When soothing your anxiety is becoming a full-time job

We all have ways to soothe our anxieties away - some more healthy than others.

For some it's about interrupting it through physical stimulation: a run, a hug, touching something comforting, sex or eating.

For others it's with more mental ways: mindfulness, gaming, gambling or reading.

For some it's using numbing or exciting substances like alcohol, drugs, nicotine ("I'm so stressed, I need a cigarette/glass of wine/joint/valium").

Personally I'm partial to apps on my phone and a glass of wine, and of course reading. And I can tell when it gets out of hand.

What all of these ways have in common, the healthy and the unhealthy ones alike, is that they only take care of the symptoms, i.e. the anxiety.

Anxiety, like any other emotion, is usually not a problem in itself - unless we refuse to look at its causes: then it will tend to develop a life of its own.

In most cases, our anxieties are about real or perceived problems we have. A job we don't like, a bully at work, someone's health issues, our difficulties connecting with others, the list is long.

Most of the time, we get away with ignoring the underlying issues. They are not so acute that we can't push them away. But when we bury our feelings, we bury them alive - they don't go away, they fester in the underground of our mind.

Eventually we spend more time soothing than living. More time pushing away than solving.

That's a good time to ask yourself "what feelings am I avoiding? what are they about? what would I rather be doing? how do I want to live?"

It's also a good time to ask for help, when the soothing has become an addictive behaviour you can't control anymore, interfering with the rest of your life.

Please reach out - there is nothing shameful about telling a friend that you are struggling, and enlisting them to support you in regaining independence from your anxiety.

Healthy boundaries are like a good garden fence

For those of you who have been reading my blog for a while, you might remember how I have likened our mental space to a garden, and psychotherapy to gardening.

Today I'd like to talk about boundaries, as it is one of the main subjects that come up in my work with clients and their relationships.

If you imagine that "you" are a plot of land that you are (hopefully lovingly) tending, of course that has to be protected from others, and you have lots of options for fencing it.

You could have just a line on the ground to delimitate your plot from your neighbours' ones. The advantage is that your neighbour can pop over all the time, which is also the disadvantage of course - it offers no protection from people with a less well-developed sense of where their plot stops and yours starts. After the hordes of elephants from their side have trampled your vegetables a number of times, you might decide to go the opposite extreme.

You build an elephant-high fence, potentially even with razor-wire and miradors with sharpshooters. No one will come over uninvited now! True, but trust me, even those whose visits you'd like won't come over anymore - who wants to makes friends with someone who shoots first and asks questions later!

The ideal fence is somewhere in the middle. A fence that lets you have a chat with your neighbour, establish relationships, pass a cup of tea over. Maybe a picket fence, low enough to see each other, but not so low that people mistake your garden for a public park where they can take their dogs to do their unmentionable things...

You get the gist. Healthy boundaries follow the same principle. They need to protect you, but not to the extent of keeping other people out completely.

This is the idea of vulnerability: in order to connect to others, the fence can't be made from concrete and be so high that no one can see you. Connection does require taking the risk of wolves or elephants attacking your garden and your chickens, but honestly, how often do these come around in the suburbia we live in?

The odds are that most people we meet are not very dangerous and as long as we have clear boundaries, they will not take advantage of us. The trick is to be consistent in defending our boundaries when someone does try to climb the fence or knock it over.

Don't forget to build in a couple of gates too, so you can invite in the people you like - ask yourself, how do you allow people to come closer into your life?

The impact of isolation on mental health

Here we are, the world as we know it doesn't exist anymore - no more travel, no more restaurants, and no more school!

Hopefully this is all temporary of course, but as we have no real end date, and are still heavily encouraged to stay home and not socialise, our everyday life is heavily impacted.

Our children are missing their friends, our elderly parents are missing us.
People who live on their own and rely on their friends for company suddenly are alone.
Families and couples who live together and don't get along are unable to escape the tension.

It's pretty crap really.
So, apart from the obvious impact on our lifestyle, what else is going on?

Well, unfortunately there is a much more worrying impact on our collective and individual mental health.

Humans are herd animals - we are meant to live in groups or families, with regular social contact.
Social contact that has nothing to do with the social of social media, and everything to do with physical and emotional presence.

We need to "rub" against each other, for comfort.

A few serious mental health issues like depression and addiction can actually be dramatically improved through human connection - the presence of others that makes us feel that we matter.

So what can we do?

The answer is simple: reach out: call, text, zoom.

Smile to the stranger on the street.

Ask your checkout person at the supermarket how they are doing.

Get in touch, repeatedly if necessary, to those people you know who have gone silent - odds are they are struggling (suicide is up).

Give the people in your life an opportunity to talk. Remind them that things will get better and until they do, you're there to listen to them.

Speak up or call the police if you hear signs of domestic violence (yep, that's up too).

And if you struggle yourself, please reach out to others, give them an opportunity to be there for you.

Be the person who cares actively, not the one who just worries actively.
Bonus: it might actually make you feel better.

It's not about saving the world.
It's about making a difference, one person at a time.



Charlotte is a psychotherapist in Sydney working with clients on four continents thanks to the miracle of modern technology. Don't hesitate to get in touch with her via charlotte1010@gmail.com

How perfectionism is a sure way to fail

I've been wondering why it has become so difficult lately for me to write new articles for this blog.

I have plenty of ideas, subjects that I'd love to write about, yet something interferes with the actual writing. Partly it is procrastination of course, but I have been wondering if perfectionism isn't the main culprit...

You see, as much as I am an avid and enthusiastic reader, I find the opposite exercise of writing very difficult. I like my sentences to be polished, and my meaning ultra clear, and when I can't get that happening quickly I postpone it until later (more and more often later seems to become never).

In some ways, I convince myself that not writing ensures that I'm not writing badly - if I don't try, I can't be crap at it, right? Wrong!

This is what psychologists call a cognitive distortion, when our brain tells us something is rational when it isn't actually; because the reality is that if I don't try, I have 0% chance of succeeding, but when I do try, even not terribly well, I have at least some chances of succeeding.

That is one dark side of perfectionism: it paralyses us.

The other issue is that we try, and try, and try, and try (you get the gist) but cannot stop working on what we do, never being satisfied with where we get to, because perfection is not reached.

The dark side here is of course that very few things in this world are made to be perfect, so basically we are failing our own expectations all the time, where perfection isn't even possible.

Motherhood is an example I have written about previously (here and here), where our expectation of being perfect drives us into the ground, and we beat ourselves up because we "fail".

So we are left with a huge amount of effort that we put in, and results that never measure up.
Sounds exhausting? It is!

But hey, I'm not just here to talk about all the problems that exist, but to also suggest an idea that leads to different perspectives:

In the case of motherhood, and most other areas where we could put in infinite amounts of effort for an ever diminishing rate of return (work being the other big one that comes to mind), the answer might lie in the beautiful concept of aiming for "good enough" instead of perfect.

Good enough is exactly what it says, it's good, and it's enough. Yes, more could be done, but it is not necessary or even desirable (because of the inordinate amount of extra time that would take - and time is the one thing of which we have so very little).

Because the aim of life is not to produce near-perfect outcomes and kill ourselves in the process, but to do what needs to be done in a reasonable way and so to find time to live, to find joy, to connect with others, and to read more books!

What might perfectionism prevent you from doing?