Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear. Dr. Weekes Claire
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and feel sore …’ This may sound a little silly and you may smile. So much the better.
CHURNING STOMACH
Begin with the nervous feeling in your stomach, the so-called churning. This may feel like an uneasy fluttering or may bore steadily like a hot poker passing from your stomach through your back. Do not tensely flinch from it. Go with it. Relax and analyse it. Take a few minutes to do this before reading further.
Now that you have faced and examined it, is it so terrible? If you had arthritis in your wrist, you would be prepared to work with the arthritic pain without becoming too upset. Why regard this churning as something so different from ordinary pain that it can frighten you? Stop regarding it as some monster trying to possess you. Understand that it is but the working of oversensitized adrenalin-releasing nerves and that by constantly shrinking from it you have stimulated an excessive outflow of adrenalin which has further excited your nerves to produce continual churning.
While you examine and analyse this churning a strange thing may happen: you may find your attention wandering from yourself. This ‘thing’ that seemed so terrible while you stayed tense and flinched from it, may fail to hold your attention for long when you see it for what it is – no more than a strange physical feeling of no great medical significance, and causing no real harm.
So, be prepared to accept and live with it for the time being. Accept it as something that will be with you for some time yet – in fact while you recover – but something that will eventually leave you if you are prepared to let time pass and not anxiously watch the churning during its passing.
But do not make the mistake of thinking that it will go as soon as you cease to fear it. Your nervous system is still tired and will take time to heal, just as a broken leg takes time. However, as you improve and are no longer afraid of the churning, and do not try to cure it by controlling it, and are prepared to accept it and work with it present, you will become more interested in other things and will gradually forget to notice whether it is there or not. This is the way to recover. By true acceptance you break the fear – adrenalin – fear cycle, or, in other words, the churning-adrenalin-churning cycle.
True Acceptance
From this discussion you will appreciate that true acceptance is the keystone to your recovery, and before you continue with the examination of your other symptoms we should make sure that we understand its exact meaning.
I find that some patients complain, ‘I have accepted the churning in my stomach, but it is still there. So what am I to do now?’ How could they have accepted it while they still complain about it?
Or, as one old man said, ‘After breakfast the churning starts, I can’t just sit there and churn. If I do, I’m exhausted after an hour, so I have to get up and walk round, so what am I to do?’ I said to him, ‘You haven’t really accepted that churning, have you?’ ‘Oh, yes I have,’ he answered indignantly. ‘I’m not frightened of it any more.’
But he obviously was. He was afraid that after an hour’s churning he would be exhausted, so he sat tensely dreading its arrival, shrinking from it when it came and worrying about the exhaustion to follow. Of course the churning, itself a symptom of tension, must inevitably come while so tensely awaited.
I tried to make him understand that he must be prepared to let his stomach churn and to continue reading his paper without dwelling on the churning. Only by so doing would he be truly accepting. In this way, and only in this way, would he eventually reach the stage when it would no longer matter whether his stomach churned or not. Then, freed from the stimulus of tension and anxiety, his adrenalin-releasing nerves would gradually calm down and the churning would automatically lessen and finally cease.
This man was asked to do no more than change his mood from apprehension to acceptance. The symptoms of this type of breakdown are always a reflection of your mood. However, it is well to remember that it may be some time before your body reacts to the new mood of acceptance and that it may continue for a while to reflect the tense, frightened mood of the preceding weeks, months or years. This is one reason why nervous breakdown can be so bewildering and why this old man was bewildered. He had begun to accept, but when the symptoms did not disappear immediately, he quickly lost heart and became apprehensive again, although trying to convince himself that he was accepting. It takes time for a body to establish acceptance as a mood and for this eventually to bring peace just as it took time for fear to become established as continuous tension and anxiety. That is why ‘letting time pass’ is such an important part of your treatment and why I shall emphasize it again and again. Time is the answer. But there must be that background of true acceptance while waiting for time to pass.
SWEATING, TREMBLING HANDS
Now look at your hands. They sweat? Maybe tremble? Maybe the skin is sore and tingles with ‘pins and needles’? But the hands of any tense, frightened person may feel like that, and you are certainly frightened, so how could your hands behave otherwise? The sweating, trembling, ‘pins and needles’ and soreness are no more than the physical expression of oversensitization of your adrenalin-releasing nerves through anxiety and fear. These sensations get no worse than this and could never prevent you using your hands. Maybe your hands do sweat and tremble, but they are still good hands to use.
Therefore, accept the sweating, trembling, soreness and tingling for the time being. These cannot be cured overnight. With acceptance, although your hands may still tremble and sweat for a while, you will find some peace, enough to begin to still the outflow of adrenalin, so that your sweat glands will gradually calm down. In place of fear-adrenalin-sweat, you put acceptance – less adrenalin – less sweat; and finally you have peace – no excess adrenalin – no excess sweat. It is as simple as that, although acceptance may not seem so simple at first.
Hyperthyroidism
Hot, trembling hands are also found in a sickness called hyperthyroidism, which is not ‘just nerves’, although it looks very much like it, and which must be treated specifically. Do not persevere with hot, trembling hands unless you have the assurance of your doctor that you have not hyperthyroidism. Once given such assurance, accept it and do not waste time and energy worrying for fear the doctor may have made a mistake. If you cannot accept his assurance, seek a second opinion but do not inquire beyond that. Hyperthyroidism is usually not difficult to diagnose.
RACING HEART OR HEART ‘SHAKES’
Now examine your racing heart. By ‘racing’ I do not mean the short attacks of palpitation you may have from time to time, but the constantly quickly beating, thumping, banging, ‘shaking’ heart that is your daily companion. You probably think it is racing, that is why I chose this expression, but if you find a watch with a second hand and take your pulse, I doubt if it will be beating at more than one hundred beats each minute. It may be beating at one hundred and twenty, but I doubt it. In fact, your heart is probably not working much harder than any other healthy heart. The difference is that you have become sensitized to its beating so that you feel each beat. And you will remain sensitized to its beating while you listen to and anxiously record each beat!
I want you to realize that it will not harm your heart in the least to beat this way. You could play tennis or baseball if you wished. In fact if you had the interest and energy to play such games, it is most likely that your heart would calm down and beat more slowly while you were playing than when you are sitting holding your pulse. I am assuming, of course, that you have had a medical examination and have been told that your trouble is ‘only nerves’.
These weeks of watching, waiting and holding your pulse have been a waste of time. You cannot harm your heart. You can do anything you wish, provided you are prepared ‘to put up temporarily with the strange feelings that come from the region of your heart. The soreness and pain are merely muscular chest-wall strain, brought on by tension. A diseased heart does not register pain