Sarah Wilson on Anxiety

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Sarah Wilson, a New York Times best selling author, journalist,

and founder of I Quit Sugar dot Com. She has published fifteen I Quit Sugar books in forty six countries and was ranked as one of the top two hundred most influential authors in the world in two thousand seventeen and two thousand eighteen. Sarah was the editor in chief of Cosmopolitan Magazine Australia at twenty nine. She was also the host of Master Chef Australia and holds a record in the Guinness Book of World Records. I'll let you google y. Her new book is First We Make the

Beast Beautiful, A New Journey through Anxiety. Hi, Sarah, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Eric. It is a real pleasure to have you on. We are going to talk about your book called First we Make the Beast Beautiful, a New Journey through Anxiety. But before we do that, we'll start in the way that we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his granddaughter and he says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

What is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the granddaughter stops and she thinks about it for a second, and she looks up at her grandfather and she said, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parawul means to you in your life and in

the work that you do well. I mean, Eric, it plays perfectly into the title, and that the same of my book. First, to make the beast beautiful because very much, you know the way I've been living for so many years with my anxiety, and I'm sure some of your listeners would relate to this, I've been fed the story that you know, what I had was a disorder. So the medical model very much told me that it was, you know, it was a beast that had to be fixed. We had to get rid of it before I could

live a big, full life. And one of the things that I explore in the book is, Um, I do this pretty pretty early on, is that you know what we can be both and we can be both anxious, and we can also feed a better beast, you know, the better beast, which is the more beautiful one, which is to see anxiety as as a beautiful thing, something that we don't have to get rid of. And you know, as as you know, Eric, because I know you've you've

read the book, You're very well researched at all times. Um, you know, it's a journey that takes us, UM, that takes us through an understanding of anxiety through a philosophical and spiritual lens. And I very much feed that story. So yes, your parable speaks to me big time. And also there's another there's another thought that occurred to me. UM. I was a big mountain bike rider for many years. I was twenty four hour mountain bike races and downhill races.

And when you're riding a bike, UM, you you know, if you've got a gap between say two rocks, as you're hurtling down a hill several miles an hour, UM, you can't really steer your way there. You essentially passed through that very narrow opening of only a few inches, say, by by looking at it, by putting your full focus on that small gap between the rocks. And I've always had this adage, which I think is similar to your parable,

which is where the mind goes, the energy flows. And I have lived by that with every business and you know, sort of enterprise that I've entered into, but also with the way I do my relationships, UM, and my also my engagement with my mental disorder or my mental illness. So I very much relate to that parable. Yeah, I think it's wonderful, and I think the way you tied

that altogether was great. In addition to ans A, you see early in the book that you know, you had childhood anxiety, lots of insomnia, bulimia, and your late teens O c D depression anxiety, and then bipolar disorder also, and so those have all sort of been a part of your path and your journey. Yeah, that's right, and I and I also say that to me, in many ways,

it was all the same thing. It was the same itch, it was the same buzz, it was the same There were just different expressions of what I described as a deeper yearning. You know, it always felt like a yearning. It felt like something bigger and deeper than just an illness. You know that that had a bunch of names and

and you know, kind of corresponding medications. And I still to this day see that's the same kind of itch, you know, that an internal itch that I think humanity has had its call for eon since we got upright, you know. Yeah, it's really interesting. It makes me think of addiction. I'm a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic and in the A A big book, there is a idea

that the disorder is related to a spiritual yearning. UM. Carl Young often mentioned and in conversations with early a A founders that you know, take the word alcohol spirit spiritus, you know, and that the alcoholic was trying to find that transcendence they felt cut off. I've always found that to be very very plausible, UM. And I love that you say that anxiety is a disconnection. UM. You call it something else, and we'll get into what something else

is in a minute. But as I've looked at my own depression, as I've looked at my own addiction and all that, I do feel that this idea of disconnection and reconnection is absolutely fundamental to the problem and the healing. Yeah. Absolutely,

and you've you've touched on something there as well. We often say these various illnesses, whether it's addiction or or a compulsive disorder or whatever it might be, as the problem, but quite often they are an expression, There are a symptom, there are coping mechanism, and I think you know, that's

something that we need to start to look at. That the deeper issue is this disconnect and that's something that is common and it's something whether you've got a diagnosed disorder as such, or whether you're a human being who has these lonely moments where you get home from a loud party at night and you've got to go and sit with yourself looking at the bathroom mirror under the fluorescent lights, you know, and you suddenly get a sense of what is all of this about? I mean, that

is common. And what was really interesting is that a huge number of readers. The book's been out for a while now, but readers from around the world commented on the fact that, you know, some of them just didn't even have anxiety as such, but they read the book and very much related to that, that deep yearning. And I feel that it's becoming louder and louder. I would send the last eighteen to twenty four months. That yearning is.

It's palpable, it's everywhere. It's playing out at an individual level, but it's playing out broadly in our society, in our politics, in our communities. I just find it also just far more nourishing to talk at that level, because it is the deeper level, and it's the deepness and connection that

we that we are creating. Right, and you ask these questions early on in the book, and I think they're they're fundamental questions that I know I wrestle with and anybody I know who has any sort of Again, I'll use the word mental illness in a loose way, will say, am I really mentally ill? Am I disordered? Am I defective? Am I just weak of character and not trying? Just taking medication? Alter? Who I am? Am I less authentic? For? It is an unnatural Is it really a problem? I mean?

With me in depression, I often just wonder, like, am I depressed? Or do I just have like what would have been called a long time ago, a melancholy temperament? Or could it be a very reasonable and appropriate response to the world that we're living in at the moment? I mean, that's the other thing, And that comes up in particular with kind of conditions like a d h D, where I often see children struggling with the toggling and the frenetic life that they are having to now live in.

And I'm not surprised that some little brains are just not you know, are just almost rebelling, you know. Um. And that's something that I think a lot of people with anxiety or depression, you know, you summed up really well all of those questions like really, do I have a problem here? Or is this is this my soul calling out to me and going something is not right here? And maybe this needs to be looked at more deeply, and you know you mentioned the idea of that. Maybe

in the past it have been called different things. What I find really interesting is how surprised people are to learn that anxiety only entered the d s M, which is the main diagnostic tool used by psychiatrists in both the States and here in Australia. Prior to night anxiety was something that probably you know, we described it as different things, um, but it was something in some ways I think that was part of life, and we did

very much talk about it in a in a different way. Also, if you go to the next level, and if you look at some of these more serious it's a diagnosable conditions such as bipolar for instance, Bipolar has existed or at least the symptoms of you have presented themselves throughout

history and in much the same percentages. So about one point two to one point four percent of any given population around the world throughout history of displayed these very particular you know, sort of behaviors that correlate now to what we call bipolar. And what I find and super interesting is to just read about how they were treated

differently throughout history. They say now that shaman and sort of kind of spiritual leaders, like really influential spiritual leaders, tended to have bipolar because they had this incredible insight, and political leaders, I mean Winston Churchill, particularly wartime leaders tended to have bipolar, and there was an understanding that there was sort of this incredible brilliance and insight and ability to sort of work out work a community's way

through the quagmire of huge trauma went hand in hand with sort of a darker side, a shadow side, but it was considered a very important part of any culture.

I talked about this, as you know, all the way through the book, and I personally found that incredibly comforting to actually start to go back to your parable, to feed that storyline, to feed that aspect of the beast, that this is an incredibly important kind of quirk, evolutionary quirk that humanity has, whether it's some anxiety depression or so on, we have it there for a reason. It exists for a reason, and that's where the beauty comes into play, and that's sort of you know, I guess

why I've called called it. First, we make the best beautiful first, we start to see the beauty of these conditions, and from there we can start to modulate and refine and use our condition and ensure that it doesn't take over and ruin our lives. Right, And I think that's such an important and subtle nuance there, which is, how do we embrace these things as being a beautiful beast to some extent? And how do we not glorify really

destructive conditions? Like I know I wrestled with this a lot as an alcoholic in an addict, because there was a cachet is not the right word, but it's the one that's coming to mind. There was a cache, there was a literary and artistic tradition and being the self destructive artist, but it was truly self destructive? Right? How

do I twease those things apart? And what you said earlier, I can't quite remember the quote, but like you said, there's a lot of people say, like, is it considered a sign of health to be well adjusted to a truly warped world? I'll just read what you said in the book, at one point you said, the interesting thing is back in the nineteen thirties, Nausea, which was an existentialist novel, was celebrated as a wonderful expression of the

essence of the human condition. Today. The main character, a third year old loner who felt sickened by the realization that he lived in a world devoid of meaning, would be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and prescribed an antidepressant or invited to undergo a course of cognitive behavioral therapy. Yeah. I mean that's how that kind of almost deviant thinking um is treation these days, because we are deeply uncomfortable with um thinking that goes beyond um what is considered

you know, a safe, normal, prescribed, etcetera. I think your point, though, it is a very subtle distinction though, or subtle line that you can easily cross where it can become glorified. And with anxiety in particular, and I mentioned this in the book, that we live in a culture where it is really quite often to know where you cross the line into disordered anxiety, because we do live in a world where being busy, being frenetic is glorified. Right, This

is the flip side of all of that. So when you say to someone, oh how are you, it's like, I'm so busy. Oh gosh, I've got so much going on. I've just got stress, you know, pouring out of me. And that's almost a worn as a badge of honor, even insomnia, even sort of boasting about how a little sleep you had. And yet here I am functioning, turning

up to the board meeting. You know. Um that is again it's sort of it's glorified and um, you know, at some point we do cross a line and it's so hard to tell a lot of people, and that's where a lot of the self berating comes into play, Like I should be able to cope with this, I should be able to you know, my colleagues are only getting four fight our of sleep at night, you know what's wrong with me? And I think the big problem is that we're not talking about it at a real level.

We slap a diagnosis onto somebody, We actually kind of really poo poo their the questions, the deeper questions that they're asking, and hand them some medication, and it's so on satiating. So it's so boring, it's so unprogressive apart from anything else. But I think we can have we can have nuance, and we can have refinement around all

of this once we start talking openly. And I agree with you, we shouldn't all become Ernest hamming away and drink ourselves into a stupor to be able to access our creative space and feel comfortable with our creativity or our devins or our questioning. However, having some spirited, wild thinking from time to time would be something that could be of benefit to our culture right now. You know, we need to have a more beautiful conversation around all

of this stuff. And I suppose that's that's the journey that I went on, you know, seven years to write that book, and it was very much about finding a more beautiful, helpful, nourishing way to talk about this. Because the friend said to me when I was part way through the researching of the book, darling, why are you doing this? Why are you writing this book? Because he was watching me become so tortured by it all, And I said, well, quite frankly, I am sick of being

alone in in the conversations I want to have. I want to have more interesting conversations. I mean that was the impetus to the book, and in fact, you know, it brought me those interesting conversations I tell you what, like this one we're having right now. Indeed, Yeah, and I agree with you. I mean, I think the debate becomes very often, not just in society but within the person about medicine, right about taking medicine. And I've I've

been on this debate. You see somewhere in the book that everybody who's been on these kinds of medicines at one point or the other, tries to go off of them or is always question genning whether they should be on them. And I've I've been through that route multiple times once not too long ago. I'm a big fan of psychiatric medication because I think it saved my life

and lifted me out of a bunch of pits. I do think that the idea that we just go to a doctor and we're given this medicine and we go take it and that's the end of it, as if it's a cold or an infection that we want to go away. That I think is all the things you said.

It's profoundly unsatisfying and boring and and it just for me, it misses the point because there's something else going on here, and my recovery from depression and alcoholism and all that has been a very challenging but has probably brought nine of the beautiful things that are in my life into my life. Yeah. Absolutely, we don't have a discourse around struggle and pain anymore. You know, if you haven't looked at the way that technology has evolved, it hasn't evolved

to my life a grander experience. It's mostly about saving us from discomfort, annoyances, delays, um, you know, and avoiding struggle and pain. So we have a whole generation and we are part of that generation because it was for a big part of my adulthood. Um where you know, it's the eradication of pain at all costs and yet the spiritual traditions all throughout our history, we have always

had a deep appreciation of the role of struggle. It is the thing that takes us to the next level of our development and as you say, it brings the most amount of beauty into into life. So that is one of the things that really gets missed when you chuck medication at a patient. I've always said, I mean, I'm the same as you, and I'm very open about it in the book, and I get asked this question almost immediately when I do public talk, So I speak

to media, well, what are your thoughts on medication? And I very openly go on and offer it um. Even to this day, I know when I need to go on it. Generally it's the look of terror in family and friends spaces. You know, I probably get to a point where I'm a little bit too much for the world, and I start to pick up the signs and I go back on my medication for a while and I pulse.

You know, I know how to manage it now. But the only reason I can do that is because I've always taken medication the context of psychiatric or in terms of the therapeutic context, so I've done it in conjunction with therapy. So I always see medication is getting to you to a point where you're in a safe place, You're in a stable place where you can start to

piece things out. But you must do the therapy at the same time, because otherwise what's the point you don't get to go to that you don't get to delve into the struggle and the point of it and the worth of it and the beauty of it, the philosophical purpose of it um, and that's probably the missing peace. Right medication is particularly good for young people, especially when you don't have the skills, the knowledge, um, you know, the wisdom to be able to have a conversation in

and around it. So it can be great for that can be great when you've at a really hard point and you're not going to need clarity, but it really needs to be used so that you can then peace out your thoughts and you can do helpful therapy. So it's the therapy that's often missing. I have sort of really lane, run of the mill depression, which is talking about boring, Like when it comes, there's no like great, you know, passionate sadness about it. It's just like being dead,

you know. It's just there's nothing there to feel anything about. And so it's not as much fun for me to come off of medicine. And I did it with the help of a doctor. I was like, you know what, I'm in a really great place in my life. I've been on these things for a while. I know how to take care of myself, and so I got off

all the medicines with help of a doctor. I did everything I know that treats my depression, and at a certain point I just went I feel like I am rolling a five hundred pound rock up the side of a hill every day for no good reason, and went back on a small dose of the medicine, and boom, I was like, oh, there I am again, you know. And so I feel comfortable with where I'm at with it because I went through that that process in a

really deep way. I would never have felt comfortable saying, you know, I should or shouldn't be on it if I wasn't doing everything else that I know is important to my depression, my spiritual life, my meditation, my exercise, my eating, well all that stuff. Like when I'm doing all of that and I still feel terror able, and I'm doing things like therapy and talking to people and I do all that and I still feel terrible, then I go, Okay, I'm okay with medicine in this case

because I've kind of exhausted the possibilities. Yeah, that comes with being a little bit older as well, doesn't it. I Mean, you've got to know that you can go out on your own and exhaust a few possibilities before you do the medication. As a young person, it's extremely terrifying, especially when it's you know, it's your first time going through one of the cycles, or whether it's professional mania

or combination of both. So there's not one size fits all, and unfortunately, the medication based model works to that that there's a one size fits all. One of the things that I think always comes as a surprise is the number of different types of medication and the number of different therapists that the average depressed or manic person needs to go through until they arrive at a solution. Now, I will also argue, and I think it's something like

five therapists and seven different types of medication. You know, I think it's something like that. I'd also argue that throughout my life, I've also had to pulse that I go through different types of therapists. They'll be appropriate for a year, and then I then I have a gap and then I have to go back to a different type of therapist because I evolve. And same for medication.

You know, it's a constant dance. And when I can frame it as something that is about modulation, and you might remember this Eric from the book that I talk about when you've got a mental condition of any type. It's like being charged with carrying a shallow bowl of water around for the rest of your life, and you've

got to walk carefully. You've got to get steadiness into your life, because if you don't and you start to get a bit wobbly, the water starts to slash backwards and forwards, and it spills all over and around you, and it bleeds through all the work that you're doing and ruins it. And then you've got to keep going back to source to fill up. And it's an exhausting process. So it's a very rough, find artful thing to live with,

and I quite love it now. I know that sounds really odd, but I find that in itself is quite beautiful. Is to be able to read where I'm at and to know when I need to go back to source, when I need to make sure that I'm stable, when to know that when the slashing is getting a little

bit out of hand, you know. And it was really something I had to learn, and it was a conversation I had to have um and people have been asked me for different tricks and techniques and things that have worked to get me to a place where I'm able to talk like this, you know, with you for instance, and your listeners. And one of the things I say is actually reading. I'm working on my next book at the moment, and it's been a three year research project.

First We Make the Best Beautiful took seven years of research. And one of the terms that I've come across, which I'm really enjoying is soul nerding nerd ing out on the soul. And I discovered it actually when I was

research and First We The Beast Beautiful. That what really helped was reading some of the texts and fiction non fiction by people who had been diagnosed with a similar disorder throughout history, whether it's Virginia Wolf, Sylvia Plath, whoever it might be, and actually just realizing the commonality and the thread that some of these people go on and and that was incredible, And I now realize it's a worthwhile pursuit because I know that some of their struggles

to maintain that shallow bowl of water, to keep it steady, um informed some of their greatest work, like It's brought some of the greatest joy to humanity. And so yeah, it's it's that refract constant reframing that learning the richest side of all of this, feeding the right beast, you know, the right wolf that has brought me to this place, you know, along with other techniques such as meditation and walking and a bunch of other things I go into

in the book. But it's that real awareness, that that kind of understanding of the meta the meta purpose behind it all that's helped I agree on changing directions just a little bit. I want to read something that you write in the book because I think this is so important. You say, one of the worst things we can do to ourselves on the anxious journey is to get anxious about being anxious, and that learning to stop that sacle is one of the biggest and most fundamental things that

we can do for ourselves. Yeah. Absolutely, people have tended to really gravitate to that little line. It's only a small section of the book, right, But what I'm trying to say is that we can choose to do anxiety once. Now what helps is to know that, yes, one of the worst things about anxiety is that we get anxious about being anxious, and then we get anxious about being anxious about being anxious, and we go down this horrible spiral, right where you know there's no clawing our way out

of it. One of the things that actually helps is that as well is to learn and I learned this on the journey, is that a panic attack, for instance, only last minutes. So once you know that what's your soul lurded your way to that truth, you realize that, oh, well, I could do twenty five to thirty minutes of abject pain, right,

I can sit through it. And as we mentioned before, you know, spiritual traditionals, traditions throughout history have talked about the notion of sitting in your suffering, passing through it, rather than trying to beat it. And that comes to comes to fruition when you when you deal with a panic attack, If you can sit in a really bad moment of anxiety and just sit in it, right it out and do it once instead of getting anxious about the fact that you've being anxious, UM, you can actually

really admit things in the bud very very quickly. And then what you do is you're not actually creating those neural pathways, You're not strengthening these anxious neural pathways because you're keeping it quite short and sistin. Do you know, um, and moving onwards. And that's a really great technique. I mean,

it's as simple as that. Right. Sometimes just understanding some of the brain chemistry that goes on that helps it helps, you know, and that only comes about when we start talking beyond the medical model and we stopped just talking about throwing a pill at the situation, right right. I often think with with a lot of this stuff, that sometimes the best we can do in certain situations, particularly when we're deep in it, the best we can do

is not make it worse. And that may sound trivial, but it's not, because our capacity to make things worse is is extraordinary. You know. We talked about on the show a lot. It's that Buddhist parable of the second arrow, you know, being anxious about being anxious is shooting yourself with the second arrow, and then the third. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on, and so I often think that, like, when it doesn't seem like I can make it better, I'm like, well,

how can I make sure I don't make it worse? Yeah? And it's a responsibility, don't you think, Eric, I mean, I think that's something that um, I that's some a bit of a part of that carrying the shallow bowl of water. It is a responsibility. If you are somebody who's being born with this condition or you've developed it for whatever reason, it is a responsibility, and you've got a responsibility to those around you, but also to yourself

to not make it worse, you know. And um, quite often those of us who have some of these conditions, we tend to be a types, don't we. You know where we are. We're not laid back characters as a rule. And so what I find is that when I'm speaking to you know, a types, it actually really does help to kind of add that extra layer, that notion of a responsibility. Right, You've got a responsibility not to make

this worse fire up, you know. And I know that that kind of that kind of mindset really works for me when I'm in that moment, because if I'm doing it for myself because I read it in a self help book somewhere, like, it ain't going to cut through, Like I will self indulge myself down a horrible anxiety spiral. But if I say to myself, no, this is my role. You know, I've got this condition and it comes with a responsibility and first and foremost is I'm not going

to make this worse. I'm not going to add any more fuel to this fire. Let's get sensible. You use a few different words in the book to describe the process of getting better or working with anxiety. One of them is slow. Let's talk about slow. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people talk about the benefits of going slow. It's been, you know, a book. Various people have written books, and there's a whole self help category.

I'm not great, it's slow. I've tended to have you know, one speed and one speed only, which is you know, surging forward. But you know, interestingly, I had an illness UM which goes part and pass it with anxious conditions. UM. I have hashymotos, which is an autoimmune disorder. And it's incredible how many people tend to have bipolar and hashingmotos. And it is a perfect disease for somebody like me. UM. I needed to almost have my body tell me to stop and go slow. UM. So when I got unwell,

I mean, it was a crazy exercise. As I say, I was a mountain bike rider and I used to do sand running races and I would run several miles to work and back every day, and I actually was forced to actually get very, very slow, and it was one of the best things for me. And one of the things that came out of that, and you probably noted this in the book, is walking. I discovered the absolute fundamental life saving benefits of walking, ice getting patient

with walking, why walk when you could run? And getting unwell and and being forced to slow down was wonderful because um, and this is the line that I use in the book, and it's wonderful. It's walking goes at the same pace as discerning thought. And I feel that so much of what we suffer today is a lack of space and time and the right environment for discerning good, deep meaningful thinking. And when you walk, it actually literally gets you into that speed, that pace where you start

to the thoughts to start to tumble in woods. Walking has just been an absolute boon. I mentioned quite a number of scientific studies that have been shown that connect walking with really alleviating anxiety. The anxious part of the brain, the flight or fight mechanism, is the same part of the brain that modulates the left right motion when we're walking.

It's sort of like that part of the brain evolved at the same point that we became upright, which is also the same point that we developed an acute sense of flight or fight. You know, you can understand why all that would have developed together. And so the walking mechanism can very much modulate and calm and almost shut down the anxious part of the brain. Because it's such an old part of the brain, it can only do

one thing at once. Various people call it the mono tasker of you know, sort of like the fusty old uncle that can only do one thing at once, you know, And so when you walk, it is very very hard to remain anxious. So yeah, that's sort of slow thing. I came to very much appreciate it. And one other thing that always makes people laugh is I hand wrote that entire book. And again, handwriting goes at the same

pace as discerning thought. Um. Lot of people and I don't know if you're the same, Eric, when they write books, they often handwrite it because you can actually connect in with your heart and your soul um far better than when you're at a keyboard. And in many ways our contemporary life goes at the opposite or way too fast for discerning thought. So actually going back to some old school techniques like walking in handwriting can really help. I

was definitely struck by that. I've always felt rescued by the computer because my handwriting is so bad. But I also have recognized that I'm not a good taper either, and I find that to be a very distracting thing. So I can at least rate by hand. No one but me can probably read it, but I can do it. But taping, I find myself having to stop and start, and you know, it's just because I make so many mistakes, whereas at least handwriting I kind of know how to

do it well. There's also the risk of toggling. While you're on a computer. You're also toggling on screens. You can check your mess buy messages, UM. You know you've got your chat messages coming in UM, and it just takes you into that vortex of destruction, which it sets you up for the anxious experience like nothing else. Yes, one of the things I have learned to do is I don't do it as often as I should, but I pretty much know how to shut all of it

off so it doesn't reach me. Like to do not Disturb feature on my phone is like one of the greatest things ever invented. Um, just because then nothing shows up. People are always like, I'm trying to call you all day and I'm like, well, oh well, yeah exactly. Let's talk about another word that you use, which is space. I think this is a really interesting concept. It's what I've been thinking a lot about lately, this idea of space. So tell me when when you were talking about space

in the book kind of what you mean? Yeah, well, I found a really useful metaphor to describe my anxiety

as this sort of knotted ball of wool. And I think in our culture we tend to this idea that if we could just find the end of that knotted ball of wool, which is all just gnarly and it's sort of the threads of all kind of got knotted together, and it's all fuzzy and it's the dense you know, um, And we sort of feel that if we could just find that end of the piece of wool and we could just kind of, you know, pull tug at it a bit, it'll all unravel into a nice, unified thread.

You know. Hopefully some drugs and some quick fixes out there and a guru or two will get us there and just ain't how it works, you know, And what I try to do instead is talk about this idea of loosening this ball of wool. That's our aim. We loosen it up, so we kind of just massage it out a bit and get some space in there. And I really do think that that that is really important. And you know, when you go and look at some of the techniques that a lot of experts share in

this realm, it is about creating space. So you know those breathing exercises where you you breathe in and you hold your breath two, three, and then you release your breath too three. You know, it's very much about trying to find those spaces between the breaths. And it's something that is not honored, it's not talked about, it's not practiced, and we have to actually proactively go and do that.

It's not about finding, you know, the fix where everything is laid out in a nice symmetrical kind of order. Sometimes it's just about finding space. One thing that is not actually I don't think it's in that chapter, but it is somewhere in the book is another lesson that relates to that when when I was the editor of Cosmopolitan, we did a bunch of different stories on stress and

so on. I remember coming across the study that found that that the most stressed and miserable person on the planet where women in their forties who are lawyers, which you know, I found interesting, having done half a law degree myself and escaped escaped such misery in my early twenties. Particular. You are sociologists, actually decided well, he was going to go and research, and he wrote a piece for for

the magazine. He thought he'd go in research, well what was it that was actually making the most happy and balanced or you know, settled women in the world. So and what he found was that most women are stressed. They've got multiple stuff coming in that they're living. That not a ball of wool life in so many ways. And many of your female listeners know exactly what I'm talking about. Um the habit all, the habit all means

do it all generation and Um. What he found is that the women who were happiest were the ones that didn't try to find perfect balance, you know, they didn't try to find that thread and pull it out so that everything fell into place where your yoga quotient matched up perfectly to man of hours that you're working in the office quotient with the number of hours you're spending with your kids, soccer practice, whatever it might be. These

women weren't doing that. Instead, they were tilting. And that word in itself, I think is just magical, this notion if you tilt towards what matters, feed that the wolf that matters. And I think that that plays into that idea of space. It's not about rigidly finding you know, um solutions and and right and wrong. It's it's tilting,

it's leaning, it's more nuanced, it's subtle. I like that idea of tilting, and I think it speaks to I always think about with balance, like is it something that can be achieved maybe over a long period of time, Like if you want to look at like, well, if I look at the year, how did the year go? You know, as far as as trying to allocate things to the various parts of my life I care about. But in real time, like you said, there's a lot of tilting that goes on. My kid is sick. I'm

tilting that direction. We got a big work project. I'm tilting that direction. I'm out of balance for a period of time, and that's just the way it should be, and that if we are intentional about what really matters to us, those things come out in the wash if we if we take the time to be intentional. But this idea of base is really fascinating to me because I've been thinking a lot lately about about the spiritual

idea of contraction versus expansion. And what I've really started in notice for me is that like when I'm doing well, there's this sense of outflowing and moving outwards and space from me, not necessarily like my focus is all in the outside world, but it feels like the movement is this is an expansion, and when I struggle my depression,

it feels like complete contraction. And it made me think about because one of the spiritual teachers I really has meant a lot to me, his name is Audi A. Shanty, has been on the show a few times and he said once that ego is just a contraction, and that hit me so strongly, And so that metaphor of contracting versus expanding, or space versus tightness has really been away for me. Without having to give a whole lot of thought to like where am I, How am I? How? What?

What place am I living from right now? By just checking into that feeling, Yeah, I I am very much on the same page, Jerry. I've recently been reading a fair bit of James Hollis. He's an American Unions psychotherapist, and he has a wonderful phrase which is very similar. He asks the question throughout his life will it enlarge or contract my life? And It's become a wonderful lens through which I'm able to navigate quite a lot of

my life these days. Um And I think at the moment as well, I think it resonates, particularly in a world where in many ways we are lacking a moral code. It's so hard to find your true north, the true north that will serve not just ourselves, but the broader community, which is essentially at the heart of our yearning right it has been throughout history we desire to be of

service to to help humanity. And the moment, I think it's a really useful question to ask, you know, as we face all the kind of climate crisis issues that you know that that plaguing the planet is what we're going to do, Is it going to be large? Or is it going to constrict life or contract life? I agree with you that space concept, that opening, that enlargening, that loosening the ball of wool rather than rigidly trying to find the end of it, you know, which invariably

makes the ball of wool even more knotted and constricted. Right. Um, you know it's it's that kind of thinking that we that is resonating right now. Yeah, I had forgotten that quote by him, and that is one of my favorite lines. I've I've wrote it down several times when I heard it because it's good, such a great question, because I do think it it helps answer for me a lot of things that feel thorny um, and it it just provides a clarity for me that you know, a lot

of other things don't. So when I when I read that you know about space in your book, it really spoke to me what we are at the end of our time here. I think this is where we're going to wrap up, which I think is a great place to wrap up. I've had a ball talking to you. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post show conversation. We're going to talk about indecision, about how when you're anxious, decisions can be your undoing and I can speak to the same for depression.

We're gonna talk a little bit about that in some ways to work with that in the post show. Listeners. If you're interested and you want to get other great things by being part of our community, go to one you feed dot net slash support. Well, Sarah, thank you so much for coming on. The book was beautifully written. Listeners. I think you know you would absolutely love it. We'll have links in the show notes and thanks so much. I've enjoyed it thoroughly. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, bye. Yeah.

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