All her life, Martha Beck had been anxious, but a few years ago she began to get really curious about anxiety. And curiosity, she wants us all to know, may just be the path out of paralysing, life-spoiling terror. During the pandemic, Beck – a bestselling author and life coach – started looking deeper into anxiety in order to help her clients. It was something she thought she knew about, having experienced it throughout her life, and over the years she had followed the standard advice: she had practised meditation for 30 years, and been on medication, but now Beck was starting to wonder if inner peace was as far as it went.
Instead of trying to control her anxiety, Beck started to befriend it: “I started treating myself like a frightened animal and doing for myself what we all instinctively know will calm a frightened animal.” Imagine, she says, “you found a freezing, dirty puppy on your doorstep, and you decided you wanted to help it. What would you do? Get down on its level, speak to it kindly and softly. Don’t try to explain to it what it needs to do next – it’s an animal. Allow it to be afraid while regarding it with compassion.” When she tried this on herself, Beck says she could “dramatically feel this shift in my psychology, my body and my brain”. And then, she says with a laugh, “I got into creativity and things got really weird.”
We’re speaking over Zoom, with Beck at home in Pennsylvania. One of her paintings, of the forest that surrounds her house, is on the wall behind her. The anxiety spiral, she decided, needed not just to be calmed, but to be replaced with something else: curiosity and creativity. She noticed, she writes in her new book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, a kind of “toggle effect between anxiety and creativity: when one is up and running, the other seems to go silent”.
Beck’s previous book, The Way of Integrity – which summed up her philosophy of achieving happiness through being true to yourself – was, she thought, “my farewell to self-help. The basic premise is that if you can find out your truth, whatever that is, and live according to it, you will not have any more psychological pain. And I stand by that. But after it was published, a lot of people said, ‘I’m living in total integrity, but I’m so scared all the time.’” It was the same for Beck. She knew her anxious thoughts were just that – a fear response gone awry in a moment that wasn’t actually dangerous – but merely knowing it wasn’t enough. She needed to get out of her mind.
She swapped an anxiety spiral for a creativity spiral, losing herself in drawing and painting, which she still makes time for every day, but she stresses that we shouldn’t stick to society’s idea of what “creative expression” entails. It could be making a sandwich or working out how to fix the car. “It’s anything that you create, whether that’s a dinner party or a doodle, or a conversation, or setting up a fort with your child. It doesn’t have to be high art, but it’s making something, and that will connect you with curiosity.” She became obsessed by her creative work. “What shocked me was the euphoria of it. It was much more powerful than the times when I have taken medication to stop anxiety.” She also noticed it in others who had embraced creativity, in the video workshops and online community she runs. “I haven’t been anxious for a couple of years now,” she says. “And the 60 years prior to that, I was always anxious.”
Beck is routinely described as “Oprah Winfrey’s life coach” – she first appeared on Winfrey’s TV show in 2000, and for a long time wrote advice for the presenter’s magazine. This is the second time I’ve spoken to Beck; since we first spoke many years ago, she has become something of a self-help superstar. This year, she has appeared on a run of high-profile podcasts. She must be pleased with the success she’s had? “I don’t care,” she says with a laugh. “I do not freakin’ care. You know what I care about today? The painting I’m doing. I’m obsessed with this painting, like I keep looking at it, I’ve got paint supplies everywhere. I got my watercolour palette right here.” She likes to practise the philosophy of non-attachment. While she says that if her new book “can help people feel good, my joy will be unbounded”, on a personal level she has no interest in how it will do. “It could totally fail, I don’t care. I’m not even looking – I’m interested in the next book.” She laughs. “Do not tell my publicist.”
It’s an understatement to say that Beck does not follow the script, but she stopped caring what people thought long ago. She was raised in Utah, in a large Mormon family, but left the church and wrote a book about surviving sexual abuse by her father, a prominent Mormon scholar. She swapped faith for rationality, went to Harvard where she collected degrees in sociology and became a lecturer, then – to the dismay of many big-brained people around her – abandoned her career in academia to become a life coach. She had married and had three children, but then she and her husband both came out as gay. Beck has been with her partner, Karen, for more than 20 years, and now they are in a “throuple” with another partner, the writer and podcaster Rowan Mangan (Beck and Mangan host a podcast together). Four years ago, at the age of 58, Beck became a mother again when Mangan had their daughter, Lila. “It’s amazing,” says Beck, beaming. “We have such a countercultural family.”
Karen fell in love with Mangan first. “[She] came to me and said, ‘I’m feeling so much love, I don’t know what this is.’ And I was like, ‘You’re in love. This is amazing.’ I really thought they would move into the master bedroom and I would go into the guest room. I looked for the fear and the anxiety and the jealousy, but there was nothing but joy. So all three of us hung out, and then we hung out some more, saying, ‘This is normal, right?’” she laughs. “Finally, we’re like, we’re all in love with each other. How does this even happen?”
It’s not like she went looking for a polyamorous relationship, she says; she knows it sounds wacky and outside the societal norm (though it is part of the culture for some Mormons – ironically for Beck, who abandoned her childhood religion). “I started to think, it’s not weird that I love my three kids – and now I have a fourth, and I love her too. People can accept that, but the idea that you can partner with more than one person at a time is just culturally unusual for us. But now I think about it, I’m like, how do people make it work with just two? That’s like a two-legged stool, there’s no stability there.” Of course they all get angry and frustrated at times, she says, but “what it amounts to is you’ve got two other people who say, ‘I’ve got your back.’”
Beck’s son Adam, who is in his 30s and has Down’s syndrome, also lives with them. “We’re just such an odd little bunch, out in the forest, and I live in a state of perpetual awe at the way things unfold. If I were to write a memoir about my entire life, I think it would be called ‘I did not see that coming’.”
It is often said that we live in the age of anxiety. Beck smiles and says, “I agree, but the Black Death must have been kind of difficult, and the second world war not so awesome. But what I think we have now is this incredible engine of information in the internet.” It’s not just the frightening or unsettling stories we see every day in the news, she says, it’s also the endless cruelty and hostility of people on social media and in forums. “There’s a tremendous amount of that zipping back and forth.”
We’re stuck in an age, she says, “where knowledge is not power. Attention is power, and people have monetised other people’s attention – and nothing gets higher levels of attention than fear. Even sex doesn’t hold a candle to fear. So it’s a very deliberate strategy to upset people more and more as they get numb to certain levels of expressed threat.” On a personal level, anxiety can make us feel “deep discontent, and you start accessing all your worst characteristics, and then you desperately look for a way to feel better”. It could be substances, it could be relationships or shouting at people on the internet. “You get angry and self-loathing, and it just goes on and on unless you stop it.”
On a societal level, Beck believes anxiety carries a lot of responsibility for “judgment, comparison. Polarisation is the biggest one.” Anxiety “makes us unkind [and] more likely to try to control other people, to tell stories about how they are not good, and how they’re not there to help you, they’re going to hurt you, and anything other than you is extremely ‘other’.” If Beck did have a flash of anxiety – rare for her these days – it was at the re-election of Donald Trump, who wields fear like a weapon. Trump’s alarming and theatrical pronouncements about the dangers of everything from the Democrats to migrants to climate scientists “sure gets the brain’s attention. The marketplace of fear out there is hard at work making other people scared, and I do think that is at an all-time high.” As a sociologist, “I was looking at the way the entire culture is feeding the spin of anxiety in all of us.”
We all know by now that anxiety gives us an evolutionary advantage. “If you’ve got 15 puppies and a cobra in the room, you want to pay attention to the cobra and get to the puppies later,” says Beck. “That means that we immediately preferentially pay attention to anything negative, and that starts this spin of anxiety. But what fires together, wires together.” Instead of defaulting to anxiety, Beck says it would be more helpful to rewire the brain to seek curiosity and creativity. “If you are continuously activating the mechanisms of creativity when you’re confronted with a situation, instead of the mechanisms of fear, you [start to] go to creativity instead of anxiety. Get rewired.”
Western capitalist society has made many of us feel that creative pursuits for their own sake (and our own sanity) are a waste of time when we should be being productive and making money. Beck started her creative obsession when she allocated a month to throw herself into it. She told herself it was research for her book, and therefore “I was able to fit it into [a] permission structure. At the end of the month, when I was supposed to finish the book, I couldn’t stop drawing, and I didn’t care about the book. Not at all.”
The reality for most of us is that we can’t devote our lives only to our creative passions – neither can Beck, who points out she’s the family breadwinner – but it’s about bringing them in when we can. And not just for individual gain. “It’s not running off to sit by yourself and be happy. It’s, ‘OK, now I’m thinking creatively, let me think of a way to clean up the oceans, a way to bring the carbon out of the air and reverse climate change,’” she says. “I do believe if you get a critical mass of people who are connected to resolving problems with kindness and creativity, and who have developed that in their brains, that the entire society could turn.” The death of capitalism? More equality and joy, less fear and selfishness? It sounds so radical. “It better be,” says Beck. (Her next book, she says, is about what a post-capitalist society might look like.)
What would she say to people who feel they have no passions, or creativity? “First, you’re probably exhausted – everything in our lifestyle leads to physical and psychological burnout. You’re not going to feel passionate if what you need is sleep. I used to try so hard to get people to resurrect their passions. They were just tired! Do whatever it takes to rest until you get up above minimum.” The idea of being swept away by a great passion is unhelpful; it will probably start as just a flicker. “You may be slightly curious, you know, about something like meteors, just random things. And then you might, from your bed, watch a show about hunting for meteorites. And then you might think, ‘Well, that sounds interesting. I’m going to get myself a metal detector.’ When people get rested and they have space, human curiosity is so adorable – we have ‘neoteny’, that thing that makes us childlike all our lives. You get your passion back, but first you get it as curiosity, and then you get connection, and it builds.”
Writing this book, and delving deep into anxiety, has been life-changing for Beck. “It was like being given this immense gift, just by deciding I don’t want to be scared all the time,” she says. “I just thought, I don’t think I have to be anxious any more.” A life without anxiety, she adds, “is not just OK, it’s euphoric”.