The thoughts rush. You're pulled further and further down into the dark. The panic rises, and before you know it, you've been caught by it, swept into a spiral you didn't see coming. A downward one. An evil one.
I know this spiral. I'm in one right now, as I write this.
I'm waiting for a decision that sits outside my control. Something needs to be resolved, and I don't yet know how to think about it. It's an unclear time, and unclear times carry worry like a river carries silt, you don't choose to pick it up, it just comes.
Long nights
For a long time, those dark periods lasted considerably longer than they do now. The thoughts escalated fast, and I had no real way of stepping back from them. They felt like truth. They felt like me. And the loss of control itself created a kind of panic, which the brain then responded to by projecting even more alarming thoughts. A loop. A spiral feeding itself.
Something shifted, though. Not overnight, and not because I read the right book. It started when I began exploring the idea that a human being isn't one single, unified thing, that we're built from different parts.
Old philosophy
According to Old Norse tradition, humans are not "created." We are assembled.
The tradition, as I interpret it, describes something like eight parts:
Lík — the body. The physical form. The word itself translates roughly to "dead body" or "corpse," which makes sense when you remember that the logs the gods found were dead wood. Without the other parts, the body is just matter waiting to be animated.
Ǫnd — the breath of life. The breath that makes the difference between a log and a living being.
Óð — the intellect. The mind, wit, and inspiration. Our capacity to reason and to be moved by ideas.
Hugr — our personality. Thoughts, emotions, conscience, courage, and will. Your ongoing inner dialogue, the constant chatter of the mind.
Minni — our memory. Our ancestors may have understood memory as extending beyond the individual, the accumulated experience of those who came before us, living on through us.
Hamr — the form. The outward shape and the way we interact with the world through speech, sight, and hearing. Hamr is how we show up in the world.
Fylgja — the guardian spirit. Our essence, often appearing in animal form and reflecting our character. The fylgja can show up in dreams, signal things to come, or appear as an omen. It walks alongside us whether we notice it or not.
Hamingja — luck. A spirit of fortune that follows a person and a family. It carries our natural strengths, our inherited resilience, and the accumulated good (or hard-won) fortune of those who came before. When a family member dies, their hamingja passes on within the family line. It's also possible, in the old understanding, to borrow a friend's hamingja when you need it.
The point
The point isn't to memorize a list. The point is what happened when I sat with this.
For me, understanding myself as built from separate parts, not one indivisible thing, created distance. And distance was exactly what I needed from my thoughts. Because if hugr, the part that thinks, worries, spins narratives, is just one part of a larger whole, then a thought is not the totality of who I am. It's a thought. It belongs to one room in a much bigger house.
That shift, from "I am anxious" to "my hugr is producing anxiety right now", sounds small. It isn't. It's the difference between being swept away by a river and standing on the bank, watching it flow past.
The tools
The brain is an incredibly powerful tool. It can spin out of control, project images that create bodily sensations, tightness in the chest, a pit in the stomach, dizziness. The loss of control creates panic, and the panic generates more thoughts to justify the panic. The spiral is underway before you've even noticed you're in it.
So what helped?
Nothing dramatic. I started writing the thoughts down.
I think what happens when you force thoughts into written words is that you have to clarify them. You can't write a vague dread, you have to decide what it is, at least approximately. And once it's on paper, the brain seems to let go. It doesn't have to keep holding the thought, because it's stored now, externally, visibly, in a form you can look at.
Once the thought is written, you can meet it without judgment. You can simply acknowledge it exists. Sit with it. Watch it fade. Or often discover what it's actually about, which is frequently not what it first pretended to be.
A simple exercise that's helped me: ask why five times.
You feel something. Write it down. Then ask: Why do I feel that? Write your answer. Then ask why again. Repeat five times. You'd be surprised how often the real source is nothing like what the first wave of emotion suggested it was.
It is tough
I'll be honest, I have a hard time with uncertainty. Especially when something is beyond my control. I'm sitting in that exact kind of situation right now. The pen is my friend in these moments. It gives perspective. It reveals that the problems and decisions are rarely as enormous as I've made them in my head.
And yes, you can write on your phone. But I believe there's an advantage to pen and paper. Writing by hand is drawing words. It creates a different kind of presence, a slower tempo, and that tempo is useful for this purpose. So keep paper and a pen close. Practice often.
Here's the thing, though: you don't learn to swim in a storm. Start when the waters are calm. Practice writing out your thoughts when things are fine, so the habit is there when they aren't. Keep it simple. Often, just getting the thoughts out is enough, and after the storm has passed this time, you usually don't need the notes again. At least, that's been my experience. You won't need a dedicated notebook.
You won't be free from racing thoughts and worry. I'm not, and I'm not trying to sell you that. But you can learn to handle them. You can learn to stand on the bank.
The anchor
My friend Ulrika and I wanted an anchor for all of this, a physical reminder. Something tangible you can hold when the spiral catches you.
In older times, according to tradition, cone-shaped objects were used to capture evil spirits. The opening drew the spirit in and held it. Whether or not you take that literally, the metaphor is striking: sometimes you are the one who's been captured. Caught in a cone of your own spiraling thoughts.
So we made a candle holder with that same cone shape. A quiet object you can place somewhere visible. When things feel heavy, when the thoughts are loud, it's there to remind you: you may have been caught in an evil spiral. But a cone that captures also has an opening. There is a way out. The spiral isn't permanent. This too shall pass.
Light a candle. Pick up a pen. Start writing.
Have you found your tool?