Is it only women who can reduce their anxiety levels to near zero?

Hi, its Jim writing again. In the last four years, the journey to beat the living daylights out of my potato (I use potato instead of the ‘C’ word), was stressful. There’s no other word for it, especially when everyone around me was thinking that my days were numbered.

It’s our moments of struggle that define us, and its where I turned to integrated medicine. I had no other option that offered me the hope that I sought. The health service here in the UK, was difficult. Chemotherapy with a 2.5% chance of success — I was having none of. But looking back, I realise that it’s how we handle the struggle that defines us. How I dealt with what was ahead of me, at that time, was the key to healing.

The fact that men don’t/can’t admit that they are stressed or have anxiety made it extra difficult. Women on the other hand show their emotions, some more vociferously than others. But can all of us, both men and women learn to live Stress-Free? According to the respected US blogger and writer Martha Beck, we can.

She writes about what we would do when we are comforting a small, scared animal. Would you lower your voice, slow your movements, and utter gentle words? Or would you try to analyse it, medicate it, and get rid of it? “Most of us would choose the former approach when it comes to a frightened creature — but when it comes to treating our own anxiety, we tend to go for the latter,” she says.

As a boy, I asked my parents if I could have a pet. My dad was a genius. On hearing of my request, his first step was to go to our local pet shop and ask them if they had a big oblong fish tank that leaked? They must have thought he was either extremely clever (which he was), or he was nuts. Anyway, the next day he came come with the glass box. Then he set about fitting it out with the most wonderful little hamster home imaginable. With tunnels, rooms and staircases, it was a luxury apartment for what was to be my new best friend. Dad knew that the hamster would gnaw, so the rooms and tunnels were made from hard- wood that wouldn’t splinter; and rather than using nails or screws to hold it together, it was pinned together with wooden dowels. Not a bit of glue to be seen anywhere.

Despite this luxury abode that was filled with the cleanest, organic straw imaginable, my little friend was shivering in fear when I came home to greet him after school.  In those days, I knew nothing about anxiety, but I lifted the trembling little animal and held it gently in my hands; stroked it and said some comforting words to treat its anxiety. We would all do that sort of thing with an animal, well at least the vast majority of us.

And then there was me, and my own terrors that I found very difficult to cope with —at least in the beginning.

Martha Beck is famed as Oprah Winfrey’s life coach. A best best-selling author with degrees from Hartford University and social science, she is using her skills to help people like us deal with anxiety; some of which has lasted from birth and even into old-age. Martha meditates, and she used this on her mission to try and find a temporary state of calm to free herself from anxiety in the long-term, and she’s published a book about it.

She reckons that if we can reach into our instinctive heritage and treat our own internal anxious creatures with that set of skills, which are evolved and innate, we can calm our anxiety and stress, just as I did for my shivering little friend. I’m not here to sell her books, but I was particularly intrigued by her evidence that shows a kind of toggle effect between anxiety and creativity. “When one is up and running, the other seems to go silent,” she says.

The focus of this idea lies in the use of the right and left hemispheres of our brains, and how they can either send us into an anxiety spiral or a creativity spiral. Some people (according to the theorists) are right brain, meaning they are more creative, whereas others are left brain and in more logical mode, like my dad. But Martha doesn’t agree. Her opinion is that we use the entire brain nearly all of the time. Both hemispheres that can be enhanced through intentional focus.

I had to chuckle when I read what she said about the box of 15 puppies and a Cobra. She asked what in this situation, we would pay most attention to? The answer, she said, “is going to be whatever you’re afraid of.”This, in my opinion is where reading the news has a lot to say about how people’s brains spiral into anxiety mode. I stopped watching the news a couple of years ago, because there’s nothing that I could do about any of the stuff that they talk about. And apart from anything, the television companies are geared to sensationalism. That’s what they sell. Bad News!!  And if you watch and listen to what they say about everything, it goes into your brain, and your subconscious. In time, if you soak up enough of it, it can start to play tricks. Give you the anxiety that you didn’t ask for, and you certainly don’t need.

So what’s the fix? Well, I think the best answer is from here to hand you over to Martha, and you can find her article by using this link. In the extract from her book (Beyond Anxiety), that I have read, she reckons that it’s the brains left-side spiral that sparks fear and makes us want to control things while it’s the right-side spiral that sparks curiosity and wants us to create things for the better.

I don’t agree with everything she writes, but it’s thought-provoking, and while you might not agree entirely with everything I write about, if it can help calm your anxiety, then my words today have at least been worthy of a read. A signpost to where better help than I can offer, may be sought. And you might have learned something about hamster care too.

And as for the next newsletter, it’s definitely going to be about the skin and health benefits of juicing (that I promised last time).

Last but not least

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