In praise of writing, and an insight into adrenal fatigue

Hello, my name is Trudie. You might remember me from such places as... this very blog, which I
have somewhat abandoned of late. Please read on as I attempt to redeem myself with this shiny new blog post.
When I started www.onegroundedangel.com three years ago, I made a commitment to post three times a week. I was at war with myself, struggling with my sense of self and feeling isolated by what I perceived as the oppressive blanket of being an outsider (I was just starting to wake up to my spiritual calling). The angels advised me to ‘write my way out of it’.
And it helped. As the words flowed before me on the screen, a sort of alchemy occurred: I began to make sense of my emotions and could see the path ahead with a smidgen more clarity. My black spots diminished. Suddenly I had a sense of purpose; my life had meaning. Responses from others who 'got it' buoyed me; I began to feel less alone - still freakish (well, the best people are!), but more accepting of that.

Then, without my intending it, my blog morphed into a business site as my angel card business started to gain traction. With the demands of social media and a YouTube channel, launched one year ago, my commitment to the blog waned.

These days I am barely managing one non-social-media-driven post a month. Those I do post are more functional than personal, and while that’s probably OK for the majority of people who click through to my site looking for information on my spiritual services, it’s kind of not OK for me. Because without a written portal for my thoughts, I’ve noticed I’m more likely to ruminate and get stuck in unhelpful thought patterns. Writing truly is cathartic. Science confirms it – research from Pennsylvania State University in the US found that keeping a ‘thought journal’ every day improved emotional balance.

So on that note, here’s an update on what’s been going on in my world of late.

This year I’ve been really struggling with low energy. Not just the ‘wow it’s been a big week’ sort of fatigue, but the ‘urge to sleep all weekend but still wouldn’t feel refreshed’ type. It’s not like any sort of fatigue I have ever known – and that’s coming from someone who has had insomnia much of her adult life. I did not notice that what I was enveloped in was not a normal sort of exhaustion. After a mild cold cleared quickly but left me feeling even more flat, I decided enough was enough and I sought out a naturopath.

What came up in tests was not low immunity, as I’d suspected, but abnormally low levels of the stress-hormone cortisol. The result: adrenal fatigue. Which was laughable since in my work as a health writer I’ve covered that very topic more than once in the past, interviewing the likes of holistic nutritionist Dr Libby Weaver, but failed to notice the symptoms in myself.

Adrenal fatigue is what happens when you operate at breakneck speed for too long. Essentially,

your body, interpreting the pressure you’re under as a dangerous situation, goes into fight or flight mode, releasing adrenaline to help you survive. This is designed to be a short-term response, to get you away from the perceived danger, but in today’s high-pressure environment, this has become a long-term state. Because our stress never dissipates, so the adrenaline keeps getting pumped out. Too much adrenaline in the body raises blood pressure and causes inflammation, so the body releases cortisol to bring these down. Because the body is unable to sustain prolonged high-cortisol release, the adrenal glands crash. You will feel, as I have for most of this year, like you are dragging your body around, day after day, and never able to regain your energy. Other effects others have reported include: constantly getting illnesses, sudden unexplained weight gain you can’t shift, low sex drive and constant irritability.

As well as dosing me up on myriad herbs and potions, my naturopath has instructed me to make some much-needed lifestyle changes. I’m banned from looking at my phone or tablet after 9pm (the blue light from these screens raises cortisol output). I must wake up between 6am and 7pm (sleeping in is a bad idea), and must be in bed by 9.30pm. I can only exercise in the mornings, at low or moderate intensity. I must reduce my sugar intake (something I have been using as a crutch to get me through the afternoons, as I don’t drink caffeine). When I’m working from home, I’m encouraged to take a short afternoon nap.

Not surprisingly to those who know me well, it’s the evening phone restriction that’s been the hardest change to implement, but it’s forced me to address my phone dependency. I spend too much time on social media, and that’s been partly contributing to my inability to switch off at the end of the evening. And so I’m trying to relax my tendency to keep checking into the online world on a regular basis; I am now questioning my compulsion to respond to every single message. These are the things that prevent me feeling fully present in my off-line (actual) life, and contribute to my difficulty relaxing in weekends and holidays.

It’s been a few weeks since I started implementing these changes – some days I do better than others – and I’m already starting to feel better. It’s a long road ahead to fully heal my energy – there is no quick fix for adrenal fatigue – and I need to be patient with the process. However if I don’t spend the time now restoring my health, I’ll crash again in the future, and then I can’t do what my soul came here to do. My body is, after all, a home for my soul. I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

How to let go of pain: pick up a pen and paper

I’ve long been an advocate for writing as a means of healing. Putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, has been the best weapon in my arsenal for plumbing the depths of my emotions and moving past hurts – particularly when an issue involves another person.

The other day I came across some academic endorsement of the catharsis I have experienced via the written word (yay science!).

In her book Rising Strong, vulnerability expert Brene Brown references research from James Pennebaker at the University of Texas. James says: “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are – our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organise the experience.”

Pennebaker’s study, published in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, found that participants who wrote about traumatic experiences for four consecutive days reported greater happiness three months later, visited the doctor less than usual during the following six weeks and seemed to have a healthier immune system compared with the control group who wrote about superficial topics.

Essentially, he says, translating painful and confusing experiences into words helps us get to grips with what happened, which helps us navigate our way through. We become active creators in our own life stories rather than passive bystanders.

I’ve never tried the four-day exercise that Pennebaker advocates, but I did use writing as therapy recently when a friend did something really shitty to me that left me reeling. My first instinct was to contact him and force him to explain his actions, but my wounded pride would not let me. I’m glad I hesitated, because communicating with him before I had got my thoughts in order would mean I would have likely launched some personal attacks that I would regret forevermore (and looked like a dick in the process).

What I did instead was write him a letter (using pen and paper, so I’m less likely to edit it as I go) being very specific about why I was upset. I wrote two pages, and when I read it back, I could see a very clear pattern. My tone had changed from being angry and accusatory to being self-reflective. Which is a helpful progression. I’d expressed my pain without having to confront him, and had managed to make sense of it to the point where I recognised how I had contributed to the situation by having unrealistic expectations of his behaviour. I was still unhappy about the event but I was no longer furious at him. Anger, after all, is a secondary emotion, masking a deeper fear – if we want to move past what happened, we need to find out the issue underlying the anger. I did not send the letter; I did not need to.

When you feel overwhelmed by emotions sometimes you just don’t want to do the things you know will help. You feel justified being angry, so you don’t *want* to move past it. But I know from experience that if I can funnel my emotions onto a piece of paper, I will process the experience in a much more helpful way. And when the lesson has been learned, the Universe won’t send me that situation again.

This entire blog is testament to the power of the written word to ease the pain of the human heart, and build a bridge to peace. Almost every post I have written has reshaped my emotional landscape and empowered me to be proactive in working through the challenges I face.

If there’s something you’re struggling with right now, I’d recommend you try writing about it. Don’t worry about being clever or lyrical or creative, just be honest about how you feel. It might not resolve your pain but I bet it will give you some clarity to move forward. 

RELATED POSTS: In praise of writing. How to make every moment count.

In praise of writing. How to make every moment count

If you’ve read my weekly Tuesday lists, you’ll know that I am a big advocate for using writing to acknowledge and celebrate what’s going on my world. Last week I used a similar approach to tackling a feeling of flatness and general life dissatisfaction. Instead of writing about external elements, as I do on Tuesdays, I sat and wrote down all the ways that I'm a more connected, more resilient, gentler and generally more likeable person than I was a year ago. I did this because I believe, as Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner declares, that “if you can write, you can change your life”.

At the end of this experience, I felt like my compass had returned to true north. Like I had twisted the end of a kaleidoscope (kids, ask your parents) and was suddenly dazzled by captivating colours and patterns. Colours and patterns which had, of course, been there all along. But I had not seen them because I was too preoccupied by the darkness. I was looking at the hole instead of the doughnut.

Even if your washing hamper is overflowing and your fridge contains only expired mustard and a mutated chilli*, you have much to be proud of. You are doing better at life than you realise. You are succeeding in ways that you likely do not recognise. You are learning more about yourself and your place in the world. You are contributing to the lives of strangers and acquaintances in ways that you will never fully understand. You are making choices to expand yourself and your world, and, ideally, learning from them. You are caring for yourself and the people around you – and this is no small thing. This is the biggest thing of all. This is what we are here to do.

Writing is how we can bear witness to that growth and also account for the actions that might be taking us far away from the people we want to grow into. It’s through the act of recording our experiences that we recognise that at any given moment, there is always more right than there is wrong. It’s how we hit the pause button on a world that seems to spin faster every year. It’s how we celebrate all that we are and all that we have. It’s how we can make the little moments count.

In a letter to her younger self, Cheryl Strayed – aka my spirit animal – writes: “The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.”

And it’s through writing that the becoming comes to light.

If you feel lost, putting pen to paper, or fingertips to keyboard, can help you find your way home. This blog does that for me. I have to be totally honest with you at this juncture: this blog is not always a joy. It steals sleep and leisure time from me, and it yields precious little in terms of bankable business. BUT the act of diarising my attempt to find meaning in my life has resulted in me discovering that meaning, every day, in ways big and small. By translating my observations and disparate thoughts into tangible and (hopefully) fluid articles, I am living more consciously and less on autopilot. Writing can do that. I highly recommend it.

*Me, currently.

This is what I do. What do you do? (Not talking about your job, BTW)

Last Saturday I woke up early, basking in the delicious joy that comes from having absolutely no plans. The

house was empty, silent. I did my meditation, my oil pulling, brushed my teeth and headed to the park with just my keys, a pen and a notebook. There was a gentle breeze flirting with my ponytail and the trill of cockatoos squabbling over territory. The light was muted, the day still withholding its secrets. I sat cross-legged in the dewy grass and watched the eager dogs and their less-eager owners. I listened to the water slapping the seawall and the bitter sigh of running shoes doing time. I felt wider than my skin, as if the emotional rigours and quenchless demands of the past week had been experienced by someone else. I opened my notebook and wrote. Not work pitches nor blog posts nor notes-to-self, but a fictional short story that has been gnawing at my imagination for weeks, urging me to sit still long enough to bring it to life. What I wrote was neither good nor clever, nor even finished. But, as with any meaningful endeavour, the product matters less than the process. Whenever I am writing something that doesn’t have a deadline, prescribed format or specified word count, I am where I am supposed to be. My soul rises up and the would-have-should-have-could-have in my brain falls away. This is what I do to feel like me. To feel right. 

For me, writing is coming back home. I know with absolute certainty that telling stories and playing with words are what I am here to do. I hope you have something that brings you back into alignment with your soul, too, and I hope you value yourself enough to make that a priority.

What are you doing with your time that could possibly matter more? 

Choose your own creative adventure

Last weekend I went to a session with that quick-witted word-sorceress Liz Gilbert (#fangirlmoment) at the Sydney Opera House, as part of a series of talks to celebrate International Women’s Day. If you follow Liz on Facebook or have seen her inspiring TED talk about creativity you’ll know this bestselling author has made it her mission to inspire everyone to “get out of your own way” when it comes to unleashing the creative being that lies within all of us.*

It’s a worthy mission. In our haste to increase our incomes, enhance our love lives, climb the career ladder and just cope with the busyness of life, the desire to indulge our creativity tends to fall by the wayside. But it’s not an indulgence at all.

Even if you don’t want to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture or write the next Fifty Shades of Grey (please don’t; the literary world deserves better), spending more time being creative can have some pretty awesome flow-on effects – greater happiness and a sense of purpose being chief among them. It also keeps you focused – especially if you have a ‘1’ in your numerology, like I do. Liz says that if she doesn’t have a creative project on the go, she starts destroying relationships with those around her. Ouch! “A creative mind is like a border collie. If you don’t give it a job to do, it will find a job – and you won’t like the job it finds for itself,” she explains.

The benefits of creativity are not in creating a one-of-a-kind, precious product, they're in the process of creating. And it’s not just about art, drama or writing. Raising children is a creative endeavour and so too are exercise, cooking and reading.

There are myriad reasons most people put off that creative project they’ve long been dreaming of. Here is a small selection Liz mentioned in her talk:

• Someone else is already doing this (or: EVERYONE else is already doing this)
•   I haven’t got the time/money/energy
•  I’m no good at this
•   There’s no point
•   I’m not ready
• I’m too fat (WTF? Apparently this is an actual reason people give)

All of these are just excuses we create because we’re deeply afraid we’re not good enough, which is a common fear. But it's something we have to learn to get past. Creativity requires us to reach beyond our safety zone, which is something the subconscious regards as very, very dangerous. “Fear will always be provoked by creativity, because creativity asks us to enter into realms of uncertain outcomes,” Liz says. And that, of course, is when growth, both creative and emotional, happens.

Liz’s approach is not to try and eliminate Fear** completely – because it never goes away, ever – but to accommodate it, then ignore it and go ahead and follow the creative path anyway. Without that strategy she might never have had such a remarkable career. She tells Fear: “You get a vote, but you do not get a voice.”

I went home after this talk and dug out the short stories I had abandoned late last year because I thought they were shit. They may well be shit but as Liz has reminded me, there’s every reason to keep going with them, if for no other benefit than the joy of the process.

Time to put my border collie on a shorter leash.

*I’ve written about this before; read my previous post here.

**Eagle-eyed readers will notice I always capitalise Fear. There’s a reason for that. my experience of Fear is that it is powerful it has often stood over me like a bully, so that’s why I personify it.