What's the problem with anxiety?
I've suffered all my life - but quick fixes don't work on mental health troubles
We live in a world that loves easy answers. From medicine men hawking their coloured water around ancient settlements to air fryers which promise you can have chips every night without losing your svelte figure, humanity longs for a quick fix.
I see this most of all in mental health discourse. ‘How to overcome depression’, ‘Be happier than ever!’, ‘Eight simple ways to beat anxiety.’ As if mental health is a graphic equaliser and all it needs is a studio engineer called Dave to stick a bit of bass on it and fiddle with the treble. As anyone who has experienced the difficulty of living inside their own troubled mind long-term knows, however, there is very little in the way of quick fixes available.
Finding a liveable level of normality can take years, good luck, commitment, therapy, medication - and still, some never manage it. Many of us never even discover what triggered our problems. Maybe, like the Maybelline advert used to say, we’re born with it, or perhaps a genetic predisposition, childhood or adult trauma, or a lack of love and care has tipped us from ‘OK and coping’ to ‘Jesus Christ, what fresh mental hell-scape is this?’
Good luck if your assigned Marvel character in life is Doctor Panic
I have suffered from severe anxiety all my life. I have no idea what it’s like not to feel sick with dread over issues that might cause other people a brief flash of concern. I couldn’t count the ways it has harmed and hampered me in the pursuit of a happy life.
Thanks to the relentless march of American positivity, where every frown must be turned upside down, there’s a disingenuous fashion amongst younger people to refer to their particular mental health problem as a ‘superpower.’ Well good luck to you if your assigned Marvel character in life is Doctor Panic, because for my money, he’s a quack.
I was born anxious, I think. I was once so frightened by a vacuum cleaner starting up, I screamed until I went blue and stopped breathing. I barely slept as a baby, and my poor mum, who was only 22 and already a TV writer with a high-powered career, would make bargains with a god she didn’t believe in (“please…if she’d just go to sleep for an hour… OK, ten minutes…”).
I remained in a state of nervous tension all through my childhood. Going to sleep frightened me in case I died or had nightmares, waking up frightened me because school was terrifying. I cried so hard at nursery, I was sent home and kept off for several months. I remember the kindly headmistress visiting, and telling me that school was ‘fun’, and full of little boys and girls just like me.
She was lying - they were not like me, because they seemed normal and happy, screaming in the playground and slapping poster paint onto sugar paper. One whiff of the dusty-plimsolls-and-disinfectant reek of the 1970s classroom, and I was awash with terror.
I’d sit up and quaver, ‘but how do I know I’m me?’
When I was about five, I developed an existential crisis of selfhood, the way you do. My parents would come to put me lovingly to bed and I’d sit up and quaver, ‘but how do I know I’m me?’
My twenty-something parents did their very best, but I’m not sure they were able to access the philosophical texts necessary to reassure me.
At infant school, I still cried so much the teachers called me ‘waterworks’ (it was 1978, and there was no such thing as ‘hurtful language’). I’d read an Enid Blyton story about some children who were sent to a farm when their mum was knocked down by a car - she was fine, she was recovering, it wasn’t Stephen King - but I became convinced that the same would happen to my parents and grandparents and there’d be nobody there to collect me. As a result, I developed a set of OCD rituals featuring whisper-chanted incantations and a small bead necklace I had to carry with me at all times to prevent anything terrible happening (which would obviously be my fault if I forgot the necklace and the correct series of words).
Even when I was older, I cried violently at the end of every school holiday because I knew I had to go back, and lay on the kitchen floor howling, like Marie Antoinette begging for a reprieve from the scaffold. It was not the bleak halls of Jane Eyre’s Lowood, nobody was swishing a cane or making bad pupils stand on chairs till they fainted - it was a pleasant girls’ day school, with generally kindly female teachers and I had plenty of friends.
I was humiliated by my inability to grasp basic maths and my utter uselessness at PE
I just couldn’t bear the idea of having to go back, because school made me feel so anxious. I was humiliated by my inability to grasp basic maths and my utter uselessness at PE, and lived in a state of dread that I’d be asked to do something far beyond my capability in front of the class and they’d all laugh at me.
Nobody ever asked, ‘well, what if they do?’, I just internalised the belief that it would be impossible to carry on living if they did. I was popular, fairly pretty, very good at Art and English, I had a small, but kind and loving family and generous, funny friends. We had enough money (more or less), nobody was ill - in the life lottery, I’d won big. Perhaps part of what drove my fear was the constant awareness that I could lose it all.
I never met my uncle, my Mum’s much-loved brother. He had died suddenly aged 13, and the grotesque knowledge that children could die underpinned my understanding of existence. I was horribly afraid of death, which of course, made me obsessed with the idea that I could very easily lose my loved ones, and that life itself was as fragile as spun glass.
I’d stand at the window on the landing every night, waiting for my dad to get back from work four miles away. If he was five minutes late, I’d feel a wave of adrenaline building, and after ten minutes of staring passionately into the dark street waiting for his yellow headlights to swing round the corner, I’d start to cry with worry. (Update: Thankfully he’s still with us, over forty years later.)
How you’d feel if a lion leapt out at you - but there’s no lion
This rolling snowball of anxiety finally exploded when I was 15 and standing in school assembly. Out of nowhere, a wave of panic overwhelmed me. I have often tried to describe it since, but can get no further than, ‘how you’d feel if a lion leapt out at you - but there’s no lion.’
I felt that I was going to die, that my sense of self had dissolved and that I was in new, uncharted territory where my body was on fire with pure fear and my brain had frozen. Melodramatic, yes - but the first panic attack you ever have makes melodrama look a bit weak. I ran home from school and called the doctor who told me I had too much carbon dioxide in my blood and I should breathe into a paper bag when I felt worried. This is standard advice - it certainly was in 1986 - but it’s not something you want to do publicly, as a self-conscious teenager.
I managed a year and a bit at University, having several panic attacks a day. You’d think you’d get used to it, and be able to say, ‘ah, a panic attack. Do your worst, my old enemy, I know your game’ - but every time is like the first time. Your brain stops and nothing makes sense. I developed a terror of accepting a drink, even from friends, in case it was spiked with hallucinogens, and soon, I wouldn’t eat anything I hadn’t made myself.
It was a great relief when I read the novel Peerless Flats by Esther Freud and a character did the same. It was the first time I had considered the idea that other people might be anxious like me.
I left university, mainly because I was exhausted from monitoring myself. Three months later, I was pregnant, and almost all my fears transferred to my baby’s wellbeing. He’s now 29 and suffice to say, I have worried about him every day of my life. Not that he’s given me cause (or only briefly) - simply that my default setting is anxiety. If I know he’s out clubbing, I can’t sleep. If he’s unhappy, I can’t function. I am beset by news stories of stabbings, suicides, sudden disappearances. I love him more than anyone on earth, but I’d have been a better mother, without question, without the constant cloud of anxiety.
That sort of fear obscures reality, it casts a mist of doubt over sensible assumptions, it surrounds me like the fog that wreathed Nicole Kidman in The Others. The difference is, I’m not dead yet, and I know there’s a better place to live on the other side of terror, if I could only find my way through it.
I have seen therapists - five, in fact
I have tried. Of course I have. I am a determined person, and I have never wanted to let anxiety ruin me. I have seen therapists - five, in fact. CBT helped slightly when I was having an empty-nest breakdown, Jungian therapy helped significantly after I got divorced and was convinced everyone hated me. The others, not so much. (It turns out that talking about anxiety often simply makes you feel more anxious).
I stopped drinking - but not till my forties. It helped a bit, but it wasn’t the great cure-all that people like to claim. Being sober means you have less in your arsenal when it comes to ignoring the anxiety.
I walk in nature every day - it’s good, it helps, I reason with myself and come to sane conclusions. Sometimes they last a whole day. I’ve taken up yoga. I go swimming sometimes. I talk to my husband and my friends. I read, all the time, which is the only activity that has ever really taken my mind off worrying.
‘Natural’ cures eventually wiped out entire populations
Most usefully of all, I now take medication. Because where all ‘natural’ cures are fine, but a bit like massaging a broken arm, Citalopram, the anti-depressant, is also prescribed for anxiety, and it works. I first tried it four years ago, after years of resistance - ‘oh, but it’s bad for you.. side effects…I should cure myself naturally...’ Rubbish. ‘Natural’ cures eventually wiped out entire populations. Allopathic medicine has saved countless lives and it’s certainly saved my sanity.
Within a week of the first pill, I had a glimpse of what ‘normal’ might look like. It was as though a fire blanket had finally been thrown over sparking embers, taking the heat out. It didn’t stop me feeling anxious, but it suppressed the swooping panic that generally accompanied every frightening thought to a manageable level.
I don’t want a higher dose - I just want my writhing brain patterns to calm. I want my imagination to stop hurtling from ‘he’s five minutes late ringing me’ to conjuring the fully realised scene of a car crash, blue lights whirring, a deathly silence as bodies are pulled from the wreckage, the slow tread of the policemen to the midnight door.
And largely, it has done. I sleep better, my hormones have calmed down, I worry slightly less. I am still an anxious person, and it’s a part of me I’ve had to accept and assimilate, over and over again.
It isn’t a superpower. It doesn’t make me a better writer or partner or friend or mother. It’s a flaw, a crack in the structure of me, and I will never be fully mended.
I know the traditional way to end these things is to add a reassuringly philosophical, ‘…and that’s OK.’ No, it’s not OK, not really. It’s been a lifelong disaster, it’s ruined relationships, happiness, other people’s comfort. It’s just the way it is. I love being alive, and I live with it. For anyone else suffering from lifelong mental health trouble, big or small - I hope you find ways to stay alive and live with it, too.
KEEP READING…
LOCHED UP: My Life in Rural Scotland
Water, gas and fire trouble this week
Last week, we went to see my family and friends in Manchester for five days, and celebrate my mum’s birthday. Coming back is always bittersweet for me - I love my Scottish home, but God knows, I miss them all. If they’d only see sense and form a permanent wagon circle around our Argyll cottage, 300 miles from everything they know and love, I could finally be happy.
Still, it was a beautiful September day and as we drove the six hours back home, the mountains glowed like a 1930s railway poster and the lochs flashed silver in the Autumn sun. How peaceful, I thought. We’re so lucky to live where we do. I had briefly forgotten the enormous downside - that when you live in a spot this brutally rural, nothing is ever bloody simple, and when it goes wrong, you might as well write off a month of your life to chase plumbers, electricians and handymen and beg them to drive twenty miles in the wrong direction. We’re often just minutes from sending fruit baskets, like Hollywood directors trying to woo their star.
We started having the outside of our very small cottage painted over a month ago. It’s two thirds done, and the painter has vanished like the cheshire cat, only a stack of drying paint pots left like a fading smile to show he was ever here. Reasons for his non-appearance so far have been, in order, a Rangers game he couldn’t miss, his cousin unexpectedly coming back from Saudi Arabia and his mum ‘putting on a spread’, and him having experienced a mild stroke last Friday. That one is somewhat worrying, but he was up a ladder working on someone else’s house when he said it.
I expected him not to have shown up, though. I didn’t expect that halfway down the motorway, Andy would get a call from the paying guests at the holiday rental house he owns and runs, to tell him that the water had stopped working. It comes from two giant plastic tanks in the ground, like a nuclear reactor from B&Q, and a lack of water suggested a disastrous leak which might cost thousands to fix.
That was a major concern all the way back, and somewhat ruined my enjoyment of Craig Charles on Radio 6 and my cake from Tebay services. We got home at teatime, and the house was freezing. I needed a bath, and the dogs looked chilly, so Andy went to put the heating on - I know fuel crisis, but I haven’t worked all my life to live in a chiller cabinet - then discovered the pilot light had gone out. He swore and tinkered, and got nowhere. In the way everyone watching someone else do a difficult task immediately thinks they can do better, I went and thumped it three times, smugly expecting this to do the trick.
Worryingly, it didn’t, even though I was drawing hard on my thirty-plus years of boiler-fixing knowledge. Andy gloomily decided that the valve had disintegrated, and ‘there’s nothing to be done, that’s it, we need a new boiler.’ Given that new boilers now cost the equivalent of a smart London townhouse, this had already ruined our evening, and I hadn’t even started cooking my tea (courgette gratin, much better than it sounds).
I needed to calm myself, so I lit a small scented candle, (lemon verbena in an attractive tin) even though I’m extremely wary of candles because my house burned down 13 years ago due to the waxy chancers. (You can read that story here.) But it was a long time ago, and I like the scent.
I started the courgette-chopping while Andy unwrapped a parcel containing something very boring and technical, probably to do with the water supply, and wandered off to fit it together.
It was a while before I idly thought, ‘that’s a familiar smell’. It was like a wood-burning stove, or the scent you get in the air on bonfire night, where fireworks are whistling and crunching in the sky, and excitable dads are throwing more chairs onto leaping back garden flames while mums hand round hot soup and sparklers… eventually, my pleasantly reminiscing brain made the connection, and I span round to see a conflagration in the middle of the kitchen table.
Andy had failed to notice the lit candle and chucked a drift of brown parcel paper onto the table, which had immediately caught fire and was now threatening to burn the kitchen down.
I simultaneously screamed and ran to the sink with the paper, poured water onto the flames, and ran back with the wooden spatula I’d been using to stir courgettes to beat out the smouldering bits. In my head, I was Bruce Willis saving New York, but possibly I more closely resembled Fanny Craddock spanking Johnnie for burning the carrots.
The fire was put out, though the house was filled with black smoke, and then the rental guests Whatsapped to say the water had mysteriously come back.
No such luck with the boiler. It seems all the elements are against us this week, and I’m fully expecting the plumber to have an urgent Rangers game he must attend before he can visit (thought ideally, not a stroke). I’m currently sitting at the kitchen table in home-made arm-warmers and woolly knee socks, thinking about how in the city, there are fire brigades and plumbers and boiler men, all just waiting for a call.
You don’t get the views, though. At least here, we have mountains to look at while we freeze to death.
KEEP READING…
RECIPE OF THE WEEK: Chickpea and Apricot Tagine
When I went to Morrocco - twice, in fact, once with a friend to Marrakesh, and once on a press trip to Essaouira where I got food poisoning from salad - I found the food delicious but difficult, if you’re not a meat-eater. I wanted the delicate flavour-thrills of tagine, but I didn’t want the hefty chunks of lamb.
They did their best, but all the vegetarian versions relied heavily on carrots, which are not my favourite vegetable. So, when I came back, I had a go at improving the tagine situation for vegetarians, and found that the following recipe is just a delight, particularly on an Autumn night when you want something cosy and, hypothetically, your boiler’s broken.
You can serve it with couscous, but if, like me, you find grains a bit reminiscent of body-scrub, saffron rice does the job beautifully.
It also tastes better the longer you leave it. Keep leftovers in the fridge and serve with flatbread and yoghurt for lunch.
Serves 2
Ingredients
1 x 400g tin chickpeas
½ a red pepper, roasted and skinned or equivalent from jar.
½ a red onion, chopped
2 tbsps olive oil
3 fresh apricots or 50g dried
100g raisins
100g pine nuts
1 clove garlic, crushed
5 g fresh ginger or ½ tsp powdered
½ tsp cumin
½ tsp cinnamon
I tbsp harissa paste (see box)
I tbsp agave/maple syrup
300ml vegetable stock
I tsp rosewater (optional)
1 tbsp chopped parsley
salt and pepper
Method
1 Add the onions to a non-stick frying pan, and gently fry in the oil over a low heat, until softened. Add the peppers and garlic and cook for another 5 minutes.
2 Add the apricots, raisins, pine nuts, spices, syrup and harissa. Stir through and cook for another 5 minutes.
3 Add the stock and chickpeas, season, and simmer over low heat for 30- 40 mins until the sauce has thickened. Scatter over parsley just before serving.
4 Serve with couscous or rice, and yoghurt.
Harissa paste
Makes enough for 2 servings
You can buy Harissa, but it’s cheaper to make it.
½ a red chilli pepper, seeds scraped out, chopped
1 red pepper (or jar equivalent), chopped
I clove garlic, chopped
salt and pepper
olive oil
1 Place all the ingredients except the oil in a food processor and blend, whilst adding a trickle of oil, to make a thick paste.
2 Transfer to a jar or pot, and keep in the fridge for up to 5 days.
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Thank you for this. I see so much of myself in it, it's almost unnerving!
This is a really brilliant portrayal of generalised anxiety disorder. Having suffered myself and also practiced as a psychotherapist for 12 years supporting others with their mental health, I’ve studied the subject from every angle. I think that just as with depressive illness, anxiety disorders (generalised, social, OCD etc…) are usually a perfect storm of genetics, generational legacy, environment and personality. Learning to live with anxiety requires acceptance that it’s just a part of who you are, then finding ways to modify or minimise symptoms as much as possible. Whether that’s therapy or medication or both, there’s absolutely no shame in either.