A New App Called Anchor & The Power of Vulnerability to Heal Stress

The director of the 1959 comedy Pillow Talk loved the split screen technique. Is this why he chose a script about a party line, perhaps?

At 7:08 AM this morning my 6-year-old daughter see-sawed on the edge of a temper tantrum. She didn’t want to be standing on a cold wooden floor in her nightgown. She was ready to fight every to-do on the unhappy Monday morning list scrolling out in front of her.

Don’t underestimate the strength of a cranky cowgirl.

As she started to howl I took a deep breath and said, “I’m actually kind of nervous.” She stopped and looked at me with a mixture of surprise and skepticism. “Why are you nervous?” she asked.

“I’m going to have to start looking for a job soon,” I said. “I don’t want people to reject me and say no.”

“Well if they do…you just keep asking until someone says yes.” She walked to the dresser and grinned. Then suddenly she was putting on her pants.

Wait, what happened there? Why was she able to interrupt her tantrum to help me? And why did that, in turn, seem to make her feel better?

---

hey, whatcha talking about on that party line?

For a little over a week, I’ve been logging (many) hours on a new app called Anchor. It calls itself “radio by the people.” In truth, it’s more like those telephone party lines from the 60s moved to a beautiful shiny new modern home. The fun and simplicity of the app belies something deep that’s taking place there every day.

But first, a look at Anchor and how it works.

It starts with speaking out loud to your phone. You record a 2-min-or-under message and then you caption it. Here’s an example of one of mine. (This is what it looks like if you hit one of the discussions from social media, i.e. you’re not a user and you’ve just had a wave shared with you):

https://anchor.fm/w/9AA2D0

If you’re a member of the community and using the app itself, this is what that same discussion looks like:

You play through each response in order, scrolling down and responding as you go if you choose. As you can see, it’s an asynchronous spoken conversation with people who start as strangers. (That just sounded like the beginning of an 80s sitcom. Cue Balki Bartokomous.)

Anchor is being used in all sorts of ways. And here’s where it gets interesting for someone examining the role of anxiety in our culture. Anchor is particularly revealing about the transformative power of vulnerability.

I surely don’t have to convince you that stress and anxiety are issues facing America today. We live in an era where people are always looking for new ways to escape. The entire Trump campaign is a barnacle that is capitalizing off of the human desire for relief and escape from stress.

This is how Anchor fits in: In the two weeks I’ve used it, I’ve received more clearer and more direct objective perspectives on my thoughts and feelings than on any of the other platforms combined. The people I’ve met are funny, smart, and thoughtful. We’re from a wide variety of backgrounds. We all share something in common: we want to share our experiences to help others and we want to keep the conversations real. It's the interplay of helping others and being helped through new perspectives that leads to a true calming of stress symptoms.

Growing up in the Midwest as a Gen X’er, stoicism and individualism were highly prized and coveted traits. If you felt undue stress or needed help, you’d do it privately, seeking out an “expert.” My experience on Anchor reinforces for me that things are changing. We’re now looking for help in all directions. We know that by helping others, we help ourselves, and that it feels good. Anchor creates a space for an easy give-and-take — especially for people who are willing to be vulnerable. Since the help many of us need is to trust ourselves, learning to be vulnerable is an important first step. Vulnerability is a daunting challenge for the anxious and stressed among us.

This brings us back to my daughter and this morning. What was it about me revealing my nervousness that immediately calmed her down?

I have a few speculations. By revealing myself, I may have helped her:

- Feel less alone.

- Show her how much she knows and how she can learn from herself. “Just keep asking!”

- Feel strong and insightful.

- Maybe I should ask my Anchor crew what they think about it.

It may seem counterintuitive, but when a cranky cowgirl is about to start screaming in front of you, leading with your own fear can be the bravest thing you can do.

Two Skeptics Discuss: What is Intuition?

Two old pals hanging out near the longing of great hearts.

Panio and I met when we both lived in New York shortly after we graduated from college. We worked in book publishing: he at Crown, me at Harcourt. Our love of books was at the center of our lives. He's always been (and will always be) a writer. I thought of myself (and probably always will) as a reader. We've now been friends for over 15 years.

We talk about life the way that old friends do, investigating the world that surrounds us together. If you read this Q&A, you'll see why Panio is one of my favorite people to talk to. 

I asked him if we could dig into this topic together for The Beautiful Voyager crowd. He was game! 

M: You and I were recently talking about how as we're getting older (we both turned 40 this year) we're both finally learning to listen to our intuition — be it about work or what to do on a Saturday. What's the deal? Why didn't we listen to our intuition before?

P: There were surely a number of factors; the biggest one for me was that intuition works in the realm of feelings. We’re a skeptical society, data driven, rationality loving, it’s brain-brain-brain all the time, and for a long time I played into that. When faced with a decision, if I’d feel a twinge of something, urging me to do or not do something, I’d push it aside and try to reason my way through it instead — for all the good that did. There’s that moment when you just know something is a terrible idea, that this job or project or person is a bad fit and going to make you unhappy, and yet you willfully disregard the feeling and do it anyway because there’s no clear reason not to. And then? It blows up in your face. Or vice versa, this sense that here’s a thing you should absolutely do, but the math doesn’t add up, so you let it go — only to regret it. Those experiences had to happen enough times for me to concede that maybe something I was feeling could be right, that feeling can trump thought, not just in my heart, but out in the world.

M: Is it intuition the right word for it? That's a word with bad connotations, right?

P: It’s true, it’s got lousy connotations — sounds childish or imaginary. “Gut” is much more respected, but I think that’s probably just sexism at play, as men love to talk about going with their gut. And “instinct” isn’t quite right because it doesn’t get at the idea that there’s learning behind intuition. I wish there were a word that combines wisdom with self-knowledge. There probably is — in German.  

M: What kind of advice would you give your kids about intuition? How do you think intuition is informed by experience — how do you think it changes over time?

P: That’s perfect framing, because I often think of intuition as being like a parent. It frequently tells you something you don’t really want to know right now. Like your mom or dad, intuition has your best interest at heart — it’s trying to help you, to protect you — but especially when you’re younger, you just don’t want to hear it, because then you’ll have to do something other than the careless thing you really want to do.

You’ve got a young child, like I do, so I’m sure you’ve seen Frozen. I remember during my first viewing, when Anna meets the dashing prince and he’s sweeping her off her feet, I found myself thinking, “What’s he hiding? This is too easy. This can’t be right.” And then he turns out to be a devious asshole and it was almost a relief, because like every parent in the audience I knew something was off. To be fair, that’s not a great example of intuition at play, that one’s more about identifying storytelling tropes, but they’re really not that different. In many ways, I see intuition as a kind of highly nuanced pattern recognition. It’s our brain sorting through all of these set-ups and inputs and consequences and then trying to ferret out what’s causality, so that we can replicate the good results and avoid the bad results going forward. There’s a pretty sophisticated set of data that needs to be gathered, with all sorts of false positives that we need to learn to discard. And then — the really hard part — the results get translated into feelings. Which we have to then acknowledge and interpret, another highly nuanced skill that takes time to develop.   

So, long-winded advice… pay attention to what you’re feeling. Don’t ignore it. Don’t belittle it. You don’t have to act on it impulsively, or at all, but at the very least, listen to what you’re trying to tell yourself through your body.

M: Should everyone be listening to their intuition, or do some people have bad intuition?

P: That’s a fascinating idea: bad intuition. I always assumed everyone had good intuition but they responded to it with varying degrees of appreciation. Of course there are people who always seem to make that key mistake again and again — what if they’re just following earnest yet terrible inner advice? I hope that’s not the case.    

M: Intuition is a weird concept but it seems important.

P: Yes, though I haven’t always been great about listening to intuition, I’ve been drawn to it. In fact, last week I went back to a novel I started writing when I was 26 and saw that the first line was “He should have known better.” So even back then I was obsessed with this idea that we intuitively know things, and yet for all sorts of reasons — pride, fear, desire — we discount them. At its heart, intuition is about identifying and communicating the truth. We live in an era that privileges reason above all else — it’s been that way for centuries — but there are limits to just applying intellectual analysis to our lives. It’s cognitively exhausting, and it’s not entirely accurate. It reminds me of how behavioral economics has come to dominate the field, because this idea of a “rational actor” has been disproven over and over by actual human experience. Intuition exists in this hazy yet critical realm between intellect and emotion. And it’s tailored to you. It’s made by you and it makes you. It’s your parent and your child. What’s more important than that?  

Thank you so much for sharing these thoughts about intuition, friend. I am so glad to have you in my life!

Panio Gianopoulos is a writer and editor based in NYC. His work has appeared in Tin House, Northwest Review, Salon, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rattling Wall, Big Fiction, Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the author of the novella A Familiar Beast and a forthcoming collection of short stories, How to Get Into Our House and Where We Keep the Money.

Feelings Come and Go

Sonia Evers of The Not Vanilla has written a great piece about a specific form of anxiety-targeted mindfulness meditation for Refinery29. The whole piece is really worth reading, but here are some of the key takeaways that make the piece stand out.

According to Harvard psychotherapist Ronald D. Siegel, PsyD, trying to get rid of anxiety is exactly where I, and many others suffering from it, go wrong. In his mindfulness meditation practice, Stepping into Fear, Dr. Siegel encourages his students to turn their attention toward, and even befriend, their anxiety, rather than resist it and try to make it go away...[It] begins like any other meditation, focusing on the breath and quieting the mind. But it quickly takes a turn when Dr. Siegel asks you, the listener, to think of something that makes them anxious. Once you have a clear idea of what that is, he asks you to increase your anxiety by thinking of a scenario that’s even worse. After that, a scenario even worse. This goes on for about 20 minutes, until he brings the focus back to the breath and the body. The theory behind it is that the more comfortable we get with the sensations that come with anxiety — panic, fear, and accelerated heartbeat — the more we will discover that the emotions associated with these sensations come and go, like everything else.  

This is definitely in keeping with Barry McDonagh's DARE approach, and it's something I ascribe to as well. Getting our bodies accustomed to the physical sensations of anxiety--the cortisol and adrenaline pumping through our systems--while allowing our minds to understand that the wave will pass is core to recovery.

Feel the surge. Use the surge.

I loved that Sonia said: 

Over the course of the 20-minute meditation, which brought forth everything from increased heart rate to full blown tears, I discovered that my mind actually started to wander away from the things that I’m constantly anxious or worried about. And unlike in other meditations, where a distracted mind is something to combat, this mental meandering was a breath of relief that not only informed me that anxiety passes, but that whatever I am afraid of or avoiding is only as big a deal as I make it. It’s here now, but it’s just as likely to be gone in a moment.

This is understanding the wave. Once you see that the wave will pass, the next time it hits, you are more likely to be able to move with it.

Sonia's final words are powerful, and so, so true:

Breathe into  it.  it'll make you feel better.

The Secret Handshake

This is not how it works.

What Is It, and How Does It Work?

Backstory: I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder seven months ago.  At the time, I didn't see it coming at all, but as soon as I heard the words, it made a lot of sense. I'd always felt out-of-step with the mainstream and cautious in a way others around me didn't. I was drawn to people who were open about their vulnerabilities and frailties. I loved the early work of Albert Brooks.

Does anything about this speak to you? hahahaha

Since learning that what I felt was called anxiety, the mountain of information I've had all of these years inside of me now has shape. It all makes a lot more sense.

Here's an example: For years, a friend of mine has asked how I manage to create fun group conversations at parties. 

Pre-diagnosis,  I buried this feeling so deeply I didn't even recognize It was there. I just invented coping techniques and got migraines.

I told her that I'd hunker down in a corner and look to see if anyone else is doing the same. I'd toss out random topics to that stranger. By doing this, it was easy to get into engaging, non-small-talk conversation that others, in turn, were drawn into. 

Pre-diagnosis, I had this information: "people want to talk, but they don't always want to talk in big groups. Sometimes it's more fun to do it off to the side, about random, small topics." I didn't know why it was the case, but I knew:  "The off-to-the-side people seem to be my people."

Now that I understand that I'm highly sensitive and experience anxiety, I've merged this new understanding into my approach to parties. I'll sometimes admit that I'm feeling stressed out to the person I'm talking to in some subtle way. If it makes sense, I'll even cop to some anxiety. This is me extending my hand for the secret handshake.

Here's the shocking part: 9 times out of 10, that person will admit that they, too, feel the same way. They respond with their own confessional acknowledgement, taking my hand for the other half of the secret handshake. We end up having even better conversations (and needing to drink less). I'm getting fewer migraines and making more and better connections with others using the secret handshake.

Does this happen because I have a special ability to nose out other beautiful voyagers? Not more than any of us do. I think all of us who are highly sensitive have access to the secret handshake. It's an incredibly powerful skill, and not just in the party setting. If you were to know that the person you were about to be interviewed by had experienced anxiety, as you do, don't you think it would help you perform more naturally in that interview? Being able to read people and understand where they're coming from is like having x-ray vision. But it comes at a cost. It starts with making yourself vulnerable.

Found a photo of Albert Brooks shaking hands...

The hardest part of the secret handshake is that you have to drop the first clue about yourself for the other person to pick up. But you will find that as you do it over time you're going to be shocked at the number of people in your life that experience similar things that you do. They just don't talk about it or may not even realize it, as I didn't. In the past seven months, I've had more people say to me, "Wow, I thought I was alone in this." Or "It was so great to meet you" in a more deeply genuine way than ever before. 

The secret handshake: another tool for the superhero arsenal. 

the lasso of truth

No Matter How Rigid, Everything Can Bend

I came across this post about Spanish sculptor José Manuel Castro López and was blown away by what I saw. López carves his sculptures from quartz and granite, incorporating wood and other natural textures as needed.

The feeling it created in me, of transformation in the face of the immoveable, of waves of movement within the rigid, seemed like an incredible metaphor for The Beautiful Voyager.

It brings a smile to my face that López describes himself as "more of a druid than a sculptor."

Why do I do this project?

Hint: The goal is not to stress out my friends

I was recently talking to a friend about my writing and she expressed some (very gentle, supportive) skepticism about it.

Why aren’t you just writing private journal entries?…I’m just not clear on what your goal is. Because writing has helped you, you seem to think it will help everyone, and I’m not sure that that’s true.

In response to the question, “Do you like to read what I write?” She said,

Sometimes, yes. Because I’m proud of you for doing it and happy that it helps you. But sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, because it is so public and confessional. And more and more it’s written in a self-help style that I have an almost visceral reaction to. I imagine it being read out loud in a calming voice, like the Headspace guy. I don’t like being told how I feel, and how I will feel if I do what you do. It also feels indulgent — I sometimes feel jealous about the time that you have (when you’re not working). Though I don’t feel jealous about you waking up in the middle of the night.

This is what me stressed looks like -- migraine.

I want to address all of this because I don’t think she’s the only one who thinks these things. It causes me stress that I haven’t made my expectations clear for friends and loved ones who have witnessed every step of this journey.

For the past six months, I’ve been writing regularly in the form of two public projects: The Hero Series and The Beautiful Voyager.

In both projects I’m exploring whether cognitive behavioral techniques applied to social media will work to help myself and others feel better (= fewer migraine days), more positive, and more deeply connected. CBT is the theme that ties the work together.

“Yes, but what’s the goal?”

The doing is the goal.

It’s about learning not to say to myself, “If I get to this [arbitrary destination], I’ll be happy.” It’s flow or process-based (as opposed to goal-oriented) thinking. For both projects, the flow is the goal.

Hero Series: Focusing on the Good.

I started this project because I was feeling beaten down by the news. The project’s evolved a lot over time, but its core mission has remained the same.

Its goal is to collaboratively create a positive snowball effect that can help counteract the negative snowball of the news.

The Beautiful Voyager: Exploring Anxiety in Our Culture.

The Hero Series helped me manage my anxiety about the news by focusing on the good, but it also ignited my curiosity about the anxiety itself. I realized that there was so little information online that looked at the role of anxiety in our world as it related to me and the people around me. I was fascinated by how huge the topic is and how much there is to say.

The voyager comes in many shapes and sizes.

Its goal is to provide a first stop for people realizing that they may be beautiful voyagers.

The Beautiful Voyager is a way bigger deal to me. When I think about many of the negative things happening in society these days can be traced to our collective fear around riding the wave of our anxiety. I understand this physiological, hormonal wave deeply because I live it every day.

Setting expectations

I wrote this post on Medium and shared it on Facebook and Twitter. It was really to help with clarity for people who have always known me, even before I was writing about these topics. The whole creation of public projects has been kinda cool, kinda awkward with some of these friends. I think people don’t always know how they are supposed to react. So this is for that purpose.

For those of you that know me, if this is your first time being introduced to these projects, here’s what I would hope:

Join the public FB group if it’s relevant to you: Hero Series. Beautiful Voyager.

Join the writer’s group if you want to take part in the Hero Series conversation. If like me, you have an interest in knowing more about the role that anxiety plays in our culture, check out what I and other writers are posting on The Beautiful Voyager.

Friends rock.

Starting these projects has helped me tremendously, despite moving through the strangeness of the public space. I’ve already found some amazing like-minded seekers and connected more deeply with others who were there all along.

I hope that helps clear up any lingering confusion about why I choose to spend my time focusing on the good and embarking on the Beautiful Voyager.

Postpartum Anxiety & Postpartum Depression: Five Differences I Experienced

Note: After Stephanie and I did our QA about her postpartum anxiety last week, I got a great followup text from a reader who said, "I still don't understand what postpartum anxiety is, exactly. I want to know how it's different from postpartum depression because it's a new term to people, I think. And maybe hard to distinguish." I was super thankful for this feedback and brought it to Stephanie, who generously agreed to dig back in to her experiences with both and try to outline how they differ from each other. She explains it here from 5 different angles. - Meredith

photo by Stephanie Lucianovic

1. The Feeling of it : How Postpartum Anxiety Felt Different from Postpartum Depression

Postpartum Anxiety snuck up on me because I’ve always been anxious, always concerned about the things yet to be. As a kid, I worried about how I would protect my baby sister if bears blundered into my family’s cabin. Or how close my dad seemed to be driving to the edge of a Canadian mountain which seemed to have non-existent guardrails. Or how to save myself from a shark attack in a freshwater lake. In the middle of Michigan.

So when I started freaking out about child abductions, and cars jumping the curb to crash into me and the baby, or what would happen if I accidentally let go of the stroller and it rolled into the street, it all seemed perfectly normal to me. I mean, every parent worries about SIDS or their child dying in some horrible way or getting some extremely rare cancer at any age. But I worried about it ALL THE TIME.

That was the difference. I couldn’t turn it off.

I’d read one headline about a child abduction and my mind would leap and leap and leap: my child, abducted at this age, and raped, and murdered, and never found, and I’ll never get over it, and my marriage will fall apart, and I will die. Those were the racing thoughts that my therapist conditioned me to stop in their tracks so I didn’t spin out.

The Postpartum Depression just made me sad. It was a heavy, weighty, soul-crushing sadness. As it is with depression, no one thing made me sad as much as nothing made me feel happiness. I remember asking my husband, “Do you ever feel like you have nothing to look forward to for the rest of your life?” And his response was, “No, I look forward to this and you and us.” The “this” was our boys and their growing up. But I didn’t look forward to that because I just saw difficulty and torture and disappointment and tragedy.

I didn’t fully form suicidal thoughts along the lines of: “I want to kill myself by doing x, y, or z.” What I did feel was that I was such a misery of a mother that I was ruining my boys’ childhood and they would be so much better without me around.

2. Timeline: Postpartum Anxiety Hit at a Different Time Than Postpartum Depression

In both cases, the Postpartum Anxiety hit me at six months. The Postpartum Depression snuck in when I weaned my second son at nine months. I also weaned my first son at nine months but at the time I didn’t think I had Postpartum Depression. However, looking at how it manifested with my second son, I probably did have with my first son. I was simply able to deal with it without even knowing I was dealing with it.

In both cases, I lost my appetite when I weaned. When you’re nursing and losing vats of calories through breastmilk, you have the hugest, most awesome appetite. Everything tastes amazing and you want to eat it all. When I weaned, that all stopped: I wasn’t hungry and nothing tasted amazing or even just okay.

When I felt a sort of ennui or heaviness during this period with my first baby, I was able to do something to make myself feel better. I was able to go on regular walks — either alone, with the baby, or with the baby and another friend and her baby — and I was able to go to a regular postpartum baby and mommy yoga class. This constant stimulus of exercise or social contact helped keep off that vague heaviness I was starting to feel but never truly recognized.

However, with the second son, I had far less flexibility to just go on a walk or go to a yoga class or see another mother because I had my first son’s schedule or needs to consider along with everything else. The depression then cascaded over me, completely unchecked.

The fog at stanford. photo by stephanie lucianovic.

3. Treatment: How I Treated Postpartum Anxiety Differently Than Postpartum Depression

With the first occurrence of Postpartum Anxiety, I eventually saw a therapist. I wanted medication, but I was still breastfeeding so my therapist was hesitant to jump into that right off the bat. She wanted to try a cognitive approach and see if it would work. If it didn’t, we would find meds that were safe for nursing. Her cognitive approach came in the form of sessions with her combined with snapping a rubber band on my wrist to stop the racing thoughts from spinning me out of control. Also, keeping my walks long and regular and remembering to breathe deeply.

It worked. Within three months, I felt more in control of those horrible thoughts. They still lurked (as they do even today), but I could move on and just leave them where they were without it melting me down where I stood. As I mentioned above, I probably (and inadvertently) handled the burgeoning depression.

With the second occurrence of Postpartum Anxiety, I used the tools my therapist had given me the first time around. It was harder to deal with the second bout, though, because once again, I didn’t recognize it when it hit. It’s possible that because so much about the second birth seemed much easier than the first time (the hospital stay, the breastfeeding, those initial days, the first pediatrician visit, my own vaginal recovery), I thought the anxiety would be non-existent. That it was emotion amplified by being a first-time mother.

But I was wrong. Some things might have been easier the second time around, but the anxiety wasn’t. It was still there and it was still huge. Once my husband recognized what was happening, then I realized it as well and could start to deal with it. This time, it took more than the rubber band, though.

Because going to the postpartum yoga was impossible to schedule, I actively sought out meditation and started using Headspace. 10 minutes of meditation a day was about all I felt I had time for, but it made a huge difference to me and for my anxiety.

Treating the Postpartum Depression was harder. I had come to the realization that even one glass of wine intensified my anxiety the following day, so I cut out alcohol. Alcohol is an appetite stimulant so losing that along with losing my regular appetite (post-weaning) meant that I started losing lots of weight. Too much.

I lost my baby weight and then I kept going. At one really dark point, I weighed less than I did in high school, and it scared the crap out of me because I felt that I wasn’t able to do anything about it. My clothes bagged and hung on me, and my friends told me I looked gaunt. Not only did I look gaunt but I felt gaunt everywhere on the inside. Just hollowed out.

Some idiots will say, “Oh, I’d take that weight loss!” to which I will say, “Will you take the crushing, closely suicidal misery that came with it? Because you can’t have my weight loss without that.”

There was nothing good about my weight loss.

There was nothing healthy about my weight loss.

At no point did I feel inclined to dash off to Anthropologie and buy a bunch of their ridiculous outfits that only look good on the tiny and the wee because you can only feel inclined to do that if you feel happy. And I did not.

My exterior weight loss was a physical manifestation of my interior horror.

Part of my self-therapy was to go on runs instead of walks. My walks are usually long to be effective, so a 30-minute run was better for everyone’s schedule. However, they were also “better” for weight loss. I was burning calories at both ends and I knew it. But the runs — the despised, painful, can’t-think-of-anything-during-this-run-other-than-how-much-I-fucking-hate-runs — were my only true relief. I needed those endorphins so desperately. I also needed to think about nothing other than the act of running.

One talisman I had on these runs was a special red iPod touch given to me by a dear friend. She had it inscribed “See Stephanie run. Run, Stephanie, run.”

It kept me going. It still keeps me going.

I am happy to say that I gained all that weight back. I gained all my happiness back.

They Need you. Photo by Sam Breach.

A major turning point was when my older son’s preschool teacher took me aside to tell me I looked really skinny. I sort of brushed her off by saying I was weaning and dealing with postpartum “issues.” She gave me my space. But on another day, she said to me, “Those boys do need you, Stephanie” and I broke down in tears. I cried in the car on the way home. I cry every time I tell that story. (I’m crying as I type this now.) Because it just hit me so hard right then. Not what was going on, because I KNEW by then what was going on, but what I needed to do to get myself better.

I needed to shower.

I needed to get dressed.

I needed to put on makeup.

I needed to run.

I needed to breathe.

I needed to breathe.

I needed to breathe.

It’s different for everyone, but every one of those tiny things was a huge success for me. Every single one of those things meant I was taking that time for myself. And that was incredibly important. NOT selfish. Important. Lifesaving.

It’s like that whole airplane thing where you put on your own oxygen mask before helping others: I had to take care of myself before I could take care of others.

But before I did anything else, I had to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it. Without talking, there was no acknowledgement and no help or treatment.

4. The Lifting: Postpartum Anxiety's Departure

For me, the Postpartum Anxiety seemed to dissipate around nine months when the Depression ate it up. I think I still had intense flashes of the anxiety while also dealing with the depression but the depression seemed to black hole everything else around it so it’s hard for me to know.

It’s much harder for me to pinpoint when the depression finally lifted. I know it was gone by the time my second son had his first birthday but it might have just vanished the month before. I think I got to the point when I finally could tell that every day was a little bit better than the last. One day I woke up and it was truly gone.

I was very close to going back to the therapist and getting medication when the relief started to peep in the cracks. I still have anxiety and I still deal with it, albeit as a now-larger presence in my life.

5. Awareness: Talking about Postpartum Anxiety versus Postpartum Depression 

Mostly, I find that people know what Postpartum Depression is but they don’t know that Postpartum Anxiety exists until they go through it or know someone who goes through it.

I don’t have an explanation why this is other than people seem to accept that Postpartum Depression — cuted up with a verbal hair bow and fat cheeks as “Baby Blues” — is something that “sometimes” happens to “some” people. But it’s shunted away from polite society as something “we just don’t talk about because it’s rather unseemly.”

That kind of head-in-sand, bullshit attitude is out-of-touch, ignorant, and deadly. It’s also that attitude that is making damn sure we don’t know a whole lot about Postpartum Anxiety. And that we fail to recognize out-of-control anxious thoughts as something far more serious than just the stress of being a new parent. As something that needs to be acknowledged, investigated, called to carpet, and treated.

In some ways, Postpartum Anxiety is more insidious than Postpartum Depression because it looks like, walks like, and talks like regular anxiety amplified by a life-changing event.

But both need to be dragged into the light to stop the suffering.

Last Word:

Stephanie, Henry, and Arthur

Going through the Postpartum Anxiety and Depression helped me recognize my anxiety for what it is and probably for what it has always been.

I am not afraid of medication and I do take Ativan when I need it.

I also run, do yoga, and am taking a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction class at Stanford, which has been another game-changer for my life.

However, I will not be afraid or ashamed about going back to therapy or taking a daily medication if the need arises.

My family and I deserve my best self and if my best self needs more help: Bring. It. On.

Stephanie has been a writer and editor for fifteen years, during which time she wrote a non-fiction narrative on the secret lives of picky eaters (Perigee 2012) and been a contributor to The New York Times, Motherlode, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, CNN's Eatocracy, Previously.TV, The Hairpin, The Atlantic Wire, and Avidly/LA Review of Books. Stephanie has also developed cookbooks for William-Sonoma, worked on a TV show with Jacques Pepin, and been known to compose cheese-based Christmas carols on the fly while mongering in one of San Francisco's stinkiest cheese shops. 

She lives in Menlo Park with her two cats, two boys, and her math professor husband.

Postpartum Anxiety: Stephanie Lucianovic's Story

Stephanie and Sir Arthur (or Cricket for short)

Stephanie Lucianovic and I first met a long, long time ago. I was working on a food magazine called CHOW. She was a recipe tester and writer, new to San Francisco. I loved how she mixed sardonic humor with insight about food and pop culture (hers is a familiar voice to fans of Television Without Pity). 

Stephanie wrote about her experiences with postpartum anxiety back in 2013 when she was still in the midst of it (and before the depression set in).  I wanted to ask her some questions about the experience. It's more widespread than you might realize...

MA: Did you know anything about postpartum anxiety before you were diagnosed with it?

SL: No. I knew about postpartum depression, but being told by a therapist that my racing thoughts and constant catastrophizing about my new baby was because of anxiety amplified by the postpartum stew I was in was completely new to me. 

I was really (am still) annoyed that people talk so much about postpartum depression but not about postpartum anxiety. Because of this dearth of discussion, people going through it do not necessarily realize they are dealing with something real and treatable.

MA: What was the most confusing part of your experience? The most surprising? 

SL: The most confusing part was trying to see a therapist. I tried to go through my health insurance company but they — of course — are a complete mess with most things but mental health services in particular. I couldn’t even call the regular access line to learn about which professionals near me took my insurance. I had to be given some completely other phone number to call and start that entire call, jab numbers, wait, jab more numbers, get a real person, explain wait, etc. process all over again. It’s not like it’s news that the health insurance industry treats mental health like some backdoor enterprise but it was demoralizing to have it confirmed in such a ridiculous way.

The most surprising part was that postpartum anxiety existed. And also that breastfeeding doesn’t ward it off or prevent it from happening, which seems to be a thing breastfeeding advocates like to trumpet.

MA: All told, how long did your postpartum anxiety last?

SL: About nine months, which is when I weaned. With my first son, I assume that’s when my postpartum depression set in but I didn’t realize it because I was making sure to get out, go for walks, go to postpartum yoga, be around other new mothers, etc. With my second son, I was managing two kids’ very different schedules, so I couldn’t just do whatever I wanted and therefore felt my postpartum depression much more keenly and disastrously. So for that second time, my postpartum anxiety went nine months but then the postpartum depression was with me for longer. It was almost a year before I felt that it had lifted.

MA: This question comes from a discussion we had about the topic. One of the first things I had to learn about worrying is that it wasn't helping me get things done. In other words, I wasn't better at my job, etc, for worrying. In what ways do you agree or disagree? What (if anything) do you think anxiety has brought to your life? 

SL: I have always been a worrier. This has just been who I am. My parents called me the family “worrywart,” and I’ve grown up accepting that it’s part of me. I used to think that worrying was my way of preparing myself for how I would deal with the catastrophic. Like, that I had to think through the horrible events since I knew I was the only one who would then be prepared to deal with them while everyone else fell apart.

Stephanie's book on picky eating -- check it out

To some respect, worrying does/did help me get things done. I was never late with a paper in college because the impending deadline gave me so much anxiety and the same goes for every freelance writing or editing assignment I’ve ever had. Ditto when I worked in publishing and treated our various deadlines as, you know, REAL deadlines. I’ll never forget when I was twisting over whether Editorial was going to get the catalog copy finished on time and my managing editor said, “Bless her, she thinks deadlines actually matter around here!”

The best thing that happened to me was when my agent (for my book) once said to me, “Deadlines slip, print dates are moved” when I was stressing out whether or not I’d finish the manuscript on time. I did finish it on time — even a week early — but I put myself and my family through such hell during that writing time because I was so anxious that I wouldn’t make the deadline.

So, yes, anxiety has made me “productive” but all that worrying is a horrible way to live.

And yet: I know that being a picky eater is connect to being an anxious person and if I hadn’t been a picky eater for 27 years, I wouldn’t have turned into someone who adores food as much as I do now. I wouldn’t have written my first book about it.

Also, if I hadn’t been so anxious, I wouldn’t have consistently pursued the things that relieved my anxiety (running, hiking, yoga, and meditation) which now do more for me than just relieve my anxiety. For instance, if I’m blocked on a work-in-progress, I’ve gotten better (but not perfect) at backing away from it. Instead of banging my head on the keyboard, trying to beat it out of myself I go on a run or I meditate. Quite frequently, the block I was experiencing releases during one of those times. Other times meditation, hikes, or runs actually inspire new projects.

To some respects, I could say that having anxiety that needs to be managed has a direct line to being more creative and a better writer. It’s a bit like how my asthma makes me healthier because I run.

I have asthma—> Asthma is helped by lung strengthening —> Running (exercise) strengthens your lungs —> I run —> I am overall healthier because I run

MA: What do you wish people most knew about postpartum anxiety?

SL: That it’s real. That it happens. And it needs to be acknowledged, brought out into the open and talked about as much as we talk about retightening our freaking kegel muscles after giving birth. 

People do not need to suffer in silence or think that what they are going through is an inability to handle being a parent.

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this info, Stephanie! I definitely want to revisit some of these topics with you again in the future.