meeting, you know, that is again, it's sort of, it's glorified. And, you know, at some point we do cross a line and it's so hard to tell. A lot of people, and that's where a lot of the self-berating comes into play. Like, I should be able to cope with this. I should be able, you know, my colleagues are all only getting four, five hours sleep a night. You know, what's wrong with me? And I think the big problem is that we're not talking about it at a real level. We slap a diagnosis onto somebody, we actually kind of

really poo-poo their questions, the deeper questions that they're asking and hand them some medication. And that's so unsatiating. It's so boring. It's so unprogressive, you know, apart from anything else. But I think we can have nuance and we can have refinement around all of this once we start talking openly. And I agree with you, we shouldn't all become Ernst Hemingway and drink ourselves into a stupor to be able to access our creative space and feel comfortable with our creativity or our deviance or our questioning. However, having some spirited, wild thinking from time to time would be something that could be of benefit to our culture right now, you know.

We need to have a more beautiful conversation around all of this stuff. And I suppose that's the journey that I went on, you know. It took me seven years to write that book. And it was very much about finding a more beautiful, helpful, nourishing way to talk about this. Because a friend said to me when I was partway through the researching of the book, you know, darling, why are you doing this? Why are you writing this book? Because he was watching me become so tortured by it all.

And I said, well, quite frankly, I am sick of being alone in the conversations I want to have. I want to have more interesting conversations. I mean, that was the impetus to the book. And in fact, it brought me those interesting conversations. I tell you what, like this one we're having right now. Indeed. Yeah. And I agree with you. I mean, I think the debate becomes very often, not just in society, but within the person about medicine, right? About taking medicine. And I've been on this debate, you say somewhere in the book that everybody who's been on these kinds of medicines at one point or the other tries to go off of them or is always questioning whether they should be on them.

And I've been through that route multiple times, once not too long ago. I'm a big fan of psychiatric medication because I think it saved my life and lifted me out of a bunch of pits. I do think that the idea that we just go to a doctor and we're given this medicine and we go take it and that's the end of it, as if it's a cold or an infection that we want to go away, that I think is all the things you said. It's profoundly unsatisfying and boring. And it just, for me, it misses the point because there's something else going on here. And my recovery from depression and alcoholism and all that has been a very challenging, but has probably brought 90% of the beautiful things that are in my life into my life. Yeah, absolutely. We don't have a discourse around struggle and pain anymore. You know, if you have a look at the way that technology has evolved, it hasn't evolved to make life a grander experience. It's mostly about saving us from discomfort, annoyances, delays, you know, and avoiding struggle and pain so we have a whole generation and we are

part of that generation because it was you know for a big part of my adulthood um where you know it's the eradication of pain at all costs and yet the spiritual traditions all throughout our history we have always had a deep appreciation of the role of struggle. It is the thing that takes us to the next level of our development. And as you say, it brings the most amount of beauty into life. So that is one of the things that really gets missed when you chuck a medication at a patient. I've always said, I mean, I'm the same as you, and I'm very open about it in the book. And I get asked this question almost immediately when I do public talks or I speak to media. Well, what are your thoughts on medication?

And I very openly go on and off it even to this day. I know when I need to go on it. Generally, it's the look of terror in family and friends' faces. You know, I probably get to a point where I'm a little bit too much for the world and I start to pick up the signs and I go back on my medication for a while and I pulse. I know how to manage it now.

But the only reason I can do that is because I've always taken medication in the context of psychiatric or in terms of a therapeutic context. So I've done it in conjunction with therapy. So I always see medication as getting you to a point where you're in a safe place, you're in a stable place where you can start to piece things out. But you must do the therapy at the same time because otherwise what's the point?

You don't get to go to that, you don't get to delve into the struggle and the point of it and the worth of it and the beauty of it, the philosophical purpose of it. And that's probably the missing piece, right? Medication is particularly good for young people, especially when you don't have the skills, the knowledge, you know, the wisdom to be able to have a conversation in and around it. So it can be great for that. It can be great when you've had a really hard point and you're not getting any clarity, but it really needs to be used so that you can then peace out your thoughts and you can do helpful therapy. So it's the therapy that's often missing. I'm Jason Alexander.

And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you

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Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I have sort of really plain, run-of-the-mill depression, which is, talk about boring. Like, when it comes, there's no, like, great, you know, passionate talk about boring. When it comes, there's no great passionate sadness about it. It's just like being dead. There's nothing there to feel anything about. And so it's not as much fun for me to come off of medicine. And I did it with the help of a doctor. I was like, you know what? I'm in a really great place in my life. I've been on these things for a while. I know how to take care of myself. And so I got off all the medicines with help in my life. I've been on these things for a while. I know how to take care of myself. And so I got off all the medicines with help of a doctor.

I did everything I know that treats my depression. And at a certain point, I just went, I feel like I am rolling a 500-pound rock up the side of a hill every day for no good reason and went back on a small dose of the medicine and boom. I was like, oh, there I am again. And so I feel comfortable with where I'm at with it because I went through that process in a really deep way.

I would never have felt comfortable saying, you know, I should or shouldn't be on it if I wasn't doing everything else that I know is important to my depression, my spiritual life, my meditation, my exercise, my eating well, all that stuff. When I'm doing all of that and I still feel terrible and I'm doing things like therapy and talking to people and I do all that and I still feel terrible, then I go, okay, I'm okay with medicine in this case because I've kind of exhausted the possibilities. Yeah. That comes with being a little bit older as well, doesn't it? I mean, you've got to know that you can go out on your own and exhaust a few possibilities before you do the medication as a young person it's

extremely terrifying um especially when it's you know it's your first time going through one of the cycles or whether it's depression or mania or combination of both so there's not one size fits all and unfortunately the medication based model works to that that there's a one size fits all. And unfortunately, the medication-based model works to that, that there's a one-size-fits-all. Yes. One of the things that I think always comes as a surprise is the number of different types of medication and the number of different therapists that the average depressed or manic person needs to go through until they arrive at a solution. Now, I will also argue, and I think it's something like five therapists and seven different types of medication. I think it's something like that. I'd also argue that

throughout my life, I've also had to pulse that. I go through different types of therapists. They'll be appropriate for a year and then I have a gap and then I have to go back to a different type of therapist because I evolve. And same for medication. It's a constant dance. And when I can frame it as something that is about modulation, and you might remember this, Eric, from the book that I talk about when you've got a mental condition of any type, it's like being charged with carrying a shallow bowl of water around for the rest of your life and you've got to walk carefully you've got to get steadiness into your life because if you don't and you start to get a bit wobbly the water starts to slosh backwards and forwards and it spills all over on around you and it you know bleeds through all the work that you're doing and ruins it and

then you've got to keep going back to source to fill up. And it's an exhausting process. So it's a very refined, artful thing to live with. And I quite love it now. I know that sounds really odd, but I find that in itself is quite beautiful, is to be able to read where I'm at and to know when I need to go back to source, when I need to make sure that I'm stable, when to know that when the sloshing is getting a little bit out of hand, you know. And it was really something I had to learn and it was a conversation I had to have. And people often ask me for different tricks and techniques and things that have worked to get me to a place where I'm able to talk like this, you know, with you, for instance, and your listeners. And one of the things I say is actually reading.

I'm working on my next book at the moment, and it's been a three-year research project. First We Make the Beast Beautiful took seven years of research. And one of the terms that I've come across, which I'm really enjoying, is soul nerding, nerding out on the soul and I discovered it actually when I was researching First We Make the Beast Beautiful that what really helped was reading some of the texts and fiction, non-fiction by people who had been diagnosed with a similar disorder throughout history whether it's Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, whoever it might be and actually just realising the commonality and the thread that some of these people go on. And that was incredible. And I now realise it's a worthwhile

pursuit because I know that some of their struggles to maintain that shallow bowl of water to keep it steady informed some of their greatest work. Like it's brought some of the greatest joy to humanity. And so, yeah, it's that constant reframing, that learning the richest side of all of this, feeding the right beast, you know, the right wolf that has brought me to this place, you know, along with other techniques such as meditation and walking and a bunch of other things I go into in the book. But it's that real awareness, that kind of understanding of the meta, the meta purpose behind it all that's helped. I agree 100%. Changing directions just a little

bit. I want to read something that you write in the book because I think this is so important. You say, one of the worst things we can do to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious about being anxious. And that learning to stop that cycle is one of the biggest and most fundamental things that we can do for ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. People have tended to really gravitate to that little line. It's only a small section of the book, right? But what I'm trying to say is that we can choose to do anxiety once. Now, what helps is to know that, yes, one of the worst things about anxiety is that we get anxious about being anxious. And then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious. And we go down

this horrible spiral, right, where, you know, there's no clawing our way out of it. One of the things that actually helps with that as well is to learn, and I learned this on the journey, is that a panic attack, for instance, only lasts 25 to 30 minutes. So once you know that, once you've soul-nerded your way to that truth, you realise that, oh, well, I could do 25 to 30 minutes of abject pain, right? I can sit through it. And as we mentioned before, you know, spiritual traditions throughout history have talked about the notion of sitting in your suffering, passing through it rather than trying to beat it. And that comes to fruition when you deal with a panic attack. If you can sit in a really bad moment of anxiety and just sit in it, ride it out and do it once, instead of getting anxious about the fact that you've been anxious, you can actually really nip things in the bud very, very quickly.

And then what you do is you're not actually creating those neural pathways. You're not strengthening these anxious neural pathways because you're keeping it quite short and succinct, you know, and moving onwards. And that's a really great technique. I mean, it's as simple as that, right? Sometimes just understanding some of the brain chemistry that goes on,

that helps. It helps. And that only comes about when we start talking beyond the medical model and we stop just talking about throwing a pill at the situation. Right, right. I often think with a lot of this stuff that sometimes the best we can do in certain situations, particularly when we're deep in it, the best we can do in certain situations, particularly when we're deep in it, the best we can do is not make it worse. And that may sound trivial, but it's not because our capacity to make things worse is, is extraordinary. You know, we talk about on the show a lot. It's that Buddhist parable of the second arrow, you know, the being anxious about being anxious is shooting yourself with the second arrow. And then the third, I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.

And so I often think that like, when it doesn't seem like I can make it better, I'm like, well, how can I make sure I don't make it worse? Yeah. And it's a responsibility, don't you think, Eric? I mean, I think that's something that I, that's a little bit of a part of that carrying the shallow bowl of water. It is a responsibility. If you are somebody who's been born with this condition or you've developed it for whatever reason, it is a responsibility and you've got a responsibility to those around you, but also to yourself to not make it worse, you know. And quite often those of us who have some of these conditions, we tend to be A-types, don't we? You know, and quite often those of us who have some of these conditions, we tend to be A-types,

don't we? You know, we're not laid back characters as a rule. And so, what I find is that when I'm speaking to, you know, A-types, it actually really does help to kind of add that extra layer, that notion of a responsibility, right? You've got a responsibility not to make this worse, fire up, you know? And I know that that kind of mindset really works for me when I'm in that moment. Because if I'm doing it for myself, because I read it in a self-help book somewhere, like it ain't going to cut through. Like I will self-indulge myself down a horrible anxiety spiral. But if I say to myself, no, this is my role, you know, I've got this condition and it comes with a responsibility. And first and foremost is I'm not going to make this worse.

I'm not going to add any more fuel to this fire. Let's get sensible. We've given our Instagram account a new look and we're sharing content there that we don't share anywhere else. Encouraging positive posts with wisdom that support you in feeding your good wolf, as well as some behind the scenes video of the show and some of Ginny and I's day-to-day life, which I'm kind of still amazed that anybody would be interested in. It's also a great place for you to give us feedback on the episodes that you like, or concepts that you've learned that you think are helpful, or any other feedback you'd like to give us. If you're on Instagram, follow us at 1 underscore you underscore feed. Those words are all spelled out, 1 underscore you underscore feed, to add some nourishing content to your daily

scrolling. See you there. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

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Yeah, Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine.

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You use a few different words in the book to describe the process of getting better or working with anxiety. One of them is slow. Let's talk about slow. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people talk about the benefits of going slow. It's been, you know, a book, various people have written books and there's a whole self-help category.

I'm not great at slow. I've tended to have, you know, one speed and one speed only, which is, you know, surging forward. But, you know, interestingly, I had an illness which goes part and parcel with anxious conditions. I have Hashimoto's, which is an autoimmune disorder. And it's incredible how many people tend to have bipolar and Hashimoto's. And it is a perfect disease for somebody like me. I needed to almost have my body tell me to stop and go slow. So when I got unwell, I mean, I was a crazy exerciser. As I say, I was a mountain bike rider and I used to do sand running races and I would run several miles to work and back every day. And I actually was forced to actually get very, very slow.

And it was one of the best things for me. And one of the things that came out of that, and you probably noted this in the book, is walking. I discovered the absolute fundamental life-saving benefits of walking. I used to get impatient with walking. Why walk when you could run? And getting unwell and being forced to slow down was wonderful because, and this is a line that I use in the book, and it's wonderful. It's, walking goes at the same pace as discerning thought. And I feel that so much of what we suffer today is a lack of space and time

and the right environment for discerning good, deep, meaningful thinking. And when you walk, it actually literally gets you into that speed, that pace where you start to, the thoughts just start to tumble inwards. Walking has just been an absolute boon. I mentioned quite a number of scientific studies that have been shown that connect walking with really alleviating anxiety. The anxious part of the brain, the flight or fight mechanism, is the same part of the brain that modulates the left-right motion when we're walking. It's sort of like that part of the brain evolved at the same point that we became upright, which is also the same point that we developed an acute sense of flight or fight. You know, you can understand why all of that would have developed together. And so the walking

mechanism can very much modulate and calm and almost shut down the anxious part of the brain because it's such an old part of the brain. It can only do one thing at once. Various people call it the monotasker of, you know, sort of like the fusty old uncle that can only do one thing at once, you know. And so when you walk, it is very, very hard to remain anxious. So yeah, that sort of slow thing, I came to very much appreciate it. And one other thing that always makes people laugh is I hand wrote that entire book. And again, handwriting goes at the same pace as discerning thought. A lot of people, and I don't know if you're the same, Eric, when they write books, they often handwrite it because you can actually connect in with your heart and your soul far better than when you're at a keyboard. And in many ways, our contemporary life goes at the opposite or way too fast for discerning thought.

So actually going back to some old school techniques like walking and handwriting can really help. I was definitely struck by that. I've always felt rescued by the computer because my handwriting is so bad. But I also have recognized that I'm not a good typer either. And I find that to be a very distracting thing. So I can at least write by hand. No one but me can probably read it, but I can do it. But typing, I find myself having to stop and start. And it's just because I make so many mistakes, whereas at least handwriting,

I kind of, I know how to do it. Well, there's also the risk of toggling while you're on a computer, you're also toggling on screens, you can check your mess by messages. You know, you've got your chat messages coming in. And it just takes you into that vortex of distraction, which it sets you up for the anxious experience like nothing else. Yes. One of the things I have learned to do is I don't do it as often as I should, but I pretty much know how to shut all of it off so it doesn't reach me. Like the do not disturb feature on my phone is like one of the greatest things ever invented. Just because then nothing shows up. People are always like, I've been trying to call you all day. And I'm like, well. Oh, well.

Yeah, exactly. Let's talk about another word that you use, which is space. I think this is a really interesting concept. It's one I've been thinking a lot about lately, this idea of space. So tell me when you were talking about space in the book, kind of what you mean. Yeah, well, I found a really useful metaphor to describe my anxiety as this sort of knotted ball of wool. And I think in our culture, we tend to have this idea that if we could just find the end of that knotted ball of wool, which is all just gnarly and it's sort of the threads have all kind of got knotted together and it's all fuzzy and it's dense, you know. And we sort of feel that if we could just find that end of the piece of wool and we could just kind of, you know,

tug at it a bit, it'll all unravel into a nice unified thread, you know. Hopefully some drugs and some quick fixes out there and a guru or two will get us there. And it just ain't how it works, you know. And what I try to do instead is talk about this idea of loosening this ball of wool. That's our aim. We loosen it up. So we kind of just massage it out a bit and get some space in there. And I really do think that that is really important. And, you know, when you go and

look at some of the techniques that a lot of experts share in this realm, it is about creating space. So, you know, those breathing exercises where you breathe in and you hold your breath, two, three, and then you release your breath, two, three, you know, it's very much about trying to find those spaces between the breaths. And it's something that is not honoured, it's not talked about, it's not practised, and we have to actually proactively go and do that. It's not about finding, you know, the fix where everything's laid out in a nice symmetrical kind of order. Sometimes it's just about finding space.

One thing that is not actually, I don't think it's in that chapter, but it is somewhere in the book, is another lesson that relates to that. When I was the editor of Cosmopolitan, we did a bunch of different stories on stress and so on. I remember coming across a study that found that the most stressed and miserable person on the planet were women in their 40s who were lawyers, which, you know, I found interesting having done half a law degree myself and escaped such misery in my early 20s. A particular sociologist actually decided, well, he was going to go and research and he wrote a piece for the magazine. He thought he'd go and research, well, what was it that was actually

making the most happy and balanced or, you know, settled women in the world so? And what he found was that most women are stressed. They've got multiple stuff coming in. They're living that knotted ball of wool life in so many ways. And many of your female listeners know exactly what I'm talking about. The have it all means do it all generation. about. The have it all means do it all generation. And what he found is that the women who are happiest were the ones that didn't try to find perfect balance. They didn't try to find that thread and pull it out so that everything fell into place where your yoga quotient matched up

perfectly to the amount of hours that you're working in the office quotient with the number of hours you're spending with your kids at soccer practice, whatever it might be. These women weren't doing that. Instead, they were tilting. And that word in itself, I think, is just magical. This notion of you tilt towards what matters, feed the wolf that matters. And I think that that plays into that idea of space. It's not about rigidly finding solutions and right and wrong. It's tilting, it's leaning, it's more nuanced, it's subtle. I like that idea of tilting. And I think it speaks to, I always think about with balance, is it something that can be achieved maybe over a long period of time? If you want to look at like, well, if I look at the year, how did the year go?

You know, as far as, as trying to allocate things to the various parts of my life I care about. But in real time, like you said, there's a lot of tilting that goes on. My kid is sick. I'm tilting that direction. We got a big work project. I'm tilting that direction. I'm out of balance for a period of time. And that's just the way it should be. And if we're intentional about what really matters to us, those things come out in the wash if we take the time to be intentional. But this idea of space is really fascinating to me because I've been thinking a lot lately about the spiritual idea of contraction versus expansion. And what I've really started to notice for me

is that when I'm doing well, there's this sense of outflowing and moving outwards and space for me. Not necessarily like my focus is all in the outside world, but it feels like the movement is an expansion. And when I struggle, my depression, it feels like complete contraction. And it made me think about it because one of the spiritual teachers I really has meant a lot to me,

his name is Adi Ashanti. He's been on the show a few times. And he said once that ego is just a contraction. And that hit me so strongly. And so that metaphor of contracting versus expanding or space versus tightness has really been a way for me, without having to give a whole lot of thought, to like, where am I? How am I? What place am I living from right now? By just checking into that feeling. Yeah, I am very much on the same page, Eric.

I've recently been reading a fair bit of James Hollis. much on the same page, Eric. I've recently been reading a fair bit of James Hollis. He's an American Jungian psychotherapist, and he has a wonderful phrase, which is very similar. He asks the question throughout his life, will it enlarge or contract my life? And it's become a wonderful lens through which I'm able to navigate quite a lot of my life these days and I think at the moment as well I think it resonates particularly in a world where in many ways we are lacking a moral code it's so hard to find your true north the true north that will serve not just ourselves but the broader community, which is essentially at the heart of our yearning, right? It has been throughout history. We desire to be of service, to help humanity. And at the moment, I think it's a really useful question to ask, you know,

as we face all kinds of climate crisis issues that, you know, that are plaguing the planet, is what we're going to do. Is it going to enlarge or is it going to constrict life or contract life? I agree with you, that space concept, that opening, that enlarging, that loosening the ball of wool rather than rigidly trying to find the end of it, you know, which invariably makes the ball of wool even more knotted and constricted, right? You know, it's that kind of thinking that we, that is resonating right now. Yeah, I had forgotten that quote by him. And that is one of my favorite lines. I wrote it down several times when I heard it. Oh, good.

Such a great question. Because I do think it helps answer, for me, a lot of things that feel thorny. And it just provides a clarity for me that a lot of other things don't. So when I read that about space in your book, it really spoke to me. Well, we are at the end of our time here. I think this is where we're going to wrap up, which I think is a great place to wrap up. I've had a ball talking to you. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation. We are going to talk about indecision, about how when you're anxious, decisions can be your undoing. And I can speak to the same for depression. We're going to talk a little bit about that and some ways to work with that in the post-show. Listeners, if you're interested and you want to get other great things by being part of our community, go to oneufeed.net slash support. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for

coming on. The book was beautifully written. Listeners, I think you would absolutely love it. We'll have links in the show notes and thanks so much. I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly

love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts