Streaming Anxiety

Streaming Anxiety

 

by Steven McCready (20/4/20)

 

Anxiety is a bastard. I’m sure for many of us, the lockdown has brought about periods of heightened stress, and I know friends whose mental health has been more challenging in these strange times. However, I feel lucky right now because, despite being told by the NHS to self-isolate for 12 weeks because I’m “at risk”, everything that normally gives me anxiety in life has been stepped down. Getting to work, being at work, having work to do, and doing work all make my body tense up with anxiety… so the news that I would be furloughed from work for two months on 80% salary was not difficult to hear. Not being allowed to go to the shops, no social commitments, and having time to do all the things I normally just dream of doing has felt like a weight being lifted from my chest. I mean, I do miss lifting weights from my chest, but press-ups will do for the time being. But it’s not all plain sailing for me and my anxiety in lockdown.

 

For years I thought I might have depression because of my struggle to find positivity in anything and the black hopelessness I saw in front of me, but it never quite seemed to fit. Unlike many friends who have opened up about depression in person, through blogs, or via their art, I have never found it difficult to motivate myself out of bed, and a lot of the symptoms they described seemed fundamentally different from my mental health experience. Still, I knew my mind was fighting something, and I eventually spoke to three different types of therapist. While all of them were helpful (I mean it really, really helps just to talk while someone listens), I took the most from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). Hopefully, the fact my therapist was Graham from The Jeremy Kyle Show had little to do with that, but he said things that clicked and even stay with me now, over 10 years later. I still wonder if some of the horrific stories he told about his behaviour with colleagues were real or just expertly designed to bring about a certain response from me. I mean, he was either AWFUL to work with or he was such a good therapist that he was willing for me to think poorly of him if it helped me get better. I guess I should make it clear that I didn’t appear on the Jeremy Kyle Show – I’m not one of the poor souls whose mental health issues have been exploited by that unforgivably horrible programme – but I worked for ITV who provided in-house staff services, including 6 hours of CBT with the inimitable Graham where appropriate. The coping strategies that he helped me learn made me stronger and far more capable of finding a way through hopelessness.

 

But life didn’t suddenly become the bouncing ball of dancing joy I had envisioned. I still felt like I was constantly fighting, defending myself from hidden enemies and poisonous environments, and I wondered where that fear was really coming from. I talked to friends and family, read articles, watched documentaries, but, while I found myself often nodding in recognition or solidarity, nothing convinced me that I had found my answer. It took a trip to Sainsbury’s (in simpler times) for me to realise why everything was a fight for me. It was an unexpected day off and I thought getting my shopping done on a quieter weekday would make me hate the experience less. I was wrong. I returned from an objectively uneventful shop with my jaw clenched so hard that I thought my teeth might shatter. That evening I got lockjaw. I was sitting watching a show (probably The Daily Show with Jon Stewart at the time), chewing on some tasty treats when my jaw just got stuck mid-mastication. I couldn’t close my mouth or even bring my teeth together, and as I tried, half choking on partially chewed food, the pain and fear kept escalating. After a mild and lonely panic attack I managed to extricate myself from that sticky mandibular situation with deep breathing and face massage. I lay on my bed wondering what the sweet fuck was going on, and then took to the internet like any modern citizen would. I felt like an enormous idiot. Even a quick search of what just happened to me brought up thousands of results referring to anxiety and the infamous fight or flight response.

 

Everything I read was so familiar that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t found it before. The memory of my first full-blown panic attack jumped into the front of my mind and the pieces of a life lived in anxiety started to fall into place. I remember being 10 years old and trying to pull my hair out while having some sort of anxious breakdown. I remember being 18 and helping my girlfriend at the time through a worrying panic attack, innately understanding what was happening to her but not noting why. I remember being in my late twenties at home for Christmas when crushing anxiety about the future brought about the worst panic attack I’ve ever experienced. I remember lying in my mother’s lap in the wake of that attack, so utterly exhausted and emotionally broken. I remember the faces of my family around me contorted with fear, confusion, and concern. I remember all of this and wonder… How the hell did I not figure this out sooner?

 

I realised I am anxious all the time. There are a few exceptions, but generally speaking I am anxious about everything and I have been since I was 10. I am anxious about my loved ones, money, health, making recipes exactly as instructed, being loved, cleaning my house, the environment, other people, all social gatherings, not being social enough, work, maintaining my bike, contributing to making the world a better place, my partner eating the snacks I bought before I get a chance to have some, going to the shops, and bin day just to offer a few examples…  I think the reason I struggled to identify anxiety as my problem was that it had been my default setting for every situation for so long that I couldn’t consider feeling any other way. Jaw clenched, shallow breathing, muscles tensed, adrenaline pumping at all times. This was life. Surely we all felt this way. I’ve been living in my sympathetic nervous system so consistently for such a long time that my parasympathetic nervous system simply went on extended leave. This was a powerful realisation. I could now start to find the things that helped me reduce or control my anxiety. I knew for a fact that I didn’t feel anxious when I was training so hard that my brain couldn’t think about anything other than the task at hand. Exercise and sports could be my escape. I knew that I didn’t feel anxious when I was lost in live heavy music (seeing High On Fire live at the Underworld in London was maybe the most free I’d ever felt). Music could be another escape. I knew that I didn’t feel anxious when I was watching an engrossing film or a good TV show. Film and television could be a third escape. Or so I thought.

 

Having improved my life with anxiety in so many ways, I didn’t foresee the problem it would manage to create with streaming services. It first started to creep in with Netflix as they slowly improved their film offering - remember when they really didn’t have many films at all… seems like a lifetime ago – and my watchlist began to grow. Initially, just a few things that I knew I would want to watch eventually. Later, all the interesting shows and films I came across. There was a moment when I should have realised that it was unhealthy for me: a film I’d had on my list for a couple of months no longer appeared in my watchlist. I had waited too long and now I couldn’t watch it. This called in to question the safety of all the items still saved to my list, so I anxiously started planning on how I could watch the survivors before it was too late. I knew that the list was growing at an unsustainable rate and I had to find a way of being more efficient. What if I started watching an episode of a show with breakfast? All I had to do was wake up 15 minutes earlier than usual and I could watch an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia with my muesli. What if I watched shows on my phone at lunch? I find socialising with colleagues pretty tough anyway. Maybe watching shows on the bus? But it didn’t work. The list continued to grow, and my free time felt ever fuller. Despite this, I continued to search and add more shows and films, throwing them on top of this teetering mass of entertainment. I had developed Netflix Watchlist Anxiety (NWA) and Compulsive Watchlist Addition (CWA) simultaneously and I saw no way out. My dreams were filled with thumbnails of shows and films I’d added to watch later: Beasts of No Nation, Archer, Breaking Bad, Over The Top. I think I even dreamt of Sly arm-wrestling Walter White at one stage, heavily sardonic commentary from H. Jon Benjamin drifting in from some unseen source. It felt ludicrous, after all I’d been through, that the thing keeping me up at night was whether or not a Jackie Chan film would still be available in the morning. All of the support my friends had offered to help me get through tough times, the incredible surrogate family my housemates in London became to help me deal with panic attacks, and here I was genuinely worried about entertainment for my free time. I had to draw a line and cancel my subscriptions to streaming services of any sort just to get my head right.

 

And life changed in many ways and I grew better at managing my anxiety, so I returned to some streaming services and revelled in being able to watch these shows I loved without anxiety. Bliss.

 

And then along came MUBI.

 

MUBI is a curated film streaming service that adds and removes one film every day. From the day the film is added, you have 1 month to watch. It focuses on arthouse, international, cult, and hidden gem sorts of films and is, on the face of it, what I’ve always wanted: access to challenging films from around the world. In fact, I have MUBI to thank for introducing me to one of my favourite films, Time of the Gypsies. However, and please don’t think I’m ungrateful here as I think it’s been a net positive in my life, MUBI IS A TIME PRESSURE HELL. It’s almost like someone expertly designed the thing that could torment me most. I love film, I am a completist, and I hate missing out. I can just imagine Mr. Mubi sat there, stroking his white pussy, concocting his evil plan: “Yes, yes. It’s perfect. Those faux intellectual not quite Gen X, not quite millennial types will love it and hate it in equal measure. But they won’t be able to stay away! Mwah hah hah. Mwah hahahahaah.” I’m sat here right now writing this nonsense, and all my brain is really thinking is if I should be watching Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman today because it’s my last chance. I go to bed and lay there thinking, “Is that Jean Cocteau film still on MUBI, or have I missed it?”. I anxiously wake in the night wondering if that interesting looking Brazilian film was leaving MUBI on the 22^nd or the 23^rd… Is there still time? I sit down to watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine on Netflix just to relax my mind while I have some tasty treats, and then my brain is like, “You could be watching Coffee and Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch right now. Stop wasting your time!” WILL IT EVER END?

 

Thankfully, yes. It will end as soon as I cancel my subscription (again). It’s good to know your limits. It’s good to take control even if it seems like something insignificant. I love a lot of the films I’ve watched on MUBI. I would recommend the service to friends. I will probably even subscribe again in the future. But the truth is that I can’t hack the feeling it gives me for long. The clenched jaw, the shallow breathing, the tensed muscles, and the surging adrenaline… all the signs that I’m ready for a fight, but all I’m contemplating is whether or not watching Sun in the Last Days of the Shogunate is how I should spend my afternoon on lockdown. Being stuck at home shouldn’t be so stressful.