3 Easy Steps to Calm Anxiety in the Coronavirus Lockdown

When I’m not being a writer and editor, I’m a mentor in a local school. Many of the pupils I see struggle with anxiety, and in these times, that’s all of us isn’t it?

I wanted to share a simple three-step process designed to ‘reset’ your system when anxiety takes over. It involves activity, relaxation, and thinking of a happy memory – all things you can do under lockdown conditions!

Holiday memories

Nearly all my happy memories are of holidays. My upcoming novel, The Year of the Ghost is about a treasured annual family holiday which one year is the scene of a haunting. It’s a story of family: of brokenness, secrets and love. The characters are not my family, but it is based on our annual pilgrimage to my father’s Welsh homeland. My memories of this beautiful place span most of my life and my happiest times. I have spent the last couple of years immersed in them as I write.

The good news is that those memories which keep you going through the winter can be accessed in this difficult time, and all the good feelings they give you will bolster your spirits right now. There's a reason why people all over the world are sharing pictures of beaches!

Anxious times

I have a constant background hum of alarm, apprehension and sadness which I put aside as I try to live this crisis one day at a time. But the effort of powering through it tires me out. Most of the time, I'm fine, but I have bouts of low mood and over-sensitivity that are not like the usual me.

These three steps are designed to help when anxiety becomes overwhelming, but at the moment I’d suggest that we need them all the time!

1 Activity

When you’re worried, your heart beats faster and your stomach feels wrong. Just becoming aware of these symptoms can make the anxiety worse. The first step to resetting your body is to do something active and fun: take your daily outside exercise or do something indoors. Make sure it’s actually fun, not something you have to force yourself to do! Dance to your favourite song, do step aerobics to music on your bottom stairs, play table tennis on the dining room table, bounce a ball against the wall… Changing how your body feels is a quick and effective way to start transforming your state of mind. Now move onto the next step.

 2 Relaxation

Tense all your muscles at once: make tight fists, clench your buttocks and tighten your leg muscles, then scrunch up your face. Count to 5 with everything clenched! Then let go, loosen, relax.

Now take a deep breath in through your nose. Picture the air going in, down to your belly and out to every part of your body… then breathe out slowly through your mouth. Again, let the good, cooling, balmy air in through your nose – and all the tension will flow out through your mouth. Do this five times altogether, in and out, in and out...

 3 Your happy memory

Think of a time you were happy and relaxed, perhaps in your favourite place. Remember all the details: the smells, the sights, the sounds. How did it make you feel inside? Be there again in your mind. Relish it, revel in it, enjoy that feeling now.

I really hope that this combination of getting your body moving, relaxing and remembering a happy time will help you through your day. 

Are We Living Too Fast?

Courtesy of itsonlyvintagebutilikeit.com

The BBC’s Back in Time for Dinner, which concluded this week, was a surprise hit with me.

The story that leapt out at me was that of our growing compulsion to do everything faster. In the 1950s, Mum was virtually tied to the stove because everything took so long, what with the daily shop for still-rationed staples and all that boiling the flavour out. In the 1960s, the kids took off to embrace flower power, leaving Mum bewildered in the kitchen where, to achieve the flavour sensation of spaghetti bolognaise, she had to take a time-consuming trip to exotic Soho for garlic. Then came the 70s with their spectacularly empty promise:

‘With all these labour-saving devices, the only problem in future decades will be what to do with all the leisure time’.

courtesy of returnofkings.com

So, let’s see – how did that turn out? We decided to take the so-called ‘leisure time’ and pack more work into it, and the faster we could do things, the more we felt compelled to shoe-horn in. In the 80s came pre-packed sandwiches to eat at your desk – so no need to take a lunch hour and sit chatting with colleagues. Soon there was no time for family meals, as everyone did their own thing in the microwave and ate it in front of a screen. Only last night I caught the new Weetabix ad – they have invented a drink that contains all the benefits of a solid breakfast, whizzed up into a drink that you can sling down your neck while breaking the land speed record on the way to work. It gave me indigestion just watching it.

Now, I don’t want to be like the man who warned that that the speed of the newly invented steam train would cause people’s brains to explode.

 But what effect does this high-speed living have on our wellbeing?

With most people working full time, everything else we want from life has to be crammed in round the edges. We have become so busy that we no longer have time to think about what we want from life. The fact is that some things that are valuable take time. Writing, for instance involves a lot of staring into space before we can get on to the nippy speed-typing part.

This blog post could be really insightful, but let’s face it – you just want it to be quick. 

And so do I – I’ve got loads to do.

We want to be fit and well-read and involved and well-informed, and our bosses want us to produce stuff better and more efficiently than anyone else, and the only way to achieve all this in one lifetime is to do it all faster.

Our children start school in nappies, because no one has time for old-fashioned, thorough potty training, and we must start cramming education into them at four, or we’ll all get left behind. 

We harass them out of the house every morning for the nag-athon to school, then hassle them along to improving after-school clubs that fit in with our own busy lifestyles. We want everything for them: wellbeing, happiness, success – and we want it fast.

I have always been mystified by statistics that show us to be the most stressed generation ever known.

How can we be more stressed than the people who lived through the Blitz? 

Could this insatiable need for speed the reason?

My husband had a major breakdown a couple of years ago, caused at least in part by his job as a primary school Deputy Head. He was spending his days running from place to place addressing problem after problem, with no time to go into the staff room for a chat and no realistic chance of solving anything or actually completing a task. He ended up suffering from crippling anxiety and depression that took nine months and a major life rethink to cure.

Courtesy of drdriving.org

Even those of us who remain well could do with a rethink.

We yearn for inner peace or a lost sense of community, while being unbearably irritated by the motorist who delays us by twenty seconds, or that rare person with ‘time on their hands’ who wants to use up our priceless minutes chatting(?!) 

Even in the middle of doing something I love, that I have looked forward to, I sometimes find myself mentally ticking off the moment and thinking, ‘I must move on now to the next thing on the list’.

But does it have to be this way? 

The Back in Time for Dinner programme did offer some hope. In every decade, as lifestyles have changed, there have always been people who have thought outside the box and decided to do things differently.

To accept that ‘this is just the way things are’ is to accept a life that someone else has chosen for you. 

We have make our own choices – but it might mean looking the prevailing culture in the eyes and declaring that there is another way. It’s worth thinking about. Or would be if any of us have time.

Using the Bad Stuff in Life to Make Your Writing Better

The good news is that my husband is better. After making very slow, two-steps-forward-and-one back progress for nine months, his eventual recovery was sudden; almost overnight it was as though he was here again after a long absence. For a while, I just basked in the joy of having him back. Anxiety and depression are dreadful for those who endure them – I don’t even pretend to know what it is like, though I did a lot of studying to help me understand Jon’s plight better. However, living with someone who is suffering takes its own toll. For the long months of Jon’s illness, I think I lived on adrenaline: researching the subject, buying books, seeing a counsellor to help me cope better and coming up with endless strategies to try to aid Jon’s recovery. I grasped on to need to economise because of our cut in income and became absurdly gung ho about that; here at least was something I could do. The problem with anxiety and depression is that healing takes time; in the meantime there is not really a lot you can do to improve the situation. You just need to find a way to endure it – and my way was constant, frustrated, adrenaline-fed effort.

The thing about adrenaline is that once it is not needed any more, it drains away, and this can leave you feeling very flat. I experienced this years ago when Jon was knocked off his bike by a car. While he was in hospital with broken bones and a punctured lung, I was Mrs Coping Marvellously, juggling hospital visits, work and caring for two young children. However, once he was home, slowly recovering, panic over, I suddenly felt very low.

I think this is what is happening now. Jon is going from strength to strength, rediscovering the joy of teaching and feeling confident and optimistic about his abilities. Ironically, Mrs Coping Marvellously now feels she is rather rubbish at everything. All marvellousness has flown. The first sign was a massive slump in my confidence about writing. A few rejections for short stories and poems I had sent off were enough to make me feel like giving up altogether. The thought of writing a query letter for my novel, full of bouncy self-confidence and marketing savvy, was too exhausting to even contemplate. Writing itself became a chore.

What do you do in these circumstances? You keep going. One word at a time. Keep thinking about your writing. Keep involved with it. Tell yourself that feelings pass. Skills learned through years of hard work don’t disappear overnight; confidence will return. Perhaps don’t undertake anything as major as contacting agents or making big decisions about your writing when you are feeling low. Just carry on being a writer until the creative spark, the energy and the motivation return.

If you are a writer, the bad things in life are never wasted; they give you that crucial edge of insight when you are creating the even worse things that happen to your characters. This week, as part of a Lent course, I was called upon to identify my ‘toolkit’ – those skills, gifts, attributes or just character traits that allow me to benefit others in a way that is unique to me. It wasn’t a great week for such positive thinking, and I was tempted to put ‘I blessed my colleagues with my ability to remain mainly upright today’. Then I thought of empathy. I always imagine how other people are feeling. Of course this doesn’t mean I am always right, but it is habit of mind I have always had: whatever happens, I wonder what other people feel about it. Thus if something happens to upset a friend or colleague, I hope I’m there with a listening ear to give them a sense that I hear them and validate their feelings – which is all most of us want when we’re upset.

It is also empathy that makes me want to write. People fascinate me. What makes them tick, what lies beneath the exterior, how do they experience life? It is this inner life that I want to create, in a way that readers recognise, believe and feel compelled to follow through to the end of the story.

When life kicks you in the teeth, it gives you a unique opportunity to experience what suffering feels like. Often those feelings are a surprise. I understood, for instance, why Jon’s illness made me feel worried for his safety, and insecure about our future. I hadn’t expected that it would make me feel angry. I hadn’t expected to feel lonely, unloved and guilty.

It was when I was walking home from work, thinking about empathy, that my mind drifted into thinking about the characters in my novel, Unspeakable Things, and it was my own surprising feelings about the last nine months that informed several sudden new insights into how these characters would feel. When I got home, I made some notes, probably explicable only to me:

‘Make Jim scarier. Churned up with anger he can’t explain over Sarah’s mood.’

‘Review bit where he thinks the place has a different meaning for her. Give Jim more edge. ADD DRAMA’.

‘Sarah might feel panic as her lack of knowledge dawns – why didn’t I ask? How could I not know what she died of? Is there a secret? Is that why all the questions, odd looks..?'

‘Clarify emotional journey between Jim and Sarah, always with the seeds of his possible betrayal of her, his feelings of anger, rejection and guilt as she drifts away.’

These notes address a structural issue in the novel: I need to tweak and clarify a potential plot twist that should get readers excited. It is a need I have identified before, and worked on, but that probably needs more work. On that walk home, though, it was my own difficult feelings over Jon’s illness that fed a reworking of my characters to make the dynamic between them more believable. I know that as Sarah drifted into deep, internalised obsession, Jim would feel angry and alone; that he wouldn’t understand the feeling, and that he would feel guilty about it with a kind of self-loathing and attempted repression that would only feed the explosive nature of his anger. I’ve been there; that’s how I know.

No one, not even the most committed writer, wants the bad stuff to happen. But when it does, eventually we can learn from it, and make our writing more insightful, empathetic and believable as a result.

Stress, Anxiety and the Thriller Writer

It has not been a good weekend. My husband, who a few months ago fell into a pit of anxiety and depression caused by work stress, has been making a slow recovery, but has had a rough couple of days. My teenage son has a chest infection and coughed most of last night, so no one has had much sleep. I sympathise with both of them, but at times my nerves are stretched to breaking point, and I have been known to rant and rave at the poor man from my own fear and frustration, then hate myself for making him feel even worse. On a lighter note, when I drove my son to the out of hours doctor to get antibiotics, he decided to follow her advice and wait a few days before resorting to using them. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, ‘Take them now! We need the coughing to stop tonight!’

Thriller writers have an interesting relationship with anxiety.  In one sense, it is what we do; we create anxiety in the reader – but the enjoyable, fictional type that gives a frisson of excitement, not the debilitating type that ruins lives. If you are someone who enjoys reading, watching or writing thrillers, the chances are that you are not someone who experiences serious stress yourself. When a friend of mine who suffers from anxiety read through an earlier version of my novel, Unspeakable Things, she asked incredulously, ‘What made you want to write it?’ which perhaps wasn’t the reaction I had hoped for. Soon though, I remembered that she tries to avoid any kind of entertainment that might be disturbing, looking instead for the type that is comforting, uplifting or funny.

People who like thrillers are like those who seek out dangerous sports: their adrenaline levels are less likely to rise than other people’s. This leads them to go looking for experiences that cause the exhilarating feeling of an adrenaline rush – the thrill of free-fall, the novelistic tension ratcheted up to breaking point, the moment in the movie when everyone jumps. That’s me. My default setting, I have realised lately, is not worried. As my sons have grown older and sought out various dangerous adventures, my assumption has remained that they are all right, unless I am given serious cause to doubt it. When one  went on a school trip to Tanzania, some of the other parents wanted a phone call to reassure them that the flight had landed safely. I told my son that I would assume they had landed safely unless I heard otherwise on the News.

Nevertheless, in order to write characters who are going through terrifying times, you do need to empathise with those who suffer. You need to describe the feelings of being nervous, tense, shocked or terrified in ways that resonate with readers and provoke a reaction in them. And of course, I am not immune to feeling anxious. Lately my resilience has been under serious strain, though of course this is nothing to what my husband is going through.

 They do say that if you are a writer, nothing that happens to you is wasted, and I have found that my experience of watching a loved one going through a difficult time has come through in my writing. In Unspeakable Things, Jim is bewildered by Sarah’s mood when she finds out shocking things about her mother’s past.

‘He began to steer her away from the whole Mary subject and tried to get her to focus on more positive things, and for a while he hoped that she was beginning to calm down. But in the evenings, he would speak to her, or glance at her as he laughed at something on the TV, and he would see her brooding, intense, hardly aware of him. In the mornings he woke up to find her sleepless, staring ahead. He found himself missing her as though she had gone.’

I hope I have not sounded callous, examining the subject of anxiety from such a writerly perspective  - but this isn’t the place for an in-depth unburdening about what the past few months have been like. I just hope that soon the brooding fear and the nail-biting tension will be back on the pages of my novel and that my husband and I, who once jumped out of a plane together, will be happily thrill-seeking again.

Glenn Close and the Fear of Madness; Should We Apologise for Fiction?

The actress Glenn Close has apologised this week for the way she portrayed mental illness in the thriller, Fatal Attraction. Close heads BringChange2Mind, an advocacy group designed to erase the stigma and discrimination surrounding mental illness.This came about because her sister has bipolar disorder and a nephew of hers has also dealt with mental illness.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2335436/Glenn-Close-says-approach-Fatal-Attraction-role-totally-differently-today-knowledge-mental-illness.html 

I have every reason to support attempts to increase understanding of mental health issues. I have friends and relatives with anxiety and depression; I know others who have watched their children grow up into adults with schizophrenia; in my twenties a dear friend of mine died as a result of undiagnosed bipolar disorder, back when effective treatments were less available than they are today. I understand Glenn Close’s discomfort, thinking of the famous ‘bunny-boiling’ role she played, when members of her family have suffered from mental health problems, but her statement made me wonder – should we apologise for fiction? Should we police it so that it only portrays the attitudes we approve of in real life? Should dramas about mental health show people recognising their problems, seeking help, receiving counselling, medication and sensible understanding, and then returning to full health? Would such a story be a drama at all?

I was already writing my story, Unspeakable Things, in which a pregnant woman is told that there is serious inherited mental illness in her family, when real life overtook me with a few surprises of its own. At the age of 13, my happy, well-balanced younger son began to suffer from strange, obsessive worries. Attempts to reassure him would seem to work for a time, and then the same worries would be back; worse than before. He was plagued by unwanted thoughts that tormented and terrified him. People tried to reassure me that odd anxieties were common among teenagers, but in the small hours, sleepless, I began to be afraid that we were dealing with a mental illness. I cannot tell you how much this thought frightened me. As my son’s condition deteriorated and he told me that he had considered suicide, I spoke to a counsellor friend. My heart thudded as I told her, ‘I just want you to tell me that this is not mental illness.’ ‘I can’t tell you that,’ she said. This was my watershed moment, in which I had to put fear and denial aside and deal with what was in front of me.

We went to the doctor’s and were referred to CAMHS (the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service), where we eventually saw a psychiatrist, who diagnosed Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. We were told that the condition is most likely to appear in families where there is a history of anxiety or low mood. Bizarrely, the inherited mental illness that I had totally invented for my story had entered our real lives.

My son was eventually treated with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, and began to try different strategies to control his OCD. Over time, with enormous effort on his part, he made progress, and as he matured, he began to cope better and the bad times became fewer and further between. At 17 he is again happy and well-balanced, and has a strength and a level of empathy and understanding that he has gained from his experience of overcoming and learning to live with his OCD. I could not be prouder of him.

Did my son’s experience make me more sensitive to how mental illness is portrayed and discussed? Yes. I bristle when people tell me they are ‘a little bit OCD’ because they like their cutlery drawer in order. People with OCD suffer torment from unwanted thoughts and crippling anxieties; it is not about being a little bit fussy or liking things tidy. But do I think that fiction should shrink from representing our instinctive fear of mental illness in order to avoid offending political correctness? No, absolutely not.

The real life story doesn’t end there. My husband, usually a lively, cheerful and effective deputy head of a primary school, is currently going through a bout of severe anxiety and depression brought on by stress at work. He is unable to work and has begun a course of medication. He feels dreadful in the mornings and when I leave him to go to work, his eyes have a haunted, traumatised look. He is thin, weak and exhausted, and this has all happened in the last couple of weeks. A few months ago he was thriving, organising fundraising events on top of his usual workload and running a half marathon for good measure. As we talked over coffee this morning, he said that until very recently, he had been trying to keep an eye on his stress levels and congratulating himself on coping well; he described it as ‘frightening’ how quickly and completely the illness had overtaken him.

Mental illness is frightening. It was a deep, primitive fear that gripped me when my son became ill, and again as my husband lost control of his rational self. The fear was there long before either of these events, and I make no apology for representing it in my writing. In fiction, all that we love, all that we dream of, laugh at, hope for, flee from, fear and dread flows into language and creates stories with a dynamic all their own. Any attempt to police this creative process with inhibiting considerations will destroy it. You will know this if you have ever tried to write while wondering what your colleagues, parents or vicar might think of your story.

Of course we all self-edit and keep a watch on the attitudes that emerge as we write. I debated at length over whether or not I should include the word ‘madness’ in this post, and I have changed it several times to and fro, from the more politically correct ‘mental illness.’ In my story, Sarah is editing a book called ‘Madness and Society’, and while reading about ‘moral panic in the media’ in reaction to ‘high-profile cases of mentally ill people murdering strangers’, she thinks how she and Jim have plans to strengthen the fence between their home and Woodlands, a mental health clinic. ‘Were they caught up in the overblown anxiety, seeing the clinic as a place packed with people who posed a danger to them? Before she could put their reactions to the test, a new thought pounced and caught her: Were there dangerous people at Woodlands?’

However, Unspeakable Things is a thriller. When you set out to write a story like this, you think to yourself, what frightens me most? And for me, the primitive fear of madness had to come high on the list. I don’t mean that people with mental health problems frighten me; that I think they are going to hurt me. That would be ridiculous and unfair. It is the idea of our minds, the framework within which our very being is defined, being disrupted that terrifies me. When I was a teenager, a girl I barely knew at school came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused.’ Her statement meant nothing to me and I felt awash with anxiety as I muttered, ‘That’s OK! You haven’t..?’ and tried to make sense of it. Eventually a teacher told me that she was going through a breakdown, and I was able to understand – but the strange fear of that moment remained with me. Four years ago, I was afraid for my son; a week ago I was afraid for my husband. I was afraid of the way I reacted when I first realised that Jon was ill: lashing out with a horrible mix of stubborn denial, fury, self-pity and despair, all flowing from a deep-seated fear. Now rationality, compassion and coping mechanisms have kicked in, and I know Jon will make a full recovery. But let’s not pretend that these things do not frighten us.

 This week, Stephen Fry, who is president of the mental health charity, Mind, has also spoken out, revealing that, struggling with bipolar disorder, he made a suicide attempt last year. He said this: "There are times when I'm doing QI and I'm going, 'Ha ha, yeah, yeah,' and inside I'm going 'I want to fucking die. I … want … to … fucking … die.'" 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2013/jun/05/stephen-fry-attempted-suicide-bipolar It frightens me that a man who is so successful, so intelligent and so engaging, and who appears to be coping so well, could be having those thoughts even while entertaining the nation. 

Fiction must flow from how we actually feel, not how we think we ought to feel. I’m not sure we should apologise if a thriller emerges from something that frightens us, even if our rational minds tell us that what is required is understanding and tolerance, rather than fear. I write about what moves me, because the writing I enjoy is that which creates a powerful reaction in me, whether it is laughter, sympathy, suspense or fear. In life, as a family we are dealing with one of the most common types of mental illness: anxiety. I love my son and my husband, and all my dear friends who suffer from mental illness either in themselves or in loved ones; I wish them all the help, understanding and peace they could wish for. At the same time, I am writing a novel bristling with anxiety and rooted in the fear of madness, and I do not apologise for that.