All her life, Martha Beck had been anxious, but a few years ago she began to get really curious about anxiety. And curiosity, she wants us all to know, may just be the path out of paralysing, life-spoiling terror. During the pandemic, Beck – a bestselling author and life coach – started looking deeper into anxiety in order to help her clients. It was something she thought she knew about, having experienced it throughout her life, and over the years she had followed the standard advice: she had practised meditation for 30 years, and been on medication, but now Beck was starting to wonder if inner peace was as far as it went.
Instead of trying to control her anxiety, Beck started to befriend it: “I started treating myself like a frightened animal and doing for myself what we all instinctively know will calm a frightened animal.” Imagine, she says, “you found a freezing, dirty puppy on your doorstep, and you decided you wanted to help it. What would you do? Get down on its level, speak to it kindly and softly. Don’t try to explain to it what it needs to do next – it’s an animal. Allow it to be afraid while regarding it with compassion.” When she tried this on herself, Beck says she could “dramatically feel this shift in my psychology, my body and my brain”. And then, she says with a laugh, “I got into creativity and things got really weird.”
