Category: Anxiety

Why I Do Yoga or Hey Everybody, I Have Bipolar Disorder

4/26/2017

I’m supposed to be making a flier to convince people to take my yoga classes at Shall We Dance. I tried putting all the usual things on the screen: Do something great for your body and mind! Build inner and outer flexibility, strength, and balance! Check out my awesome credentials!

But my heart just wasn’t in it.

You want to know why I do the physical practice of yoga? It may not be for the reasons you think.

I do yoga to help me get through the week. It’s no secret that I have multiple anxiety disorders (OCD, panic disorder, generalized anxiety). But recently I’ve been diagnosed with Bipolar 1, which makes a lot of sense given my hugely productive upswings and staggeringly apathetic lows.

But no matter what mood I’m in when I get to the mat, by the time class is over I’ve moved back toward the baseline, back toward feeling like everything is going to be OK.

It isn’t magic. I looked it up, because I fear being duped and appreciate scientific evidence. Yoga really does change your brain chemistry, if you’re paying attention. It’s the conscious act of placing your attention on the experience of moving and being still that

initiates the process of flushing out stress chemicals,
provokes the release of serotonin and GABA and a bunch of other feel-good neurotransmitters, and
activates those parts of the brain responsible for feelings of peaceful equilibrium as well as patience, empathy, compassion, creativity, and the ability to concentrate.

Caveat: it works best if you move . . . very . . . slowly.

I say some weird stuff in class because of this connection between feeling the physical sensations of the present moment and the mental effects of practicing yoga. This is why I say:

Stay in your body.
Feel your whole body: front, back, left, and right.
Be aware of the stretch, and on another level be aware of your entire body.

I say all this craziness and other stuff to remind us (myself as much as everybody else in the room) to “stay embodied,” which is another odd thing I say. Because staying aware of being embodied is the trick to why yoga feels like magic.

So that’s why I do yoga. The rest is bonus. Sure, it makes it so my body hurts less when I wake up in the morning. Sure, I’m more flexible than a whole lot of other women in their mid-40s. Sure, my lung capacity is huge, I can open my own pickle jars, and I feel secure standing on my tiptoes reaching for stuff on the top shelf. There’s no doubt that a physical yoga practice helps maintain us physically. So would a lot of other types of exercise.

But what matters to me is being kind and present with my family and friends. And without yoga, my brain gets tangled in knots. Yoga smooths it out. That’s why I teach what might be the slowest (non-yin or restorative) class in town. That’s why I say strange things like “Feel your skin.”

There are other classes, other teachers, other styles, that serve other purposes. And I would absolutely recommend them if you want to sweep through the beautiful flows of sun salutes or gain mastery of the more challenging acrobatic poses.

But if you want to practice slowing down, being present, and changing your outlook, at first temporarily and then maybe even lastingly, you should check out my classes at Shall We Dance.

Now, how do I fit that onto a flier?

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Benefits of Yoga for Anxiety in a Nutshell

12/2/2016

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Frustration by Tanya Little. CC BY-SA 2.0

A college student recently sent me some interview questions for a paper she's working on about yoga and anxiety. One of the questions was “What are some positive effects you have seen with people who are struggling with anxiety?” I thought I’d share my answer here. If yoga has helped you, I'd love to hear about it!

People in my classes report both short term and long term benefits from yoga when it comes to anxiety. In the short term, they say having attended a yoga class makes the rest of the day easier to handle. This can stem from a combination of a number of things:

the mood-lifting effect of having taken the time to do something that is good for them and that they enjoy
rebalancing the nervous system with slow, deep breathing and savasana, and
the neurochemical effects of shifting attention to the body, which lowers stress-related hormones and neurotransmitters while simultaneously increasing those chemicals that inhibit negative thoughts and induce positive emotions.

In the long term, I think the key word is patience. Even people who don’t have anxiety have told me that yoga increased their ability to be patient in frustrating situations. Anxiety makes everything seem urgent, overwhelming, and impossible. Frustration with self and others comes on quickly. The practice of yoga builds patience through purposefully and repeatedly removing our attention from our mental chatter and placing it in the body, using the body as the object of meditative focus. With an ongoing practice, we build the brain’s tolerance for frustration by increasing both the number of neurons devoted to patience as well as the strength of their connections.

With patience comes peace. Through the practice of yoga, we are increasingly able to slow down and handle the situation in front of us with thoughtfulness and compassion. This in turn allows us to rebuild our self-confidence, to know that we can take life as it comes. Then we can stop worrying so much about the past and the future and engage whole-heartedly with the present. That's the goal anyway!

Has yoga helped you manage anxiety? If so, I'd really like to hear your story. You can post here in the comments or you can email me through the contact page or at yogatoeaseanxiety(at)gmail(dot)com.

Relaxing by Onderwijsgek. CC BY-SA 3.0

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There’s Always Less You Can Do

9/21/2016

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When I was first coming out of my agoraphobic stage, I told a friend that I felt like I was never doing enough. This woman, for whom I had mad respect, who spent her days in social activism and hands-on sustainability projects, said, “There’s always more you can do.”

Because of my irrational achievement needs, I interpreted this as an admonition, as saying “If you’re not at maximum capacity, you don’t really care.”

I realize now that she may have meant there will always be more work to do, and all we can do is our best. But I was off the deep end. I had gotten to the point where there was no such thing as down time. I believed that even reading fiction was a wasteful sin, forget about television. My entire life was striving to be a perfect version of the Earth Mother archetype.

Central to the story—this was never the role I wanted to play. I was well aware that I was living somebody else’s dream life: stay at home mom, huge raised-bed gardens full of vegetables, spending my days making beautiful vegan food and educating myself about all the atrocities modern life has wrought on the planet.

We installed a solar hot water system; composted; tried not to buy anything nonreusable; embarked on large research campaigns before all major and many minor purchases; and saved up our recycling for when we drove one county over, since our county didn’t have recycling yet.

I wrote blogs for a carbon credit organization and a vegetarian magazine, lecturing into the void about our failures as a culture from the safety of my home. Mostly I judged: I judged every single one of my own actions and most of everybody else’s by a set of completely unreasonable standards.

I was absolutely miserable. There was always more I could have been and should have been doing.

But, like I said, I knew this wasn’t my life. This was someone else’s ideal existence. I had left my path of study; of delving into the mysteries; of gathering lofty thoughts and taming them into manageable, relatable chunks. And in the process I lost my self.

Over the last year and a half, I’ve become overwhelmed with striving again, overwhelmed with the feeling that there’s always more I could be and should be doing, and it all has to do with the business of Yoga. I think there's more I should be doing: to be out there in the community, to market my books, to reach more people.

And I have to keep reminding myself, I came to Yoga to find peace. I became a teacher to make sure I maintain my practice and keep returning to that place of peace within. I love that what I do also helps other people, and I love the community I’ve become a part of. But I have to watch out for trading in one obsession for another.

So, this is the lesson from Yoga that I need to keep in mind these days –“There’s always less you can do.” As long as we are wrapped up in the ego personality, there is always something we can let go. As long as we keep holding on to the past and projecting into the future, there is something we can stop doing. Until we are at peace, present to this moment with grace and gratitude, there is always less we can do.

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Facing Criticism with Anxiety

6/19/2016

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I take criticism hard. I automatically assume they are right and I am wrong for even trying. I think I have to be all the way right or I shouldn’t even open my mouth. That's perfectionism and all or nothing thinking, two symptoms of anxiety. Add paranoia to the mix and the merest inclination that I could have done better means jumping to the conclusion that everyone will see I'm a total fraud.

It's like a punch to the gut. One negative comment washes away years of positivity and sets off roiling doubt, inducing a self-reflective funk that makes me a drain to be around. That is how anxiety becomes depression.

I am not writing this for kudos or comfort, but to let others know, if they react (overreact) this way, they are not alone.

It's embarrassing. I'm supposed to be able to handle this kind of thing. I mean, I know that when someone offers a critique or constructive criticism the thing to do is rationally evaluate it on its merits and progress from there, incorporating or disregarding as appropriate.

But it can take me days to get to that point, depending on what the topic is, depending on how sore the sore spot is that they touched. And why am I covered in sore spots?

Fear. Some days I am made out of fear.

Anxiety is a maladaptive expression of our response to threats. I experience a knee-jerk reaction to protect my sense of self-worth, when really I should wait until my amygdala is done hijacking me and I can think more clearly to respond.

Instead, I end up reconsidering my entire purpose in life and wishing I could just fade away, back into the oblivion where I used to live. Agoraphobia was in no small way a reaction to this fear—I was hiding from the possibility of being wrong.

And this reaction is set off not necessarily from someone actively trying to tear me down. Just pointing out a misstatement or a nuance I neglected is enough.

Some people can brush off criticism. Maybe I should have gotten used to it in academe, where people build careers off of falsifying and criticizing what came before. I hid from that too, writing on obscure topics no one would see, or that were so divisive it was easy to set any criticism into the "skeptic" category—the equivalent of saying "haters gonna hate" and walking away.

But now what I write is relatively mainstream, at least it's for a much wider audience than the metaphysical and ethical consequences of parapsychology or the relationship between Kohlberg's stages of moral development and the emergence of wisdom. What I write now is like standing naked in the town square compared to being covered in the armor of other people's theories and the multisyllabic pomposity of the ivory tower.

It's my heart bared to the world every time.

To disregard criticism out of hand, to go to the other extreme and say "I can't be wrong; therefore, you must be," is narcissism. We see this a lot online and maybe it's a viable defense against the propensity for anonymity to lead to indiscriminate asshole-ishness. But I can’t seem to just blow it off.

I want to find balance between RuPaul's admonition that "What other people think of me is none of my damn business" and falling apart every time. I’m getting there. At least now I can keep functioning. Thanks to years of treatment—cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, meditation, medication, and self-compassion—the episodes of extreme self-doubt pass more quickly, and I know better than to make irreversible decisions while in the midst of them.

Until this balance comes naturally, all I can do is keep showing up, take my time, and make the best decision in each case regarding when to engage for my own growth and the benefit of my work and when not to engage because there is nothing to gain from the dialogue.

But how do you know which is which? What if I’m wrong?

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Simplicity, Patience, Compassion

3/10/2016

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Laozi, legendary author of the Tao te Ching, By Jean-Pierre Dalbéra, Paris, France - Exposition Clemenceau, le Tigre et l'Asie (MNAA-Guimet, Paris), CC BY 2.0

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.
Tao te Ching, 67. Trans. Stephen Mitchell

I have been stuck in a loop. It goes like this: I find myself with a little spare time or energy, so I commit to a couple extra projects. (Extra for me is anything besides teaching and writing.) Then life happens and I find I’ve taken on too much. I “soldier” on, trying to keep my word and maintain all of my commitments.

Writing gets put to the side and, as the chaos mounts, I use teaching as my own refuge instead of maintaining that space for my students. The pressure continues to build as I deny I’m in over my head. Then, I hit the wall.

I break down, freak out, panic, cry, and, ultimately go into hiding.

In self-fabricated crisis, I drop the extra commitments like hot rocks and find breathing room. When anxiety ruled my life, I dropped everything, not just the extra. And I stayed hidden for months and years.

A few weeks or months after finding balance, I get asked to take on one more thing, then one more thing, then . . . and the cycle repeats itself.

Why do I do this? Because I want to be of service? Yes, and . . . I want to be important to people. It’s ego attachment par excellence. Freud would call it sublimation: I’m camouflaging my need for acceptance and approval with helping behaviors. And we all need these things; we all need to be needed. What I need to realize is that the work I love and feel called to do is enough.

Those actions that feel like a natural extension of my true self are enough.

The Tao te Ching is the wisdom text I turn to when I need comfort. “Tao” is a big concept referring to something like the Universal Flow. The Tao, while it can’t be completely captured in words, is described as living close to the ground, as flowing like water, as having great strength without effort.

Since I first heard it decades ago, I’ve been attracted to the Taoist concept of wu-wei. It mean, paradoxically, “inactive action” or letting actions come from a place of stillness. Nothing is contrived. All is spontaneous.

And to get there, we practice simplicity, patience, and compassion.

So, I’ve simplified. I’ve let go of projects that are not teaching or writing. I’ve removed the Facebook app from my phone. I leave my phone behind when I go places with my family.

I’m being patient and giving myself time to let the water calm and the sand settle so I can see more clearly.

And compassion? Well, for me right now that means acceptance, not berating myself for having fallen into the same pattern again. And that might just be the hardest part.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

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Gentle, Soft, and Strong

9/13/2015

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Tao Te Ching
78

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.
Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible
nothing can surpass it.

The soft overcomes the hard;
the gentle overcomes the rigid.
Everyone knows this is true,
but few can put it into practice.

Therefore the Master remains serene
in the midst of sorrow.
Evil cannot enter his heart.
Because he has given up helping,
he is the people’s greatest help.

True words seem paradoxical.

(Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

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Getting Help When Anxiety Holds You Prisoner

7/8/2015

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I have arthritis in my jaw because of anxiety. My clenched muscles wore holes in the disks of cartilage between the bones. Then the bones wore away at each other. It is irreversible damage that will cause me discomfort and sometimes pain for the rest of my life.

Anxiety doesn’t just mess with how you think; it causes long term damage to your body and your brain. It shortens your life. And, if you let it, anxiety can kill you.

I had all kinds of reasons why I thought I shouldn’t get help: I ought to be able to fix it myself. Needing help was weakness. Other people needed those resources more than me. Who would understand? This is who I am.

Really, I was afraid. I was afraid to call my insurance provider to get preapproval. I was afraid of being told there was nothing wrong with me. I was afraid treatment wouldn’t work. I was afraid it would.

Eventually I started thinking of suicide too often. (!?) I had people in my life I did not want to hurt or abandon. I had memories of loving life to my core.

Step one was to get educated.

Read: I read a lot. These three books were the most helpful: What You Can Change and What You Can’t by Martin Seligman; The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook by Martha Davis et al.; and Anxiety, Phobias, and Panic by Reneau Peurifoy.
Look for help online: There are a lot of support groups and places to go for advice. Check out the adaa.org to start.
Research options for treatment: I was fortunate enough to have insurance that covered behavioral health, so I found the therapists and psychiatrists in my area that were on my plan and read everything I could find about them. If you don't have insurance, there are low cost and government funded treatment options. Mental Health America is a good place to start.

After all that, I knew what I needed to do, but I still couldn’t pick up the phone.

Real change only came when I learned how to consciously relax my body and my breath. Doing these two things saved my life.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation is a simple exercise where you tighten and relax different muscle groups in turn. I had no idea how tense I was until I learned how not to be. This is the recording I listened to over and over, until I had it memorized and could guide myself through it: Progressive Relaxation.

Abdominal breathing. I would do the progressive relaxation exercise and then lie on the floor, set a timer for five minutes, place my hands on my stomach, and practice deep abdominal breathing.

I had to constantly, consciously override the cranky, judgmental bitch fest in my mind telling me I was wasting time, doing nothing, get to work you slacker! Eventually, it worked and that voice subsided.

I was not only able to release some of the tension and the pain it caused in my body, but I could step back from my thoughts and see them for what they were, surprisingly irrational! Calling the insurance company was not setting myself up for rejection. Getting into therapy was not a complete waste of time.

It hasn’t been a short or easy road, but I’m happy now. I wake up at peace with myself and you can too. I still practice progressive relaxation and abdominal breathing, and I teach them in my yoga classes. I also make house calls.

You do not have to suffer.

Om shanti shanti shanti.

Om peace peace peace.

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Have You Tried Not Giving a Fuck?

7/7/2015

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What if you didn’t care what other people think? Assuming you aren’t a sociopath and that you have at least moderate levels of empathy and compassion, you would probably find it liberating to try not giving a fuck.

When we, as humans, hit adolescence we develop a habit of thought psychologists call the “imaginary audience.” We think people are always watching and judging us. Usually this fades away as we mature, though it may come back at times of stressful transition, like when you have your first kid or go through a divorce.

For some of us, it never leaves. Anxiety puts your brain on high alert for danger, and as social creatures we can end up on high alert for negative social cues to the point where we see them when they aren’t really there. I spent a long time feeling like I was under constant observation. It’s not much of a stretch to say I was paranoid about what people thought of me.

The first step to overcoming caring excessively about what other people think is to separate what you know from what you are imagining. For instance, a friend is uncharacteristically short on the phone. What I used to do was rack my brain for how I offended them. What did I do wrong? And you know what? I’d always find something that I could have done differently.

But they never said I offended them. There could have been a million and two different reasons they were abrupt that had exactly zero to do with me, but that didn’t occur to me. Frankly, anxiety makes you pretty damn self-centered.

The point is—don’t guess. Just stop pretending you can read people’s minds. (Unless you really can; then let’s have lunch!) Let the people in your life be responsible for saying what they mean. The vast majority of the time people are not judging you. And for those few who do spend their time criticizing others, well, they have their own steep path ahead of them.

When I let go of imagining what other people were thinking about me (which took a long time and a lot of reminders that I’m not telepathic), I realized I had been a social golem. I’d been encased in clay that I tried to make look like what I thought people wanted to see. When that clay finally cracked and fell off, piece by piece, then I could finally just be me.

Yoga is about stripping away the layers, the façades our egos build around us. Our egos think they are protecting us. But when they fall away and we are able to just be, then we learn how to care for people instead of caring about what people think of us.

So try it—try not giving a fuck. Let go of all the fucks you give about what people think of you. Try it for a minute, then for half an hour. Discover how much of what you do is influenced by your ideas of what you think people expect of you. Then try it for a day. See how it feels. You might find a little freedom.

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Letting Go of Worry

5/23/2015

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If you trusted yourself to make the right decision and to take the right action in situations as they arise, would you still worry?

Dr. Thynn Thynn, a Burmese doctor turned meditation teacher in the Theravada Buddhist tradition has said,

“Peace is a natural mind-state in every one of us. Peace has been there since the day we were born and it is going to be there till the day we die. It is our greatest gift; so why do we think we have no peace of mind?

“Experiencing peace is like looking at our hands. Usually, we see only the fingers—not the spaces in between. In a similar manner, when we look at the mind, we are aware of the active states, such as our running thoughts and the one-thousand-and-one feelings that are associated with them, but we tend to overlook the intervals of peace between them.”

Worry fills up those intervals, those spaces, until there is no room between thoughts. Worry causes stress and extended worry turns into anxiety.

I spent years constantly worried. I worried about everything and everyone. One particularly acute instance comes to mind.

I once had a friend who went to jail for dealing pot. He was away for years, and I never wrote or visited him because I was afraid to ask his brother how to get in touch with him. This was because the brother had gone a little wacko stalker on me many years earlier.

I was in the depths of my disorder when I heard that my friend was out of jail and had a job as a workman for a company in the small town where I lived. My guilt racked me. I was worried—beyond worried—that I would run into him. Maybe obsessed. Did I mention the town was small, so that an accidental meeting was actually highly likely? I just knew that he would be disappointed in me. I had let him down. I just knew that if I saw him I would panic, say something stupid, and ultimately have to admit to being an utterly shitty person.

I became hypervigilant. When I saw any truck belonging to that company I would hide, to the point of turning down streets I had no business being on, whether I was walking or driving. When I was alone at home, which was the whole school day long, I would sit rigid at the window, watching for their trucks, terrified to see one.

I spent days, maybe weeks, with my heart clenched in guilt over past actions and fear of an imaginary future experience.

Nuts! Yes, indeed. Frighteningly so. I knew something was very wrong with how I was acting; I was completely hijacked by worry.

Most of us, most of the time, aren’t consumed with worry to the point of being immobilized. But we do worry needlessly. We worry most about the people in our lives—our family and friends and co-workers. We might worry about what could happen to them or what they think about us. We might even worry for them. We might worry they aren’t making the best decisions. I used to worry about what my husband wore and what he ate. Turns out, he is indeed a grown man who can take care of himself!

999 times out of 1000, worry isn’t helping. The people we care about don’t need a worry-wart; they need someone who will be present with them and accept them as they are without trying to fix them; someone to listen with an open heart; and someone who will take action when it’s needed and only when it’s needed.

From Swami Rama,

“You can learn to control your mind very well—because it is yours, but do not try to control the minds of others and make them dependent. When one becomes dependent, one suffers, so you should learn to be independent, and you should not make others dependent upon you.”

Worry is a symptom of a lack of trust. If you trusted yourself to make the right decision and to take the right action in situations as they arise, would you still worry? What about the people in your life? Can you trust them to make their own choices? Spoiler: they’re going to anyway! The only person whose actions you can determine is you.

So, how can we, as individuals, come to make spontaneously good choices? Be Love.

I do not mean a superficial love, with rainbows and Lisa Frank stickers, or gooey, lusty love. I mean the Love that created and sustains this Reality and that beats in your heart. The Love that mystics mean when they say God is Love. Let Love be the rule that you always follow, to the point that it becomes ingrained in you.

In Yoga, the first moral precept is ahimsa—nonharming. All the other rules are based on this one. In every decision, do the least harm. It’s not unlike the Golden Rule, which can be found in one form or another in all the world’s religions: Do to others as you would have done to you. In every decision, do the most good.

Rick Hanson, Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley put it this way,

"Across all faiths and traditions, every great teacher had asked us to be loving and kind. Loving-kindness is not about being nice in some sentimental or superficial way: it is a fearless, passionate cherishing of everyone and everything, omitting none."

Plus, it feels good to let yourself live a life of Love. It feels like freedom and joy.

Worry will happen. Our brains are built to seek out threats and escape them. But if you trust in yourself and in Love, you can learn to let go of your worries. It just takes practice. That is what we do on the mat and in meditation.

I did eventually run into my old friend. He let me hug him.

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About Perfectionism

5/6/2015

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Many of us manifest our anxiety as perfectionism. And it is a drag.

Here’s a good definition of what I’m talking about, from Reneau Z. Peurifoy’s Anxiety, Phobias, and Panic.

“As with all human traits, perfectionism has both positive and negative sides. In its healthy form, perfectionism is characterized by setting demanding, but attainable goals for oneself. Healthy perfectionists also tend to enjoy working on tasks that require great attention to detail. This type of perfectionism leads to excellence in a chosen field and can help a person tremendously.

“In its negative form, perfectionism has three primary characteristics. The first is the tendency to set unrealistically high standards and goals for oneself, and often for others as well. The second is the tendency to use all-or-nothing thinking when evaluating one’s actions or achievements and to consider failure anything that does not meet the unrealistically high standards. The third characteristic is a selective point of view that focuses on small flaws and errors rather than on one’s overall progress or achievement.”

I find this super helpful. It’s important to know what we’re looking for when we’re trying to identify and root out irrational thinking.

For me, they all tie in together. I have a tendency toward thinking I have to be the best, and if I'm not then whatever it was, it wasn’t worth doing in the first place. I zoom in on what went wrong and let that overshadow what went well. Unrealistically high standards? Check. All or nothing thinking? Check. Focusing on flaws rather than progress? Check.

The mat is a great place to let go of perfectionism. We can pay close attention and work hard on our yoga without having unrealistic expectations, without thinking we aren’t doing it “right” because we don’t look a certain way in a pose.

To be good at yoga has nothing to do with how you look in a pose, and everything to do with paying attention, noticing when your mind wanders, and coming back – again and again. Coming back to your body and to your breath. Coming back to that still, quiet center and reconnecting with your True Self.

More thoughts on being “perfect” at elephant journal: Learning to Work With What We Have.

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Why I Do Yoga or Hey Everybody, I Have Bipolar Disorder

Benefits of Yoga for Anxiety in a Nutshell

There’s Always Less You Can Do

Facing Criticism with Anxiety

Simplicity, Patience, Compassion

Gentle, Soft, and Strong

Getting Help When Anxiety Holds You Prisoner

Have You Tried Not Giving a Fuck?

Letting Go of Worry

About Perfectionism

Yoga Talk

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