Tame Your Anxiety Read online

  Fish release cortisol when their oxygen falls into the danger zone. The bad feeling motivates a fish to seek more oxygenated water, and that relieves the cortisol. A plant releases cortisol when it doesn’t get enough sun, and that motivates it to grow toward the sun until the cortisol is relieved.

  Cortisol motivates action to relieve a threat. But how does a system know when it is threatened?

  Nature’s Threat Detector

  The meerkats at my local zoo go on high alert when a jet flies overhead. You can see them freeze and stare, even though they have never been dive-bombed by commercial aircraft. Some innate pathways must trigger this, since it doesn’t fit their lived experience. Meerkats evolved in a world where overhead dark spots swooped down and ate their babies. Their cortisol is triggered by overhead dark spots, even though it’s wasted effort for meerkats that live in a zoo near an airport.

  Inborn threat circuits make sense. If you had to learn about the pain of a predator’s jaws by experiencing it, survival rates would be low. But hardwired pain responses are a problem. They lead to false alarms, and they leave you defenseless against new threats. Natural selection built a brain that can build new pathways from lived experience instead of just relying on pathways shaped by your ancestors’ experience.

  The bigger a critter’s brain, the more it relies on learned pathways rather than inborn pathways. This is clear because small-brained creatures have very short childhoods. The length of a creature’s childhood grows with the size of its brain. A lizard has no childhood at all. It runs away from home as soon as it hatches from its shell, and if it doesn’t run fast enough, a parent eats it. It manages by relying on inborn survival skills. Survival rates are low when one is only equipped with fixed responses to specific opportunity and threat signals. But enough lizards survive to keep their species alive.

  A lizard has very little ability to build new circuits from new experience because it has very few extra neurons. Extra neurons make it harder to survive because they consume so much energy. A critter with extra neurons can only survive by wiring them in ways that more than offset the burden. Wiring neurons from lived experience makes a huge contribution to a critter’s ability to meet needs and avoid harm. But it takes time. That’s why bigger brained creatures are born with the ability to build survival skills during an early period of dependency rather than with the skills themselves.

  Monkeys have a big reserve of extra neurons compared to non-primates. If a little monkey is grabbed from a tree by a hawk, the pain of the claws in its flesh builds a circuit. That circuit includes the sudden darkness created when the hawk’s approach blocked out the sun. If the little monkey survives the attack, it will release cortisol as soon as it perceives a sudden darkness. This capacity to anticipate a hawk attack gives it a huge survival advantage. And it works without a cognitive conception of hawks or of danger. Neural pathways do the job.

  Your Emergency Broadcast System

  Your eyes and ears are constantly flooded with more information than you could possibly process. If you paid attention to everything, you wouldn’t notice threats in time to act. Natural selection built a brain that sifts and sorts inputs in a way that zooms in on what’s most relevant to your survival. And it does this almost effortlessly.

  When your senses are activated by the world around you, they send the particular pattern of electricity to your brain. The electricity flows easily when the pattern has already been experienced, because neurons become more efficient with use. An unfamiliar pattern means trudging down an undeveloped path. The going is so rough that the electricity just peters out sometimes. This is why familiar inputs are so easy to decode that you don’t know you’re doing it, while unfamiliar inputs send such a weak signal that you tend to ignore it unless a high threshold is reached.

  The pain you’ve already experienced makes it easy to turn on your cortisol when you see something similar. A reward you’ve already experienced makes it easy to turn on the happy chemicals it triggered. Experience wires you to seek rewards and avoid pain in ways that worked before. Your chemicals make these impulses powerful even if your verbal inner voice does not know the reason for them. You may even deny these motivations with your verbal inner voice. Or you may see them as facts about the world instead of bodily responses created by old neural pathways. You’re like the rider who focuses on the trail map instead of on the horse. You can enjoy a better ride through life by getting to know your neurochemical operating system.

  Watching animal trainers helps you do this. They have developed the art of building neural pathways intentionally with careful use of rewards. Dolphin trainers are especially interesting because a dolphin is high in the air when it does a beautiful flip, so it’s impossible to give an immediate reward. If you reward it when it returns to the water, it doesn’t know which behavior is getting rewarded and thus which behavior to repeat. Dolphin trainers started blowing a whistle when the dolphin executed a desired behavior high in the air, thereby training the dolphin to associate the whistle with a fish treat when it gets back to the water. Dolphin trainers “shape” amazingly complex behaviors by rewarding one tiny step after another. Trainers of other animals began using this method with a clicker instead of a whistle, so it has come to be known as clicker training or target training.

  We humans will do flips when we expect rewards. We are always learning about which behaviors get rewarded and which bring pain. We are always building pathways that anticipate future rewards and pain. Your verbal brain rarely understands the sources of this anticipation, but the chemicals are so powerful that you feel motivated with or without your verbal brain’s approval. Alas, life is confusing when your verbal brain can’t explain your motivations. But you can help your verbal brain understand your mammalian neurochemicals so that your two brains can work together.

  Your Danger Radar

  The mammal brain is always scanning the world for survival-relevant information. For example, a gazelle doesn’t run as soon as it smells a predator because it would die if it ran in the wrong direction. It scans for more information first. It zooms in on details about the location of the threat, and potential paths to escape. It focuses on the path more than on the lion. Its neural pathways do this almost effortlessly.

  You are not consciously scanning for information about threats, yet you do it almost effortlessly all the time. You have ten times more neurons going from your brain to your eyes than you have from your eyes to your brain. That means you are ten times more equipped to tell your brain what to look for than you are to interpret whatever just comes along. Your ears work that way too. Your senses constantly scan for information relevant to survival rather than processing whatever just happens to be there. You define survival with pathways built from your past rewards and pain.

  Our brain seeks rewards as enthusiastically as it avoids pain because rewards are necessary for survival. But in the state of nature, pain can kill you faster than missing out on rewards, so our brain prioritizes threat signals over reward signals.

  If you lived in a world of hunger and predation, those immediate threats would command your attention. But in a world where your immediate needs are met, your danger radar scans out for threats that are more distant in time and space. You can end up with a constant sense of threat even in a life that’s quite safe.

  Social Pain

  Social interactions also trigger cortisol. These alarm signals are hard to make sense of because you do not consciously think your survival is threatened when you feel social tension. But the brain you’ve inherited links social isolation to the jaws of a predator. Social pain hurts because it triggers the anticipation of physical pain.

  Of course you don’t literally expect to be eaten by predators when you’re isolated. But from your moment of birth, you have been building pathways linking the survival threat feeling to social isolation. We are born helpless and vulnerable, needing social support to survive. A lack of
social support equals death to an infant. It has no conscious awareness of death, or even of other people, but it’s hardwired to release cortisol when it’s hungry or cold. That triggers the “do something” feeling, but the infant doesn’t know what to do. Social support relieves the bad feeling, which wires the infant to anticipate the relief from social support. Relief doesn’t always come, alas, which motivates a child to develop skills for relieving its own pain. But it also wires in life-and-death feelings about social support.

  Sometimes social interactions trigger pain rather than relief. Sometimes it’s real physical pain, but it’s usually just anticipated pain. From a child’s perspective, any threat to its social support triggers the anticipation of pain. That wires in the expectation of more pain from similar interactions. Thus we can get wired to expect pain from the very same interactions we seek for support.

  Social pain is curiously distressing when other needs are met. When a gazelle is starving, it roams farther afield because the expected reward outweighs the expected threat. But when the gazelle has a full belly, social isolation seems more threatening. It’s easy to see how social pain can command your attention. Small threats to your social support can feel like huge threats when they’re the only threats you face.

  A gazelle can lose its support network at any time if it doesn’t notice when the rest of the herd moves on. A brain would have poor survival prospects if it let that happen. Our brain is inherited from ancestors who paid careful attention to what the rest of the herd was doing. A gazelle can’t survive by blaming separations on its herd mates. It survives by constantly updating its information on its support network.

  Monkeys have bigger brains than gazelles, and more social drama. They groom each others’ fur in their free time. Research shows that a baboon’s grooming partners tend to come to its aid when it is attacked. You may think of this as heartwarming evidence of cooperation and empathy, but baboons must groom their protectors. They must give “likes” to get “likes.” And sometimes these expectations are disappointed. Field research shows that a baboon’s distress calls are sometimes ignored by its grooming partners, even when it has risked its life rescuing them. If the baboon lives, it manages this social pain by offering its groomings elsewhere.

  We have inherited a brain that promotes survival by anticipating social pain and acting to relieve it. You can create a lot of social pain when you attach a big cortex to a mammalian limbic system. You may interpret your social pain as evidence that something is wrong with the world, or with your life, or with you. It helps to see social pain as information that helped our ancestors survive.

  Disappointment

  Disappointment hurts because your brain anticipates physical pain. You do not consciously think you’re in pain when you fail to get the pony you wanted for Christmas. But cortisol is released when expected rewards don’t materialize.

  The link between disappointment and physical pain is easy to understand in the state of nature. Imagine you’re a lion that hasn’t eaten in days. You start chasing a gazelle, but it gets away. Your cortisol surges when you see the growing gap between you and the gazelle. You get a bad feeling about this chase so you stop running. That cortisol saved your life because you would die of starvation if you kept running after gazelles that got away. Disappointment frees you to scan for a more accessible reward.

  When an animal fails to find food, low blood sugar triggers cortisol. This sense of urgency could motivate the animal to run after everything, but wasted effort would threaten survival. It needs the information wired in by past disappointments. It takes a really big cortisol blast to get a lion’s attention when the cortisol of hunger is already surging. That’s why disappointment feels so bad.

  We all have limited energy available to meet our survival needs. When you get a good return on your investment of energy, your brain rewards you with happy chemicals. When you get a bad return, it alarms you with cortisol. The bad feeling of disappointment is as essential to nature’s steering mechanism as the good feeling of reward.

  If you were a hungry monkey, you would want to climb after any piece of fruit you saw. But you might die if you climbed onto a branch that couldn’t hold your weight. And you would starve if the fruits you went after were grabbed by other monkeys first. You survive because past disappointments wired you to make careful decisions about which rewards to go after.

  We are constantly making decisions about our investment of effort. Past successes and failures wire in expectations about what will succeed and what won’t. Past experience is not a perfect guide to how the world works, of course, but it’s the guide that is connected to our chemical motivators. Our expectations are disappointed sometimes, but we need expectations to initiate the investment of effort. Our disappointments are easy to remember because big cortisol surges build big pathways.

  We learn from rewards and pain throughout life, but the rewards and pain of your youth build the superhighways of your brain, as we’ll see in chapter 4. We strive to predict an unpredictable world with a prediction mechanism built in childhood and adolescence. Good predictions about rewards and pain are essential for our well-being. Disappointment feels bad in the moment but it can lead to better predictions.

  Relief at Last

  From a survival perspective, relieving a threat is the best reward there is. That’s why cortisol commands your attention with the urge to make it stop. It may feel like the world is in crisis when cortisol is doing the job it evolved for.

  When you succeed at relieving cortisol, you feel like you’ve saved your life. Imagine you’re a baboon being chased by a lion and you see a tree. Climbing that tree saves your life. The surge of relief wires you to scan for trees the next time a lion threatens. The mammal brain is always scanning for whatever brought relief in its past.

  Imagine you are a teenager at a party. You anticipate social disappointments because you have experienced them before. You decide to smoke a cigarette and you suddenly feel less threatened. The relief wires you to expect relief from cigarettes. You don’t consciously believe that the cigarette saved your life, but it feels that way to your mammal brain.

  Relief feels good because you go back to getting rewards. A gazelle goes back to grazing once it escapes a predator. Anything that shifts you from a bad feeling to a good feeling promotes survival from your mammal brain’s perspective. It wires you to seek more relief in that same way.

  Sometimes you get relief in ways that harm you in the long run. Then you’re in a quandary. You feel threatened when you engage in the harmful behavior, and threatened when you don’t. This conundrum is natural. Nothing is wrong with you. Nothing is wrong with the world. You are just a big-brained mammal trying to feel safe in an unpredictable world. You can learn new ways to feel safe. You can trigger the great sense of relief in new ways. You can wire your brain to expect to prevail, the way a gazelle does. Let’s see how.

  Remember:

  Anxiety is cortisol triggered by the perception of threat.

  Cortisol is a full-body sensation that evolved to prepare an animal for action against a threat.

  Cortisol turns on when a new input activates a pattern of neural pathways paved by past cortisol surges.

  Cortisol builds neural pathways without conscious intent because that promotes survival.

  Cortisol gets your attention because that promotes survival.

  When an organism’s survival needs are not met, cortisol alerts it to take action.

  Neurons consume a lot of energy, so they make it harder for a creature to survive.

  Creatures with more neurons have a long childhood because it takes a long time to wire neurons in a way that promotes survival.

  Our brain is constantly learning from rewards and pain.

  Safety in numbers promotes survival for most mammals, so social support triggers reward chemicals and the lack of it triggers threat chemicals.
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  Disappointment triggers cortisol. An organism has limited energy to get the rewards it needs to survive. When expected rewards do not materialize, cortisol alerts a mammal to the threat of wasted energy.

  Relieving a perceived threat is a big reward to a brain focused on survival.

  3

  A Taming Tool That Works

  Would my needs be met by raging at the supervisor who gave me a bad review?

  Anxiety is a cortisol pathway built from life experience. Fortunately, you can build a new pathway to trigger happy chemicals instead of cortisol. But you have to feed your brain new experiences to do that. This may seem like an impossible paradox. How can you feed your brain new experiences while you’re running on old pathways?

  The short answer is to focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want.

  You can’t rewire your brain all at once, but you can control your focus for one moment. And you can do it again in the next moment. By carefully planning your focus, repetition will build the new pathway. Your electricity flows more easily each time. This chapter helps you design your new focus, and the following chapters help you find your power to repeat it.

  You can design an experience that feels good now and doesn’t have bad consequences in the long run. You can design a reliable way to shift into happy chemicals. Wire it in now and it will come more easily in moments of distress.

  Maybe you think, “If it were that easy to feel good I would be doing it already.” Maybe all your feel-good strategies have bad long-run consequences. But you will learn a new taming tool that leads your inner mammal to natural good feelings.

  This taming tool has three steps:

  Spend one minute asking your inner mammal what it wants.