I always thought self-help was like self-serve frozen yogurt or coffee. Instead of seeing a therapist or a life coach you could get exactly what you wanted. With all the benefits for a fraction of the cost using a book or video, it was the DIY approach to mental, physical, or financial well-being.
Now I realize my mistake. Self-help isn’t like DIY or self-serve. It means helping your self, object, not subject. And maybe that is why it is doomed to failure.
If I want to install a faucet, I can draw upon countless videos and articles explaining step by step how to do it. If I follow those steps exactly, I can, with a reasonable amount of intelligence, expect to end up with a working faucet. If I end up with a flooded kitchen, it isn’t because the advice is somehow flawed or there is something inherently wrong with giving advice on how to improve another person’s home. It is because, in all probability, I didn’t follow the instructions correctly.
Self-help doesn’t work that way for the obvious reason that people aren’t made to precise specifications in a factory in China. We do not all work the same way. We are complex.
When I say self-help doesn’t work, I don’t mean it never works. I mean that, on average, self-help doesn’t help anyone except the person offering it. If it does help, it only helps for a short while.
This article isn’t self-help. You won’t find ways to help or improve yourself here. You won’t find anything that will cure what ails you. Instead, this article is an antidote to self-help. Unhelp.
In March 2020, I had just been sent home from work for what was supposed to be 6 weeks. Case numbers were rising. I’m an anxious person by nature, but this was beyond anxiety. Even as I saw the numbers, in the back of my head whispered a voice: “it is so much worse than it looks. No it is much, much worse than even that.”
For once my catastrophizing turned out to be accurate.
As the parts of my life that sustained my mental well-being were slowly slipped out from under me: casual work interactions, social gatherings, family trips, Sunday worship, and so on and my kids all began homebound lives, my mental state became more precarious.
Then something even worse happened: I turned 40.
As my 30s died, so did my sense of being young, and one more thread snapped in the rope to which I clung.
I think if things had been much worse. If I had lost my job, my wife had left me, or even a loved one had died, I might have handled it better. I don’t know. It was the sense of everything being “fine” at home but really not fine that did me in.
To everyone around me, I was completely fine.
Then one Sunday in August, I went to the emergency room with a resting heart rate of 140.
The diagnosis was dehydration with a strong suspicion of anxiety attack. They gave me IV fluids and my heart rate came down. Then I went home and drank a gallon of Gatorade.
I called my therapist, whom I hadn’t spoken to in five years. We talked. I felt better, but I wasn’t the same.
I couldn’t stand being idle or having my thoughts to myself. I needed busy-ness to drive away the demons that were waiting for me to have an idle moment. Covid gave so many of those.
Uneasiness replaced any comfort I received from reading.
I was just uncomfortable with myself. And the self-consciousness of every waking moment made me long for sleep. I slept more.
I spent a lot of time analyzing my worries and what caused them. This made things worse. My worries were not about anything. I wasn’t worried about getting sick anymore. I was numb to that. I didn’t have anything bad in the future on my mind. I felt like I had no future with endless lockdowns and closings on the horizon. Even the thought of my own mortality didn’t scare me.
It was simply that sense of being outside myself, watching myself and that sensation of another silently watching me, judging me, that creating my distracted unease.
Try to make a man completely safe, and he will find his own existence to fear.
Fear of existence is not the same as fear of dying or even the fear of non-existence. When you become aware of yourself existing and you contemplate the loneliness and uncertainty of that existence, you fear it for its own sake. How can a being even contemplate their own non-existence, after all? Yet, they can certainly contemplate existence.
Indeed, I don’t have faith in non-existence at all. I believe that we exist eternally (either forever or timelessly) in some form. Somehow that makes it worse.
I see people, busy with their more grounded worries, and I silently ask: “do you know you are being existing? How can you stand it?”
The sense of watching oneself existing acts to slow down time. You hold on to a single moment, like grasping a tree branch while falling off a cliff with no bottom. You contemplate existing within that moment. Then you blink, your attention is distracted, and the moment and the “you” that existed within that moment are both gone, dead.
This leads me to ask: am I a being who exists in many moments in time or am I many beings all existing in one moment each? Perhaps my uniqueness as an individual is an illusion created by having memories in my brain.
If that is so, then I only exist in a given moment and that self-consciousness is that person’s vain attempt to hold on to an existence that is fleeting, trying to prevent present me from coming into being.
This reminds me of Homer Simpson casually drinking Vodka and mayonnaise while saying that the gastrointestinal fallout of this concoction is a problem for “Future Homer”. I almost envy his joie de vivre. Almost.
One of my favorite poems, by Mary Oliver, is In the Blackwater Woods. The last lines go like this:
To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
And it seems like this self-consciousness and holding on are, in some sense, an attempt to hold on to not any thing or person but existence; To stop time, as it were. Failing that you become more and more anxious to see yourself existing, moment to moment, until you become distracted and busy, and you can feel calm and in control again.
Anxiety is insidious because to combat it you must learn to live with it and to love it. If you start to become attached to certain states of mind, activities, or behaviors that, at one time, brought calm, they will make you anxious. It is like a drug that you develop a tolerance for.
You can try prayer, meditation, yoga, exercise, and all those are good, but they don’t cure you. If you think you’ve figured it all out, as I have many times thought, you will find that anxiety is one step ahead of you. If you think a mantra or anthropomorphizing it helps, go for it, but, as with the cat that came back the very next day, get ready to answer the door.
Trying not to be anxious becomes like trying not to think about a polar bear. Once you have it in your mind that that is your task, you will never succeed, but that’s not the real problem.
The real problem is trying not to think of trying not to think of a polar bear. In other words, once you are anxious, if you just let it run its course, it will be gone before long. But if you can’t stop thinking about getting rid of the anxiety, it won’t go away. That is what learning to live with it and love it means.
The human mind is not always logical in this respect, but the feelings we have are not always for a reason. They have a cause of course, but that cause may not be based on anything other than recurrent loops in the mind that have no external cause either in the present, past, or future. Rather, they are cognitive behaviors that have no rational underpinning. The mind is not entirely under our control.
Anxiety certainly has an important function for us. If you look at people who never worry about anything, they often get themselves into trouble. Worry kept our ancestors alive. Because they worried about having enough food, clothes, shelter, avoiding predators, and defending themselves from neighboring tribes, we are here today. If worry were so easily dismissed, then it would not have that power for survival.
Yet, when worry itself becomes the predator, then worry never leaves you for the hunting lion has entered your mind. Thoughts become distorted and soon everything looks like a predator. You become possessed, and that is a dark place to be.
The way out looks a lot like the way in. If you turn worry into an enemy, you make it stronger. If you turn it into a friend, you make it weaker. Actually doing it and not just pretending to do it is the tricky part.
If you can’t do it yourself, don’t try self-help. Find real help. There are resources out there: https://www.mentalhelp.net/anxiety/hotline/. Existence may be lonely, but dealing with mental health doesn’t have to be.