Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear

Once More, True Acceptance

Make sure that you appreciate the difference between truly accepting and only thinking you are accepting. If you can let your stomach churn, your hands sweat, your heart thump quickly, and your head ache, without paying too much attention to them, then you are truly accepting. It does not matter so much if at first you cannot do this calmly. It may be impossible to be calm at this stage. All I ask for true acceptance is that you are prepared to live and work with your symptoms without paying them too much respect.

The Limited Power of Adrenalin-releasing Nerves

After examining these ‘terrible feelings’, I want you to remain seated and concentrate on each in turn and try to make it worse. You will find you cannot. Apparently the power of the adrenalin-releasing nerves is limited. You may succeed in slightly intensifying its effect with concentration, but only slightly. And yet, all this time, without realizing it, you have been shrinking from facing these symptoms squarely because you were afraid that by so doing you would somehow make them worse. It was as if you gave them a fearful, sideways glance.

Let me reassure you. You cannot increase your symptoms by facing them or even trying to intensify them. In fact, you may find that when you try consciously to make them worse, they improve. The very act of concentrating on them in this way means that, for the time being at least, you look at them with interest rather than fear, and even this brief respite from tension may have a calming effect. Symptoms can be intensified only by further fear and its resulting tension, never by relaxing, facing and accepting. Are you beginning to suspect that your symptoms may have had you bluffed? They most certainly have.

A student whose sensations were very much as I have described, could make little headway at his study because of banging heart, sweating hands and churning stomach. One day, when he thought he would go crazy unless he could get relief, a friend, an ex-soldier, came to see him. He told his friend about his suffering and said, ‘I can’t stand it much longer. I have done all I can to fight it and I dont know which way to turn next. Surely there is a way out of this hell?’

The friend explained that many soldiers at the ‘front’ had had nerves like this until they realized they were only being bluffed by them. He advised the youth to stop being bluffed by his nerves, to float past all suggestion of self-pity and fear and go on with his work. The student saw the light and from being afraid to put one foot in front of the other for fear of damaging his heart, in two weeks was climbing mountains. That was many years ago. He has similar feelings from time to time when overwrought but he knows that they will pass if he relaxes, accepts and floats past them. He has learnt how to live with his nerves.

‘Floating’

To float is just as important as to accept, and it works similar magic. I could say let ‘float’ and not ‘fight’ be your slogan, because it amounts to that.

Let me illustrate more clearly the meaning of float in this regard. A patient had become so afraid of meeting people that she had not entered a shop for months. When asked to make a small purchase she said, ‘I couldn’t go into a shop. I’ve tried, but I can’t. The harder I try, the worse I get. If I force myself, I feel I am paralysed and can’t put one foot in front of the other. So please don’t ask me to go into a shop.’

I told her that she had little hope of succeeding while she tried to force herself in this way. This was the fighting of which I had previously warned her. I explained that she must imagine she was floating into the shop, not fighting her way there. To make this easier, she could imagine she was actually on a cloud, floating through the door. I also explained that she could further help herself by letting any obstructive thought she might have float away out of her head, recognizing that it was no more than a thought and that she need not be bluffed into giving it attention.

When she came back she was overjoyed and said, ‘Don’t stop me. I’m still floating. Do you want me to float for something else?’

Strange, isn’t it, how the use of one simple word could free a mind that had been imprisoned for months? The explanation is simple enough. When you fight you become tense and tension inhibits action. When you think of floating you relax and this helps action. This woman was in such a state of tension that I have seen her nearly reduced to tears when, with shaking hands, she tried to find a car-key in her handbag. After learning to float, one day when on a similar search she said, ‘Sorry if I’m taking your time. The keys can’t be too far away. I’ve just floated past two bills, a lipstick and a purse. I’ll float round a bit longer and find them.’ The shaking hands were almost steady. She was learning to float past tension.

I have seen patients so tensed by continuous fear that they were convinced they could neither walk nor lift their arms to feed themselves. One man afflicted in this way had been bedridden for weeks. After a few conversations with him, I found he was able to understand that the paralysis lay in his thoughts and not in his muscles. He learnt the trick of freeing his muscles by floating past obstructive thoughts. Within a few days he was ‘floating’ the food to his mouth unaided and announced that he was now ready to walk.

This caused a fine stir in the ward. Several doctors, students, and nurses stood by to watch. No sooner had the patient stood up than a nurse, seeing him sway, said hurriedly, ‘Look out – you might fall!’

The patient, describing the event afterwards, said that this suggestion was almost too much, and he nearly crumpled to the floor. However, he heard a voice in the background saying, ‘Float and you can do it. Float past fear,’ and he said, ‘I “floated” down the hospital ward and back, to my own and everyone else’s astonishment.’

Such frightening thoughts as were experienced by these two people can be very persistent, almost obsessive, to a tired mind, and it helps some people to imagine a pathway along which they can let these thoughts escape, float away. (Another use for ‘float’.) For example, one woman thought of them as passing out of the back of her head; another said she let them float away along a channel over her right ear, where the grocer keeps his pencil; yet another thought of them as little balls that she let bounce off her head. This may sound childish to a healthy, resilient mind, capable of directing and discarding thought, but to the exhausted, frightened person it is not childish. Nothing that helps is childish to him and this idea works well.

Masterly Inactivity

Masterly inactivity, a well-known phrase, is another way to describe floating. It means to give up the struggle, to stop holding tensely onto yourself trying to control your fear, trying ‘to do something about it’ while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis. It means to cease trying to navigate your way out of breakdown by meeting each obstacle as if it were a challenge that must be met before recovery is possible. It means to bypass the struggle, to go around, not over the mountain, to float and let time pass.

The average person, tense with battling, has an innate aversion to practising masterly inactivity and letting to. He vaguely thinks that were he to do this, he would lose control over the last vestige of his will-power and his house of cards would tumble. As one young man said, ‘I feel I must stand on guard. If I were to let go, I’m sure something would snap. It is absolutely necessary for me to keep control and hold myself together.’ When he was obliged to talk to strangers, he would dig his nails into his palms while he tried to control his trembling body and conceal his state of nervous tension. He would watch the clock anxiously, wondering how much longer he could keep up this masquerade without ‘cracking’.

Loosen Your Attitude

It is especially to such tense, controlled, nail-digging people that I say ‘Practise masterly inactivity and let go.’ If your body trembles, let it tremble. Don’t feel obliged to try and stop it. Don’t try to appear normal. Don’t even strive for relaxation. Simply let the thought of relaxation be in your mind, in your attitude towards your body. Loosen your attitude. In other word, don’t be too concerned because you are tense and cannot relax. The very act of being prepared to accept your tenseness relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don’t have to strive for relaxation. You have to wait for it. When a patient says ‘I have tried so hard all day to be relaxed,’ surely he has had a day of striving, net relaxation? Let your body find its own level without controlling, directing it. Believe me, if you do this, you will not crack. You will not lose true control of yourself. You will float up to the surface from the depths of despair.

The relief of loosening your tense hold on yourself, of giving up the struggle and recognizing that there is no battle to fight, except of your own making, may bring a calmness you have forgotten existed within you. In your tense effort to control yourself you have been releasing more and more adrenalin and so further exciting your organs to produce the very sensations from which you have been trying to escape.

Float past tension and fear.

Float past unwelcome suggestions.

Float, don’t fight.

Accept and let more time pass.

CHAPTER 7 Cure of Recurring Nervous Attacks (#ulink_08156af2-edfd-5874-aadf-5c36dff14c4d)

Now let us consider the symptoms of breakdown that may occur in attacks – panic spasms, palpitations, slowly beating heart, ‘missed’ heart-beats, trembling turns, inability to take a deep breath, ‘lump in the throat’, giddiness, nausea and vomiting. Depression and sleeplessness are such an important part of the nervous breakdown caused by problem, sorrow, guilt or disgrace, that in order to save repetition I shall leave their discussion until describing this second type of breakdown.

PANIC SPASMS

As already mentioned, fear can produce a state of constant tension, or it can take the form of intense recurring spasms of panic that start in our ‘middle’, just below the breastbone, and seem to spread, like a white-hot flame, all over the body, passing through the chest, up the spine, into the face, down the arms and even down into the groins to the tips of the toes.

If you suffer from these spasms you will probably find that whereas you had some control over them at the beginning of your breakdown, you now seem to have lost control and live in constant dread of them. Your nervous system has become so sensitized to them that it discharges them instantly and swiftly at the slightest provocation. In this sensitized state you remain tense with an apprehension which helps only to increase the frequency and intensity of the spasms. Can you see the vicious circle in which you have placed yourself?

The treatment already offered to cure the symptoms of sustained fear will also cure these spasms of acute fear. You face, analyse and try to understand them, learning how to live with them temporarily, letting time pass to bring recovery.

In the past, as soon as you have felt a wave of panic approaching, you have either tried to control it and stop it coming or have shrunk from it and tried to forget it as quickly as possible. In this way you have lived in constant dread, preparing a battleground for each approaching spasm. Now, just as you examined and described your churning stomach and sweating hands, on the next occasion when you panic I want you to examine this feeling without shrinking from it, describing it to yourself as it sweeps through you.

You will find that fear strikes hardest when it first strikes, and that if you relax and stand your ground and see it through, it quietens and disappears. When you have learnt the trick of relaxing and seeing the wave of fear through to its finish without adding further panic and tension to fear or without trying to arrest it by controlling it, you will begin to lose your fear of fear. You will probably be surprised to realize that a hot feeling in your stomach, a burning feeling up your spine, pins and needles in your hands and a throbbing feeling in your temples could have held such terror for you. You have been terrified of no more than a physical feeling. By analysing fear in this way and seeing it as physical feeling that conforms to a set pattern and disappears with acceptance and relaxation, YOU UNMASK FEAR AND WITH IT YOUR OWN BREAKDOWN, AND YOU FIND THAT ONLY A BOGEY REMAINS.

Other Ways to Conquer Fear

There are ways to conquer fear other than analysing and unmasking it, and some doctors have the experience of watching a sufferer inventing his own method. Some find the cause of the fear and try to conquer and control this, believing that with the cause removed the fear will go. For example, one woman, terrified of the palpitations because of fear of dying during an attack, so succeeded in losing her fear of death, that she lost her fear of the palpitations. I have not suggested that you use this method for this type of breakdown, because there are too many instances where much would be made from nothing and one difficulty overcome only to find a dozen in its place. At this stage I prefer to attack fear itself.

For example, Mrs G. was afraid to walk up the street to go shopping. When she analysed why she was afraid, she found many obstacles causing fear, among them passing the telephone booth where she once collapsed, passing the neighbour with the glittering eye, waiting to be served at the butcher’s, and so on – the list was long. To discover why she feared each obstacle would have been a research programme in itself. Common sense rebels at the thought. It is more satisfactory to find a common approach to meet each obstacle encountered on that journey up the street. Unmasking fear itself is such an approach. No longer afraid of the physical sensation of fear, Mrs G. can float past the telephone booth, past the neighbour’s glittering eye, even into the butcher’s.