Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (10 page)

7

Crises and revelations

Many people who are suffering from despair have turned their backs on an impending crisis that they are unable or unwilling to face.

ESCAPIST STRATEGIES

Personal crises can be terrifying and make us feel physically ill. They seem to threaten our very identity, and this is why we often choose to avoid the serious problems that give rise to them. Escapists know in their hearts that the crisis is coming, that it is out there waiting to be faced and resolved, but they distract themselves in the hope that it may go away. It doesn’t go away. Instead what happens to escapists is this:

1
They gradually sink into a trough of numbness and denial.
 

2
Even their desires and needs become muffled and vague.
 

3
They grow apathetic, craven and dishonest in their habits, both with other people and themselves.
 

4
They lose confidence and self-esteem.
 

5
Hope looks like a candle blinking out in the distance until finally …
 

6
They feel desolate and see no way forward.

Running away from serious problems sends feedback to the brain that we are flustered and defenceless. This naturally increases our fear, so we have to run farther and faster. Eventually reality must be faced. But the result may surprise you. Every crisis offers an opportunity, a learning curve, from which we may emerge stronger and wiser and happier than we have ever been.

Personal crisis: W. G. Wilson

William Griffith Wilson, an ex-soldier and successful Wall Street businessman, drank to alleviate depression. By 1933 he had become an unemployable alcoholic, living on charity in Brooklyn. Incarcerated for the fourth time at Manhattan’s Towns Hospital the following year, Wilson lay awake in his bed, terrified. He had reached a crisis of inner torment worse than anything even he had felt before in which he was struggling with his ideas and feelings. He expected the worst. But then suddenly he saw a flash of white light and felt a profound religious certainty. The epiphany changed his life. He never drank again. Wilson went on to found Alcoholics Anonymous and the revolutionary ‘twelve-step programme’ that has helped millions of alcoholics to kick the habit.

Personal crisis: Timothy Gallwey

Tennis player Tim Gallwey crashed his car into a snow-bank driving towards northern Maine. It was around midnight and 20 degrees below zero, and he had only the sports jacket he was wearing. He had no map or mobile phone and the last town had disappeared behind him 20 minutes ago. He got out and started walking but the cold hurt his ears. He tried to run but the cold sapped his strength. He realised that he was probably about to die:

I found myself saying aloud, ‘Okay, if now is the time, so be it. I’m ready.’ I really meant it. With that I stopped thinking about it and began walking calmly down the road, suddenly aware of the beauty of the night. I became absorbed in the silence of the stars and in the loveliness of the dimly lit forms around me; everything was beautiful. Then without thinking, I started running. To my surprise I didn’t stop for a full forty minutes, and then only because I spotted a light burning in the window of a distant house.
¹

Gallwey didn’t die frozen in the snow. He invented a Zen meditative technique for playing tennis without thinking called the ‘Inner Game’. It made him rich and famous.

REVELATIONS AND EPIPHANIES

These two stories illustrate an experience that has happened to a great many of us: a sudden moment of calm, clarity and visionary joy that occurs at the very climax of a personal crisis or when people seem to be facing imminent death (when the revelations are called NDEs or ‘Near Death Experiences’). As we know, these epiphanies are actively
sought out
by religious devotees who put themselves through fasting, scourging and climbing up into high mountains to try to achieve them. But they can occur naturally to those who are not at all religious, and to people of all ages and cultural backgrounds.

Author’s epiphany

I had such an experience myself when I was young. I was starting out as a writer, living with my parents, and I was suffering from panic attacks that were becoming more and more distressing. I could not take drugs because my father was addicted to sedatives and I saw what they had done to him. My habit had been to try to escape the symptoms by surrounding myself with friends and keeping busy. But nights were terrifying spirals and I feared for my sanity. One evening I decided I couldn’t outrun this any more: I was too exhausted. I would turn and face the monster. So I went to my room, lay down and waited for the worst. I remember that I actually folded my arms. Suddenly, instead of terror, I felt absolute peace. I went downstairs and looked at my violent, drug-addicted father watching a film on television:
On the Waterfront.
I was overwhelmed with a feeling of love and pity for my father, admiration for the film, gratitude for our tiny council house, the lamp on the television, the world I lived in. Everything suddenly made sense. I never suffered from panic attacks again.

‘COMPLEXITY SCIENCE’

How can the brain, at the very height of a crisis that threatens to disintegrate us, suddenly convulse its powers like this and produce a life-changing revelation? Neurologists haven’t really fathomed this out yet, but one group of exceptionally gifted scientists at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico have produced exhilarating research that gives us a clue.

Nobel Prize-winners like Murray Gell-Mann, Philip Anderson and Kenneth Arrow have been studying what are technically known as ‘complex systems’.

Examples of complex systems are:

piles of sand
pans of simmering water
the money markets
artificial intelligence
insect swarms
bird flocks
tornados
storm clouds
etc.

All of these systems exhibit a strange transition that the scientists have named
emergence
.

At the highest point of tension and on the very edge of chaos, they ‘change gear’ and spontaneously produce
order
.

Example of emergence

A pan of water is put on to boil. All the little water molecules behave more and more randomly and chaotically until suddenly, as though at the throwing of a switch, they all organise themselves into a hexagonal convection pattern and simmer. From the very edge of chaos emerges order.

Nothing to do with me, you might think. Except that one of the complex systems under study is the human brain.

Undergoing tension and resolution may be absolutely crucial to its vital work of making connections. The nervousness that our stress-managed age has come to
fear and avoid may actually be part of a complex process designed to produce a heightened version of our abilities. This would certainly explain why creative people go through an emotional loop to produce their best work and why they so often need what they call pressure, or a deadline, in order to bring forth their magic.

Rossini’s crescendos

Gioacchino Rossini (famous for the crescendos in his music such as the
William Tell Overture)
couldn’t compose until the night before the performance. Once he composed on the actual day of the performance, with the impresario’s henchmen standing over him as he wrote and threatening to throw him out of an upstairs window. What was happening to poor Rossini during these scary creative episodes?

THE BRAIN’S BATTLE STATIONS

When we face a threat or challenge, the body goes into the complex ‘fight-or-flight response’, triggered by the hypothalamus at the back of the brain as it galvanises us into action. Stress management people are fond of telling us that this is a ‘very primitive’ threat mechanism, suitable for fighting sabre-tooth tigers but inappropriate for our modern lives. The mechanism is
in fact
highly sophisticated. This is just some of what happens.

Yellow alert

The hypothalamus transmits electrical and chemical signals to the pituitary gland. The pituitary relays the exciting news to the adrenal glands just above the kidneys using the hormone ACTH (Adreno-Cortico-Trophic Hormone). Over 30 chemical messengers suddenly cascade from the adrenal glands and are sent round the body. Their tiny tasks are complex: they can alter metabolism, alter blood pressure, alter the pigmentation of the skin and raise blood sugar levels. The main effects are:

•
the heart rate increases

•
metabolism of sugars increases

•
blood thickens

•
blood pressure rises

•
hands and feet lose heat

•
sweating increases

•
the mouth becomes dry

•
muscles tense

•
digestion is disrupted giving rise to …

•
‘butterflies’, diarrhoea and nausea.

Red alert

Blood supply is being diverted away from the extremities and non-essential systems like digestion. Why? The blood is needed elsewhere. Of course some of it must go to the large muscles, which may be needed for fighting or fleeing. But this emergency blood boost must also flow elsewhere. It must go to the brain, which literally experiences a ‘rush of blood’, although this is carefully controlled by the surrounding vascular system or you might have an aneurism. The body may be preparing for action, but the brain is readying itself to work in a high gear, to focus, connect, create, crystallise and come up with appropriate solutions to this emergency.

Lift-off

Within the brain’s own circuitry an electrical charge now goes down the tiny main cable or ‘axon’ of each affected nerve cell and crosses the synaptic gap to neighbouring cells and circuits – sometimes on a very grand scale. The bigger the connection, the bigger the brainwave and the bigger the epiphany we may experience. The brain is signalling to us that it is making sense of our reality. There is even a metaphorical language that we use to describe our feelings during crises, of which ‘pressure’, ‘rush of blood’, ‘seeing red’ and ‘don’t burst a blood vessel’ are among hundreds of examples.
²

This miraculous process is evidently the source of our brainwaves, our peak experiences, our epiphanies. The brain changes gear when we face threats and challenges. It has to. It is designed to help us survive and learn. This is why it is wired to produce brilliant ideas when we are in the middle of bad experiences. This is also why most of our leisure pursuits, as we shall see later on, are designed to bring us to
artificial
crises and climaxes, and give us what we call an adrenalin rush or a ‘buzz’.

THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL

Without the complex physiological changes that go by the name of ‘nervousness’, the brain would not be able to move into its higher gears, or orchestrate its key connections, or create its brainwaves, or manage its crisis thinking. People would just go bumbling along from day to day without ever having access to its special powers. This is why creative professionals like writers and composers tend to live on the edge or ‘on their nerves’. This is where they find their brains function at their optimum capacity and where they can produce their magic.

You can use this knowledge when you yourself face a crisis. It may help you get through and appreciate the true powers of your brain and its workings. As Othello puts it in Shakespeare’s play of the same name:

                      … O my soul’s joy!

If after every tempest come such calms,

May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!

And let the labouring bark climb hills of seas

Olympus-high, and duck again as low

As hell’s from heaven! If it were now to die,

’Twere now to be most happy, for I fear

My soul hath her content so absolute

That not another moment like to this

Succeeds in unknown fate.

(William Shakespeare,
Othello
, Act II)

NOTES

1
. W. Timothy Gallwey,
The Inner Game of Tennis.
Jonathan Cape, 1975, p. 138.

2
. Angela Patmore,
The Truth About Stress,
Grove Atlantic, 2006, pp. 348–50.