Tame Your Anxiety Read online

  For example, a gazelle does not always run when it sees a lion. It knows the difference between a lion on the prowl and a lion just passing through. A gazelle would rather keep eating than run from every potential threat signal. It needs to eat a lot of grass to survive. On the other hand, a little hunger is better than instant death. The gazelle brain is constantly taking in the evidence available to its senses. Those sensory inputs flow down the neural pathways it has. When inputs match past threats, electricity flows to the “on” switch of its cortisol, and the gazelle acts to relieve the cortisol. When the inputs do not match past threats, electricity keeps flowing to the reward of eating grass.

  Your brain is constantly responding to the world with neural pathways built from your past experience. Your pathways are similar to a gazelle’s in some ways and different in others. They are similar to those of other people in some ways but also unique. You have more power over your neural pathways when you understand them. You can blaze new trails in your brain to enjoy more good feelings and relieve more bad feelings.

  We humans often want to change ourselves. A gazelle never feels the need to change. It just accepts its neurochemical responses without judging them. Gazelles are not happy all the time the way you might think. Sometimes a gazelle sees its child get eaten alive. Sometimes it drinks at a waterhole next to the predator that ate its child. But a gazelle does not dream of disconnecting its internal alarm system. It honors the valuable survival information. It strives to turn it off the way nature intended: by escaping threats and seeking rewards.

  Life is different when you have a big spaghetti of extra neurons. Our big cortex allows us to anticipate future threats instead of just waiting until the threat is upon us. Predators don’t eat our babies because we anticipate threats in time to prevent them. But we end up feeling threatened a lot.

  If you tamed your anxiety the way a gazelle does, you would spend your day eating and reproducing, and ignore threats until they were about to get you. The flaw in this strategy is obvious to your big cortex. It is so skilled at anticipating threats that it even sees how today’s pleasures can cause tomorrow’s threats. We humans build neural pathways that anticipate future consequences instead of just focusing on immediate rewards and threats. These pathways shape our eating and reproductive behavior, leaving us with diets, grooming rituals, and PTA meetings that gazelles don’t have. They shape our threat perceptions, motivating an endless quest for “news.” But all that anticipating doesn’t relieve our sense of threat. On the contrary. When we succeed at taking action to relieve a potential threat, our cortex skillfully moves on to the next potential threat.

  Blazing a New Trail

  Anxiety is just a trail in your brain. It’s a neural pathway connecting an input pattern to your cortisol’s on switch. You have a lot of these pathways because you have a lot of experience with potential threats. But some of your pathways have grown huge because you’ve used them so often.

  Taming anxiety means blazing a new trail in your brain—a trail that leads to your happy chemicals instead of your threat chemicals. That is hard to do for many reasons. You don’t know how to build trails because your old ones weren’t built intentionally. You don’t feel safe when you leave the trails you know. And it seems like a lot of work.

  But the trails you have lead to a bad place sometimes. You can imagine a better place. You can get there by learning to build a new trail.

  Yes, it’s work. But this book shows you how to make that work effective. You will learn to design the trail that’s right for you, to stimulate your happy chemicals in moments when you feel threatened. Your trailblazing effort will be richly rewarded.

  There is no one perfect trail. This book has no secret trail map to offer. It helps you discover your unique trails, and reroute them toward your unique happy circuits.

  Your Power over Your Brain

  You may find it hard to believe that your feelings come from trails in your brain. Our feelings seem urgent and real, so it’s hard to think of them as accidental connections between neurons. Of course your feelings are real in the sense that a real chemical molecule is released that triggers a real physical response in your body. We presume these responses are real information about the world around us because that’s how the mammal brain is designed to work.

  Your verbal cortex struggles to make sense of your mammalian responses. The cortex has no insider information about the mammal brain it’s attached to, as unbelievable as that seems. Your verbal mind just guesses at the reason for a neurochemical spurt based on past experience. Sometimes it just ignores the spurts.

  But your neurochemicals are powerful. They evolved to create urgent impulses to approach rewards and escape harm. They make you feel like it’s a matter of life and death because brains that did that survived and their children survived. This is why life-and-death feelings creep up on us without our conscious awareness. You almost feel like they didn’t come from you because your verbal inner voice did not decide to turn them on. When you understand the relationship between your two brains, you can improve that relationship.

  Each of us is born with billions of neurons but very few connections between them. The connections we build shape the responses we have. Fortunately, you can build new connections by feeding your brain new experiences. But it’s a conundrum: how can you have new experiences with the old pathways?

  This conundrum explains why you can’t just relax when someone tells you to “just relax!” Your brain is not designed to just relax. It’s designed to seek rewards and avoid harm. A gazelle does not survive by relaxing.

  Nothing is wrong with you. You are using your brain for the job it evolved for: to promote your survival by responding to the world with a sense of urgency.

  And yet, we long for relief from the endless anticipation of threats and lost rewards. I learned about this longing as a docent at my local zoo. Visitors often asked me whether animals break out of the zoo, and I had to tell them that more animals break in than break out. What animal wouldn’t want to get into a place where all your needs are met effortlessly?

  But our brain did not evolve for life in a zoo. It does not release happy chemicals when your needs are met by a zookeeper. The more you know about your happy chemicals, the better you can blaze a trail that turns them on in healthy ways.

  A gazelle’s happy chemicals turn on when it steps toward meeting its needs. It feels good before the grass is digested and the nutrition is absorbed. Just seeing a patch of green grass turns on the good feeling, and that initiates a step toward it. A gazelle does not need a world of perfect safety to feel good. It only needs to step toward rewards with no immediate threat.

  The mammal brain rewards you with a good feeling when you take a step. It is not designed to reward you for imagining yourself on a tropical beach. It rewards you for actual steps toward rewards or away from harm.

  We can’t guarantee that our steps are the right ones, of course. Our big brain anticipates possible missteps. A gazelle expects its steps to succeed because they have succeeded before. It has escaped a predator before. It has found grass before. It anticipates relief, and if it doesn’t come, cortisol keeps surging and new steps are tried. Gazelles die young, but they don’t imagine everything going wrong while they’re alive. They don’t have enough neurons to do that.

  We do. We have enough neurons to imagine missteps that we have never actually experienced. Our imagined threats feel real enough to trigger our cortisol. But we can also imagine new steps that tame our cortisol.

  Remember:

  We have two brains—a spaghetti of neurons that is unique to humans (the cortex), and a standard mammalian operating system (the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, etc.).

  Your mammal brain controls the chemicals that make you feel good or bad. If you want to feel good, you have to get it from your mammal brain.

  Natural selection built a brain that is
focused on survival. It rewards you with a good-feeling chemical when you meet a survival need and a bad-feeling chemical when you see a survival threat.

  We define rewards and threats with neural pathways built from experience. Your pathways build each time your reward chemicals and threat chemicals are released.

  The human cortex can construct abstractions instead of being limited to the information that comes in from your eyes or ears or hands. The future is an abstraction and the cortex constructs information about the future.

  The brain anticipates threats in order to prevent them and thus feel safe.

  We anticipate threats with neural pathways built from past threats.

  The brain anticipates rewards and motivates steps toward them. A reward is anything you expect to meet a need.

  Our brain evolved to promote survival so it creates life-and-death feelings about meeting your needs and avoiding potential threats.

  2

  What Is Anxiety?

  You don’t consciously think your sock drawer can kill you, but cortisol creates the feeling that you will die if you don’t make it stop.

  Anxiety is cortisol triggered by the perception of threat.

  Our threat perceptions can be mystifying until you know some biology. The fight-or-flight response was discovered in the early twentieth century by Walter B. Cannon. Of course, people had always seen animals fight and flee. What Cannon discovered was the way brain chemicals cause these behaviors.

  Cannon and his colleagues at Harvard Medical School were studying animal responses to better understand disease in humans. They usually studied one thing at a time, but when they explored the body’s response to cortisol and catecholamines (adrenaline), they uncovered a startling array of diverse responses: the heart speeds, digestion slows, the breath accelerates, and simultaneous changes occur in the eyes, ears, skin, liver, reproductive system, and immune system. In his autobiography, Cannon describes his bewilderment at these discoveries. Why would the body produce many seemingly unrelated physical responses at the same time?

  Cannon realized that each of these changes prepare an animal to manage a threat. He called it the “fight-or-flight response” in his 1915 book, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage. This insight may seem obvious today, since we know how the story ends, but it was a huge insight at the time. In fact it was three insights:

  that the separate physical responses are a coordinated preparation for managing threat;

  that the different responses are triggered by the same chemicals; and

  that these physiological responses in animals are the stuff of emotion in humans.

  This chapter zooms in on the cortisol response to illuminate our anxious emotions. You can help your horse and rider communicate when you understand the job that cortisol is designed to do. We will not focus on adrenaline, so the difference between adrenaline and cortisol must be explained. Let’s say you hear a noise and you wonder if it signals danger. You freeze to listen closer and interpret information. Adrenaline creates the awareness that something relevant to your survival may be happening and you should focus completely on it. Cortisol is only released if you decide that the noise is actually a threat.

  Public speaking is another familiar example. Before you start speaking, adrenaline revs you up with excitement. After you speak, cortisol is released if you think it went badly. Adrenaline evolved to prepare your body for immediate action, while cortisol’s job is to pump you up for a sustained struggle. We will focus on cortisol here because it’s the chemical most directly associated with the perception of threat.

  Cortisol is not a philosophical thought. It’s the full-body sensation that you are facing a mortal threat. You don’t consciously think your sock drawer can kill you, of course, but cortisol creates the feeling that you will die if you don’t make it stop.

  Cortisol turns on when you see cues that fit the basic pattern of past cortisol surges. Once it turns on, you experience changes in your heart rate, digestion, breath, eyes, ears, skin, liver, and reproductive and immune systems. Past experience associated those feelings with threats, regardless of what your verbal brain is thinking. Often, your verbal brain notices the response and tries to explain it with the pathways it has.

  You can reroute this response when you understand it. You can accept your natural physical arousal without believing you are actually threatened. You can honor the ancient lineage of your cortisol instead of letting it darken your thoughts and trigger more cortisol.

  But you don’t feel like doing that while it’s happening. That’s why it’s important to build this skill right now. You can wire in a new approach to cortisol so you will have a new pathway in your brain the next time your senses report a potential threat.

  Cortisol Evolved to Protect You

  Cortisol evolved to protect you from harm in three ways:

  It commands your attention.

  It prepares you to act.

  It wires you to recognize similar future threats.

  Let’s look closer at these functions.

  Cortisol Commands Your Attention

  Cortisol grabs your attention even when you’d rather be doing something else. A monkey would rather keep eating when it hears a predator warning from a troop mate. But cortisol makes the monkey feel so bad that stopping it is more desirable than the food. Cortisol feels bad because feeling bad promotes survival. A mammal can survive the loss of a reward better than it can survive a predator attack. Natural selection built a brain that prioritizes cortisol.

  Cortisol Prepares You to Act

  Cortisol motivates you to do what it takes to make it stop. You don’t always know what to do, alas, and you may not even know what “it” is. Maybe a little comment or a tiny facial expression got you started. As much as you don’t want to be that kind of person, cortisol keeps trying to protect you from potential harm. It’s easy to see why it’s called “the stress hormone.”

  Cortisol prepares you for action by arousing what has come to be called the sympathetic nervous system. But in the modern world, physical action is rarely the best response to perceived threats. Thus, we end up squelching our arousal rather than using it. You squelch your arousal when your loved one makes that little comment or your boss makes that tiny facial expression. You squelch the arousal triggered by the electronic images you expose yourself to. But even squelched arousal can give you the sense that something is urgently wrong.

  Cortisol Wires You to Recognize Similar Future Threats

  Cortisol protects you from future harm by paving neural pathways that turn it on faster the next time. Understanding this function is the key to taming anxiety.

  If a toddler touches a hot stove, cortisol paves a pathway that alarms the child the next time it sees a hot stove. Triggering the bad feeling of pain in advance alerts the child in time to act to prevent pain. This works without intellectual knowledge of burns or conscious fear of stoves. All it takes is pain.

  In the modern world, we want to prevent pain. We want our kids to learn without having to suffer. Sometimes this works. A parent may tell their child not to touch with enough alarm to trigger the child’s sense of pain through its mirror neurons. Gazelles have their own way to do this. A baby gazelle does not understand the threat of predation, but without appropriate caution, its parents’ genes would be wiped out. Thus a mother gazelle bites a child that wanders off. The pain of the bite wires the child to release a bad feeling when it starts to wander off. The child sticks close to its mother to relieve the bad feeling.

  You got wired by your past pain. You may not remember it because it doesn’t require conscious memory to work. It works by building a neural pathway linking a cluster of inputs to the on switch of your cortisol. You didn’t have to touch a hot stove twice because cortisol built a pathway the first time. You don’t have to remember your first burn for the pathway to
do its job.

  Why We Anticipate Pain

  We anticipate pain in order to prevent it. We can end up anticipating a lot of pain in our quest for survival. No one consciously decides to do this, so it helps to understand the natural mechanism.

  A striking example is the girl who had panic attacks when she heard laughter. The girl had been in a car accident that killed her friends. She woke up from a coma to the bad news with no memory of the accident. The crash had triggered a huge cortisol surge, which built huge connections among the neurons active at that moment. She had been laughing in the back seat at that moment, so her brain wired the pain of the crash to the sound of laughter. Her anxiety was her brain’s effort to protect her from the anticipated pain.

  In the modern world, we see pain as evidence that something has gone wrong, but pain exists because it has survival value. This is easy to see from a reptile’s perspective. A lizard spends its whole life running from pain. When it hides under a rock, it feels the pain of hunger and cold, but when it goes out to sun or forage, it risks being eaten alive. It constantly acts to relieve the most urgent threat. When its temperature or blood sugar falls into the danger zone, cortisol motivates it to go out and do what it takes to meet its needs. It’s on high alert the whole time, and rushes back into hiding as soon as its urgent needs are met. If it smells a predator, it weighs one anticipated pain against the other. Strategic management theory is not needed to do this. It simply acts on the most active circuit.

  When you see a lizard basking in the sun, you may think it’s enjoying the good life. You don’t realize it’s on high alert and struggling to relieve the pain of hypothermia. The lizard doesn’t worry about death or the future because it only has enough neurons to anticipate immediate threats.