I have saved an interview with actor Andrew Garfield from the magazine America (January 2017) by Brendan Busse because it deals with something that is part of my life and something I have written about: anxiety.
Garfield is one of the many performers I have read about (Barbra Streisand, among them) whose stage-fright has often prevented their going on stage. The fear of being seen and watched and judged has affected me, not on the stage but in more ordinary circumstances I won't go into.
What's interesting is how Garfield, on the verge of suicide while preparing for a Shakespeare performance in London a few years ago, felt hopeless. "I feel like I'm going to die, " he said. He had never before felt such terror or absolute dread at the idea of revealing himself.
People who hate to give public speeches can understand this common phobia.
To calm himself, he took at walk and encountered a street singer with a mediocre voice singing Don MacLean's "Vincent." Garfield remembers the imperfection of the performance: "If that guy had thought he had nothing to offer and told himself he was not ready to perform in public, I would not have been given what I needed."
He needed a bit of outside inspiration, and it came from that song, which he considers a gift from God, just as his despair came as a moment of grace, a sign that he had to suffer before seeing that his depression was a kind of prayer, a cry for help.
Garfield then began to cry, feeling that God was telling him, "You think if you go on stage, you're going to die. But actually if you don't, you're doing to die." And so he went on to this and other performances, always aware of the tension between the deep fear of being seen and the deep need of this.
As several self-help books tell us, feel the fear and carry on anyway. Maybe your inner self will experience a moment of grace, as Garfield did,
when your inner self moves you from despair to participation in life.
A writer who has analyzed (in his book "Monkey Mind") his own acute anxiety is Daniel Smith, who reminds us of the universality of fear, an essential emotion essential for a full experience of life. Acute anxiety and terror are also common and can, he says, be dealt with despite their daily horrors and discomforts (by exercise, meditation, counseling, medication perhaps).
Before such anxiety leads to despair, he says, we must fight it. Keeping up the daily fight, I would add, is a holy struggle. It can be a form of prayer, a reaching out to the God outside us.
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anxiety. Show all posts
Sunday, July 30, 2017
Friday, May 19, 2017
Nature and our health
A friend just sent me an undated article from MIND reporting on research about the impact of being in nature on our sense of well being. As a writer who has long been cooped up inside, I savor my time by the lake or ocean or just looking at trees in my neighborhood; now I understand more about why the natural world is essential for my health.
In one study, 95% of those studied said that spending time outdoor improved their mood. Presumably, this did not include dreary, rainy days. Those who were stressed, anxious or depressed felt more calm and balanced. No surprise, really, yet it is so easy for us to be tied to our technology that we forget to look beyond our narrow horizon.
Another study said that time spent in nature, or viewing nature scenes, increases our ability to pay attention. To observe the sky or water or a forest of trees is a respite from our over-active minds and refreshes us for new tasks.
I recall a quote from the writer Colette, a bit of advice to a young man: Look closely at what pleases you. Observation and the complete focus on the beauty of the natural world takes us out of ourselves and at the same time feeds the soul, which needs beauty. This type of attention is the basis of art and of a basic kind of spirituality: being fully present to the now.
Even if we live in drab cities, it is not hard to find natural beauty somewhere, perhaps in a tree, whose very stillness can, upon lengthy observation, be calming.
All of this seems especially important for writers, who often begin with observation but too often stay in their heads: nature beckons!
In one study, 95% of those studied said that spending time outdoor improved their mood. Presumably, this did not include dreary, rainy days. Those who were stressed, anxious or depressed felt more calm and balanced. No surprise, really, yet it is so easy for us to be tied to our technology that we forget to look beyond our narrow horizon.
Another study said that time spent in nature, or viewing nature scenes, increases our ability to pay attention. To observe the sky or water or a forest of trees is a respite from our over-active minds and refreshes us for new tasks.
I recall a quote from the writer Colette, a bit of advice to a young man: Look closely at what pleases you. Observation and the complete focus on the beauty of the natural world takes us out of ourselves and at the same time feeds the soul, which needs beauty. This type of attention is the basis of art and of a basic kind of spirituality: being fully present to the now.
Even if we live in drab cities, it is not hard to find natural beauty somewhere, perhaps in a tree, whose very stillness can, upon lengthy observation, be calming.
All of this seems especially important for writers, who often begin with observation but too often stay in their heads: nature beckons!
Friday, September 2, 2016
Trapped by Fear
Fear plays a greater role in our experience than we tend to admit. It is often the unstated motivational force in stories and films, as in life.
In researching the life of T. S. Eliot recently for an upcoming talk, and in reading Philip Roth's 2008 novel, Indignation (made into a recent movie that I've not yet seen), I see the ironic confluence of anxiety, especially the kind passed on from father to son.
First, Eliot: When I taught the major poetry of Eliot at the university, I referred to his life, his troubled marriage in particular, but focused mainly on the ideas, as I tried to help students cope with the challenge of his poems. Now that I have read three important biographical studies of Eliot by Lyndall Gordon, I can see how fear governed his life.
As one of his friends said of him: Tom, like his character J. Alfred Prufrock, is enveloped in "frozen formality." He was not merely shy and reserved, but fearful of people, of women in particular, of sexuality--this the heritage of his Puritan New England grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, whose influence on the family seems to have been significant. The poet's father registered a disgust with sexuality. And the upper-class world of Tom's upbringing taught him to be suspicious of outsiders and especially of feelings. So he turned inward, to poetry and philosophy.
We now can see that "The Waste Land" and Eliot's other poems and plays are the direct result of his disastrous first marriage to a hysterical woman, later institutionalized. His true love (Emily Hale) was turned into a muse, as Beatrice was for Dante. Tom ran away from emotional conflicts and found some comfort in his faith as well as in his literary career.
The poet's various torments had much to do with the Eliot family; the same is true of the young protagonist in Roth's novel, the 18-year-old son of a kosher butcher--about as remote from the occasionally anti-Semitic world of Eliot as one could imagine--whose father is so worried about his son's safety that he runs away from his Newark home to an Ohio college, where he is unhappy, tense, restless, and worried much of the time.
The consequences of the father's high anxiety are tragic for the young man, yet the tone of the novel, as in much Jewish American fiction, is comic because the feelings are so extreme.
This masterful short novel by Roth has nothing in common with the work of Eliot except one basic thing: the centrality of fear and how, when passed on from one generation to another, it can ruin one's sense of happiness. But it can also create great literature, which always stems from more than ideas: it comes from the emotional experience of the author, shaped and transformed into art.
In researching the life of T. S. Eliot recently for an upcoming talk, and in reading Philip Roth's 2008 novel, Indignation (made into a recent movie that I've not yet seen), I see the ironic confluence of anxiety, especially the kind passed on from father to son.
First, Eliot: When I taught the major poetry of Eliot at the university, I referred to his life, his troubled marriage in particular, but focused mainly on the ideas, as I tried to help students cope with the challenge of his poems. Now that I have read three important biographical studies of Eliot by Lyndall Gordon, I can see how fear governed his life.
As one of his friends said of him: Tom, like his character J. Alfred Prufrock, is enveloped in "frozen formality." He was not merely shy and reserved, but fearful of people, of women in particular, of sexuality--this the heritage of his Puritan New England grandfather, William Greenleaf Eliot, whose influence on the family seems to have been significant. The poet's father registered a disgust with sexuality. And the upper-class world of Tom's upbringing taught him to be suspicious of outsiders and especially of feelings. So he turned inward, to poetry and philosophy.
We now can see that "The Waste Land" and Eliot's other poems and plays are the direct result of his disastrous first marriage to a hysterical woman, later institutionalized. His true love (Emily Hale) was turned into a muse, as Beatrice was for Dante. Tom ran away from emotional conflicts and found some comfort in his faith as well as in his literary career.
The poet's various torments had much to do with the Eliot family; the same is true of the young protagonist in Roth's novel, the 18-year-old son of a kosher butcher--about as remote from the occasionally anti-Semitic world of Eliot as one could imagine--whose father is so worried about his son's safety that he runs away from his Newark home to an Ohio college, where he is unhappy, tense, restless, and worried much of the time.
The consequences of the father's high anxiety are tragic for the young man, yet the tone of the novel, as in much Jewish American fiction, is comic because the feelings are so extreme.
This masterful short novel by Roth has nothing in common with the work of Eliot except one basic thing: the centrality of fear and how, when passed on from one generation to another, it can ruin one's sense of happiness. But it can also create great literature, which always stems from more than ideas: it comes from the emotional experience of the author, shaped and transformed into art.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
The Joy of Anxiety (?)
There is little pleasure and no joy in living in that heightened state of fearful apprehension known as anxiety. Yet we know that the imagination, spurred by fears of what might happens, can thrive on anxiety, which T. S. Eliot called the handmaiden of creativity.
This is the basis for an odd little essay by Katie Roiphe, "The Joy of Stress," which tends to equate stress with anxiety and which shows little inside understanding of the subject. No surprise: the author, with a Ph.D. in English, has a reputation as noted feminist and like many younger academics today, seems to have avoided conventional literary scholarship for cultural studies and journalism.
As such she can pontificate about anxiety as if she knows something about it. Roiphe seems to associate anxiety with the high generated by an extra shot of caffeine. Her suggestions: calmness is not as attractive (exciting) as anxiety, which gives a crisp focus to our days. The result is a kind of perversely pleasurable sensation. In fact, "if you are safe and secure, you are bored. If you feel comfortable, you lack desire."
She intends to raise provocative questions but ends up making empty statements, even for a journalist tackling a topic in the social sciences that it too much for her. For example, "some. . .widespread anxiety may be clinical. But much of it is surely a cast of mind, an atmosphere, a style."
Oh? It's something we can adopt or drop at will? And if we want to live on the edge and be creative, we might consider maintaining the vitality of anxiety?
Perhaps there are times when people thrive on being anxious and enjoy the rush, but, for me, there is little joy in living on a high wire.
This is the basis for an odd little essay by Katie Roiphe, "The Joy of Stress," which tends to equate stress with anxiety and which shows little inside understanding of the subject. No surprise: the author, with a Ph.D. in English, has a reputation as noted feminist and like many younger academics today, seems to have avoided conventional literary scholarship for cultural studies and journalism.
As such she can pontificate about anxiety as if she knows something about it. Roiphe seems to associate anxiety with the high generated by an extra shot of caffeine. Her suggestions: calmness is not as attractive (exciting) as anxiety, which gives a crisp focus to our days. The result is a kind of perversely pleasurable sensation. In fact, "if you are safe and secure, you are bored. If you feel comfortable, you lack desire."
She intends to raise provocative questions but ends up making empty statements, even for a journalist tackling a topic in the social sciences that it too much for her. For example, "some. . .widespread anxiety may be clinical. But much of it is surely a cast of mind, an atmosphere, a style."
Oh? It's something we can adopt or drop at will? And if we want to live on the edge and be creative, we might consider maintaining the vitality of anxiety?
Perhaps there are times when people thrive on being anxious and enjoy the rush, but, for me, there is little joy in living on a high wire.
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Fear, trust, and happiness
I am something of a sucker for new books dealing with happiness and inner peace, especially when they present the findings of neuroscientists about how the brain works.
And so I had to bring home from the library "Hardwiring Happiness" by Rick Hanson, who says that we must learn to take in the good things around us because we are hardwired to recall what is dangerous: evolution apparently turned the brain into "Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive." So it is easier to mull and review past and present hurt feelings while letting positive, even joyful, experiences pass us by.
Hanson presumably shows (I have only skimmed the opening so far) that we can change the brain itself by positive thinking: sound familiar?
Another book I glanced at is "The Truth about Trust" by David DeSteno, another psychologist headed for the best-seller list. He focuses on a topic little studied: the fact that a great deal of our mental energies are expended in determining who and what to trust. The mind, he says, is constantly trying to figure out how reliable other people are as well as the need to be trustworthy. Much of this is unconscious, such as the daily encounter with uncertainty and risk-taking, so essential to any creative process.
DeSteno does not seem to emphasize fear, yet the way trust relates to our relationship with ourselves brings up the topic of anxiety, in particular a revealing article in The New Yorker by Louis Menand: "The Prisoner of Stress" (What does anxiety mean?). The article is essentially a review of the book by Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety, which I read and commented on earlier.
Menand's take on the complexities of crippling fear is that it is an illness without a cure, not a problem to solve despite the years and years of time and money Stossel and people like him have spent on various psychological approaches and medications. Why some people seem to be fearless and others panic remains a mystery.
Are people who can speak easily in public born lucky? Consider the comforting (to anxious people like me) reality of those celebrities who have been tormented by social anxiety, from Charles Darwin to Laurence Olivier and Hugh Grant; the latter two, like Barbra Streisand, seem to have experienced stage fright after they became stars, that is, when they were aware of being judged by a critical public whose image of them was different from the very human reality.
The more talented and creative we are, the more anxious? Perhaps. We can imagine the worst with a vivid intensity that paralyzes us.
Basketball legend Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics vomited before every game. So, apparently, did the brilliant and handsome operatic tenor Franco Corelli. One might think these accomplished, brilliant performers would have nothing to fear, but reason and fear have little to do with each other.
However beneficial anxiety may be, like primal fear as a means of self-protection, it can wreak havoc on the mind and body, as Stossel indicates. How it works remains unclear.
Many things can help, but we are left in the end to deal with the mystery of the mind and of the panic button in the brain that registers alarm, requiring us, day by day, to counteract this as best we can with memories and experiences of beauty, love, and happiness.
And so the struggle with the mystery of who we are goes on.
And so I had to bring home from the library "Hardwiring Happiness" by Rick Hanson, who says that we must learn to take in the good things around us because we are hardwired to recall what is dangerous: evolution apparently turned the brain into "Velcro for the negative but Teflon for the positive." So it is easier to mull and review past and present hurt feelings while letting positive, even joyful, experiences pass us by.
Hanson presumably shows (I have only skimmed the opening so far) that we can change the brain itself by positive thinking: sound familiar?
Another book I glanced at is "The Truth about Trust" by David DeSteno, another psychologist headed for the best-seller list. He focuses on a topic little studied: the fact that a great deal of our mental energies are expended in determining who and what to trust. The mind, he says, is constantly trying to figure out how reliable other people are as well as the need to be trustworthy. Much of this is unconscious, such as the daily encounter with uncertainty and risk-taking, so essential to any creative process.
DeSteno does not seem to emphasize fear, yet the way trust relates to our relationship with ourselves brings up the topic of anxiety, in particular a revealing article in The New Yorker by Louis Menand: "The Prisoner of Stress" (What does anxiety mean?). The article is essentially a review of the book by Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety, which I read and commented on earlier.
Menand's take on the complexities of crippling fear is that it is an illness without a cure, not a problem to solve despite the years and years of time and money Stossel and people like him have spent on various psychological approaches and medications. Why some people seem to be fearless and others panic remains a mystery.
Are people who can speak easily in public born lucky? Consider the comforting (to anxious people like me) reality of those celebrities who have been tormented by social anxiety, from Charles Darwin to Laurence Olivier and Hugh Grant; the latter two, like Barbra Streisand, seem to have experienced stage fright after they became stars, that is, when they were aware of being judged by a critical public whose image of them was different from the very human reality.
The more talented and creative we are, the more anxious? Perhaps. We can imagine the worst with a vivid intensity that paralyzes us.
Basketball legend Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics vomited before every game. So, apparently, did the brilliant and handsome operatic tenor Franco Corelli. One might think these accomplished, brilliant performers would have nothing to fear, but reason and fear have little to do with each other.
However beneficial anxiety may be, like primal fear as a means of self-protection, it can wreak havoc on the mind and body, as Stossel indicates. How it works remains unclear.
Many things can help, but we are left in the end to deal with the mystery of the mind and of the panic button in the brain that registers alarm, requiring us, day by day, to counteract this as best we can with memories and experiences of beauty, love, and happiness.
And so the struggle with the mystery of who we are goes on.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
When fear is good
Maria Popova's valuable blog recently cited several interesting books by visual artists that deal with facing fear--what in my field is called writer's block.
One of them, Steven Pressfield, says, "Fear is good...it tells us what we have to do." The more scared we are of a work or calling, he says, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Shaun McNiff in Trust the Process cites Monet as saying that people should not fear mistakes but welcome them because they can be harbingers of new ideas: a mistake may represent something we never saw before.
So fear and creativity go hand in hand, it seems. The horror of the blank page can also be a stimulant; the initial fears we have in beginning a story or painting seem directly related to the joy we experience, or at least the satisfaction, when the work is completed.
As an anxious person, I have often thought that, if I had been a laid-back guy, I would have not only written less and achieved less but explored fewer spiritual paths. Would I have taken an interest in silence, meditation, mindfulness and prayer?
When I look at people outside the fields of art and spirituality, I see fear as the driving force in much human achievement, in the intense work that produces success in the world of business, science, academia, etc. Would there be much comedy without anxiety?
So far all of its negative aspects, fear, even anxiety, can lead to great things; but, of course, it must be balanced with trust.
One of them, Steven Pressfield, says, "Fear is good...it tells us what we have to do." The more scared we are of a work or calling, he says, the more sure we can be that we have to do it. Shaun McNiff in Trust the Process cites Monet as saying that people should not fear mistakes but welcome them because they can be harbingers of new ideas: a mistake may represent something we never saw before.
So fear and creativity go hand in hand, it seems. The horror of the blank page can also be a stimulant; the initial fears we have in beginning a story or painting seem directly related to the joy we experience, or at least the satisfaction, when the work is completed.
As an anxious person, I have often thought that, if I had been a laid-back guy, I would have not only written less and achieved less but explored fewer spiritual paths. Would I have taken an interest in silence, meditation, mindfulness and prayer?
When I look at people outside the fields of art and spirituality, I see fear as the driving force in much human achievement, in the intense work that produces success in the world of business, science, academia, etc. Would there be much comedy without anxiety?
So far all of its negative aspects, fear, even anxiety, can lead to great things; but, of course, it must be balanced with trust.
Saturday, January 4, 2014
The age of anxiety
The poet W. H. Auden proclaimed the mid-20th century the age of anxiety, but every age, it seems, can lay claim to being so called--at least if we judge by the number of anxious people around.
In a revealing article in the new Atlantic, the magazine's editor, Scott Stossel, describes the extreme phobias he has experienced and the remedies, none of them effective. He seems to have tried everything. He takes Xanax along with vodka when he ask to speak or fly in a plane. Not too wise.
Like chronic fatigue syndrome, imagined by outsiders to be imaginary, severe, crippling anxiety is often little understood or acknowledged. Having suffered from a milder form of anxiety than Stossel's most of my life, I can identify with his agony and frustration yet agree that many accomplished people, like him, have plunged into work, having successful careers in spite of intense fears and worries. I do not mean garden-variety worry and fear but the kind that leads to panic attacks.
It is comforting to know that Cicero, known for his oratory, panicked before his speeches and that stage fright has crippled Laurence Olivier, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Hugh Grant, and countless other performers; that Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Jefferson and Gandhi, Freud and Proust are among those who seem to have had some form of this emotional disorder, which is largely genetic but reinforced by habits of worry.
Yet the worriers of the world are often sought out by smart employers who know that anxious people will be excellent researchers or financial advisors because of their compulsive attention to detail. The person who imagines the worst is also highly imaginative and creative. What is painful and often shaming can become a source of strength. Kierkegaard went so far as to say, "The greater the anxiety, the greater the man."
Well, I doubt that. It is sad that all the medication and therapy in the world cannot really heal the anxiety of someone like Stossel. He doesn't mention the combination of exercise and meditation that has helped me. No doubt his work as a writer is a spiritual pursuit, as it is for me, but there is nothing about religion or spirituality in his catalog of remedies.
And it is sad that so little about this disorder, which affects one in six American adults, or 40 million people, is widely understood. This is a major health problem and leads many, like me, to prayer or to a form of Buddhist practice, which has a great calming effect. There is no cure--the fears surface each day--but there are helpful remedies that enable us to cope and to live good lives despite all the things in the world that can alarm us.
As I thank Mr. Stossel for going public with his lifelong malady, I wish him peace in this new year. I pray that I, like all the restless, anxious souls out there, we will find in and through our fears and worries, vehicles that lead not to despair but to productive living in an age that is, inevitably, one of anxiety.
In a revealing article in the new Atlantic, the magazine's editor, Scott Stossel, describes the extreme phobias he has experienced and the remedies, none of them effective. He seems to have tried everything. He takes Xanax along with vodka when he ask to speak or fly in a plane. Not too wise.
Like chronic fatigue syndrome, imagined by outsiders to be imaginary, severe, crippling anxiety is often little understood or acknowledged. Having suffered from a milder form of anxiety than Stossel's most of my life, I can identify with his agony and frustration yet agree that many accomplished people, like him, have plunged into work, having successful careers in spite of intense fears and worries. I do not mean garden-variety worry and fear but the kind that leads to panic attacks.
It is comforting to know that Cicero, known for his oratory, panicked before his speeches and that stage fright has crippled Laurence Olivier, Barbra Streisand, Carly Simon, Hugh Grant, and countless other performers; that Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Jefferson and Gandhi, Freud and Proust are among those who seem to have had some form of this emotional disorder, which is largely genetic but reinforced by habits of worry.
Yet the worriers of the world are often sought out by smart employers who know that anxious people will be excellent researchers or financial advisors because of their compulsive attention to detail. The person who imagines the worst is also highly imaginative and creative. What is painful and often shaming can become a source of strength. Kierkegaard went so far as to say, "The greater the anxiety, the greater the man."
Well, I doubt that. It is sad that all the medication and therapy in the world cannot really heal the anxiety of someone like Stossel. He doesn't mention the combination of exercise and meditation that has helped me. No doubt his work as a writer is a spiritual pursuit, as it is for me, but there is nothing about religion or spirituality in his catalog of remedies.
And it is sad that so little about this disorder, which affects one in six American adults, or 40 million people, is widely understood. This is a major health problem and leads many, like me, to prayer or to a form of Buddhist practice, which has a great calming effect. There is no cure--the fears surface each day--but there are helpful remedies that enable us to cope and to live good lives despite all the things in the world that can alarm us.
As I thank Mr. Stossel for going public with his lifelong malady, I wish him peace in this new year. I pray that I, like all the restless, anxious souls out there, we will find in and through our fears and worries, vehicles that lead not to despair but to productive living in an age that is, inevitably, one of anxiety.
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