Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear. Dr. Weekes Claire
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as far as your heart is concerned, it is a good heart, beating very much like any other. You are only aware of its beating and are making yourself more aware by worrying about it and paying it too much attention. Have the courage to relax and analyse this beating and understand that it, too, like the sweating hands and churning stomach, is once again the result of over-sensitization of adrenalin-releasing nerves. The nerves of your heart have become so sensitized by fear that they answer the slightest stimulus. A sudden noise may suffice to make your heart ‘rattle’; or, more puzzling still it may suddenly beat quickly for no apparent reason.
Be prepared to live with this erratic beating until your nerves become less sensitized. They will do this as you become more philosophical and accept the racing and thumping as part of your recovery programme. You have made the mistake of thinking that while your heart continued to beat quickly, you must still be ill. It may be some weeks before you cease to be conscious of the quick action, but once you accept it, you will be getting better all the time. There is no magic switch to immediately calm your heart, although sedatives can be a great help and you need not hesitate to let your doctor prescribe them.
SORE HEAD
The soreness around, or on top of, your head is caused by contraction of your scalp muscles as a result of continuous tension. You may notice how relief comes if you press your scalp or place a hot water-bag where it is most sore. This should prove to you that the cause is local, where you can reach it and is not deep-seated. These are not the symptoms of brain tumour.
Since contraction of tense muscle causes pain, it naturally becomes worse when you worry and improves as you relax and release tension. Pain-killing tablets help, but only a little. With the relaxation that follows acceptance, tension eases and the pain gradually lessens. However, this scalp pain, this ‘iron band’, is a most stubborn symptom to cure, so do not despair if it lingers a while. I assure you that it eventually goes. The hardest, tightest band will gradually lessen and disappear with acceptance.
Once More, True Acceptance
Make sure that you appreciate the difference between truly accepting and only thinking you are accepting. If you can let your stomach churn, your hands sweat, your heart thump quickly, and your head ache, without paying too much attention to them, then you are truly accepting. It does not matter so much if at first you cannot do this calmly. It may be impossible to be calm at this stage. All I ask for true acceptance is that you are prepared to live and work with your symptoms without paying them too much respect.
The Limited Power of Adrenalin-releasing Nerves
After examining these ‘terrible feelings’, I want you to remain seated and concentrate on each in turn and try to make it worse. You will find you cannot. Apparently the power of the adrenalin-releasing nerves is limited. You may succeed in slightly intensifying its effect with concentration, but only slightly. And yet, all this time, without realizing it, you have been shrinking from facing these symptoms squarely because you were afraid that by so doing you would somehow make them worse. It was as if you gave them a fearful, sideways glance.
Let me reassure you. You cannot increase your symptoms by facing them or even trying to intensify them. In fact, you may find that when you try consciously to make them worse, they improve. The very act of concentrating on them in this way means that, for the time being at least, you look at them with interest rather than fear, and even this brief respite from tension may have a calming effect. Symptoms can be intensified only by further fear and its resulting tension, never by relaxing, facing and accepting. Are you beginning to suspect that your symptoms may have had you bluffed? They most certainly have.
A student whose sensations were very much as I have described, could make little headway at his study because of banging heart, sweating hands and churning stomach. One day, when he thought he would go crazy unless he could get relief, a friend, an ex-soldier, came to see him. He told his friend about his suffering and said, ‘I can’t stand it much longer. I have done all I can to fight it and I dont know which way to turn next. Surely there is a way out of this hell?’
The friend explained that many soldiers at the ‘front’ had had nerves like this until they realized they were only being bluffed by them. He advised the youth to stop being bluffed by his nerves, to float past all suggestion of self-pity and fear and go on with his work. The student saw the light and from being afraid to put one foot in front of the other for fear of damaging his heart, in two weeks was climbing mountains. That was many years ago. He has similar feelings from time to time when overwrought but he knows that they will pass if he relaxes, accepts and floats past them. He has learnt how to live with his nerves.
‘Floating’
To float is just as important as to accept, and it works similar magic. I could say let ‘float’ and not ‘fight’ be your slogan, because it amounts to that.
Let me illustrate more clearly the meaning of float in this regard. A patient had become so afraid of meeting people that she had not entered a shop for months. When asked to make a small purchase she said, ‘I couldn’t go into a shop. I’ve tried, but I can’t. The harder I try, the worse I get. If I force myself, I feel I am paralysed and can’t put one foot in front of the other. So please don’t ask me to go into a shop.’
I told her that she had little hope of succeeding while she tried to force herself in this way. This was the fighting of which I had previously warned her. I explained that she must imagine she was floating into the shop, not fighting her way there. To make this easier, she could imagine she was actually on a cloud, floating through the door. I also explained that she could further help herself by letting any obstructive thought she might have float away out of her head, recognizing that it was no more than a thought and that she need not be bluffed into giving it attention.
When she came back she was overjoyed and said, ‘Don’t stop me. I’m still floating. Do you want me to float for something else?’
Strange, isn’t it, how the use of one simple word could free a mind that had been imprisoned for months? The explanation is simple enough. When you fight you become tense and tension inhibits action. When you think of floating you relax and this helps action. This woman was in such a state of tension that I have seen her nearly reduced to tears when, with shaking hands, she tried to find a car-key in her handbag. After learning to float, one day when on a similar search she said, ‘Sorry if I’m taking your time. The keys can’t be too far away. I’ve just floated past two bills, a lipstick and a purse. I’ll float round a bit longer and find them.’ The shaking hands were almost steady. She was learning to float past tension.
I have seen patients so tensed by continuous fear that they were convinced they could neither walk nor lift their arms to feed themselves. One man afflicted in this way had been bedridden for weeks. After a few conversations with him, I found he was able to understand that the paralysis lay in his thoughts and not in his muscles. He learnt the trick of freeing his muscles by floating past obstructive thoughts. Within a few days he was ‘floating’ the food to his mouth unaided and announced that he was now ready to walk.
This caused a fine stir in the ward. Several doctors, students, and nurses stood by to watch. No sooner had the patient stood up than a nurse, seeing him sway, said hurriedly, ‘Look out – you might fall!’
The patient, describing the event afterwards, said that this suggestion was almost too much, and he nearly crumpled to the floor. However, he heard a voice in the background saying, ‘Float and you can do it. Float past fear,’ and he said, ‘I “floated” down the hospital ward and back, to my own and everyone else’s astonishment.’
Such frightening thoughts as were experienced by these two people can be very persistent, almost obsessive, to a tired mind, and it helps some people to imagine a pathway along which they can let these thoughts escape, float away. (Another use for ‘float’.) For example, one woman thought of them as passing out of the back of her head; another said she let them float away along a