Emotional Fortitude 101

Your roadmap to nerves of steel

Meitao Qu, Smooth Sailing (2024)

My body… she is, admittedly, weak. My doctor made me do a newfangled scan recently that tells me that my physical composition is approximately that of a tub of cream cheese (this is not hyperbole). And after The Accident, I have some ailments to work through. But my nerves? Have been forged for a moment like this. I do not wish upon my friends any of the experiences that wired me this way, but as I work on book two—the one about connecting with joy in difficult times—here are some broad strokes I can share about my discoveries.

First, we can’t know anything about the kind of nightmare that’s about to unfold. I could sit here all day and come up with a thousand end-times scenarios, and twice as many different ones will happen. But we can ready ourselves to ride the waves of uncertainty and misery without our nervous systems short-circuiting. Just as you would train your body before climbing a mountain, the coming years will require intensive emotional conditioning. A prophylactic against the unknown, let’s say. And here are some approaches I’ve incorporated over the last 30-odd years that might help:

1. Understand the difference between anxiety and fear. The unknown will take up your whole life if you let it, and we can’t let this guy hijack four more years (or more! I know!). I’ve already proselytized about the heady cocktail of TM x Unwinding Anxiety, but will continue to repeat myself until anxiety is eradicated from the globe. Imminent danger is an actual threat — being scared of an unknown is not. It is a simply a trick your brain is playing on you.

2. Pare down and filter your “news” intake, and recognize your role in spreading the panic. The actual news is bad enough! Discourse is not news. Opinions are not news (I write opinion pieces! They come from the inside of my head!). Tweets, posts, and secondary pieces about things people said about news items (takes on takes, I call them) are not news. I’ve gotten a startling number of messages from people that are something like “X is stressing me out,” with an attached link or screenshot. And my immediate response, which I haven’t sent back to anyone, is why are you telling me this? But I don’t mean this in an irritable way. I mean it as a real question—why is your instinct to reach out with this? Does sharing it actually make you feel better? Or worse? Is the idea that you feel bad and you want someone to soothe you immediately? Or join you in the anxiety pit? Why is that? And how can you learn to manage it, and soothe yourself?

3. Gratitude and Perspective. Do you wake up every day grateful for the sheaf of lottery tickets that make up your life? Can you try? So many of us have natural gifts, reliable family, financial security, good friends, and/or our health. Can you start to keep track of your gifts, instead of only the things that you stand to lose?

4. We are all chemistry experiments, and as a naturally depressive person, I’ll do any outlandish thing that promises to keep my happy chemicals up. I’ve written about what vagus nerve stimulation does to my mood—the hypothesis here is that it supports the pathways between the gut (which makes 90% of the body’s serotonin) and your brain, which needs it for mood regulation. I find loud singing and a cold plunge the two most effective options, although I much prefer singing to freezing.

5. I wish I were the kind of person who craves exercise, but I am more like a lavishly fed cat who’d rather bask on a windowsill—thus the cream cheese thing. Nevertheless, I persist in finding ways I like to move and doing them, even if it they’re not workout classes (blech). I dance in the house. I rollerskate down the alley. I tidy up fast-and-furious and call it the day’s cardio. I harangue my friends into going for long walks. These are the things I have to do to stay mentally afloat. It helps that I am not easily embarrassed.

6. Seek out (healthy) novelty: given any sort of choice—what to eat, where to go for a walk, anything—try to reach for something unknown. It’s tempting to go for the familiar comfort you crave, but exposure to even the smallest new thing can balance your dopamine in unexpected ways. I had a tripe dish at a Japanese cafeteria the other day, even though I would normally get the katsu curry, and aside from the taste, I felt that long chemical high far past the meal itself. It was all part of a novelty-forward day where I stopped by an art gallery with the kids and tried a new ice cream place and let them do a bunch of stuff we wouldn’t normally, and the detour from rigid structure made us all so happy.

7. Prioritize inconvenience. I realized last year, while attempting to operate at optimal efficiency, that I was bored and miserable. Too many things simply appear in my life—food, groceries, lightbulbs, kids’ clothes, anything—without me having to go get them. And the isolated feeling I dragged around with me was no coincidence. I know not everyone has the time for this every single day, but whenever I can, I try to make every errand, every act of acquisition, an exercise in enjoying the journey. If I need a battery, I go to the store and talk to the grumpy man about which one to buy, and why. I get my groceries from a physical place—store, market, ethnic grocers’—and have a full conversation with the butcher, or the lady who checks me out. On the days I can’t cook, I’ve ditched food delivery in favor of low-key dining in or picking up tacos. I don’t shop online. Maybe this sounds bizarre, and I should be an outcast. But there’s something about the Richard Scarry pace of all of it that makes me feel like I’m in one of his books, and the objects and stories I bring home feel somehow more satisfying.

“How are you OK?” people have been asking me lately. I agree there’s something a little weird about it. And I’m not, exactly. I’m filled with dread. But my nervous system is tops. Hope this helps yours.

xo