Anxiety – the “Handmaiden of Creativity”?

If you are a friend of mine on FaceBook, then you already know that I was pretty freaked out yesterday. It had to do with my need to take four hour-long sessions from my standard Fear Not retreat and turn them into two thirty-minute sessions and one 45 minute session. Can you say slash and burn? I was trying so hard to delete delete delete. But with each passing hour, I became more and more anxious.

Nice, eh? Fear, worry, and anxiety AS I’m studying God’s Word re: His sovereignty, goodness, and immanence. True irony. (And a true reflection of just how far I still have to go in life’s sanctifying journey.)

Anyway … people were great and prayed for me and I did finally stop my efforts, print out my notes, and try to entrust it all to the Lord. But I am still (appropriately, I think) nervous about my event tomorrow because I just don’t know when I’ve ever spoken for only thirty minutes on anything (!). More or less something that I have ninety minutes of content just itching to pour out of me. (As always, your prayers would be appreciated.)

But all of that is not the reason for this post. The real reason I wanted to write a quick post was to direct your attention to a recent Time magazine article that I read on my flights out today:

I know you can’t read the entire article unless you’re an online subscriber, so let me give you just a few of the notes I took from it:

– “Anxiety is the handmaiden of creativity.” T.S. Eliot

– “Anxiety feels like no friend.”

– “Before I go on, I’m a nervous wreck. But I feel more comfortable being uncomfortable.” Richard Lewis, comedian

– “In just the right amounts, the hormones that drive anxiety can be powerful stimulants, arousing the senses to function at their sharpest. Psychologists are familiar with a curve that elegantly captures the relationship between stress and performance. It’s a bell shaped line that steadily climbs as the tension and worry that accompany a performance rise in lockstep with the quality of that performance. The peak of that arc—where the systems are clicking, the senses are alert and we recall with perfect clarity everything we’ve learned—is precisely where seasoned performers learn to hop off.”

– “The actress Sarah Bernhardt once told a young protegee who claimed not to have stage fright, ‘Don’t worry. It comes with talent.'”

– “The problem is [our bodies] aren’t able to distinguish between a jungle full of killer cats and a conference room full of nothing but other people.”

– “The fight-or-flight response, with its surging cortisol and respiratory and cardiovascular hysteria, leaves little room for learning.”

And my favorite line (taken from the subsequent Dr. Oz essay entitled, “Easy Does It”):

“One easy strategy to reduce anxiety in social and professional situations is to arrive for an event or a meeting five minutes early. Being the first to show up rather than the last can help you avoid that sense we all get that everyone’s looking at us as we enter (though usually people are doing nothing of the kind).”

Interesting, eh? Not the biblical encouragement I hope to give the ladies tomorrow … but still very interesting, I think.

Hope you have a great weekend!

G’nite and God bless,
Tara B.

PS
Have you seen this very, very, very sorry apology? I’m glad the Seven A’s of Confession don’t require all that or we’d be sunk.