I'm not stressed. I'm anxious! And that makes all the difference.

And 8 tips to ease your anxiety

I feel my stomach tighten. My throat tightens. My breathing jerks. I don't understand...Yet everything is fine. I'm watching TV with my boys. They're laughing. I've had a good day. Why am I stressing?

It took me 45 years - and a children's film - to realize that I wasn't suffering from stress, but from anxiety. And that changed everything.

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Hello, I'm Anne Bezon, writer and writing coach. My mission with this newsletter is to inspire and encourage you to write the life that's right for you, without worrying about society's diktats. We already have 862 subscribers here. Welcome to the new ones🖐️👋 and thank you for being here.

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Anxiety vs Stress

There's a fine line between stress and anxiety. Both are emotional reactions, but stress is usually caused by ONE external trigger. This trigger can be short-term (a meeting to prepare for at work or an argument with a loved one) or long-term (inability to work, discrimination or chronic illness). Stress can cause both mental and physical symptoms: irritability, anger, fatigue, muscle pain, digestive problems or difficulty sleeping.

Stress is a cause-and-effect relationship: something happens in the environment that generates stress.

Anxiety is more treacherous. It's defined by persistent, excessive worry that doesn't go away, even when there's no stress factor. Let's go back to the context of my departure: I'm sitting quietly in front of the TV with my children, when all of a sudden... PAF! Thoughts invade me for no real reason. I'm going to look at my boys and imagine they might get sick. Or think about the e-mail I sent to one of my clients and imagine she'll take it badly... There's nothing rational about it because there's nothing real about it.

To sum up:

• Stress = reaction to a real danger or threat

• Anxiety = anticipation of potential danger

Understanding this is essential, and allows us to take a step back from what we're feeling. Being afraid of a potential danger is not the same thing as dreading a real danger.

• Real danger = a strategy can be put in place

• Potential danger = exists only in our brain

Is there a link between anxiety and creativity?

Scientists are only just beginning to study the link between creativity and anxiety disorders. It is difficult to find a precise answer to the question of why they are linked. It seems that both anxiety and creativity involve deep thought processing.

As the anxious brain is in a perpetual state of solving a perceived problem, it has to explore a multitude of options and angles in order to understand what works and what doesn't.

So, do anxious people tend to be creative? It would seem so. This is not to say, of course, that all anxious people are creative, or that they are more creative than non-anxious people. But we do notice that anxiety is more prevalent in creative people than in the general population.

So, if you're a creative person and suffer from an anxiety disorder, know that you're not alone! Welcome to the club 😉

The movie Inside Out 2 is a great example of the link between creativity and anxiety.

Warning! If you haven't seen the film yet, you can skip the end of this paragraph to avoid spoiling the surprise.

Anxiety (one of the new emotions that come with adolescence) uses the imagination center of the brain to work out all the catastrophic scenarios that could happen to Riley, preventing him from getting a wink of sleep in the process. We see the little guys churning out the worst that could happen the next day at Riley's field hockey practice.

It all starts with a good feeling. Anxiety is convinced she's doing the right thing: by anticipating the worst, she tells herself Riley will be ready for anything.

There are 2 reasons why I had to sit through this scene:

1/ When I imagine worst-case scenarios, I'm convinced I'm doing the right thing. I prepare myself for all eventualities. "If I expect the worst, I can't be disappointed". But in doing so, I miss out on the present and don't imagine positive scenarios.

2/ Anxiety is just that: projections, things I imagine. And so if I imagine the worst, I'm also able to imagine the best.

In fact, in Inside Out 2, the character of Joy regains control of the situation by (literally) drawing up new scenarios, this time positive, which helps calm Riley, who finally manages to fall asleep... at least for a while 😉

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Should you kill your anxiety?

When we're caught in a vicious circle of anxious thoughts, we might tend to want to silence our anxiety forever. But that would be a mistake.

Firstly, because we need to stop classifying emotions as positive or negative. They all have their role to play. Fear, for example, is not a negative emotion in itself. Ask Sapiens if it didn't help him survive when the mammoths were around!

The same goes for anxiety.

Anxious people are like the canaries we used to put in the mines to detect odorless but deadly gas fumes before humans did. Anxious people imagine all the worst-case scenarios, so when something negative happens, they're often ready for any eventuality. If you're anxious, take this test: try to find a difficult moment in your life that you haven't been able to overcome? What was it? If you're like me, I'm sure you've come up with little or nothing. And why is that? Because we've anticipated everything in our minds! Yes, it's hard, but it's not useless.

Second argument.

How can we kill our anxiety? If you ask the medical community, they'll tell you: drugs, starting with antidepressants. But I think this is a mistake.

***Please note that I am not a doctor and this is my personal statement***.

I took antidepressants for 3 or 4 years. I don't regret it at all. At the time, I needed them to cope with a difficult situation and to do the necessary work on myself. Then came the time to stop them. Since then, I've gone through some painful and stressful periods. Some people advised me to go back on antidepressants. But deep down, I knew that wasn't the answer.

The thing I hated about taking antidepressants was that I wasn't really myself anymore. Of course, I was always in an even mood, but that just wasn't me! A human being can't be just about right all the time. They have ups and downs. Being hypersensitive, my highs can be very high and my lows, very low. Not always easy to manage, but that's me, the person I really am. I don't want to erase all my rough edges.

-> Anxiety is part of us. We have to accept it, tame it, but not silence it completely.

My 8 tips to soothe it

Here are my tried-and-tested tips for making your anxiety an easy-going friend on the road:

1/ Find an activity that anchors you in the present: for me, doing puzzles or sudoku allows me to unplug my brain by focusing on one task at a time.

2/ Meditate: I suck at meditation. Sitting on a mat and going "ohm" is really not my thing. But when I feel I'm losing my footing, I concentrate on my breathing. I feel the wave it makes in my body. And apparently, that's already meditation!

3/ Regain control of your imagination: just like in the film, you have the power to invent positive scenarios. Do it regularly to make it a habit.

4/ Put things in perspective: remember all those moments when you imagined the worst and managed like the big boss you are. If you need to, make a list so you can refer to it whenever you need to.

5/ Don't stay alone: the risk of letting your anxiety get the better of you is that it ends in an anxiety attack. Anxious thoughts are often endless spirals. Talking to someone about it, or even better, talking about something else, can break this spiral. When I'm anxious, I don't feel like seeing anyone, but I force myself because I know it always makes me feel better.

6/ Try to understand: talk to your anxiety. Say: "Okay, you're telling me it could happen like that, but why? What makes you say that? What proves to you that there's a chance of it happening?". You'll see that, very often, there won't be an answer.

7/ Take care of your health: pay attention to your diet. I'm more and more convinced that what we eat plays a very important role in what we eat (especially sugar). Get moving, go for a walk (even if only for 5 minutes) as soon as you feel yourself starting to brood. Do a sport that you enjoy and that lets off steam.

8/ Imagine the worst-case scenario: what? I give you advice on how to ease your anxiety, and then I tell you to imagine the worst! Yes, you read that right. But be careful, we're not going to do it any old way. This is an exercise by Tim Ferris. Take a sheet of paper. Write down the worst thing that could happen to you in a specific situation. Then make 2 columns. In the first column, write down what you can do to prevent this scenario from happening, and in the second column, write down what you can do if the worst happens. It's a powerful exercise that helps you put things into perspective and realize that you have all the resources you need to face up to difficulties.

Are you stressed or anxious? Tell me all about it.

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Inside the brain of a writer 🧠+✒️

I hadn't planned to write this, or when the magic of writing works!

I had planned to write a rather different story for my novel number 3, but my characters decided otherwise! I know it sounds totally crazy to say that. You think it's me, the writer, who makes my characters do what I want? Well, not quite. Sometimes you build characters and they lead you down other paths. It's a bit of a weird moment to have, but it's also so exciting!

Okay, it's not totally magic. More like psychology. As a character comes to life, you understand what decisions he'd make in real life, what sentences he might say. You build up a real personality and use your experience of people to be consistent. For me, that's essential: that my characters are as realistic as possible.

That's something I can't stand (in books or films): when I don't believe in the characters, when they don't sound right, when they're stereotypes. I'm very careful about that. I'm crossing my fingers that I'll get it right again 🤞🤞🤞

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