Befriending my body

"Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's extraordinary capacity to transform with experience ... When we commit over time to pursuits such as yoga, our brains forge new connections, grow new cells, increase cell size, or enhance cell activity, among other things. The brain transforms when we repeatedly practice a skill such as playing the piano or hitting a baseball. It also builds patterns through yoga's therapeutic tools: in particular, breath, relaxation, meditation and postures. We can't avoid repetition; the way we use it, however, is critical. We can take a positive tool (such as deeper breathing) and practice it over and over again to create positive emotional patterns."
Bo Forbes, "Yoga For Emotional Balance"

If some people have depressive tendencies and some anxious ones, I tend towards the latter. Overall I have an optimistic temperament, but in challenging times I can quickly spiral into catastrophising. 

I am deeply familiar with the feeling of anxiety in my body, but it never gets easier. Anxiety is a pounding heart, it's hardly any breath, it's heat behind my skin, it's a knotted stomach. 

My thoughts tumble and race, with more and more dramatic stories fuelling more adrenalin flooding into my body. Wilder tales and a bigger assault on my body's equilibrium.

When I was a teenager I had CBT for a particular issue and it worked pretty well. I found self-help methods like slow breathing and self-coaching to cope with life's hurdles (job interviews, international travel, getting into lifts). Without noticing, I was generally in my comfort zone enough to not be anxious, most of the time.

It felt nice to say, I used to be an anxious person. Then I had kids. (Ha!) It threw me - as it hurls all of us - into uncharted emotional territories, with (as my friend, writer and yoga teacher Naomi says) spectacular highs and soul-crashing lows. From the earliest days when I couldn't conceive that it was possible for this tiny thing to keep breathing on its own, to later ones when I had to leave her in someone else's care and trust that they wouldn't let her suffocate or run into the road, or trust her to navigate her own way through classroom challenges without me being there to support her (aka interfere). The biggest struggle was often contending with my own worst fears. 

Recently I noticed that enough of my fears were similar as to be able to be grouped into one category, called health anxiety. It was sometimes about the kids but mainly about me, perhaps because it's more likely - if we're talking odds - that something could go horribly wrong for me rather than the kids. (Though also, probability doesn't tend to soothe anxiety - it might never happen, but it could).

In the past five years, at times, I have been convinced I have a whole range of life-threatening conditions (I would list them here but I know that can be triggering). I would plunge myself deep into these stories, with all their most heartbreaking parts. Yet at the time of writing, I am still here. Though health anxiety sometimes feels like a rational response to being mortal, to being someone who enjoys life, who wants to protect their children from harm, at other times it also seems ... insane. Like every other anxiety, as well being frequently boring and completely pointless to go round and around the same paths of potential cataclysmic events, unchecked it can ruin our capacity to enjoy the short, precious time we do have here on earth.

I have wondered how I can manage these feelings, even though talking about them with a therapist helped a few years ago. But also, as the years go by, I realise I am getting practice at coping with them, just by living with myself. I have gone around the spiral enough times to change the pattern of response. When something happened recently that concerned me, all the others diseases I didn't die of were the first thing in my mind. I was able to think, what is most likely to be happening here?

There was still room for fear, for negative possibility instead of positive. But it felt more balanced. I remembered how many years it takes to practise being a mother, and how we are constantly served new challenges and opportunities to practise more. Practise your kid going to nursery then school for the first time, practise them not being invited to a birthday party when other kids in the class are, practise their first school trip, practise them moving out (aaaaaarrrggghh!), practise thinking about the most terrible things that could happen and how to allow yourself to feel fears without submitting to them.

After I'd had children, I hated it when I couldn't say "I used to be an anxious person" any more. Living with anxiety in the present tense felt like a backward step, another thing I'd failed at. But this isn't how change works. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain's "plastic" ability to support change. If you default to a pattern, that doesn't make you a failure, it makes you human, with neural patterns - years and years of practice of feeling and acting a certain way. 

And I had no practice at being a mother. I had no practice of navigating its physical challenges or its enormous and complex emotional demands. And when the ground is shaken underneath us, it's not surprising that we fall back into old patterns. The body only has so many resources to cope, and finding new ways of being requires a lot of energy.

Bo Forbes (quoted above) discusses these ideas in her brilliant book "Yoga for Anxiety and Depression". Bo - who is a psychotherapist as well as a yoga teacher - talks about the incredible research that shows that often, we don't actually have to talk all our worries through with a therapist or go back over painful childhood memories (although of course this can and does have a lot of value). Instead we can process and heal a lot through certain practices in the body, like the simple breathing techniques and restorative yoga practice explained in the book.

But sometimes doing the thing we most need it the hardest. We feel resistance (maybe because it feels like giving up or interferes with some other story we have about one particular line of success?) Or stopping is actually triggering to our systems. Something anxiety-inducing happened recently and one of my ways of coping with it was to start on this mammoth tidying job I'd been meaning to attack in our flat, and attack it with great gusto. I could feel my heart hammering as I carried on at that rate and how it wasn't helping me, but also stopping felt like it would trigger me even further into anxiety. Like furiously cleaning was also a way of my body feeling in control, feeling safe. 

I knew I "should" go and have a lie down or do something different or ask for help or whatever. But it would have been too much challenge for the only thing I could control in that moment, my ability to do that task and complete it to a certain standard. Instead I thought of one thing I could do, and that was to change the way I was moving, i.e. in a frenzied way, which I could tell was fuelling my anxiety. So I slowed down my physical movements. I also breathed more slowly. It helped. I felt proud that, in the moment I had found a way through.

Trying to manage emotions is a complex business. But there are moments when we can regain some sense of control and balance. I want to be kinder to myself next time I am Going Through Something.  Feeling the sensations of anxiety or depression in our bodies and minds doesn't mean we've failed to heal. It means we're human. All of us have these feelings at certain points, every single one of us, even those who look like they've never had a vulnerable moment in their lives (they're the ones who are MOST dying inside, right?!)

It is one of the things that binds us, the truth that sometimes, we are all on our knees. Wading through the muck together, when we most feel alone. When that happens, and when there is a moment to see the wood for the trees, we can move to reach out for the support that makes being alive feel better again. There is every chance for recovery. There is every chance for a better day.