Tame Your Anxiety Read online

  This impulse was demonstrated in monkeys by a landmark study at Cambridge University. Researchers trained monkeys to do a task in exchange for a spinach leaf. After a few days, the researchers suddenly switched to a bigger reward—a sip of juice. The monkeys’ dopamine soared because sugar meets caloric needs more than spinach. The researchers continued to reward with juice, and after four days, the monkeys had no dopamine response. They literally took the juice for granted. The brain saves its dopamine for new information about rewards. Once you expect a reward, there’s no new information and thus no dopamine. The monkeys’ new expectations came from new dopamine pathways built in the first four days.

  This study has an amazing twist because the researchers switched from juice back to spinach. The monkeys flew into a rage and threw the spinach back at the hand that fed them. They were provoked by the loss of a reward that didn’t trigger their dopamine when they had it, and in fact were perfectly content with a week earlier. They now saw the world through the lens of new expectations, even thought they could not consciously articulate those expectations.

  Humans experience the same paradox. We see the world through the lens of our dopamine past. When the world falls short of our expectations, we can surge with cortisol, even in the midst of a fine life. We’re always eager for another dopamine surge because our brain evolved to seek it. Without it, we feel like something is missing.

  Philosophers call this the “hedonic treadmill.” You may feel like you are on a treadmill, never getting ahead and always at risk of falling behind. You have probably been taught to blame “our society” for the treadmill. That explanation leaves you feeling powerless and aggrieved, which is not good for you. You will start feeling powerful when you understand your own operating mammalian system.

  The three-step taming tool can reap new rewards, but someday you may habituate to those rewards. The juice will stop exciting you, yet the risk of losing the juice fills you with fear. This chapter offers some tools for taming that paradox and finding new juice. Then it helps you master those tools throughout the life transitions that tend to magnify your ups and downs.

  Habituation and Anxiety

  If you were thirsty in the desert, the sight of a distant waterhole would fill you with joy. But in your life today, endless running water doesn’t make you happy. It can even make you anxious as you ponder threats to your water. This conundrum is easier to manage when you remember the useful purpose of habituation. Our ancestors survived because their brains focused on unmet needs. In a world of scarcity, unmet needs are obvious and pressing. To understand that, imagine you’re on a camping trip. At first, the novelty of the surroundings triggers your dopamine joy. But soon you are hungry, cold, and tired, so you focus on the next step toward relieving your most urgent discomfort. Each time you relieve a discomfort, you feel good. The more uncomfortable you are, the easier it is to find a way to feel better.

  After the camping trip, your physical needs are more easily met. Now you have to find other needs to meet in order to feel good. That challenge is complicated by your myelinated pathways. They trigger expectations about good feelings, yet the good feelings somehow fail to come. If you don’t understand myelination and habituation, you keep trying the same things, and failing to get the desired happiness. You decide that something is wrong with the world.

  And to make life harder still, serotonin and oxytocin habituate too.

  Habituation and Social Rewards

  Your oxytocin surges when that special someone notices you, but if that person becomes a regular part of your life, the surge stops. Your brain stops seeing that person as new information. And with your needs met, you don’t have that joy of meeting an unmet need. The point is not that you should have affairs. The point is that you should understand oxytocin. You can value the steady drip of oxytocin in your daily life instead of risking everything for one big spurt. And you can stimulate more oxytocin by building new trust bonds that are not based on romance.

  It’s the same with serotonin. You got a big spurt when you won the talent show, but soon the applause is over. The serotonin stops, even though you are still the person who won the talent show. You still get a drip when you think about it, but your brain evolved to crave another spurt. It expects to find it in ways that worked before, so you can end up investing a lot of energy in a quest for applause. It’s easy to sneer when others do this, but it’s useful to recognize your own longing for serotonin. Perhaps you stimulate it with a quest for a big promotion. Once you get the big promotion, your brain habituates, and it takes a new source of social recognition to stimulate it. But losing the great job is always possible, and your cortisol flows when you think about that. So you end up suffering over a job that doesn’t make you happy.

  Even if you discovered a new planet, your inner mammal would be on this treadmill. At first, you’d be thrilled each morning when you remembered your planet, but in a short time, the thrill would mysteriously disappear. Your brain would look for ways to get it back, and it would seem like you need to discover another planet. You start seeing up-and-coming astronomers as survival threats, despite your good intentions.

  To complicate life further, we often have to sacrifice one happy chemical to get more of another. Spending time at the office may get you the serotonin-boosting promotion but cost you oxytocin at home. When you stay home, however, you miss the serotonin you got at work. Or you may have the opposite wiring: you get oxytocin at work from a sense of belonging with coworkers, and you get serotonin at home where you’re treated like you’re special. However you’re wired, uncomfortable trade-offs are part of life. Your promotion may cost you the acceptance of your coworkers, so your oxytocin goes down as your serotonin goes up. You can grieve the loss of oxytocin, or you can enjoy the serotonin and design new oxytocin steps. It’s your choice.

  You can say we shouldn’t have to choose. You can say everyone should applaud everyone else all the time. But it’s just not realistic. Your coworkers are mammals. Your loved ones are mammals. You are a mammal too.

  A gazelle constantly faces uncomfortable trade-offs between the herd and greener pastures. When you face uncomfortable trade-offs, it helps to know that your brain is designed to make those choices. All mammals do it.

  Habituation and Addiction

  The first time you ate a brownie, it was the best brownie you ever had. That surge of joy built a pathway that motivates you to seek brownies, but if you eat another brownie tomorrow, it is no longer the best you’ve ever had. You miss that “best-ever” feeling and look for a way to get it back.

  Addiction is widely seen as a quest for that first high. It’s hard to get that with a brain that habituates to good things. But you still expect it, because your brain got wired by past experience. So if one brownie doesn’t trigger it, you may think a second brownie is needed.

  Extra-large reward circuits trigger extra-large motivation. For example, the rewards you experienced in adolescence were easily myelinated, making it easy to keep expecting a reward even if it keeps disappointing you. Another example is any reward you experienced in a moment of threat. Your brain prioritizes anything that relieves threats. So whatever relieved your threatened feelings in adolescence built your biggest reward pathways. In time, habituation limits the reward feeling, but the pathways remain.

  You also build an extra-large reward circuit if you expose yourself to an unnatural reward, because it is more rewarding than anything you can get naturally. For example, cocaine gives you a bigger jolt of dopamine than you could get from daily life. Heroin supplies more endorphin than you get from daily life. Pornography triggers more chemistry than real life. But your brain habituates to even the extra-large input of artificial rewards, which motivates you to seek even more. It’s hard to get excited about natural rewards as a result. Extra-large neural pathways make it feel like the artificial reward is good for your survival, even when it obviously is not.

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sp; Our brain is designed to look for the best return on its efforts. Addiction is a pathway that promises a big reward for your efforts. The promise is disappointed, but the circuit remains, motivating more focus on that reward. The solution is to build new pathways to expect new rewards. This is not easy when the old pathway got a boost from artificial rewards, adolescence, and the relief of pain. But with repetition, a new pathway will build.

  Some people say intoxication is natural because monkeys imbibe when they have the chance. This is false, and it’s easy to see why with a close look at alcohol in nature. Fruit produces alcohol when it’s past its prime. Animals dislike the taste and avoid the fruit, so alcohol protects animals from eating rotten fruit. But when food is scarce, hunger will drive an animal to eat it anyway. The animal gets too tipsy to keep eating, which again limits consumption of rotten fruit. Animals do not try to get tipsy, and they would not survive for long if they did. Alcohol-seeking animals would quickly be weeded out of the gene pool.

  So why are we told that animals seek alcohol? One reason is that monkeys steal mai tais from vacationers at tropical resorts. Many monkeys have been caught chugging on video. But monkeys did not evolve in a world of resort mai tais. They evolved in a world where sugar was a huge reward because calories were hard to come by. A monkey would have to spend a lot of time chewing green leaves to get the energy in a cocktail, so its brain sees the cocktail as a big reward.

  The myth of party animals was reinforced by rat studies purporting to show that rats prefer alcohol to water. Of course the rat’s brain is good at detecting the sugar in the alcohol. Pampered lab rats never have to deal with the consequences of intoxication. This creates the illusion that intoxication is desirable in nature when the reality is quite the opposite.

  When the Party’s Over

  What happens when the thing you love stops feeling good?

  It feels like a blast of cortisol.

  Even when you’re perfectly safe, you feel threatened when a good feeling ends because happy chemicals mask the stresses of daily life. When the mask falls and those stresses return to your awareness, it’s easy to believe you are actually threatened. And it’s easy to rush for more of your familiar reward, even though its effect is disappointing. For example, imagine a gambler who longs for the familiar thrill. One day at the casino, the gambler isn’t feeling the thrill, so they rush into bigger stakes. The more they seek feelings that mask reality, the worse their reality gets, and the more motivated they are to mask it.

  We all long for the thrill of happy chemicals because they mask cortisol. The more safe ways you know to seek them, the more you protect yourself from harmful ways to seek them. But in that moment when your old thrill is gone, alternatives may not sound appealing. Cortisol motivates you to do something fast. What can you do?

  Sit with the bad feeling for one minute. This valuable skill teaches your brain that the bad feeling doesn’t actually kill you. Each time you face the dragon, you build the circuit that trusts your power against the dragon. Each time you run from the dragon, you build the circuit that fears the dragon. Stop running and the dragon will start to seem tamer.

  Our happy chemicals are not designed to surge all the time. They are designed to droop after they surge, and we are designed to live with the droop. A monkey’s dopamine droops after it finally gets the mango it was climbing toward. Without that excitement, the monkey is more aware of other things going on around it. But it will not manufacture threats, because its cortex isn’t big enough. It will not rush for another mango to mask the bad feeling of a manufactured threat. It will rest and digest for a moment and then choose a step toward an unmet need. You can call it their neutral gear.

  When your happy chemicals droop, it helps to think of this as your neutral gear. It protects you from overreacting to the sudden inrush of reality after pleasure subsides. Neutral is natural, not a crisis. Neutral frees you to define your next need and your next step.

  If you were a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, finding berries would have thrilled you with dopamine. If you were told about the berries from the start, you would have anticipated the excitement through weeks of trudging through harsh terrain. If a time-travel machine brought that pioneer to a modern supermarket, they’d be ecstatic. Yet supermarkets don’t thrill us today because the reward is already expected.

  Hope at Last

  When old rewards lose their thrill, how can you replace them in healthy ways?

  An interesting solution is presented in Csikszentmihalyi’s book, Flow. He uses the example of a piece of music that lifts your mood when you’re down. If you listened to that music all the time, it would eventually lose that effect. Now how can you lift your mood?

  Music stimulates dopamine because your brain is constantly anticipating the next sound and feeling rewarded when it finds an input that fits what it anticipated. Each match stimulates a drip of dopamine, and then you move on to the next match and the next dopamine drip. Music that is too familiar doesn’t trigger much dopamine because sound flows effortlessly into an old pathway without the seek-and-find effort. Music that is too unfamiliar doesn’t trigger much dopamine because you can’t make successful predictions. The sweet spot between familiar and unfamiliar makes music feel good. Now you have a dilemma because the music you enjoy will eventually become too familiar. So if you want to feel good, invest some time in unfamiliar music to the point where it becomes predictable, but not too predictable. Start now so you will have that pleasure by the time an old pleasure wears out. You may not be in the mood for this today since you still enjoy your old favorites. And you may not be in the mood for it when your pleasure is gone and anxiety makes it hard to focus on the unfamiliar. That’s why this effective tool often goes unused.

  This tool works for much more than music. Many of life’s pleasures work the same way. For example, a sport may not be fun the first time you play, and a craft may be frustrating the first time you try it. Great pleasure can be found in skills and social rituals that do not feel good at first. That’s because our cortex is a pattern-matching engine. Experience wires in patterns, and when you find a new input that matches a stored pattern, dopamine is your reward. Bigger patterns bring bigger dopamine rewards.

  You can stay in the sweet spot if you keep wiring in new patterns. This strategy can enhance rewards in all areas of life. Start building new career skills before you hate your job. Start cooking new foods before boredom leads you to overeat. Start building new social bonds before you get bitter about the old bonds.

  I am not saying you should queue up new lovers to be ready when an old romance fades. It bears repeating that long-term relationships have advantages. You have someone who knows who you are when you barely remember yourself. Long-term relationships are easier to sustain when you manage your own droop instead of blaming it on the other person.

  You can cultivate new pleasures instead of limiting yourself to primal pleasures. You can manage the “been-there/done-that” feeling instead of blaming it on your friends, your boss, or your leaders.

  Life Cycle Anxiety

  Anxiety is often blamed on the stage of life one is in, from childhood insecurities to teen angst, to college stress, career transition, parenting woes, empty nest syndrome, retirement, and aging. A whole life of anxiety can result if you take this view. Instead, you can tame anxiety by looking at the life cycle from the mammal brain’s perspective.

  Existential Angst

  Death is an abstraction, so animals don’t think about it. When you attach a human cortex to a mammalian limbic system, you get a brain that can terrorize itself with awareness of its own mortality. Our brain urgently strives for survival with the knowledge that it will fail someday. We don’t know what will kill us, so we never know if we are safe.

  The brain tries to ease this terror by creating something that will survive. Procreation was nature’s way of doing that. Animals aren’t consciously promotin
g the survival of their genes, but their brain makes them feel good when they do that. We have inherited a brain that makes us feel good when we promote the survival of our unique individual essence. Before the age of birth control, children were your primary legacy, because you had little energy left for other things after you provided for them. If you were lucky enough to reach middle age, you saw grandchildren carrying on your traditions. That stimulates the good feeling of survival, which eases existential angst. And if you had more energy, you created more things that would survive, whether hand-made tools or granite temples.

  In the age of birth control, we can make decisions about where to invest our energy. But today, for one reason or another, few people have the comfort of watching grandchildren carry on their traditions. Thus, we are more eager to create other things that survive. Whether it’s a work of art, an institution, children, or your legendary chili recipe, creating something immortal helps ease mortal fears. Throughout human history, people have made colossal sacrifices to build a legacy.

  But it’s complicated, because every threat to your creation now feels like a survival threat. Any criticism of your art, your grandchildren, or your chili triggers life-or-death feelings. And you believe it’s a real threat because you don’t understand your natural urge to leave a legacy.

  Death had a big presence for most of human history because more people died younger and at home. Today we strive to avoid the inevitable. We direct our anxiety at the health care system without acknowledging the existential fear that drives it. The more energy you direct into your legacy, the less you waste on anxiety.

  The legacy urge has tremendous motivating power, but we often overlook it because it’s nonverbal. Animals can help us understand the power of the urge to promote one’s unique individual essence. Male chimpanzees are only interested in females that are actively fertile. This only happens once in five years because lactation for each newborn continues for four years. Male chimps invest five years struggling with other males in order to be in a position of strength at the right moment. Conscious knowledge of biology is not required, because the mammal brain rewards behaviors that build its legacy. (Female chimps are equally motivated to promote their legacy; they jockey with other females for resources that promote the survival of their young.)