Sarah Wilson, Author at Sarah Wilson

Interrupt anxiety with gratitude

November 6, 2018January 12, 2017 by Sarah Wilson

I caught up with Danielle LaPorte the other day. I wanted to ask her a bit about anxiety. She gets it. She writes about it.

I’ve followed her White Hot Truths for a while. And her career in the self-help-of-the-brutal-variety realm. (Note: Danielle tours Australia next month, with special guest Clare Bowditch. Details, and a ticket giveaway, below). A while back she dropped one of her “truth bombs”:

Interrupt anxiety with gratitude

I like this. I’ve dug around on the topic of late. Alex Korb writes in The Grateful Brain, ‘Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli.’ Literally, you can’t be grateful and anxious at the same time. You can, thus, derail your anxiety by being grateful. Chuck a bomb under it!

On top of this, research shows gratitude stimulates the hypothalamus, a part of the brain that regulates anxiety.

Korb adds that the brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias – it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. ‘So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for.’

And thusly interrupting anxiety even more.

I asked Danielle a little more about her anxious thinking.

Me: Why do we get anxious?

DLP: Because every time anxiety shows up, it’s our psyche’s way of saying, “Knock knock, I’ve got something to show you about yourself that you really should see.”

Me: How do you cope with it?

Always telling people to quit sugar? Now you can get paid for it…

April 25, 2018January 10, 2017 by Sarah Wilson

Hey, you’re probably one of those people who tells their mates and family about the I Quit Sugar 8-Week Program rather a lot. Maybe you’re a personal trainer or nutritionist and recommend it to your clients? And perhaps you’ve thought, “I should be getting commission for this!”. We’ve thought the same and my crew over … Read more

Here’s the beauty products I pack when I travel…

April 22, 2018December 14, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

This year I’ve travelled a lot. And, in fact, for the past three years I’ve lived mostly in transit. And so my “beauty regime” in general is a simple and mobile affair.

My travel case. This is everything I use, daily. All of it. Even when not travelling.

A big bunch of you ask me via the socials to share what such a regime looks like and today I’m obliging.

Previously when I’ve done beauty posts The Folk Who Make The Products That I Use have reached out to offer a discount to you guys. I figured I’d do this again, in time for Christmas. Please be aware, however, that the recommendations are genuine – I purchased all products myself and sought discounts for you later. Cool?

PS catch up on my advertising and sponsorship policy.

How I pack my travel beauty kit

I travel very light and this has informed how I “do” beauty in general (since I live light anyway).

As a general rule, I work with beauty products with the least number of ingredients, preferably just the one.
I don’t fall for “organic” or “natural” labelling. “Organic” can mean only a few of the ingredients were grown and produced organically, not all. You can learn more about this here.
You can also learn about what to look out for in beauty products. And how to chose a toxin-free sunscreen.
I work with concentrated products – extra strong formulas only requiring small amounts, thus requiring small packaging.
I work with stuff that’s multi-purposeful – jojoba oil for cleansing, moisturising, facial scrub and hair control, for instance.
I transfer bulk stuff (eg shampoo) into travel bottles that I reuse (I avoid buying travel-size bottles as such…because it’s not a great use of packaging).
Everything in my kit can go carry-on (ie is under 100ml), as this is how I often travel.
I don’t carry body moisturiser…If things get dry, I use some olive or coconut oil from Air BnB kitchens, etc. At home, I do the same (with my own).
As an aside, I use a travel alarm clock. This one above is my second in 21 years. They last a looooong time. I NEVER sleep with my mobile near me.

How is the state of your heart, in this breath?

April 25, 2018December 8, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

I ask, “How are you?”.

“Busy”. “Flat out”. “So much going on.” That’s what I get back.

We might be busy. But busy is a choice of mindset, if you think about it.

It’s funny, busy-ness is what creates our aching need for more self-care and a deep desire to live a life we actually want. And yet, it’s also the the thing that prevents us from having this life.

Or put simply: we are too busy to live. Which is just craziness!

There’s also this. When I ask how you are, I’m not asking if you’re busy or not. The satiating, more connecting answer is a true description of where you are at, behind the busyness. The real you that’s always there, regardless of how much activity you’ve chosen to sign up for.

I read that Arabic for “How are you?” is Kayf haal-ik? In Persian it’s Haal-e shomaa chetoreh?

Which translates as,

“How is the state of your heart, in this breath?”

Do we need a 30-hour work week? Let’s talk about it seriously.

April 25, 2018December 1, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

How about this for an idea? A mandated 30-hour work week? Recently in The Guardian leading UK social policy voice Anna Coote presented the idea as something that makes sense from many angles – social, environmental and economic.

And yet we resist the idea. What are we all waiting for?

Technology and automation was meant to see us work less. So why are we working more? Why aren’t we making the call and pulling back from being so ‘busy’?

Me, I think it’s because we’re all waiting for someone to tell us we can. I’ve talked about the importance of creating our own boundaries many times before – we can’t wait for someone to lay out the red carpet for us. The world doesn’t work like this anymore.

But I do wonder if it’s time this critical matter (for our ‘busy-ness is making us sad and sick) might need to be mandated. If ‘someone else’ needs to step in in this instance.

Leonard Cohen: The yearning at your core

April 25, 2018November 29, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

Leonard Cohen is a man who lived with inner anguish, but did so gallantly. He celebrated the melancholy of life. He planted the truth of our existence (we die, my friends!) before us without apology. He wrestled with all this, but, again, without apology.

In the wake of his recent passing, you might like to catch up on how he took five years (unapologetically) to write Hallelujah.

And to revisit his beautiful line about how we have to become the ocean to avoid being seasick.

The New Yorker published a heart-soaring longread about Cohen and his brave confrontation of darkness recently. I liked lots in it. But this bit stuck with me:

“Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said…

“He wanted to reach ‘inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists’.”

The line is perfectly evocative. All six cohorts share the same desperate, grasping and well-meaning pain. All search for love and come up with… death.

My favourite longreads (for your weekend-reading pleasure)

April 25, 2018November 24, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

Earlier in the week I shared how I longread. I flagged why it is such an important practice for our frazzled brains.

Today, I give you my list of favourite sources for finding long things to read that enrich my mind, make my heart soar, enhance my understanding of the world, while also drawing me in nice and close and focused and away from our terribly toggling world.

By way of a nice launchpad, my mate Katharine Viner, Editor-in-Chief of the the Guardian worldwide, wrote about the value of considered writing for keeping us true to truth in an incredibly rewarding longread a few months back (click on the hyperlink a few words back!), just before we met up in London during my last trip. So we chatted about the notion robustly, particularly in relation to the future of good journalism (pivotal to longreads). I quote Kath:

“My belief is that what distinguishes good journalism from poor journalism is labour: the journalism that people value the most is that for which they can tell someone has put in a lot of work – where they can feel the effort that has been expended on their behalf, over tasks big or small, important or entertaining. It is the reverse of so-called “churnalism”, the endless recycling of other people’s stories for clicks.”

I, too, believe that this is part of the importance of longreading to the human psyche. We relish demonstrations of effort expended. It reminds us we’re here for a reason. It rallies us to be more than our deadline.

Anyway,

A list of my longreads:

The Scientific American. I subscribe to their newsletter and buy digital copies of select issues. Many of their articles are free through their newsletter, however. This one on how we make sense of time was a recent favourite.

The Guardian. I follow their various sections on Facebook. I follow their Long Read section on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and their weekly email here.

This is how I do my longreads

April 25, 2018November 22, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

Much of where we are feeling we’re going wrong lies in the speed at which we are moving, talking, toggling and…reading. I’ve shared one of my favourite takes on this, by David Malouf writing in the Quarterly Essay not so long ago.

Malouf suggests:

We are moving at a speed that’s not conducive to discerning thought.

We can’t keep up. We’re frazzled. We’re missing out on good, deep, mindful learnings. I agree and love Malouf’s way of presenting this idea.

Do you, like me, find it hard to longread? Which is to say, do you find it hard to read long, mindful articles that have been crafted carefully and go in deep, thus requiring more words and focus than a clickbait-y grab? Yes?

I’ve realised the importance of ensuring I do in fact longread on a regular basis. In part to train my brain into more discerning thinking.

This is how I do my longreads:

* I subscribe to and follow various channels specialising in considered reads on social media and via newsletter.

* I save them. I do this in a rudimentary way. I email them to myself (from Facebook or Twitter or email newsletter) and keep in a mail folder.

* I set aside time once a week to read. For a good hour or two. I make a big pot of tea. It’s a lovely ritual.

To be a full person, you have to let nothing happen

April 25, 2018November 17, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

There was a lovely response to my I have my freedom today because nothing really happened post a few weeks back. Nicely, this pierced my radar – an interview comedian Louis C.K. did on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

He discusses the same theme. Of being OK with nothing happening. He refers to our smartphone habit – how we grab for it when we’re anxious, sad, unsettled.

“You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, is the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person.

Because underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty — forever empty. That knowledge that it’s all for nothing and that you’re alone. It’s down there.”

Bloody hell, yeah. My God, we’re losing our bravery don’t you think? The empty forever is there. We are all alone. And we die.

We don’t wish to have mindful conversations about this fear that we run from. We just want to keep toggling and distracting and hoping that we can connect and find worth in an Instagram notification or a Facebook reply or a Tinder swipe-right.

A really bizarre trick for drinking coffee when you have hormone issues!

April 25, 2018November 15, 2016 by Sarah Wilson

My mate Kate Callaghan is a nutritionist, personal trainer and author, specialising in hormone healing and fertility. Today I’ve asked her to share a trick she told me about recently for those of us who have hormone derangement, but who love coffee. It’s a common quandary…and it would appear Kate has a solution…

Over to you, Kate…

To begin, is coffee good for us?

When it comes to supporting hormone health and fertility, it’s not something I recommend. The caffeine can prod your adrenal glands to release cortisol, your stress hormone, which signals to your brain to step things up a notch into “fight or flight” mode. This simultaneously gets you out of “rest, digest and reproduce” mode, and can lead to dwindling sex hormone production. Not only is this bad news for fertility, but can have other negative consequences, including menstrual irregularities, skin and gut issues, mood swings and low libido.

On the other hand, coffee has some quite well-known health benefits, including:

Improved insulin sensitivity (meaning reduced risk of diabetes and PCOS)
Reduced risk of liver disease (when consumed in moderation)
Improved memory and brain function
Increased ability to burn fat
Great source of antioxidants

[Sarahs add this: The upshot, pay attention to what your body is telling you. If you get jittery and jumpy from coffee, back off for a few days. Your adrenals are telling you they’re overloaded. Also, if you find yourself craving it and unable to go a day without, also back off. Give your body a chance to recalibrate.]

But Kate adds even more…

The weirdest coffee balancing tip ever

Fortunately, there is a way to get the best of both worlds – to enjoy your coffee without negatively affecting your