What I Learned from Chris Martin and Dakota Johnson about mental health
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One of the most confounding things about clinical anxiety is that it will appear even when life is going well. So, here I am living in Italy—living my dream—and yet about ten days ago I started experiencing intense anxiety.
Without any precipitating factor, the typical symptoms appeared: tightness in the chest, nausea, and feeling off and disconnected.
Then I got a new symptom that I’ve never had before: I started throwing up.
Each time, I blamed it on something I ate, even though that didn’t really make sense.
After telling my husband that I somehow had gotten food poisoning for a third time, I went on to deliver a monologue which was so jacked up with anxiety about the collapse of the United States, decline of the value of the dollar, how it is going to lose its reserve currency status, and also how I’m unemployable because people hate women when they get older (despite having a successful Substack and book contract with Harper Collins) and that my husband was going to die before me leaving me all alone (he’s ten years older than me) and so on.
When we got to the end of the conversation, my husband said, I don’t think it was the salmon tartare that made you sick.
I knew he was right.
This was anxiety.
It’s not that none of my concerns were valid.
It’s that when find myself in one of these states, I descend into a doom loop, worrying about all the ways things could go terribly wrong in my life and the world generally to a degree that can be slightly unhinged. I fret about what is out of my control (so, everything). I imagine the worst-case scenario involving any issues I’m currently dealing with. I then start comparing myself to other people and wondering why I’m such a loser and they’re all so happy.
Yes, of course, logical me knows I’m not a loser. I also know everyone else isn’t super happy. But when you’re in an anxious state, reality is distorted.
I’ve learned that when I’m in that frame of mind, I have to get some perspective. There were two things that helped me this time in addition to my usual bag of tricks (journaling, meditation, exercise, therapy), and one of them was kind of shocking to me.
The first is sort of obvious. Every time I felt anxious, I went to the beach and watched the ocean, and then I didn’t feel anxious anymore. It’s kind of annoying how simple and obvious this is.
I didn’t invent this.
Haven’t we all heard that when you spend more time in nature, you’ll feel better, you’ll feel more grounded, and so on? It’s part of the reason I moved to this part of Italy.
So, spending time near the ocean has become an important tool for me to rely on.
But the thing that was shockingly helpful to me is that two famous people who I feel no particular connection to helped me see a life-long struggle in a radically different way.
One day, as I was spiraling, I remembered that I had seen an Instagram video from Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, about feeling depressed. He was sharing this after one of his four sold out concerts in Hong Kong where hundreds of thousands of fans had been cheering for him.
I re-watched the video, and then I googled to read more about Chris Martin and depression. It turns out he has been very open that it is an ongoing struggle for him. Following the end of his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow, which led to a year long depression, he told an interviewer: “There are still many days when I wake up and feel down, but this experience has given me extra tools to keep going.”
Some of the tools Martin shared in the video1 and the various articles I read include:
- Regular practice of TM (Transcendental Meditation)
- Listening to “Music for Psychedelic Therapy”2 by Jon Hopkins, who I learned has worked on various Coldplay albums. He also finds joy in listening to artist Chloe Qisha.
- Writing down all your thoughts for 12 minutes, then burning it (known as “free form writing” or “expressive writing”)
- Martin credited the Rumi poem “The Guest House”3 for giving him a new perspective following the end of his marriage to Gwyneth Paltrow.
While looking this up, I was also led to articles about Martin’s girlfriend, the actress Dakota Johnson (she is the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson and stepdaughter of Antonio Banderas) who has been very vocal about her struggles with depression and anxiety, which she says started when she was a teenager.
Johnson hasn’t talked as much about the tools she uses to combat her anxiety and depression but has said that Martin is a huge support when she is in these states. “I feel the most insane anxiety about our world and our planet,” she told an interviewer. “My brain moves at a million miles per minute. I have to do a lot of work to purge thoughts and emotions, and I am in a lot of therapy.”
While I immediately implemented many of Martin’s suggestions, without the perspective that even people like Chris Martin and Dakota Johnson get into these states I don’t know if using these tools would have been as helpful.
Something that happens when I spiral, and I notice when my friends are spiraling, is that we imagine that if we only had X, Y, or Z, we wouldn’t feel depressed or anxious. But as I looked at Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin, I realized they have everything I could ever possibly want, and they still have depression and anxiety.
I intellectually already get this. I know that it’s a lie that there’s something outside of us that’s going to bring us peace or whatever it is that we’re seeking. But when I am in an anxious state, it’s hard to access that wisdom.
What’s happening when I am in an anxious state is a full body immersion experience. It doesn’t make sense to any person who has not experienced clinical depression or anxiety. It’s not just happening in my mind. Seemingly every part of my body gets in on the action.
The first time I experienced what I would later learn was clinical anxiety was during my senior year of high school, long before anyone talked about things like anxiety or panic attacks.
It’s hard to explain what I was feeling, but essentially I was in a state of watching myself observing everything and everyone around me. I felt like a stranger in my own body. Whoever was doing the observing wasn’t really me.
Everything was both too vivid but a little blurry at the same time.
It was terrifying. I was sure I was losing my mind.
My mother took me to a therapist who explained it was common for these kinds of feelings to happen during a significant life change, and I was going through one of the biggest: leaving a small town in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I had spent my whole life to go away to college where I didn’t know a single person.
For some reason, all it took for me to get rid of the anxiety was hearing this from a professional. The fact that she was saying it was normal made it go away immediately.
Fast forward to my senior year in college (again staring down a big life change), and I had my first panic attack while driving on a busy highway. I ended up in the emergency room because I was sure I was dying. When I recounted this to my mother, she shared that she, too, had had a panic attack while driving and that she always had a Xanax in her purse just in case.
This information would have been useful to have sooner.
Anxiety and panic attacks are so mainstream now it’s hard to remember what a big deal it was when Tony Soprano had them, and audiences got a sense of what it felt like to have this terrifying experience.
I say a “sense” of what it feels like because unless you’ve had a panic attack or you have experienced clinical anxiety, there is just simply no way you could ever understand what it feels like. Worrying sometimes or even feeling anxious in a non-clinical way is nothing like an anxiety disorder. It’s like telling someone with cancer you know what chemo feels like because you’ve had the flu.
One of the most frustrating things about struggling with anxiety is that people try to reason with you and tell you that you have no cause to be anxious or that maybe you do have something to be anxious about but focus on the positive. Just relax.
I can’t stress how unhelpful this is.
My nervous system is on fire. I am not going to positive think my way out of this.
I am not going to relax.
My anxiety shows up when things are going badly or going well, which is fun. The only time it absolutely will not be present is in a crisis. It will wait until I feel I have weathered the crisis with aplomb and sucker punch me when I’m sure I’m in the clear.
This is how I came to develop a full-blown panic disorder in my mid-20s.
One day, I didn’t hear from my grandmother, who I spoke to every day, and when I called and didn’t get a response, I drove to her house, which was about 40 minutes away. When I got there, one of her friends was waiting for me (these things happened before cell phones) and said that my grandmother was in the emergency room. She had experienced heart failure.
My grandmother was the most important person in my life, and I was terrified.
I rushed to the emergency room. Thankfully, my grandmother was stabilized. But she had to undergo surgery to get a pacemaker. In the end, everything went well, and my grandmother was soon home and lived a long, healthy life.
About ten days later, I had the most massive panic attack I had ever had. Yes, I went to the emergency room again. This started a loop of living in constant fear of another panic attack, which then just created more panic attacks.
Ultimately, my doctor put me on an antidepressant, and I was one of the lucky ones: I stopped having panic attacks.
But I didn’t stop having anxiety.
My issue was definitely mitigated by the antidepressant, but it was hardly a cure. Now, the classic symptoms of anxiety were less likely to occur when things were going well and mostly only showed up when something really stressful happened (a death or breakup or something like that).
What I didn’t realize until recently, though, was that even when I am not experiencing the classic symptoms of anxiety, a lot of the issues that come and go for me, whether fatigue or TMJ, are also anxiety. Dr. John Sarno, one of the early leaders of the mind-body movement, called it the “symptom imperative.” This means that your symptom will find a way to express itself until you get to the root cause. Sarno believed the root cause was always repressed emotions.
I am totally bought into this idea, but I also think sometimes the root cause of anxiety is that some people feel the world more deeply than others. They are more affected when other people are suffering. I am one of those people. It seems like Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin are too.
The only thing we have control over in such situations is to learn how to manage the anxiety, which, as Chris Martin said, requires having the right tools. I’m grateful he shared his with the world, and that they reached me. I hope more famous people will follow his and Dakota Johnson’s lead and share their stories too, because it makes such a difference.
