Worry into Wonder

This post is a window to my soul. You can see firsthand my geekiness and the systematic ways in which I work through stress and depression and personal problems. I let you see my own personal therapy methods. Part 1: Worry into Wonder

In June I got depressed, I had no control over my negative emotions, and I wend down the spiral of depressive cycle to reach the very bottom. Clinical diagnosis would be a ‘major depressive episode’. For people who do not believe depression is real, and for those who think that you could snap out of it if you so wished, this state could be compared for example to physical paralysis of your fingers. You are making all the mental effort to snap those fingers, but they do nothing. They stopped responding to the signals from the brain, they are paralysed.

In similar way I was paralysed by stress and by the anger of being completely powerless in the situation in which I found myself in - being unable to either change it or leave it. All the adrenaline was making my body go into ‘flight or fight‘ but I could do neither.

And then there was the worry. I do not remember now what exactly I was worrying about a few months ago (apart from having no income if I leave and being temporarily homeless). It must have had something to do with all the fighting, I was worried that I would be defeated in my struggles to escape this prison. The worries I do not know the future, about not having enough money to escape, about getting everything organised in the country where I am illiterate and quite helpless without the help of others.

On top of the constant tension, stress and daily doses of adrenaline the worry was keeping me in the vicious circle of depression. When I was leaving Japan to take a break in July I really wished I could just snap out of it by changing the outside setting.

Time away from Japan felt like a daze. At the back of my mind I knew there are problems in my life, but I pretended they do not exist. I refused to think about them and for a few weeks, until confronted by the demands of those problems, I pretended to myself that I escaped the prison and I am never going back there again.

This illusion made me feel quite well. It made me feel in control of my life. It enabled complete focus on a new found hobby, healthy living, and was able to block out all the thoughts of worry from my mind.

But it was an illusion, that time was not a real freedom from worry. It was there, hovering above my head, with me actively looking away and refusing to see it. But this strategy helped me to calm down my shattered nerves. I slowly started healing.

On my way back to Japan, killing the time on the long haul flight, I was browsing thought the music, TV and radio, when I came across some short podcasts about healthy life, jetlag and stress. A few-minutes-long podcast about ‘Stress Management’ hit the spot (more about it in the next post).

Soon after getting my act together I was googling to find out more about the stress management techniques described in the podcast, when I came across the post ‘Turn your Worry into Wonder’ by Jane Garnett.

The inspiration for it comes from some sort of New Age'y thinking, which, as scientist, I reject in the overall concept, and it is quite unreal that it really hit me. It made me think. It made me Wonder.

In the first weeks back in my old job, I did not quite know if they are going to ridiculously fire me just after coming back to Japan, whether I would be able to start a new job in autumn or not, whether they would pay me for half of the summer when I was actually working or penalise me for taking time off by withholding my whole summer's income. I had a lot of things to worry about. But instead I just wondered.

I reached a new calm. When all those thought were going through my mind during the endless commuting hours I was thinking ‘I wonder if they fire me’ or ‘I wonder if they pay me’ or ‘I wonder if they let me use the accommodation’... This was a miraculous re-framing of my thinking and for a while*, actually for about the first six weeks, it worked wonders!

**I was no longer able to creatively re-frame worry into wonder after the critical mass of the difficulties, tension and stress was exceeded in the present situation of being held-up with the application for the job that I am supposed to be starting in less than two weeks time, because of the administration slowness/laziness/retardation.