Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (14 page)

•
Participant sports

•
Extreme sports

•
Racing

•
Martial arts

•
Fitness workouts

•
White-knuckle rides

•
Adventure activities

•
‘Drumroll’ circus acts

•
Gambling

•
Classical music

•
Challenges (mental & physical)

•
Romance and sex

Ah, you may think:
romance and sex
– that explains it all. But cerebral climaxes are not some minor version of, or substitute for, sexual climaxes. They are better than sex. Religious devotees have foresworn sexuality to experience them, and adventurers put their very lives at risk. In fact, sex is a version of what cerebral climaxes are, because the body serves the brain, and in all its subsystems recognises its master. ‘Frisson’ is that exhilarating tension without which sex can be staid, and humans have turned sex into an art form just so that they can have lots of CCs. Animals just use it for making little animals.

ASSIGNMENT

Experience the CC yourself. Try the following:

A sports event, either as a spectator or – even better – a participant

Notice the build-up of tension that makes you nervous. Why is this worse if there is a nip-and-tuck contest? Why is a mismatch not exciting? If you like football, what do you feel when there is a draw, followed by a ‘sudden death’ result? Have you been cheated of genuine resolution?

A thriller

Choose a thriller, a real page-turner that is difficult to put down (you can find plenty of ads on the Amazon website or ask in your local library). Try to read it as quickly as possible rather than over several weeks. Notice the effect on your heart rate. Some thrillers, like Thomas Harris’s novels
Silence of the Lambs
and
Red Dragon
, are advertised as heart-thumpers. How would you feel if somebody had torn out the last ten pages?

A movie

Choose a ‘high-end’ (clever and emotional) classic film rather than a cheap tricks, gore-and-guts, special-effects flick. Pick an epic like
Gladiator
or a classic sci-fi thriller like Alien, or a Hitchcock tension-building horror, or even a classic romance like
Gone with the Wind
or
Brief Encounter
. Big movies often feature a lead character who is put through very hell yet comes out of it genuinely heroic. But their main purpose is to arouse tension, climb to a climax and then resolve. Experience it and you’ll see. My trainees were asked to draw a graph as the film went along – it can look like the temperature chart of a very sick patient!

A musical classic

Listen to one of the following:

•
Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor

•
Beethoven’s
Egmont
Overture

•
Dukas:
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

•
Grieg:
Hall of the Mountain King

•
Holst:
The Planets Suite
(especially Mars)

•
Khachaturian:
Spartacus,
the Adagio

•
Mozart: Overture to
The Marriage of Figaro

•
Orff: ‘O Fortuna’, from
Carmina Burana

•
Ravel:
Bolero

•
Richard Strauss:
Also Sprach Zarathustra

•
Rossini: Overture to
The Thieving Magpie

•
Tchaikovsky:
1812 Overture

•
Vaughan Williams:
The Lark Ascending

•
Wagner:
Tannhäuser Overture 

THRILL-SEEKING

Thrill-seekers are generally
not
trying to kill themselves. The edge-technician, the danger-controller, is going for the CC. Anyone willing to freefall, sky-dive, fly, water-ski, leap or climb may achieve one: the surfer boring through the coil of a wave, the skier or speeding motorcyclist, senses forced against the wind, just on the knife-edge of control. Descending from one of four BASE jumps (the acronym stands for Building, Antenna, Span and Earth) gives you a CC that is like an out-of-body experience. Adrenalin junkies, as they are labelled by the uninitiated, are drawn to a place beyond fear, of catharsis, ego-release, timeless beauty and tranquillity.

Professional sport

Pro sport is a test of nerve, not simply of physical skill. The experiment pits skilled contestants against each other under time limits and constraints, motivated by shedloads of money. Millions of spectators can then watch as the nail-biting tension mounts. The Grand National commentary canters along, rises to a frantic crescendo as front-runners pass the post, and then tails off as they saunter into the winners’ enclosure. This is the typical CC arc.

Television quizzes

TV quiz shows place contestants under a microscope as they ascend a ladder of questions. Reality shows expose contestants to gruelling emotional ordeals, exploring climaxing in the contestants and vicariously in the viewer.

Computer gaming

In computer games the CC is achieved with the help of a ‘boss’ – a computer-generated force that struggles with the player in a tense series of ‘grades’ and enables him to reach a final crisis.

THE ARTS

The arts are all predicated on tension and resolution. Usually, as in fiction, ballet, opera, cinema and theatre, this is delivered through a storyline that builds and takes the audience with it. But our great poems, paintings and sculptures also manifest it. The high point of a great work of art causes a fusion in the mind. The climax makes total sense. It is a visceral experience – the hairs rise on your arms. It takes the breath away. It may even have a ‘cleansing’ effect, coalescing and releasing confused or pent-up emotions and moving you to tears.

Theatre

Two millennia ago, Aristotle studied the effects of drama on theatre audiences. He noticed that the Greeks went through hell with the characters on stage, and the action built up to a moment of extreme tension before erupting in violence and terror. He divided a play into four parts:

The audience went away ‘cleansed’ of their emotions. Aristotle called what they had experienced
catharsis
. He was the first to use this expression.

Fiction

The central characters of great fiction are put through a wringer, and at the point of highest tension there is a supreme struggle, during which the protagonist fails or triumphs but dramatically learns. Writers explore extreme emotions, narrating their characters’ crises and torments. They take their readers through these as well, in order to achieve a resolution. Perhaps the most famous example of a fictional epiphany comes from Charles Dickens. In
A Christmas Carol
hardened miser Scrooge is subjected to disturbing visions, the most harrowing concerning his own death. Scrooge is converted by all this terror into a joyous fellow who gives his money away and stands on his head.

Movies

All great movies, but scary movies particularly, carry the hallmarks of the CC art form, its patterns and devices. Alfred Hitchcock was known as the Master of Tension. His movies focused not on gore, but on unsettling the viewer. He wanted to ‘make the audience suffer as much as possible’. The resolution, when it came, was so much more satisfying. Quentin Tarantino once boasted, ‘We’re gonna sell you this seat but you’re only gonna use the edge of it.’ Half the frightened moviegoer wants to escape, while the other half wants to know what happens. The climax and pay-off leave him flushed and laughing.

Classical music

Classical music transcends linguistic and cultural barriers and speaks directly to the brain. It has been composed by geniuses over the centuries to invoke the cerebral climax. Its complex notations are a formula, exquisitely developed, for producing tension and pressure in sounds and sequences, climbing, falling back and then climbing ever higher, to one CC after another. Listeners can both hear them and feel them.

Musical mind over matter

Musical prodigy Lloyd Coleman was born in Bridgend, South Wales to working-class parents who knew nothing about classical music. He is deaf and almost blind, but at 17 he has taken the classical musical world by storm as a performer, composer and conductor. Lloyd is now being hailed as a second Beethoven, yet when doctors broke the news to his mother that her little boy was deaf as well as practically blind, she thought: ‘What on earth is life going to hold for him now?’ At seven years of age, Lloyd told her. He said, ‘Mummy, my dream is to play in the Royal Albert Hall.’ And he has – three times.

GO ON – GIVE YOURSELF A THRILL!

If you are willing to try these arousal curve activities yourself, knowing what you now know, you will certainly see ‘the shape of things that come’. Good luck, and enjoy! If anything is purpose-built to lift even the deepest gloom, it is the CC.

11

Getting tough

When I was agony aunt Marje Proops’ official biographer back in the 1980s,
it was part of my job to study her mail from troubled readers, over two million of whose letters were secretly housed in the
Daily Mirror
archives. A lot of the people who wrote to Marje were in despair because of the problems they faced, and most of them were frightened of someone or something.

Marje was renowned for her intelligent but very assertive brand of ‘aunting’, and often encouraged her readers to get tough – with themselves, their problems, their persecutors, or all of the above. They listened to Marje because they trusted her common sense, and time and again, as I could see from her correspondence, her robust advice ‘did the trick’. More than once it literally saved people’s lives.

Yet today when I offer very similar advice, I am accused of being a heartless bitch. This is because we are living now in an unusually protective, safety-conscious society that thinks the way to help the weak and vulnerable is to nurse them like infants and prevent them from feeling bad. But look at the number of adults who are suffering from depression and anxiety today and ask yourself:
Softly-softly – helping or harming?

Have you ever wondered where the theory of ‘stress management’ actually came from? Past generations never even heard of it. Few people who believe in ‘stress’ trouble to look into its provenance. I have. Here is one
possible
interpretation of how it happened …