Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear. Dr. Weekes Claire

and discarding thought, but to the exhausted, frightened person it is not childish. Nothing that helps is childish to him and this idea works well.

      Masterly Inactivity

      Masterly inactivity, a well-known phrase, is another way to describe floating. It means to give up the struggle, to stop holding tensely onto yourself trying to control your fear, trying ‘to do something about it’ while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis. It means to cease trying to navigate your way out of breakdown by meeting each obstacle as if it were a challenge that must be met before recovery is possible. It means to bypass the struggle, to go around, not over the mountain, to float and let time pass.

      The average person, tense with battling, has an innate aversion to practising masterly inactivity and letting to. He vaguely thinks that were he to do this, he would lose control over the last vestige of his will-power and his house of cards would tumble. As one young man said, ‘I feel I must stand on guard. If I were to let go, I’m sure something would snap. It is absolutely necessary for me to keep control and hold myself together.’ When he was obliged to talk to strangers, he would dig his nails into his palms while he tried to control his trembling body and conceal his state of nervous tension. He would watch the clock anxiously, wondering how much longer he could keep up this masquerade without ‘cracking’.

      Loosen Your Attitude

      It is especially to such tense, controlled, nail-digging people that I say ‘Practise masterly inactivity and let go.’ If your body trembles, let it tremble. Don’t feel obliged to try and stop it. Don’t try to appear normal. Don’t even strive for relaxation. Simply let the thought of relaxation be in your mind, in your attitude towards your body. Loosen your attitude. In other word, don’t be too concerned because you are tense and cannot relax. The very act of being prepared to accept your tenseness relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don’t have to strive for relaxation. You have to wait for it. When a patient says ‘I have tried so hard all day to be relaxed,’ surely he has had a day of striving, net relaxation? Let your body find its own level without controlling, directing it. Believe me, if you do this, you will not crack. You will not lose true control of yourself. You will float up to the surface from the depths of despair.

      The relief of loosening your tense hold on yourself, of giving up the struggle and recognizing that there is no battle to fight, except of your own making, may bring a calmness you have forgotten existed within you. In your tense effort to control yourself you have been releasing more and more adrenalin and so further exciting your organs to produce the very sensations from which you have been trying to escape.

      Float past tension and fear.

      Float past unwelcome suggestions.

      Float, don’t fight.

      Accept and let more time pass.

CHAPTER 7 Cure of Recurring Nervous Attacks

      Now let us consider the symptoms of breakdown that may occur in attacks – panic spasms, palpitations, slowly beating heart, ‘missed’ heart-beats, trembling turns, inability to take a deep breath, ‘lump in the throat’, giddiness, nausea and vomiting. Depression and sleeplessness are such an important part of the nervous breakdown caused by problem, sorrow, guilt or disgrace, that in order to save repetition I shall leave their discussion until describing this second type of breakdown.

      PANIC SPASMS

      As already mentioned, fear can produce a state of constant tension, or it can take the form of intense recurring spasms of panic that start in our ‘middle’, just below the breastbone, and seem to spread, like a white-hot flame, all over the body, passing through the chest, up the spine, into the face, down the arms and even down into the groins to the tips of the toes.

      If you suffer from these spasms you will probably find that whereas you had some control over them at the beginning of your breakdown, you now seem to have lost control and live in constant dread of them. Your nervous system has become so sensitized to them that it discharges them instantly and swiftly at the slightest provocation. In this sensitized state you remain tense with an apprehension which helps only to increase the frequency and intensity of the spasms. Can you see the vicious circle in which you have placed yourself?

      The treatment already offered to cure the symptoms of sustained fear will also cure these spasms of acute fear. You face, analyse and try to understand them, learning how to live with them temporarily, letting time pass to bring recovery.

      In the past, as soon as you have felt a wave of panic approaching, you have either tried to control it and stop it coming or have shrunk from it and tried to forget it as quickly as possible. In this way you have lived in constant dread, preparing a battleground for each approaching spasm. Now, just as you examined and described your churning stomach and sweating hands, on the next occasion when you panic I want you to examine this feeling without shrinking from it, describing it to yourself as it sweeps through you.

      You will find that fear strikes hardest when it first strikes, and that if you relax and stand your ground and see it through, it quietens and disappears. When you have learnt the trick of relaxing and seeing the wave of fear through to its finish without adding further panic and tension to fear or without trying to arrest it by controlling it, you will begin to lose your fear of fear. You will probably be surprised to realize that a hot feeling in your stomach, a burning feeling up your spine, pins and needles in your hands and a throbbing feeling in your temples could have held such terror for you. You have been terrified of no more than a physical feeling. By analysing fear in this way and seeing it as physical feeling that conforms to a set pattern and disappears with acceptance and relaxation, YOU UNMASK FEAR AND WITH IT YOUR OWN BREAKDOWN, AND YOU FIND THAT ONLY A BOGEY REMAINS.

      Other Ways to Conquer Fear

      There are ways to conquer fear other than analysing and unmasking it, and some doctors have the experience of watching a sufferer inventing his own method. Some find the cause of the fear and try to conquer and control this, believing that with the cause removed the fear will go. For example, one woman, terrified of the palpitations because of fear of dying during an attack, so succeeded in losing her fear of death, that she lost her fear of the palpitations. I have not suggested that you use this method for this type of breakdown, because there are too many instances where much would be made from nothing and one difficulty overcome only to find a dozen in its place. At this stage I prefer to attack fear itself.

      For example, Mrs G. was afraid to walk up the street to go shopping. When she analysed why she was afraid, she found many obstacles causing fear, among them passing the telephone booth where she once collapsed, passing the neighbour with the glittering eye, waiting to be served at the butcher’s, and so on – the list was long. To discover why she feared each obstacle would have been a research programme in itself. Common sense rebels at the thought. It is more satisfactory to find a common approach to meet each obstacle encountered on that journey up the street. Unmasking fear itself is such an approach. No longer afraid of the physical sensation of fear, Mrs G. can float past the telephone booth, past the neighbour’s glittering eye, even into the butcher’s.