My Anxiety Doesn't Care That I'm Living My Dream Life
What I Learned from Chris Martin and Dakota Johnson about mental health
One of the most confounding things about clinical anxiety is that it will appear even when life is going well. So, here I am in Italy—living my dream—and yet about ten days ago I started experiencing intense anxiety.
Without any precipitating factor, the typical symptoms appeared: tightness in the chest, nausea, and feeling off and disconnected.
Then I got a new symptom that I’ve never had before: I started throwing up.
Each time, I blamed it on something I ate, even though that didn’t really make sense.
After telling my husband that I somehow had gotten food poisoning for a third time, I went on to deliver a monologue which was so jacked up with anxiety about the collapse of the United States, decline of the value of the dollar, how it is going to lose its reserve currency status, and also how I’m unemployable because people hate women when they get older (despite having a successful Substack and book contract with Harper Collins) and that my husband was going to die before me leaving me all alone (he’s ten years older than me) and so on.
When we got to the end of the conversation, my husband said, I don’t think it was the salmon tartare that made you sick.
I knew he was right.
This was anxiety.
It’s not that none of my concerns were valid.
It’s that when find myself in one of these states, I descend into a doom loop, worrying about all the ways things could go terribly wrong in my life and the world generally to a degree that can be slightly unhinged. I fret about what is out of my control (so, everything). I imagine the worst-case scenario involving any issues I’m currently dealing with. I then start comparing myself to other people and wondering why I’m such a loser and they’re all so happy.
Yes, of course, logical me knows I’m not a loser. I also know everyone else isn’t super happy. But when you’re in an anxious state, reality is distorted.
I’ve learned that when I’m in that frame of mind, I have to get some perspective. There were two things that helped me this time in addition to my usual bag of tricks (journaling, meditation, exercise, therapy), and one of them was kind of shocking to me.
The first is sort of obvious. Every time I felt anxious, I went to the beach and watched the ocean, and then I didn’t feel anxious anymore. It’s kind of annoying how simple and obvious this is.
I didn't invent this.
Haven't we all heard that when you spend more time in nature, you'll feel better, you'll feel more grounded, and so on? It's part of the reason I moved to this part of Italy.
So, spending time near the ocean has become an important tool for me to rely on.
But the thing that was shockingly helpful to me is that two famous people who I feel no particular connection to helped me see a life-long struggle in a radically different way.