Finding Joy Even with Anxiety and Depression

I recently watched the interviews between the Dahli Lama and Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu, both great spiritual leaders in their 80s who’ve personally experienced decades of tragedy and horrific injustice brought upon their people. 

And yet! They both literally bubble over with joy, love, laughter and kindness. 

How do they do this? How are they not jaded, depressed and anxious from the suffering they’ve witnessed, but instead shine with a deep authentic joy? 

One experiment in the documentary gave a great insight into how. 

The Dahli Lama challenged a neuroscientist who was doing brain scans of people with anxiety and depression to also study the brains of peaceful people if he really wanted to understand the mechanisms of these emotions. 

So they brought in a bunch of Tibetan monks who had strong meditation practices along with a group of people who had no meditation practice.

They told all participants they would apply a short electric shock while in the MRI scan, let them first feel the shock before they entered the scan, and explained they would make a high pitched tone 10 seconds before the shock was administered. 

For the non-meditators the MRI machine showed that all of the pain centres in their brain fired as soon as the high pitched tone was made (meaning they started feeling pain before the actual pain was applied), but for the monks their brain patterns stayed the same when the tone was made and the pain centres only fired when the electric shock was applied. 

After the short electric shock stopped the non-meditators' pain centres continued to fire (meaning they felt the pain of remembering the pain even after it passed), whereas the monks' brains went back to neutral almost immediately. 

So the non-meditators experienced three times the amount of suffering as the meditators even though they experienced the same thing. Why? Because the meditators had cultivated the skill and strength to come back to the present and settle their nervous system (inner peace). 

The non-meditators got caught in the suffering of anticipating pain before it even happened as well as the continued suffering of re-experiencing pain after it ended. 

It’s really hard to be happy and joyful if we can’t be present in our life but instead spend so much energy worrying about the future and re-living the past! 

So much of the work I do with clients (and have done on myself) actually revolves around these two traps. 

Anxiety, worry, catastrophizing, and unhealthy protection patterns come from the part of us that’s feeling the pain of what might come before it even happens. 

Depression, unworthiness, despair and overwhelm come from the parts of us that continue to feel the pain of the past even though it’s over. 

In fact, many of the post traumatic stress symptoms are defined as the nervous system responding as though it’s still in the trauma even though that traumatic experience is over. 

So how do we get out of these traps? How do we suffer less and create more space for peace and joy in our life?

The Dahli Lama and Desmond Tutu give us some answers. 

First, they both said happiness is an inside job and comes from cultivating inner peace regardless of what’s happening in the world. That means learning how to tune inwards and settle your nervous system before, after and amidst chaos, tragedy and pain. 

The Dahli Lama does it through meditation, Desmond Tutu through prayer, but there are many ways to connect inward and settle such as walks in nature, yoga, journaling, tapping, breath practices and more. 

Second, it takes persistence and practice to create inner peace

They both said going inward, connecting to your heart and settling yourself into a more peaceful place is like working out a muscle. Sometimes it’s hard, and they too have struggled with it, but creating a regular inner peace practice has made them both tremendously strong leaders in our world… and adorably joyful beacons of love. 

If you need simple practices to help you settle and get out of the traps of anxiety and depression I can support you in private sessions or through the online course I created that allows you to practice at home many of the tools I use in my sessions.