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I chanced upon an article on Inner Peace in my StumbleUpon travels, and was caught by this concept. My recent deeply anxious state was pretty well the opposite of inner calm.

Now I awlays blame the intensity and my hair trigger  nature of my emotional response to the World as an underlying weakness and cause of some many problems.

For example, excessive emotions to females when young pushed them out of reach. I react to injustices with excessive anger, even if not expressed. Anxiety before playing in a tennis tournament severely limiting my ability. And so on.

Now I have always felt that my emotional signature was fairly will immutable. Indeed, it might well be.

But I have bought a few books that might help. Essentially, they are centred around the taming of the Ego.

The Ego, it seems, employs emotion to reinforce its behaviours and carry out its wishes.

The more you can calm it down, so that it is more rational, and less devisive, the calmer you are, and the more you will enjoy life.

It is certainly worth a try.

After a few days of food poisoning, I am back to health now, and now stable on the change of nutrition.

The food poisoning  knocked me for six, but I gained from it - it helped me kick out the deep level of chronic anixety I had become saturated in. Which in turn allowed my nutrition to operate properly, and most of all, to the focus onto something new. More of that later.

For now, I eat 3 meals a day, when I am hungry, with snacks if I want to eat a meal too early.

My  skin continues to smooth outover my whole body. Dry skin on my shins is gone. A long term nasty dry part ofone ear is completely healed.

I still have daily tension headaches, but if I do not get too stressed, I can think clearly - I do not get the fogginess that often accompanied them. This month has been the best month for relief from headaches in 15 years. That is pretty profound.

I am starting to get takeaways and eat out - trying not to be too wary about getting enough fat - most meals are lean these days, so something has to be added to replace the missing carbs.

I have steady energy levels throughout the day, but no great surge in energy yet. I’ve stopped waiting for this - let it happen if it does.

Mood is much much flatter and less excitable. That takes getting used to, but make life much less of a rollercoaster.

The loss of anxiety meant the loss of racing heart and other worrying feelings. Once again, the anxiety disguised itself as something plausibly physical.

Learning to realise that I am very much what I think.

Excuse the expletive, but such a swear word is lame by orders of magnitude to the impact of anxiety on my life and countless others.

After 3 days struggling with food poisoning, I believe that I am out of the other side. I am about 2 or 3 kilos lighter, and still very weak, but the little food I have eaten in the last 4 hours has stayed down.

But accompanying each micro meal was a wave of stomach cramping and light headedness - all thanks to my good old buddy, anxiety. This massively overreactive defence mechanism is way out of kilter. I know how to passify it, but it often takes hours or days, and in no sense I am ever in control of its departure.

The anxiety takes great pains to disguise itself. And to sustain itself. To lie in bed with a racing heart on many nights, even though so relaxed that I swiftly fall asleep is deeply frustrating. The anxiety is just keeping me on my guard. Other times, it is more obvious - just a tightness in my chest or stomach. Light headedness is another of it’s specialities.

It sustains itself in a viciously nasty catch 22 scenario :

• Something triggers anxiety in my subconscious - normally an overreaction, so inappropriate.
• My conscious mind does not like this feeling, of course, so the subconscious marks it as bad
• When the trigger is later simply anticipated, my subconscious gets anxious in advance - because of fear of the original anxiety symptoms it created in the first place!

But the anxiety is so blind and lumbering and stubborn. Before Christmas, as I suspect I wrote about, I had 6 days in a row of light headedness that felt like I had been blowing up balloons. It deteriated into a bed bound state that felt very much like I was dying. Intellectually, I could reason that it was quite probably my mind making me ill. But it was so enormously overwhelming that it deprived me of the energy needed to do this.

The consequence of having a hair trigger anxietal reactivity is that I spend not just a lot of time feeling crap, but a large proprtion of that time trying to work out if it is a real physical ailment I need to sort out or ‘just’ an inappropriate anxiety.

Part of the problem is apparently a poor feedback loop with the amygdala. Where reasoning does not get much leverage to calm down emotions. Worry cycles can set up, and cascade, it seems, into higher and higher levels of anxiety.

It reminds me of a chat I had with a man in a pub a few years back that rang ever so true with myself. He said that he had discovered a lump on his back. Until he went to the doctor and had it diagnosed as benign, his brain stressed minute by minute, obsessionally about the possibilities, such as cancer. As soon as his Doctor cleared him, he relaxed and got on with life.

Nice in the end.

Except that is not how it happened. As soon as he was cleared, the next worry in his stack of worries kicked straight in, the subconscious permanently malcontent - a worry stack is essentially never ending, even when it gets down to whether you chose the best restaurant for lunch on holiday - a truly unimportant matter.

Such was it with me today - as soon as I started feeling able to eat, my subconscious hit with me with a negative thought.

If this happens to you, try to see what has happened as quickly as you can. You might well be able to detect, as I feel I did, that your conscious mind neither generates or wishes this thought. You are a puppet to the whims of a beligerent child of a subconscious mind.

Which reminds me of a friend at school. He was super cool. And I was (and still am) controlled by massive emotions. He was gifted intellectually with a very calm set of emotions. I am gifted emotionally - in my artistic and empathic ways - but these are heavily outweighed by the burden of the negative emotional aspects. My emotions are highly overreactive. The degree of overreactivity is damaging when negative, and destabilising when positive. And makes judgements ever so slightly tricky.

For example, as a teenager, I was virtually incapable of having a meaningful relationship with a girl because I was emotionally overwhelmed by them. You are likely to have no idea at all what it was like.

Compare with my school friend. He married at age 17 without any worries. Yes, of course, he swiftly divorced, but just kept moving through life. He was recently director of personel for the John Lewis Partnership.

Sorry this entry has been rambling. A kind of get things off my chest moment.

The emotional hypersensitivity, coupled with a tendancy to worry, and obsess, was eventually likely to cause chronic anxiety. And chronic headaches. Knowing that you worry, much like knowing you get anxious only partly helps, because worry and anxiety are valuable emotions, when appropriate. An excessively emototional personality, even coupled with a logically sound mind regularly fail to work out when it is right to worry or be anxious.

But at the bottom of it all, to judge me by my emotional intensity, and not my morals and compassion is to totally misjudge me. I have to fight the effects of emotions and anxiety on an ongoing basis. I try to sustain good relationships with people - with many people - in spite of these burdens.

But I never chose to be like this.

That is the salient point.

And yes, I have spent countless hundreds of hours trying to figure out how to live a life less encumbered by such excesses of overload.

And one final point.

When I read that I should turn to God and take him into my life I get really irritated. If he is as described, and is all loving, and all powerful, watching over me, feeling every pain and discomfort, then why the bloody hell did he not give me a break, or tell me why he lumbered me so. 15 years of life in limbo because of headaches, struggling to find out why. If my Mum had some of God’s power, she would have sorted me out, as any rational being would. Along with the countless millions across the World in a worse state than me. Yes - I have talked to God many times. Not a bloody dickie bird in reply. I would only ever have done that if I had some kind of belief that he existed. But his total failure to act, as any non-existant entity must also fail finally turned me atheist.

Not so perfect a God after all.

You see, whilst I have spent the last 8 years out of full time employment because of my headaches, I have failed to contribute as much to society as I would have hoped. So this plight is not merely self pity. I have been miserable company on many occasions because of debilitating headaches - I suffer and those around me suffer. And headaches and anxiety and emotional overload are generally invisible. So I frequently suffer in silence. What kind of life is that?

So next time you see me smiling and happy, but being silly, then please try to understand me. It is a massive relief to be alive and healthy enough to be able to do so.

Postscript : To add insult to injury, when I get to bed, I cannot get properly to sleep for hours.Maybe 2 or 3 am. And I see each hour of the night on the clock face as I keep awaking. 3 days out of 5 where I have been awake every hour of the night. Not content with this, my friend decides to text me at 6.54 am. So my mobile phone beeps me awake. I go downstairs to switch it off and then have no hope of getting back to sleep. So Another day arrives and I feel crap. But at least my food poisoning is behind me. I feel crap but not ill.

I was just reading about the security measures needed in South Africa for the football World Cup next year. Sadly, an average of 50 people a day are killed in this country. They are gradually stamping down on crime and killings, although it is no small task of course.

But as I read this, I pictured a stereotypical rogue character arrested for suspected crime. You know the scene - a flagrant disrespect for the ‘law’, a flippant attitude, and a well honed ability to lie.

Yet the police are, at least in principle, bound to play fair when assessing potential crooks. So, not only do the crooks mostly get away with their anti-social behaviour, but then, when unfortunate enough to be caught, can hide behind lies, and the need of the legal system to obtain proof.

Is it any wonder, then, that some Police officers are less ‘correct’ in their methods? The ‘Life on Mars’ series of 1970’s police programmes hit on this. Was there much abhorrence amongst the viewers to the ‘mistreatment’ of crooks who regularly ‘mistreat’ their fellow man?

The crooks in this World are in a small minority, but cause staggeringly disproportionate damage and harm to the majority, mostly without any guilt or concern. For example, spam email costs enormous amounts of money to transmit across the World, clogs up servers and email inboxes, and serves only those who do not care one iota about this impact.

Diet is the wrong word. Yes - I am losing weight (about 8 pounds from my waist and backside in 6 weeks) - but that is not the reason for changing how I eat.

So I will describe it as a change of nutrition.

Had coffee with my sister on Saturday, and enjoyed it in spite of yet another dose of low energy and agitation (the latter most likely to be generalised anxiety). She said that I looked well - my skin especially.

Well, I felt crap, so I mostly ignored what she said. Sorry Carol!

Anyway, yesterday and today, I felt the skin on my face. Bloody hell - it was as smooth as a baby’s!! This side effect of the diet was totally unxpected. Quite how long it has been this good I do not know. Nor do I know why I did not notice it! I wash my face enough!

Now I can’t stop smoothing the skin by my eyes - silky smooth. And this is a heavily sun tanned 52 year old face!!

I spent the Winter writing not one, but 2 books. All about the Oriental game of Go.

At long last, they are available Worldwide on Amazon :

Learn Go

Games of Go

And I have a web site to accompany them :

www.learngo.co.uk

Now I will send copies to the American, Europoean and British Go Associations for reviews. I hope!

Many of those that know me are abundantly aware of my weaknesses. Whether it be an excessive proneness to injury, ineptness at football, overly childish sense of humour, proneness to tension headaches, and so on. Sadly, human being as it is, weaknesses are a common source of attack, so I tend to be ridiculed for my frailalties. Often, I agree this is justified. But, not always. And I hope that some restraint can be exercised in this direction when you read the following. Only then will it have the appropriate meaning.

I have been on my change of diet for 6 weeks now. Most days, I have problems - low energy, weakness, leg cramps. Without the signs of benefit for my headaches and low blood sugar, I would not keep going.

This morning was different. I awoke at 6am with a surge of energy that was way above normal for the period of this diet. Except that I then struggled to go back to sleep. But I did, at last, fall back to sleep. At least I think so. Because it seemed that as soon as I had done so, a fl, quiet all night, decided to buzz in my room. This happened a few times before I managed to release it from the room. And then sleep was beyond me.

So the very first energised day - one to treasure - is handicapped by headache and tiredness that accompany the early awakening.

So why am I telling you all this?

I do so because it elegantly illustrates (anecdotally of course)  the non existance of a benign and benevolant God. If God is there with me all the while, why on earth would he meaninglessly compromise a potential breakthrough day? Why give me energy, only to take it away because of a fly?

More likely, by orders of magnitude that God does not exist.

—

I thought more about this, and thought it appropriate to give a fuller picture of my life and flies. You see, I am one of those people who are adverse to swatting them. Many times, I have waited patiently to guide flies out of doors and windows. Some are so weak that I can literally carry them out, and they then fly to their freedom.

But many do not escape, and die a probably painful death of dehydration and exhaustion.

So did God really make these flies and then not help them seek an escape from the confines of my house rather than repeatedly fly into window glass?

Again, the non existance of a benign and benevolant God is the most plausible answer.