How I deal with the anxiety octopus

I must have had a drink every day for the last 20 years, more or less. Not loads of drinks, not drinking until I black-out, but at least a beer or two, for 95% of the last 7300 days.

I drink to take the edge of the anxiety I’ve felt ever since I had a couple of bad trips when I was 18, which gradually developed into PTSD and social anxiety.

I especially drink in social situations, to calm my autonomic nervous system and stop it from being overwhelmed with information.

Unfortunately, in the past I have over-drunk in social situations, veering right through ‘disinhibited’ into ‘asshole’, and then I feel tired, anxious and paranoid the next day. And guess what helps with that?

I sometimes felt a bit of a fraud, giving a talk about philosophy, or even spirituality, and then sinking a beer or two afterwards.

But by now you must know that most people in the ‘wellness’ game are in it because some unwellness shoved them into it. So don’t expect us to be paragons of normality.

Only the unhealthy bang on about health. The truly healthy take it for granted.

I especially drink to calm my nervous system down when I’m in a relationship. I find it easier to relax into emotional intimacy if I’m slightly or very drunk much of the time.

The problem is, since January I’ve been going out with a Californian, and she barely drinks.

The Californian takes her health pretty seriously. She has a ‘health plan’ and asked me what my health plan was. I showed her a leaflet from Dignitas and explained I had gone for the ‘quick and painless’.

[This, for American readers, is a joke about a Swiss euthanasia clinic].

When I’m with the Californian, I don’t necessarily have to drink. I may feel irritable and tense, but I can get through an evening with her without booze. And even enjoy it!

Plus, through her influence no doubt, I have started to take my own health more seriously, including the quality of my sleep. And I’ve noticed that even a couple of beers worsens the sleep I get, which in turn affects the quality of my consciousness the next day.

So I’ve decided to give up booze, at least for a month. It’s the first time I’ve not drunk for a month since I left school. In fact…probably since I was 12 or so.

This has taken away one of my principle methods for coping with anxiety, and the antsiness has come back in force, especially at night, when I sometimes have vivid nightmares (they’re common after you stop drinking).

I figure it’s a necessary unblocking of the dream-drain.

Sometimes I’ve lain awake, feeling intense social anxiety, as my mind goes over perceived social slights from years ago, like a rosary of shame and resentment.

I think, my God, how am I still feeling social anxiety, after 20 years of this shit. How have I not grown out of this?

Better coping methods

This brings me to my main point. I’m now just about mature enough to know how to handle this anxiety, and I thought I would share what works for me.

The first thing I do is recognize I am not my anxious thoughts. They are occurring in my mind, crawling all over it, but they are not me.

If you identify with your anxious thoughts, you can get sucked into that soap opera for hours, days, weeks, months, years.

So you want a way to practice ‘cognitive distancing’, which is recognizing you are not your thoughts.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy uses various metaphors to help people de-identify from their thoughts.

For example, your consciousness is a river, and your thoughts and feelings are leaves going along the river. Watch them float by, without immediately grabbing each leaf and feeling ‘I AM this thought, I AM this feeling’.

Or — this one from Rumi — your consciousness is a guest-house, and your thoughts and feelings are temporary guests. Welcome and accept them, one by one, even if they’re unruly and disruptive, knowing that they are not YOU, they’re temporary visitors, who may be ‘sweeping you out for some new delight’.

The metaphor that occurred to me, at 3am one night this month, was my anxious mind was like an octopus, squirming around and releasing a lot of ink.

I am not the octopus. Thinking this immediately disentangles me somewhat from its tentacles.

But then I follow that up with ‘soothe the octopus. Calm it down. Show it some TLC’.

I literally imagined calming the octopus down. And it helped.

I also switched the rosary of thoughts. Before I slept, rather than going over the litany of difficult social encounters or broken friendships, I would go over moments where I felt really connected to others.

Moments where I felt safe, relaxed, open, trusting in my friendships, where I became a group mammal, rather than a separate anxious self.

Those are some of my favourite moments in life — when the boundaries of our selves blur, and we become a collective mammalian organism, joking, cuddling, facing life together.

A pod, a parliament, a gaggle, a pride, a bask, a conspiracy.

Going over these memories calms my nervous system down and gives me a warm feeling.

The other thing I do, which helps me change the programme and get to sleep, is simply to count my breath as I slow breathe, in and out, sometimes up to 100.

To help that, every morning I’ve been training my attention with a mala, Tibetan prayer beads. A very old and basic technology which I’ve found helpful.

I simply count my slow breaths and go round the beads — there are 108 beads on a mala, and it takes me around 15 minutes to go round.

Being able to touch the beads as I go round makes me much less likely to get distracted and lost in the soap opera of my thoughts.

Gradually, as one trains in this, you can get stronger in detachment, and occasionally you feel you are not just your personality.

Your personality is a set of programmes, rules, code, commands, which you were born with and then developed through your upbringing, culture and life events — and also through your own efforts of course, but largely it’s given to you.

We identify so much with this set of programmes. Each new rule or command that comes online, we immediately identify with it and act on it, no matter the completely contradictory set of commands our CPU is flooded with each day.

So much energy, so much emotion, is invested in this set of programmes. Gotta do this, mustn’t do that, how am I doing, have I achieved my commands?

The more one identifies with these programmes, the more (to mix my metaphors) the octopus wraps you in its tentacles, and the more your reality narrows and darkens, until all you can see and feel are the tentacles.

Eventually, existence can become unbearable.

So much suffering and mental illness arise because people are so identified with their ego-thoughts and ego-feelings that they can’t see anything else.

We are thrown into this life, and we naturally assume we are this flawed, wounded, vain, touchy and anxious personality. And that’s all we are.

Gotta fix the self! Polish it, upgrade it, refurbish it, fill it with accolades. That’s the game, right?

And always the bass note of dread — what if my self isn’t good enough? Am I failing at the game? How am I comparing to others?

Sometimes, people would rather kill themselves than have to be themselves for another day.

But it is possible to loosen the grip of the tentacles just a bit, and see the ocean through them.

This does not have to be mystical or religious or anything like that.

Every therapy involves some variation of this process.

You detach a bit, you dis-identify with the thoughts and emotions, you achieve a little cognitive distance and perspective, you recognize a habitual tendency and pattern in yourself, you accept it, and you learn not to get quite so caught up in the whirlwind of thoughts.

You can breathe again. Life becomes a little more bearable.

Another metaphor I thought of this week, while watching the Olympics, is life is a skate park. You do not choose the skate park in which you are incarnated, nor the run that you are expected to do.

Looking around, you might see some people seem to have much easier runs that others, and this can make you feel life is very unfair.

Or you might feel people watching you as you make your run, and you freeze in self-consciousness.

The point is to just try and do your run, which means learning to ride your mind through the ups and downs.

Now here’s the last point, it’s an important one.

When does detaching from your thoughts and feelings become spiritual bypassing?

When does spiritual detachment become just a way of escaping into the mystical ether, and not really dealing with life?

This is the balancing act that is right at the heart of life’s journey.

Can we acknowledge what we are thinking and feeling, feel the pain and sit with it, without denying it or getting completely lost in it.

This is a key life skill. We won’t achieve it instantly, it takes practice to develop, we will fall off the skateboard many, many times, but gradually we can develop it and learn to ride our mind.

A useful acronym is RAIN.

Recognize when a difficult thought or feeling arises.

Accept the thought or feeling, as a temporary visitor to the guest-house.

Investigate the thought or feeling — what is it like, where is it in the body, how does it change as you observe it?

Non-identify — taste the thought or feeling without seizing hold of it and yelping ‘this is ME! Why am I so messed up!’ and thereby getting lost in the soap opera.

What’s the point of this practice? What’s the end goal?

In the short term, as I said, it can help us untangle some of the tentacles of our difficult habitual thoughts and emotions, which makes every day a little easier.

It makes space, enabling us to enjoy more of the wondrous reality beyond our narrow self-absorbed ego.

Occasionally I’m able to enjoy life as a mysterious and wonderful experience, without imposing any conventional conditions onto myself, such ‘I’m only acceptable and life is only OK if…I’m always successful / popular / married’ or whatever.

Seeing through our ego-thoughts helps us to be more selfless, to look up from our ego dramas and see what’s going on with others, and maybe to help them where we can.

And perhaps it enables us to explore the big question — who am I beyond this personality? If my temporary thoughts and feelings are passing leaves on the stream, what is the stream? What is the ocean beyond the octopus?

I don’t know the answer to that, so will spare you any glib mystical conclusions. But it’s an interesting question!

Finally, let me say that I lay out these internal thoughts and feelings for you not in any expectation or desire for advice about my life.

I write these essays as an exercise in self-observation, and in the hope they might be helpful to others.

That said, feel free to comment on Medium about what works for you — how do you cope with difficult thoughts or emotions?

How do you find that balance between detachment and acknowledgement, between cognitive distancing and being real about what you’re feeling?