Anxiety The missing stage of grief : a revolutionary approach to understanding and healing the impact of loss

How did i know my anxiety had gotten the better of me? When I found myself taking meticulous notes on a forthcoming book by Erica Feldmann called hausmagick: Transform Your Home With Witchcraft (HarperOne, $25.99, available in March). The year 2018 hadn't been so great, what with the death of a husband and, possibly, a republic. Maybe 2019 would be better if 1 bought certain purifying elements for my home. The right crystals, sage sticks and - salt? Apparently, you can sprinkle salt around the house after a person with "toxic energy" visits. Attention future dates: If you see me reaching for the shaker as you're leaving, you know things haven't gone well. If my nerves are frayed, 1 take cold comfort in knowing I'm not alone. Whether it's our political situation, the jangling distractions of everyday life or the not-irrational sense that mankind's need to find another planet isn't just a sci-fi plotline, we seem to be in the midst of one massive freakout. Kierkegaard argued that anxiety stemmed from the "dizziness of freedom," the paralysis that comes from infinite choice and possibility. That was in 1844. Imagine what he would have thought about today. But here's some good news: If we're all a little tense, well, there's a book for that. Many books, actually. Several of the ones 1 consulted were so wrongheaded or incomprehensible they made me more nervous. ("Motivation is a Unicom Fart" almost made me hurl in a glittery rainbow arc.) Here are three that worked. Recently a friend told me that he had reached what he calls his vidpoint: the moment you realize you have more movie hours stored on your DVR than you have hours left to live. 1 thought about that friend while reading Matt Haig's notes on a nervous planet (Penguin, paper, $16), a follow-up to his previous book "Reasons to Stay Alive," which chronicled his struggles with anxiety and depression. The core of first-world malaise, he argues, can be summed up by something T S. Eliot observed in "Four Quartets": We are "distracted from distraction by distraction." Here, in clever chapterettes and listicles (he seems to assume we're all too jumpy to read more than a few pages at a time), Haig muses about our anxieties: our fears of aging, of not being rich, of not being beautiful or successful enough. All while being massive consumers of everything. What really sells, he says, is not so much sex as fear. Every day, every minute, we're deluged with images of people who are prettier, richer and having more fun than we are. And then there's the bombardment of news, which is presented in a way to provide "more food for our nightmares." Which is why we must take time to simply turn it all off and go outside. (I'm going to do this just as soon as the Mueller report is delivered.) This isn't exactly a novel concept, and Haig mentions but doesn't explore the science of, say, why staring at the sky or simply being out in nature helps our mental health. But he does have some memorable ways of telling us about it. ("Hello. 1 am the beach_1 have been around for millions of years. 1 was around at the dawn of life itself. And 1 have to tell you something... .1 am entirely indifferent to your body mass index.... 1 am oblivious.") And he has one terrific piece of advice that I'm thinking of sewing on a pillow sampler and giving to my teenage sons: "Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You'll be cool when you're dead." I can't help noting, however, that the last time 1 checked Haig's Twitter feed he had posted seven times in two hours. Maybe he's still trying. "Anxiety" is a mild term for what can be a severe mental illness. In fact, anxiety disorders of various degrees are among the most common mental illnesses in America, affecting more than one in five adults. In how not to fall APART: Lessons Learned on the Road From Self-Harm to Self-Care (TarcherPerigee, paper, $16), Maggy Van Eijk starts with a hopeful message: You can have any number of mental health issues and still learn to cope. Van Eijk, who's now the BBC's social media editor, has a history of severe anxiety as well as borderline personality disorder; her arms are scarred from years of cutting. She's also really funny. Here's a partial list of what one of her bad anxiety days can look like: "Waking up in the middle of the night to remember that thing 1 said five years ago was a bit rude. Time to linger on that memory until sunrise! ... Having a bath to try to relax but then remembering the bath is basically an open coffin filled with my own liquid filth.... Seeing a pile of clothes in the dark and thinking it looks like a massive panther, then thinking ... 'What if it is a panther?' " Van Eijk's book is organized around life challenges, and what to remember if they happen to You, Person With Mental Illness. Her explanation of self-harm is particularly touching and helped me to understand why a person might do it. Among the reasons she hasn't done it, she writes, is that "I've been listening to My Chemical Romance all day." Rather, it's about the anger that "refuses to leave my body" if she's upset or about the feeling that "my voice isn't being heard and it has nowhere to go." This is a woman who, after a breakup, had to go to a burn unit after repeatedly putting out a cigarette on her arm, so one tends to listen to her about the distraction/substitution methods she uses to stop hurting herself. And her reasons for doing things as mundane as making lists turn out not to be mundane at all. "Lists," she reminds us, "are a direct link to the future." And if you're someone who has thoughts about having no future, she says, they can at least temporarily steer you away from a terrible decision. If I had a self-destructive young adult in my life, someone in real pain, this is probably the book I'd get her. Like many who have experienced recent loss, 1 tend to bolt upright at 3 in the morning, heart pounding, with one overarching thought: "What now?" Which is why 1 found Claire Bidwell Smith's ANXIETY: The Missing Stage of Grief (Lifelong/Da Capo, $26) both soothing and informative. Smith was 14 and an only child when both of her parents got cancer. If that's not enough of a breeding ground for a lifetime of anxiety attacks, 1 don't know what is. The experience of both parents dying when she was young propelled Smith into hospice work and grief therapy. "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear," C. S. Lewis wrote in "A Grief Observed," and Smith understands this observation on the deepest personal level. She goes over techniques for dealing with anxiety, whatever its source. Maybe it's about the guilt you feel when recalling the decisions you've made for a dying loved one; maybe it's about your loneliness; or maybe, as is often the case in full-blown panic attacks, it's because you're convinced that you're next. Smith's words are particularly useful for panic attack sufferers. Once you know that you're not, indeed, dying, she shows you how you can normalize your panic, and how you can look at these episodes with curiosity, not terror, ft's also useful to be reminded that American society isn't one that honors grief. In many other cultures, she explains, quoting a colleague, you have "six or 12 months of a grieving period where the world doesn't expect much of you." Someone give me that one-year-free pass, please. Certainly reading a book or three may not be the answer, and none of these books emphasize, or even discuss, medication as a possible aid. My own thoughts about dealing with severe anxiety? Start with your doctor. And then, for life's more modest challenges, there's always my new goto: A DRINKABLE FEAST: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris (TarcherPerigee, $18), by Philip Greene. 1 have yet to try a Monkey Gland or a Scoff-Law cocktail, but am infinitely calmer after three glasses of vin blanc cassis - and pleased to know it was a Henry Miller favorite. Four ounces of chilled dry white wine, one ounce of chilled creme de cassis, red fruit for garnish. Now breathe. You're welcome. Judith newman is the author, most recently, of "To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son and the Kindness of Machines."

Fear and loathing and sickness unto deathit's enough to put a person into a fretful tailspin, the subject of this useful work of self-help.Why do so many people fall apart? As psychologist and grief therapist Smith (After This: When Life Is Over, Where Do We Go?, 2015, etc.) notes, it's likely that underlying the anxiety that produces such effects there's unresolved griefe.g., a loved one has passed away, but in our culture's insistence on moving on, we have not adequately acknowledged and processed the passing. The author recounts that the "predominant symptom" she sees in those experiencing grief is not anger but anxietyand if we don't know how to deal with grief, we know even less about anxiety apart from throwing medications at it. Smith assures readers that "the anxiety you are experiencing is normal," welcome words given that those experiencing anxiety too often feel they are doing so in isolation and shame. The author notes that while the brain is processing the separation, regret, and other emotions accompanying loss, that loss is also tangible: "We are forced to rearrange our lives to accommodate for the absence of this person." In discussing that rearrangement and those emotions, Smith turns from the canonical work of Elisabeth Kbler-Ross to more recent practitioners, such as Thomas Attig, who analyzes the changes that accompany loss, including, inevitably, changes in one's own identity, a potential cause of grief all its own. Sometimes awkward, sometimes obvious, Smith's book is formulaic, one story, anecdote, clinical note, and exercise following on the other ("Let's check in with your level of anxiety"; "Now let's get you writing"), and there's a sameness to the proceedings that can dull the luster of that insight. Still, that insight alone, linking anxiety to grief, is worth the price of admission.If Smith's ideas of "resilient grieving" help even one reader cope with the trauma and fearful thoughts of anxiety, she will have done a great service. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.