Enough complaining about what’s wrong, what’s not happening & people who aren’t doing anything. Every Friday I post a simple way to save the world; whether an action to take on behalf of the environment or an outpouring of love over the planet, there are hundreds of little things we can do to make a difference.

Buy Nothing

It’s easy to let pennies slip through our fingers on a daily basis; a couple of quid on a pasty at lunchtime or a magazine to read in the station, a new pair of trainers when the old ones get ratty, a t-shirt with a cupcake design, that badge because your mate would love it & so on. After a failed attempt at budgeting, I recently just started to write down everything I spend with no aim at reduction. It’s a little bit scary how unconcious spending can be.

There is an official Buy Nothing Day annually, this year on the 27th of November, which encourages people to refrain from buying on that day. People often hold get-togethers in the street, handing out balloons and generally making anti-capitalism look like a right laugh. The aim is to educate people that everything we buy has an effect on the environment and 80% of the Earth’s resources are being consumed by only 20% of the population. Hit up the website & get involved!

It doesn’t have to be for just the one day, obviously consumerism affects the planet no matter what day you buy on. For more info on just how much it does so, check out The Story of Stuff. This actually made me feel so ill I still haven’t watched it all the way through. It’s not meant to be traumatising, but informative & educational. Still! It will definitely encourage you to take a look at whether you really need what you want.

For day to day advice on being frugal, there’s a whole blogosphere of frugal-istas out there, such as Katy Wolk-Stanley who advocates the Buy Nothing New compact.

How does this save the world? We all know, or at least I hope we do, the statistic that we need three Earths for the amount of resources we are currently using. Buying less shit means that we are using less resources, particularly if we recyle & reuse as much as possible as well. If we ask ourselves more often how much we really need the latest whatever, especially in light of the cost to the environment, then we can slowly but surely make a difference to the amount of junk that ends up in landfills & pits, of no use to anybody.

Skip1.org is a place where you can switch up buying nothing & doing something; for every item you choose not to buy (to skip!) you can donate the same amount through the website to a cause they deem worthy. Of course, you can also pop the pennies into a charity box or let yourself be charity mugged in the street. (Thanks to Kate at Define Fabulous for a great article on this.)

A couple of weeks ago I had a (somewhat inebriated) discussion with a political philosopher who suggested firstly that I was an anarchist & then told them that I couldn’t possibly be, as I still existed within the ‘system’. Constructing & defeating strawmen as an argument tactic aside, I’ve noticed this attitude in a lot of people. The logic seems to be that if you profess a political, philosophical or religious viewpoint then you must adhere strictly to the other person’s notion of that concept, at all times, or risk having your theory ignored on the basis that you are a hypocrite.

In order for me to have been an anarchist of the standards of this gentleman I would have had to live on a communal farm, grow my own food, make my own clothes & live completely independantly of the current capitalist system. Since I live in a house, have a computer & a job, buy my food & talk to capitalists like him then I cannot hold any anarchical beliefs. While I exist within the ‘system’ I am a hypocrite for entertaining the idea that a world based on mutual respect, personal power, skillsharing & eschewing the idea of power unless I immediately make that world happen for myself as soon as deciding that it is a better way to live.

A similar event happened on my livejournal a couple of months ago. I wrote about going vegan & how it was the easiest way to reduce your contribution to fucking up the environment & had a rant about people who do nothing. I received a comment asking if I owned a car, then if I used aeroplanes. The commentor then proceeded to inform me that however I eat my foodI am making an impact on the environment (after also asking if I grow my own crops, walk or cycle everywhere & use renewable energy sources). Defensiveness aside, when someone mentions that they are doing something, anything, concerning an issue, beit animal rights, the environment, slavery, rape &c, they are often attacked by others for not doing more about it or for picking one issue over another.

As well as being harangued into doing more about whatever topic I’ve clambered onto my soapbox for, people also feel the need to disabuse me of the idea that my thoughts and actions will make the blindest bit of difference. There will never be a society of total equality & mutual respect, so why even think about it? People will never stop eating meat & using animals (& destroying the rainforest in the process), so why bother being vegan?

Why this ALL OR NOTHING mentality?

Either do everything now or do nothing ever.

Doing a little bit & another little bit & encouraging other people to do little bits? What utter bollocks. No great change ever came about because of a whole bunch of little actions, a few speeches here & there. Something as trivial as a lady not getting off a bus could never make a difference to a movement. Right?

I honestly don’t understand this need to disabuse people who talk about positive change of its ever occurring. Surely it is better to be doing something, anything, than nothing at all? Even if the goal is so far away in the future, it will only get closer through action. Inaction will leave it an impossibilty, because not trying is akin to quitting and quitting has a 100% fail rate. Can’t pass your exam if you don’t take it. As to the ALL faction, well, we could all be doing more. Personally, I am vegan & I hold various anarchist viewpoints.

Can anyone go from capitalist, McDonald’s munching, constant shopper, superficial, non-consequence considering pawn of the media corporations to carrot munching, sock-darning, power-station swooping anarchist farm-hand in the space of an epiphany?

Eventually I hope to live in a more communal space, frequently partake in direct action, set up community schemes & skill shares, cycle around the country living out of tents & benders engaging with like-minded people and documenting my experiences. Slap whatever political label on that idea that you like but it will take time for me to achieve this, just as it takes time for anybody to achieve anything. Even something as easy as getting a degree takes three years. Every status change has a doorway & a threshold. However, there are a lot of changes which don’t have an obvious beginning, middle and end. You can go from alive to dead, omnivore to vegan, virgin to sexually awakened being and those are pretty obvious.

Is someone who turns off the taps between brushing their teeth an environmentalist? Is someone who has just realised that money is imaginary & power is a societal construct an anarchist?

I don’t know. I don’t know & I don’t understand. All I do know is that I am currently happy with the direction I am headed towards concerning what I believe & the actions which I take. & that’s all anybody can really say, isn’t it? What do you think of how much should be done?

Enough complaining about what’s wrong, what’s not happening & people who aren’t doing anything. Every Friday I post a simple way to save the world; whether an action to take on behalf of the environment or an outpouring of love over the planet, there are hundreds of little things we can do to make a difference.

Eat Less Meat

My absolute favourite way to save the world & the absolute easiest way to make a huge difference. I’ve already written about this in more depth so suffice to say that agribusiness contributes between 17 & 33% of global carbon emissions (if you worry about that sort of thing). This is a contentious figure because some tallies of the damage agribusiness does don’t take into account the knock-on effect that the wanton destruction of the Amazon rainforest for farmland to grow animal feed & pasture land to ranch cattle has on carbon levels. Not only does eating meat contribute towards this, indigenous tribes in South America are also getting kicked off land they have lived on for generations & have to watch it razed to the ground by people who claim to own it through the exhange of piece of paper, not through having lived on it & hunted it & had it provide for them their entire lives.

Meat Free Mondays is a good place to ease yourself into the idea, & they don’t use scary words like vegan like I do. This here Guide to Cruelty Free Eating, obviously, focuses on animal cruelty more than I do, but is a pretty exhaustive starter guide to heading in a vegan direction with your dinners.

You don’t have to give up barbecue or bacon for ever, but reducing your meat consumption reduces market demand for it, & profit is the language of government & business. Less money in meat means less devastation in the rainforest, if enough people give it a go. Try holding veggie potlucks, or knocking up some vegan cupcakes for friends.

The funniest thing I heard about being vegetarian recently was the idea that people think the food is ‘tasteless’. Moby points out in an interview with SuperVegan that it’s, uh, plant products which are used to give meat its flavour; garlic, cumin, pepper…

Give it a go!

I’m on a mission this year to read 100 books, roughly equivalent to two books per week, or eight books per month. I’ve managed seven every month so far, so as well as following my progress over here, I thought I’d chat about some of my favourites.

Newspeak in the 21st Century – David Edwards & David Cromwells

This book takes a scalpel to British journalism and points out quite how biased reportage is; newspapers can’t and don’t report fairly on green industry and environmental news when their pages are funded by oil-hungry corporations, Western perception of Iraq is pretty fucken distorted and the standard language used about anyone we ought to precieve as an ‘enemy’ is, well, quite insulting. It’s a very enlightening read which encourages you to take a deeper look at the way even the most ‘left’ among the press are enmeshed in the need to create an us/them mentality when it comes to war victims and crises which occur in non-English speaking countries (or countries which have little political relevance to the West). As well as an A-Z of BBC propaganda (which would be funny if it didn’t make me feel a little bit ill) there’s an incredible chapter at the end about finding compassion, and tips on visualisations which create this feeling towards every person – the point being that if a journalism is truly compassionate towards their fellow human-beans then they will report fairly, and accurately?, considering deaths and tragedies on both sides of any given conflict, and perhaps not using such subversive language when it comes to describing the oh-so-awful ‘insurgents’ who, you know, like, want the Invasion to go away?

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism – Natasha Walter

Since I read this at a party (yeah, I’m that cool) I couldn’t quote it, but overall it seemed like a good pop-primer for getting a grasp on the sexual revolution and how women are increasingly encouraged to see themselves, from an early age. Literally, a couple of days after I was quizzing my baby cousins about their need to be ‘pretty’, I was reading about the culture of PINK & BLUE which children are thrown into, and the gender sterotypes which are reinforced throughout life. That part struck a chord with me, but the whole book seems to rely on anecdote rather than studies or proof, so I found the chapters on attitudes to sex and sex work quite vague and heavily biased. It’s a very tricky area to cover, with many a conflicting viewpoint, but what’s needed is a more analytical and in-depth study of the subject, rather than a couple of stories about chatting with girls in a café after a competition to model in some lads’ mag or other. For me, it mostly raised the question of men’s attitudes. Since a lot of the book focused on how women are pigeon-holed into PINK-lovers, submissive sex-vessels and, basically, objects, I began to wonder about men’s culture and the gender stereotypes propagated on the BLUE lovers side. Are rapists born, or encouraged? If we’re going to focus on equality, then we don’t need to ‘raise’ women to the level of men, but literally create an equal community in which men are not pressured into being all-powerful, MACHO or MANLY. This is a topic I plan to look into, alongside more in-depth analysis of women and the sexual ‘revolution’ of recent years.

The Last Witchfinder – James Morrow

Morrow puts a whole load of effort and research into his books. The Last Witchfinder took around seven years to come to fruition and is the story of Jennet Stearne and her fight against the prickers of England and America after her father burns her precious Aunt at the stake for witchcraft. Ooooh! Also, it’s written by the Principia Mathematica by Newton, which is waging a war on the Malleus Maleficarum via Cambodian paper-eating-termites and the like. Jennet is a completely absorbing character who never lets her focus waver, even when she gets kidnapped by Native Americans. Just another opportunity to learn, right? The plot follows her from the animal-familiar dissecting capers of her youth, to emmigration across the Atlantic, through a few years picking corn, towards the cumulation of her argumentum grande – oh, and she meets Benjamin Franklin; the Early Years. They spend some time shipwrecked on a Carribean wash-up paradise. If there were more good historical narrative fictions like this, I would probably know a lot more about the past. I also recommend The Philosopher’s Apprentice which is a more moral tale; in a remote location, a girl suffers an accident which removes her sense of morality and the eponymous philosopher is instructed to re-instruct her. There’s a strange foetal sub-plot, but otherwise it’s quite funny.

Wish me luck as I embark on Marx’s Selected Writings and Trickster Makes the World after that!

What have you been reading lately?

Enough complaining about what’s wrong, what’s not happening & people who aren’t doing anything. Every Friday I post a simple way to save the world; whether an action to take on behalf of the environment or an outpouring of love over the planet, there are hundreds of little things we can do to make a difference.

Compost Food Waste

Whether you have a garden or not, it’s easy to compost food waste. You can get mini-compost buckets for cheap in any B&Q, although this one is pretty cute. Obviously, these will fill up pretty quick if you eat a lot so you’ll also need somewhere outside to compost. In your own garden you can use plant pots to pop the composting food debris in if you can’t afford or don’t have a larger compost bin. If you don’t have your own garden, ask around the neighbourhood for somebody who does, and who would appreciate your mulch (mmm, yeah). Food debris & plant waste take between four months & a year to turn into useable compost – a process which is sped up by the addition of worms.

How does composting save the world? Think of all the food waste that gets scraped off your plate straight into the bin. Every single crumb of that could be used to replenish gardens & allotments in your neighbourhood, instead of ending up on landfill sights for seagulls to pick through. Having a fairly free supply of compost also makes it easier to grow your own veg…

Enough complaining about what’s wrong, what’s not happening & people who aren’t doing anything. Every Friday I post a simple way to save the world; whether an action to take on behalf of the environment or an outpouring of love over the planet, there are hundreds of little things we can do to make a difference.

Have A Cup Of Tea

Making a cup of tea is a ritual which dates all the way back to Ancient China where it was discovered that steeping certain leaves in freshly boiled water produced a rather pleasant tasting brew. Strangely, no wars have been fought over tea, although political points have been made using it. I’m not suggesting that you head down to your local dockyard -although if you want to stage a taxation protest, I ain’t stopping you – but the next time you stop for a cup of tea, do so mindfully.

The whole ritual of tea, from popping the kettle on to washing the tea pot, is a very calming one. If alone, a cup of tea gives you some time to sit and blow on your brew, watch the reflections pass by and focus inwards for a moment as you consider the rest of the day. Holding a warm mug & sipping a warming mixture both produce happy chemicals in your brain, & slowing down for a moment in the middle of a busy day to breathe & begin can effectively reset your stress levels.

With friends, hit up the local tearooms (don’t pretend like you don’t where they are) or host a tea party. Dust off your teaset, sugar tongs included!, and make an occasion of it. Only serve cubed sugar, and put the milk in first. Also, lemon with Earl Grey, & perhaps some honey (or agave nectar!). If you’re more a coffee or beer kinda crowd, switching it up for the tea ritual can make a welcome change, especially if you find somewhere as cute as Tiny Tim’s (disclaimer; yes, I used to work there) and go the whole Afternoon Tea hog – this includes scones and miniature cakes! Reconnecting over a cuppa is one of Britain’s most preferred past times.

How does this save the world? Being calm, happy & feeling supported by your peer group is a perfect place to set out from when it comes to dealing with the more unsavory aspects of life, like campaiging for animal rights or writing strongly worded letters to MPs about idiotic policies.

It’s completely true that any crisis in England is greeted with the phrase: I’ll get the kettle on.

I am the proud possesor of a couple of awesome baby cousins. They’re both six and I don’t get to see them often enough. So this week, when I was home, I pestered my Mum & she went to get them for me. We had a mini-adventure & played together in the supermarket while I put food together for my dinner. They sat in the trolley & I span them around in the aisles, racing between the frozen chips & peas. They read the list off for me & then begged & pleaded for a magazine. They like Barbie, & they like Bratz.

We passed all the ‘guy’ magazines – they eschewed Total Film & Nuts – preferring to go for the ‘girly’ mags. They didn’t seem to understand when I said that Nuts is a girly mag and grappled between them until Bethany was clutching at GirlTalk & Tae held Disney Princesses in her hot little hands.

I said that they could have a magazine when they could tell me why they wanted it.

Firstly, cannily, Bethany said that they could read the magazines & they would help them learn.

& what’s wrong with a book?

Books don’t come with toys, like make-up or ballerina outfits.

& why do you want make-up?

Bethany likes wearing lipgloss because it makes her pretty.

& why do you want to be pretty?

People like you when you are pretty.

& people who don’t wear make-up?

They’re boring & crazy.

& what is more interesting or fun to do; look at a beautiful painting or go outside to play?

silence.

My cousin is wikkid cool because she can lick her elbow

I wish this exchange was an exaggeration by me to prove a point, but this is almost verbatim – to prove a point. Children are fully immersed in the same world that we are. They see all the adverts we see that encourage us to be sexier, the programmes we watch that encourage us to find a partner, the magazines we read which encourage us to be, ironically, more child-like in order to attract a mate. Children see all this and nobody suggests to them that they don’t have to believe it. When you’re younger, adults are always right. They know what’s going on. Parents tell you that fire is hot, teachers prove that 2+2=4. Grown-ups done got knowledge. When grown-ups are primping and preening themselves with a view to hooking up, kids are seeing that and thinking that is how life is.

Sure, for a lot of people, it is. Make-up & hooking up aren’t inherently bad, but that’s a whole other blog post, and a tricksy one. However, when six-year olds are worried that they need to be pretty to be liked then something is twistedly wrong. We’ve all heard the stats about three year olds who think they’re too fat, but I always assumed that their parents were crazy mad about dieting. It didn’t really cross my mind that ‘regular’ children, raised in fairly normal families, would be concerned about their looks or their bodies. I always assumed that kids just ran around, falling over and playing on the swings. Well, apparently, they have little minds & personalities & they absorb all the information the world has to offer, & they believe it.

They see women put on paint & pink dresses as if their lives depend on it & they want to be like the grown-ups are. They want to do what Mummy does, & Tinkerbell. They want to be pretty because we, as a society, pay more attention to pretty people. Pretty people live more interesting lives; they have wings & castles & people in love with them. Logically then, being pretty makes you interesting, because only pretty people are doing interesting things.

To a six year old, the way to be pretty is to put on make-up. Make-up is designed to cover your ‘flaws’. What six year old has ‘flawed’ skin? If we take ‘flaws’ to mean spots, or larger pores, or wrinkles then, none. Six year olds don’t understand that make-up is supposed to make you look younger, and that youth is the epitome of beauty. They’re just being conditioned from that age to believe that they, as they were born with their faces & figures, are not good enough. They are not good enough. They need to be prettier. They see beauty as one of the most important attributes of a woman.

This fucks me off quite considerably.

Eventually, we bought dirtgirlworld, a one-off magazine from CBeebies about a gardening, digging, dirty-getting, energy & water conscious girl & her friend Scrapboy who recycles scrap to make orange-peeling machines to press fresh juice, which comes with stickers that encourage you to ‘Turn off the Light!’ & ‘Turn off the Taps!’. We went home and stuck pictures of vegetables in dirtgirl’s wheelbarrow, coloured in butterflies & wellyboots, drove the tractor around the farm to water the apple tree & stuck stickers on the giant flower whenever we remembered to ‘Turn off the Light!’

They really enjoyed it, and I got to teach them where electricity comes from and why we need to save water. I suggested that my Mum let them have a plant in the garden they could care for & water whenever they came over. They got quite excited about the craftbox it came with and we were going to make cards with flowers on to give to Nanna, but made cookies instead. They got to stir the mix & lick the spoon. We ate the cookies in the bath, & read the story of dirtgirl & scrapboy together.

As well as all the junk kids are being conditioned into believing, it seemed as though no-one had spoken to them the way I had; questioning their beliefs about being pretty or why they wanted boys to like them. They’re being sucked into and seduced by this world as soon as they’re born, & we can’t just hang around until they reach an age of understanding to begin disabusing them of societal constructs. Avoiding ‘big’ world topics doesn’t protect children. They have to find out about war, water shortages, extinction & the impending planetary doom at some point. Children are going to play with their sexual organs whether they know what they’re for, or not. I don’t see how a child knowing what a vagina is called is any worse than one who wants to make herself pretty for a boy. We don’t need to protect kids, we need to educate them and talk with them about how they view the world.

Really, we all need to be talking more about these apparent inherent truths of the world, what they really mean & how they affect us & the people around us. To some extent, we’re all being brainwashed and children who trust adults who buy into beauty routines & fear aging are suffering the most of all.

Well, we can’t change the world
We sure can change the way we live

-Bonobo

It is unlikely that we will ever wake up to see a world in which everybody values people & planet before their own convenience, where the majority do not buy into adverts & consumerism, where the genders are equal worldwide, where we have struck a balance between world resources & usage & distribution, where we respect others regardless of whether we like them, where atmospheric carbon levels are falling & people think nothing of walking or cycling five miles, where every other house has a veg patch & trading between neighbours is more prevalent than knife crime…or any other benchmarks of the utopian society in my head. (Sidenote; Utopia actually means either no-place or any-place depending how you translate the Greek. Which is pretty apt, no?)

It’s not going to happen. No matter how I act, what I write, how many people I educate about the desecration of the rainforest or the horrific consequences of tar sands, no matter how many times I illustrate the incredible disconnects in our lifestyles, I will not change the world. And neither will any of you.

Adverts will continue to pressure the public into being thin, while conditioning them into eating high sugar foods & driving everywhere in loan-bought sports cars. Planes will continue to fly, soy production will continue to ravage the Amazon, indigenous peoples will still be marginalised & poisoned by big business, vegetables will be flown across the world to supermarket shelves & people will judge each other according to race, gender, income, class, heritage, looks, weight & intelligence.

Each of us alone can keep our environmental impacts low & educate others on how to do the same. We can suggest that everyone is equal & we should all respect each other. We can argue that nobody really needs all the crap that adverts paddle, but how much will really change? How much of a difference will each of us really make on our own? The world is not going to be any different on the day I die, save less rainforest & more people.

Might as well not bother, eh?

Actually, I don’t understand this argument. Sure, everything above is true. I doubt that in the next seventy years any changes that dramatic are going to happen (although I’m hoping for that earthquake/volcano/nuclear winter apocalypse that’s been predicted) but the idea that these changes won’t occur in my life time isn’t enough to put me off.

In fact, the idea that these changes will take a long time to occur makes me want to work harder to speed the process up. System change will take a long time & it will be hard work…which means we need to put a lot of time & a lot of hard work into making it come about, not give up because it’s ‘impossible’. There is a lot to do, which means we need to be do-ing that & trying to recruit others to help, not complaining about how there’s too much to be done and things will never change.

Whether I will ever see the fruits of my actions, whether we will live to see a ‘better world’ or not is irrelevant. That’s the thinking of the ‘instant gratification’ culture we live in; if I don’t get a result NOW it’s not worth it. Someone pointed out that the reason we’re not willing to save the world for our children is because we’re not used to being good towards people we’ve never met. We won’t get to see the future, therefore it has nothing to do with us.

These ‘too difficult’, ‘too inconvenient’, ‘anything I can do won’t be enough’, ‘what will I really change anyway’ mentalities are what we need to start addressing in our culture.

NO, you won’t necessarily see instant results – adopting a penguin won’t put the ice floes back together – but instant gratification is not what saving the world is all about.

Is it?

P.S

Welcome to my new digs. I ‘should’ be posting my Cordoba photos today, according to my own schedule, but I’m not a fan of ‘should’. I’m not a fan of any ‘rule’, particularly accepted societal constructs which imply how we should think, act, behave, dress. I’m not a fan of the word ‘should’.

Anything which is described as ‘the way things are’ or ‘self-evident’ deserves questioning. All advice deserves to be questioned. Every preconception we have about right, wrong or ‘how it is’ deserves to be questioned & questioned some more, until the reasoning behind the rule or opinion is reached.

Herein, I want to question as much as possible. I want others to question me. I want to understand everything, & learn to accept desire & move on. I want to see life without over-consuming & with awareness of my choices & their consequences. I want to chart my progress in learning to love & making sense of society, of ‘norms’ and constructs. I want to learn happiness & find ways of coping with mental illness. I hope to connect with people as I emotionally explode onto the internet & learn not to be afraid of others, or myself.

If you’re with me, let me know. (Yeah, you. I know you’re here…)

. ..

Frequently I find myself sitting among friends, walking alone or reading in my room & I notice that my chest is tight, my muscles are tense & my thoughts are rushing all over the place, alighting briefly on each to-do, then on on onto the next one. I think that I’m seeking out solutions to what ails me, but I’m really fueling my nervous, paranoid anxiety, uselessly & meaninglessly.

What I realise what I’m doing to myself I have a few go-to methods for calming down.

Strip it all Back

Getting naked is a sure-fire cure for anxiety. Er, mentally naked that is. All these worries are ephemeral & usually something which nothing can be done about at the moment of worry. Often they’re beyond out control altogether. Instead of letting my mind trip over the piles of junk in my brain, I breathe deeply & focus on feeling the inhale & exhale inside my lungs & throat. It reminds me that I am alive & all I need to survive is air & everything on top of that is practically a bonus. I’ve written about breathing before.

Get into Nature

Have you ever been walking down a country path & realised that you can’t remember anything you just thought? You have a memory of the wind in the trees & on your cheek, the birds chattering & the way the edge of the clouds glow golden in the sunset but nothing beyond that. A walk in a forest or an afternoon on the beach or a hike up the nearest hill provide enough of interest to distract the brain but in a calming & refreshing manner. Green is also supposed to be the most calming colour!

Fuck Shit Up

Do something! Anything! Go for a bike ride, fly a kite, have a tea party, hit the gym, bake, dye your hair blue, get a tattoo, hoover, do the weeding, skydive. Anything which absorbs you completely &/or gets the adrenaline pumping &/or leaves you feeling as though you’ve achieved something. I usually make cookies or go for a long walk. The concentration required to follow a recipe isn’t much but following a step-by-step guide keeps my mind of all my ‘problems’ from real life. Taking part in an activity which keeps your mind & body engaged leaves you no time to dwell on that which makes you anxious & the adrenaline & extra skills are a bonus!

Phone a Friend

Trust that your people know how to, and want to, cheer you up & distract you. A few of my most visited spots on these anxiety trips concern my friendships & trust/dependency, so I have to first convince myself that it is perfectly okay to phone my friends and freak out at them. So I have only managed to do this once, but we talked about self-appointed dictators & ruling the world, because that sort of thing makes I laff. Ahem. Each to their own.

Do What Scares You

What are you anxious about? Instead of putting it off & letting the tension build, get it done. Write that poem, apply for the job, kiss the girl/guy/porpoise, fashion fancies from fondant, start the petition, get on the plane, say ‘I love you’, say ‘It’s over’, throw away your television, email your idol, give that speech, dive in, jump out, roll over…It probably won’t be half as bad as you imagine & once it’s done, it’s over. You can learn from it & do it all over again, nervosity be damned.

This surely isn’t a full-blown analysis into anxiety & these tips are most useful when you know that your anxiety isn’t helpful at all. If you have serious issues which need addressing then don’t use avoidance techniques such as these (!) but talk to someone who can help & try to deal with the problem constructively. I often freak out irrationally because I don’t have seventeen hands and a time-turner so distracting myself from that which I cannot change is usually the best course of action.

How do you deal with being overwhelmed?

Amelia