Quotes from Sarah Wilson

We have an original anxiety that stems from feeling we're missing something, that there's more to life, that we need to know where and how we connect with life. But to sit with our true selves causes another anxiety, a lonely, exposed anxiety. Then, if we flee this sitting with ourselves, we encounter the anxiety of, well, knowing that we're fleeing ourselves and truth. It's

To be anxious wasn't shameful, it was a high calling. It was to be . . . more receptive to the true nature of things than everyone else. It was to be the person who saw with sharper eyes and felt with more active skin.

Irish poet David Whyte, pausing after a complex thought, or a hoary quandary, looking out to the room of devotees who flock to his workshops around the world, and asking, "But what is the more beautiful question?" And we are immediately reminded that there is always a more beautiful question that should be asked. I've heard David explain that asking the more beautiful question (invariably the courageous one) delivers us the answer we seek.

As Nietzsche said, when we have a why we can handle any how.

Technology freed us up . . . to imprison us further. It's created the imperative to go faster, to take on more ideas, and to juggle more.

Insomnia isn't really to do with not being able to sleep; it's about not having given ourselves a chance to think.

Serotonin relays messages related to mood, sexual desire and function, appetite, sleep, memory, learning and social behaviour. The crude theory is that when we don't have enough serotonin, the information doesn't get through.

Part of the deal with treating Hashimoto's was that I had to stop exercising. I could walk, the doctors said, but extremely slowly.

Walking and hiking does this. Cooking does, too. The witchy, grandmotherly type of cooking where you prepare things from scratch and you treat it as a hobby, not a chore to be rushed through. Fermenting vegetables gets me back in sync. Yoga works. Hot and slow and controlled by breath, breaking down to our bone-heavy pace.

Live somewhere slow. Zen blogger Leo Babauta moved to Hawaii to get away from the distraction that is city life. Novelist Pico Iyer moved from Manhattan to rural Japan, 'in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event...Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place'.

According to a 2010 report in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology, even getting out into nature for five minutes at a stretch is enough to give your self-esteem a substantial upgrade. And know this: walking near water seemed to have the biggest effect.

book out fifteen minutes either side of every one of her appointments. "I use it to reflect on what just happened," she says. "It gives me the space to view what I need to do next.

I also don't have much memory of going to the counsellor who told me I was anxious. Actually, this is a common theme across all of my anxious episodes - very hazy recollections of every day details, like dates and locations, but sharp-as-tack memories of the theories and ruminations that accompanied the episodes. Anyone else experience the same?

I get Weekend Panic, although less and less these days. Weekend Panic is when you think you should be doing bigger things, farther out of town, all perfectly planned ahead. And the fact that it's Saturday morning and a whole heap of nothing is ahead of you sends you into a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) spin.

I am not my sickness; I have a condition that can wander all lonely and cloudlike into view from time to time. I (the whole me) can choose to sit back and witness the clouds, let them be, let them pass.

As Anne Frank once wrote, "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Am I really mentally ill? Disordered? Defective? Or am I just weak of character and just not trying hard enough?

To everyone I'm just the girl who talks too much and tries too hard, when really I'm just trying to quiet this battle in my mind for the hour.

You could say we've been in a maintenance phase for decades, if not centuries. But now things have gotten destructive, as they have before, and we need to step up from our comfortable lull – our acedia – go to our edge and serve.

We emerged into human-hood walking in nature. Our human brain evolved because we got upright and walked. Our sentience and awareness – the stunning and special stuff that sets us apart in the animal kingdom – evolved to the rhythms of walking and in response to the patterns in nature we saw when we quit schlepping around on all fours and began looking upward. Hiking brings us back to our nature because hiking is how we know our nature.

I kept putting one foot in front of the other, drawing up energy from the earth through my feet, breathing in air that creates a cool, vibrant rhythm inside me until it becomes trance-like. Mountains take you to this point very effectively.

We can be in grief, we can itch, we can be overwhelmed, and we can choose to do something about it. We don't have to be rendered numb, asleep, despairing. I learned some time back that I could be fretting with anxiety and I could choose to live a great life.

When we ask, "How are you?" we are generally met with the equally flat "Not too bad." The whole thing becomes a go-nowhere "connection-lite" interaction. If I reached out and asked you right now, "How is the state of your heart, in this breath?" I'm already connected to you.

Wrestling with the darkness has left me more committed to this path than I could ever have imagined. And with one last beautiful question that guides me in my most personal moments: "What is left if we might lose it all?" My answer gets more beautiful by the hour: nature, humanity, and my wildly alive love of it all.