Before I get cracking this morning I want to take a minute to breathe. Stop what you’re doing right now and take a monster breath in. Full up your lungs so much that your belly has to extend to take in all that air. Now hold it. Hold it for as long as you can. When you feel like you can’t hold any longer, start to slowly breathe out - mouth or nose, it doesn’t matter - but you want to exhale until there isn’t a single bit of air left. Repeat this two more times and now your ready for whatever is going to happen next.
I realised this week that I’d forgotten to breathe. It sounds silly because of course I was breathing but there is a difference between mindfully breathing and breathing because you have to. I picked up this error when I arrived home from work yesterday in a massive funk. Nothing particularly bad had happened during the day but I felt disconnected and weighted down by my very existence. This is how my anxiety manifests itself. A bit like HP’s invisibility cloak but made out of weighted blanket.
Anxiety is a manageable constant in my life that can be triggered by the most random of events. Most of the time it's linked to having too many spinning plates in the air but sometimes it’s triggered by not having enough plates to spin. Very rarely do I have a time when I’m not challenging myself, this is by choice of course but it's important to acknowledge that constantly sitting in the growth zone can take its toll.
I never thought I’d lament not drinking (stone sober for 4 years now) but I do miss the ability to alter my state of mind quickly. I drank a lot in my teens, 20’s and early 30’s. Definitely too much by most modern standards but it kept my anxiety at bay until one day, it didn’t. Once I hit 30, bad hangovers gave me crippling anxiety. I couldn’t get off the couch or look at anyone without feeling like my soul was being crushed by an invisible mass. It sucked but was a pretty good reason to not drink when I was compiling a ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ list four years ago.
Since then I’ve had to figure out other ways of managing my anxiety. Prevention is always better than a curse so I run, I write, I am kind to myself and I hold things lightly. Sometimes these are easier said than done but they’re designed to be achievable. They need to be if they’re going to be useful. If my coping mechanisms were complicated, expensive or annoying I would never do them. Part of me wishes I could throw money at it, a bit like booze. It would be great if I could just take a pill but current budgets don’t allow for medical intervention so I’m on my own. The benefit of this is that I’ve set myself up with a system that has very little overheads. All I really need to do is stick to the plan, keep showing up and buy a good pair of runners every 18 months. It’s cheap but effective.
This is what my life has gifted me. Limitations have required me to be creative. What do you do when you can’t throw money at it? How do you solve a problem using only what you have in front of you today? Once you get used to making it work, even if it's stuck together with duct tape, you start to create more ambitious problems to solve. This is where I sit today. I have many spinning plates in the air - some of them are mine, some of them are Matts.
When anxiety makes itself known again I have to give it some space. Like a kid pulling at your arm saying ‘Mum, Mum, Mum’. It's always better to turn around and say, ‘Right kiddo, what's up?’ Ignoring the nagging will only make things worse. This is how I like to treat my anxiety - with kindness.
‘What is it mate? What’s going on?’
Nine times out of ten the very act of acknowledging the situation, defuses it. The key is being able to see the red flags before everything explodes. Coming home from work yesterday in a funk was a warning. I needed to make some adjustments around the expectation I have for myself and make sure I’m keeping up with my preventives.
I’ve been reading Sarah Wilson's ‘first, we make the beast beautiful’ which is her story about managing anxiety. One of the things she mentions is meditation which is something I haven’t done for AGES! During Covid times I got pretty good at it but I’m struggling to find the time to do both exercise and meditation in the 1 hour I have for self-care everyday.
This morning I made myself stop and meditate for 5 minutes after my run. I sat on the wet grass in front of my house, closed my eyes and tried to imagine a blue sky. I’m not a natural when it comes to mediating so I used an app yonks ago that had a great analogy of a blue sky with the clouds representing thoughts and feelings. It's really hard to clear your mind, so imagining a blue sky with clouds gently passing you by is great. There is no need to react, just observe.
I’ve always found this method really helpful. The ability to take an objective view of your anxiety really is the best way to disconnect yourself from it. Give it some attention but don’t let it ruin your day. Another great trick to change your state of mind quickly is to turn the hot water tap off and stand in a cold shower - holy shit - if there was ever a cheap why to change your outlook on life then that is it.
