Book Review: Anxiety Hacks

Title: Anxiety Hacks

Author: Kate Hudson-Hall

Date: 2022

ISBN: 978-1-8382381-8-6

Quote: "[Y]ou are anxious all the time, and out of nowhere, your anxiety bursts like a volcano erupting, stopping you from leading that 'normal' life like everyone else."

This book is a keeper.

I personally do not have an anxiety disorder. This is a blog, so some insights I do have into anxiety may help blog readers who feel interested in the book. 

I'm pretty sure that, if I'd been able to communicate what I was feeling at the time, I would have been diagnosed as having an anxiety as a child. I "don't scare easy" as an adult. I did as a child. I attached irrational fears to all sorts of triggers that weren't real dangers, like the ugly-looking pictures in some of my picture books, or the look of public toilets. Fear of filthy seats or backed-up pipes in public toilets are rational, but I extrapolated from that into a fear of just looking at the fixtures. Probably the best thing about these childish fears was that I was also afraid of talking about them, so nobody tried to "help." This meant that eventually I could just tell myself that these phobias were pretty silly for a great big ten-year-old to have, and outgrow them, just like that. Consciously outgrowing fears is very empowering. The "help" available for anxiety in the 1960s was not empowering at all. 

Why did I even form those phobias? I felt deep emotional distress, and still do, during some chemical reactions I have. As an adult I feel the emotion as anger, because the basic sensation is a sense of evil and as an adult I'm responsible for doing something about it. I've even learned to give thanks when an anger attack tells me to find and clean up mold in the house.

I knew, though, that my anxiety attacks weren't typical when I had one...in a subway tunnel, where Hudson-Hall says she had hers and some of her patients had theirs. 

I was reacting to black mold blowing out of the heating-cooling vent in a pylon. Suddenly the pylon seemed like an evil alien in a science fiction movie. I moved away. I was waiting to change trains on Rosslyn Station, in Arlington, Virginia, so I walked about and explored a bit. From the train I'd noticed the glass-walled elevator in between the escalators and recognized it as one of those features of Washington's Metrorail system that are oddly fascinating, exciting, fun for some people because they trigger panic, vertigo, even seizures in other people. I walked toward the gate and saw that the escalators were among several sets of super-sized escalators that often cause vertigo and panic. Yes, I was physically ill enough that day that looking up the row of escalators gave me vertigo. Washingtonians quickly become accustomed to seeing tourists react to super-sized escalators and other neurological triggers in the Metrorail system. Since most Washingtonians used, in those days when the city was less crowded, to adore helping tourists, some goodhearted older woman tried to lead me out of the station. "No! I was only looking!I'm waiting for another train!" I'm not sure the woman believed me but, in those days, trains ran every six minutes, so the one I wanted came in and I ran for it. I felt anxiety, though I didn't show it, all the way to the job I was doing and told myself that the anxiety was "really" about starting a new long-term job. 

It wasn't. That sensation would return a few more times when I was riding Metro. It felt less like fear and more like anger as I grew older. It was completely irrational. It was all about the mold. From time to time the human drama that plays out on commuter trains gave me cause for righteous indignation, as when I saw a stationmaster built like Henry VIII threatening a couple of scrawny, sickly-looking tourists who were trying to explain that both of them had been advised to try to walk as far as they could and use a wheelchair when they needed to. What I felt as anger, that day, had a different emotiona quality than what I sometimes felt in reaction to a blast of live Stachybotrys. Both emotions were in the general category of anger, ,but they felt like completely different kinds of anger. 

Here's the difference, though, between my subway anxiety and Hudson-Hall's: When my anxiety attack happened, and later when the anger attacks happened, I felt the emotions. Anyone who'd been paying attention to me, as polite people usually don't do on Metrorail, would have noticed that I looked and sounded anxious, or angry, or some mixture of the two. Then I got off the train and the emotions went away. I didn't stay stuck in them. I didn't have nightmares about the subway all night. I didn't wake up thinking "What if I have another anxiety attack on the subway?" I knew that, if I did, it wouldn't make a bit of difference on my job. (Luckily, I liked the job.) The fact that the quirky architecture of Metrorail sometimes delighted me and sometimes intimidated me piqued my attention. I observed it with scientific detachment and concluded that what made the difference was the amount and activity of mold in the system. Living, growing mold is a threat to human health; though almost never successful, mold spores do attack the human body. I learned: garlic helps. When I ate a lot of garlic people thought I was Italian. Not a problem.

So why is it so hard for people who have not merely anxiety attacks, but anxiety disorders, to deal with the experience? What gets them stuck in anxiety> Nobody knows. Many don't want to know. It's possible to suppress the symptoms of anxiety. Alcohol, as Hudson-Hall explains at some length, is a temporary symptom-buster that quickly becomes part of the problem. Hudson-Hall does not discuss more specific medications that are prescribed for anxiety, but the same thing can happen with them. For her, she says, it's been enough to apply the principles of Positive Thinking, self-hypnosis, and very simple massage techniques, to be able to calm herself by massaging spots on her head and shoulders. 

Can these techniques help you, or an anxiety sufferer you know? Possibly. If they don't help, at least they can't hurt. If anxiety becomes a "chronic disorder" when it's caused by continual exposure to black mold or glyphosate or some other chemical trigger, these techniques can help while the person identifies and eliminates the physical cause of the disorder. If anxiety has become a habit because the person enjoys others' efforts to help, this book may distract the patient while others take a long-needed break from trying to help the patient. 

Hudson-Hall delivers a set of eight "hacksters." Each is a self-soothing technique combined with thought exercises about what the patient might do to replace anxiety-dsorder behaviors with brave behaviors. 

Full-length self-help books used to be padded with chapterson specific types of, say, anxiety if that was the topic. The idea was that readers would the benefit of any special experience the author had with, zy  anxiety about exams as distinct from anxiety about public speaking. Those specific chapters are notin this book. Applying Hudson-Halkl's advice to an individual's anxiety has to be done by the individual. A set of additional worksheets is available for the reader ysubg tgus book to reduce anxiety. 

If you are not the person for whom this book was written you may think its advice is trite, a mixture of general common sense and psychological boilerplate. That's probably just an indication that you don't have the disease Hudson-Hall has learned to treat.