Wax - Sane New World: Taming the Mind

Contents

Arriving in Britain from the United States in 1977, Ruby Wax began her acting career with the Royal Shakespeare Company. She went on to write and perform in her own hugely popular television programmes for the BBC and Channel 4 and was Script Editor on all series of Absolutely Fabulous. Recently she has obtained a Masters degree in Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy from Oxford University and spoke at TED Global. She has become the poster girl for mental illness in the UK.

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First published in Great Britain in 2013 by

Hodder & Stoughton

An Hachette UK company
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Copyright Ruby Wax 2013

The right of Ruby Wax to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

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A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 444 75576 3

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To Ed, Max, Marina and Maddy

This book is dedicated to my mind, which at one point left town, and to the rest of humanity, who perhaps at one time or another might have misplaced theirs. Though I personally have gone on a rollercoaster ride of depression for most of my adult life, this book is not exclusively for the depressed. I am one of the one in four who has mentally unravelled; this book is for the four in four. Its for everyone, because we all share the same equipment: we suffer, we laugh, we rage, we bitch, were all vulnerable, delicate creatures under our tough fronts.

In this book I am going to attempt to give a rough guide for where we (the human race) are at right now and offer some suggestions that might make our time on Earth a more joyful experience. Im not talking everyone in the jacuzzi joyful, Im talking about the almost blissful state you sometimes have when time stops, your body feels like its home and the volume of those internal critics in your mind lowers. I know those voices well and so many people I meet recognize this dictator barking orders in their minds, keeping them up at night with that tormenting I should have, I could have tape playing relentlessly.

Many of us suffer from the pressures in todays world that drive us from burnout to depression. We are slaves to our busy-ness with an insatiable drive for money, fame, more tweets you name it, we want it. The problem is, its only in the last 50 to 100 years that humans have lived with such abundance. Weve gone from scarcity (when we were probably somewhat normal and had appetites to match) to the limitless demands we have today. You could say that multi-tasking has driven us mad; like leaving too many windows open on your computer, eventually it will crash. We are simply not equipped for the 21st century. Its too hard, too fast, its too full of fear; we just dont have the bandwidth. Evolution did not prepare us for this. Its hard enough to keep up with whos bombing whom, so we have no room to understand our emotional landscapes; our hearts bleed because we hear of a beached whale while the next minute were baying for the blood of someone who stole the last shopping trolley.

The reason I decided to devote myself to this inward journey is because I wanted to find some shelter from the constant hurricanes of depression, which left me depleted and broken. Each episode got longer and deeper. I dont want to blame my parents but childrearing was not their specialty. Friends would come over and there my mother would be, perched on the lampshade, a vulture with a Viennese accent, waiting for someone to drop a crumb. When they did, she would swoop across the room screaming, Who brings cookies into a building? Everyone would run away terrified. It got much, much darker later but I am not going to talk about that here. My point is that this is the type of background that usually leads to a career as a comedian or a serial killer; I went for the comedy.

So, after some serious breakdowns, I decided to go back to school to study psychotherapy to figure out exactly what they were charging 80 an hour for. I used to leave my shrink knowing exactly who I was, until I got to the tube station and then Id forget again. Also, as I knew nothing about psychology, therapists could tell me anything, so how could I tell if they were any good? Once, when I was on the couch, I caught the shrink behind me eating a pastrami sandwich, mustard all over his face.

So I went to study psychotherapy. I got a library card and never discussed my previous life again. I thought, Lets give something back to the world (I probably didnt but its a good line). Ive noticed that many women like myself choose to study therapy when they meet the wild surf of menopause; the hormones dry up and they realize the chances are low they're ever going to be hit on again, so they find themselves wanting to care for other people or starting a rest home for stray cats.

A few years later, I decided to go further and learn about what I was really interested in: the brain. My thinking was, if I learnt how my own engine worked it might prevent me getting stuck in the middle of nowhere, shrieking for someone to come and fix me; I would provide my own AA service. Id be able to lasso this wild beast of a brain, stop it from churning away over the same ground, keeping me up at nights; worrying, rehashing, regretting and resenting.

After much research, I thought mindfulness might help me best as I had heard it gives you the ability to regulate your own mind. (I would say it saved my life but Ill get to that later in the book.) I decided to go straight to the horses mouth, to one of the founders of mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, Professor Mark Williams, who told me that unfortunately I would have to get into Oxford University in order to study it alongside neuroscience.

I scraped together some old school records and managed to excavate my one or two decent high school grades, but most of all I give great interview, so I got into that masters course. The other 14 students in my class were very brilliant and looked at me on day one as if they were having an encounter with a third kind; but God dammit, I was there.

So after many decades of agonizing investigation, a masters in mindfulness, a degree in psychotherapy and even a small taste of fame, here I am writing this manual on how to tame your mind.

Ill go into detail later but I want to mention one fact right away; the gold at the end of the rainbow is that YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND HOW YOU THINK. This is called neuroplasticity. Your genes, hormones, regions in the brain and early learning do not necessarily determine your fate.

Scientific evidence has shown that neurons (brain cells) can rewire and change patterns throughout your lifetime as a result of your experiences and how you think about them. So your thoughts affect the physiology of your brain and the physiology affects your thoughts.

Think about sex for a minute. Thats Ok, Ill wait. Once you get an inkling, a whole cascade of hormones is let loose in your body to get you ready to cha-cha. Sometimes its the other way around; youre minding your own business, for no reason a hormone switches on in your brain and suddenly your thinking goes X-rated.