It is nearly two years since I started this site, and it has been a good journey so far,
and importantly a journey that has helped me with the problems I have with anxiety. It has been two weeks since I started this post, with other subjects to write about, but on re-reading it, I still wanted to finish it off. Whilst my anxiety is greatly reduced from my darkest days to the extent I go long periods without any, the distraction of writing is a massive help to me, and knowing I have my own website is a bit of a ‘tick the box for me.
What has changed for me is that whilst anxiety is quite rare these days, it does still come back, and I have always said it is as if it is popping back to say ‘hello, I won’t let you forget me.’ And again, a reason writing is good for me. In the early days, I was told ‘don’t recognise the condition, or it can often win and get to you.’ Here I am writing about it, and it doesn’t get much closer to recognising the condition than that, but I do it without a care in the world and zero anxiety.
What I don’t like, sometimes as much as the anxiety, is my mood swings, for which I take medication, and I’m not ashamed to say so. I have myself reduced the small dose to fifty per cent of that prescribed, and it helps, there is no doubt. My mood swings of the past were horrendous, and that is why I went for help. But like anxiety, they are still there and like the anxiety just not so bad. But it shows that whatever problem we have with mental health, there are people out there that can help us, and that is why we need to make sure we ask for it.
I have tried to let people know how anxiety can affect you, but we are all different. One minute you can feel good; the next it is getting to you, and you feel terrible, but then it can be the opposite, such is the condition. One of the best examples I can give you of how it can get to you and then disappear is in this post I wrote:
For me, anxiety has come and gone very quickly, and also very slow, but then so has my mood swings, and the two conditions, whilst very different in my world, are similar because of how they react within you, but I know the difference, I know when it’s anxiety, and I know when I am down, or as I have started calling it recently ‘feeling flat.’
I was flat yesterday, and I was this morning but not as bad. It took me an hour to
drive twenty miles, one of my biggest dislikes (never hate) in life. But what can we do? Well, I don’t get anxious because it is beyond my control. I didn’t create nor thankfully was I involved in the accident at the traffic lights that held me up, but then I didn’t create the tediously slow traffic either, a situation I believe has worsened since lockdown ended, and something I don’t enjoy and never will.
But I have learned just to accept it and listen to the radio and try to chill out; well, it’s pointless getting annoyed, that’s for sure. If we get annoyed, we get more uptight, if we get more uptight, we can get more anxious, and we can’t do that to ourselves. It isn’t easy at times, but the radio is a saviour. The problem I have with driving is that it is the time my mind will wander most often, especially on the motorways. Lo and behold, I am off to Reading for a night on Wednesday, back on Thursday, and a round trip of about 260 miles for work, fortunately, something I don’t have to do very often. Then on Friday, I am off to Scotland to see family, a round trip of about 620 miles with the driving I have to do when I am there, so the radio will be a good friend to me over the next few days, as will the company of my good lady on the trip North.
And we all have our favourites, and my radio day goes like this. Virgin Radio for the Chris Evans Breakfast Show, then over to Radio 2 for the Ken Bruce show and especially the Popmaster Quiz at 10.30, still trying to score over thirty after all these years, more likely to achieve three! Heart 70’s, taking me back to my younger days (occasionally Talk Sport), and back to Radio 2 at 2 pm for Steve Wright, still a funny DJ to this day and one of the best on the radio.
However, this morning, Chris Evans was on holiday, so I started listening to Zoe Ball on Radio 2. Thankfully for me, whilst being held up in traffic, it gave me more time to listen to the article. I found myself listening to a wonderful interview with Billy Connelly, and funny it was too, as he always is. I can only ask if you can find it on the Radio 2 app or playlist or however we catch up with radio, but please do. I won’t spoil it by telling you the funny story about naked bungee jumping.
But what a man, who has Parkinson’s disease, the funniest part of the interview is when he said about his close friend, Michael Parkinson, ‘I wish he had kept it,’ I don’t know much about this disease, but a quick internet search tells us it is; ‘a progressive disease of the nervous system marked by tremor, muscular rigidity, and slow, imprecise movement, chiefly affecting middle-aged and elderly people. It is associated with degeneration of the basal ganglia of the brain and a deficiency of the neurotransmitter dopamine.’
Another quick search tells me ‘dopamine is one of the ‘feel-good chemicals in our brain. Interacting with the pleasure and reward centre of our brain, dopamine — along with other chemicals like serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins — plays a vital role in how happy we feel. In addition to our mood, dopamine also affects movement, memory, and focus.’ (Both internet searches courtesy of Google.)
Yet Billy Connelly seems, for want of a better description seems to embrace the condition. I feel he has always embraced life, and he has always been (or seems to have been) a very positive and funny person, but then doing what he does, like all those in his line of work, when we see him, he has to be positive and funny, as they all do. But there is another side to comedians that we don’t see, and for all, we know it could affect Billy too, but I have a feeling it doesn’t concern him too much, but that’s just my opinion.
However, on that subject, I wanted to draw your attention to this article on the BBC website, which shows us how being funny might not necessarily give us a happy life. And another one of my favourites, Robin Williams, a very, very funny man who took his own life with the reports into his death stating that Williams had been suffering from depression and anxiety, and there is more than can be read using an internet search.
It must be very, very difficult making films or standing up and making people laugh. Imagine going out on stage or on set and people not laughing at your material, and so is that a concern? Would that make you anxious? I believe it would.
We were lucky to see the very funny Lee Evans once at our local theatre, seating some 750 or so people. He used these venues as warm-up gigs before embarking on a national theatre tour at the likes of the NEC or the SECC playing to thousands of people over many nights, and so if the 750 or so didn’t laugh, the thousands and thousands wouldn’t laugh.
He actually brought his material out on an A4 pad and used it as his prompt to tell jokes and funny stories. I’ll never know if it was part of the act, but after one short story, we didn’t really laugh too much, so he ripped the page out and threw it away, for which did get laughs, so was it all planned? I’ll never know?
I haven’t done much research into this subject as I rarely do; I just give my opinions and some facts. But having a look at the topic, it is amazing what we can find quite quickly. This is one I had never heard of before, but it sums up the connection between comedy and depression/anxiety, and it’s called ‘Sad Clown Paradox’, and it is the contradictory association between comedy and mental health disorders.
But to me, it highlights not just what comedians go through, but all of us who may suffer from a mental health disorder. They are in front of audiences, making them laugh and usually smiling whilst they do it, and probably on a high, then feeling so low they can take their own life, and that is bad, and it is sad. The same will happen to people with mental health issues without trying to make people laugh; they have up’s and down’s too, and it is strange how the mind works, even when we discuss comedy and depression/anxiety in the same sentence!
Thanks for reading, and stay safe.