Tame Your Anxiety Read online

  Spend twenty minutes doing an activity you like that completely absorbs you.

  Spend one minute planning your next step, and take that step by the end of the day.

  Practice this taming tool every day and your electricity will flow in a new direction. You will literally forget to be anxious.

  This chapter explains the science behind each step so you know why it works. But let’s start with some practical examples so you can feel how it works. I’ll start with a personal example: the day I got a bad review from my supervisor. I tamed my anxiety with the three-step tool without consciously knowing it!

  When I got my review and saw checkmarks in the “fair” boxes, I shook from head to toe. I couldn’t wait to run out the door at five o’clock. But I knew I’d still feel awful when I got home to my tiny studio, so I spontaneously decided to walk instead of taking the subway. Walking from Wall Street to Midtown Manhattan seemed like an epic odyssey in 1980, though in the age of digital maps it’s clearly just 3.3 miles. In the days before headphones, it felt even longer.

  I had been working on Wall Street as a trainee at a bank for a few months. I wasn’t really interested in the job, but it was popular at my graduate school, so I gave it a try. Now I seemed to be a wash-out at the mundane tasks they were training me to do.

  You may think I wanted to rip the head off of the supervisor who gave me the bad review. But this was not my first workplace setback, so I knew it was more complicated. I had bombed at a few jobs in my twenty-seven years. I grew up in a home with lots of conflict and had learned to avoid conflict by minding my own business. I was good at getting things done on my own, but not especially good at working with others. I wanted to change, but my anxiety surged when I deferred to others. What I really wanted was a job where I got to rely on my own judgment.

  I didn’t know how to make that happen, but I was out of the banking district and into terra incognita when I had that insight. It was thrilling to see the sights I had ridden under every day. The neighborhoods I was headed toward were not considered safe for a stroll at that time. This gave me a sense of adventure that completely diverted me from my career issues.

  Finally I reached the familiar turf of Midtown Manhattan, and my problem drifted back into my awareness. How could I face work the next day? I could smile and try harder, but I would explode if I did that forever. I tried to think of something I could enjoy doing. I had a dream of designing a course. I was already teaching night courses at local universities, but these courses were designed by others. I had lots of ideas for a course of my own. I decided to write a proposal as soon as I got home and find out how to submit it at lunchtime the next day. I felt better as soon as I thought of that. I had the good feeling of stepping toward a goal even though I didn’t know exactly what the goal would be. And less than ten years from that moment, I was a tenured professor with significant scope to rely on my own judgment.

  Our brain evolved for the job of meeting survival needs. Would my needs be met by raging at the supervisor who gave me a bad review? My brain is designed to make that decision. I made it by quickly defining what I really wanted, taking time to decompress, and then designing a step forward that I could take immediately.

  My friend Al used this three-step technique for a different sort of anxiety. Al’s lady friend was not returning his calls, and an awful feeling surged through him. The bad feeling turned on whenever he thought of calling her back, or calling another woman, or just using his phone. He was surprised by the intensity of this response, since he had gone through a divorce recently and thought he handled it pretty well. Now, two weeks later, he was suddenly crumbling.

  He knew that this lady was not really the issue, because he was lukewarm about her. So he decided to stop and figure out what he really wanted. He had trouble feeling safe with women. When he was young, his mother got sick so he spent time with his grandmother. Then his grandmother got sick. He was mostly on his own then, and he hated to be surprised by things out of his control. He got through the divorce by telling himself he would have more control in his new life. Now he was forced to realize that he wouldn’t. Even if he found the perfect relationship, anything could go wrong. He wanted to learn to feel safe in a world he didn’t control. He didn’t know how to do that, so he went out for a bike ride.

  After biking a while, Al stopped for a break. He saw someone pull out a phone and felt a stab of anxiety. It occurred to him that he hadn’t felt bad all the time he was on his bike. He realized that he had controlled the feeling even though the world itself was still out of control. Of course he couldn’t bike all the time, but he could bike when he needed power over that feeling. He could call a new woman for a date just before his bike ride tomorrow. He might worry until then, alas, so he considered doing it tonight, but that would be a bad time for a bike ride. What if he did it now before his ride home? He pulled out his phone and dialed before a minute had gone by. He couldn’t control the world, but he could control where he focused his attention.

  Step One: Ask Yourself What You Want for One Minute

  Your inner mammal wants to survive. That is not what your conscious brain is thinking, but your conscious brain doesn’t control the happy chemicals. If you want to feel good, you have to work with your mammal brain.

  Your inner mammal feels safe when it expects your survival needs to be met. Yet you focus on potential threats to meeting needs for most of your day. This triggers threatened feelings even when you do not consciously believe you are threatened. Asking your inner mammal what it wants relieves those threatened feelings by shifting your focus back to what you want instead of what you don’t want. Focusing on what you want triggers the expectation of meeting your needs, so your inner mammal feels safe.

  You cannot guarantee that your needs will be met, of course. But you can build trust in your ability to meet them. You trust your survival skills to manage whatever comes along.

  To be sure your inner mammal gets this comfort, you need to set a timer and spend one full minute clarifying your needs at this moment. But first, you need to know how your inner mammal defines its needs.

  Natural selection built a brain that rewards you with a good feeling when you meet a need. The chemicals that make us feel good are the mammal brain’s signal that the need is met. The mammal brain does not run on philosophy. It just strives to do things that trigger the happy chemicals: dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin. Each of these chemicals creates a specific good feeling when a specific need is met. You have been feeling them all your life, but you don’t know what triggers them. When you know what triggers them in animals, it’s easy to see how they work in yourself.

  The happy chemicals evolved to do a job. They are not designed to flow all the time for no reason. They are released in short spurts when you take a step toward meeting a need. Each spurt is soon metabolized and you have to take another step to stimulate more of them. These neurochemical facts of life may seem shocking when you are used to thinking of happiness as a right. But when you know how your reward chemicals work, you know that your ups and downs are natural. Instead of feeling threatened by ups and downs, you can feel safe in the knowledge that your brain is doing its job.

  You Want Dopamine

  Dopamine is the excitement you feel when a reward is at hand. If you were thirsty in the desert, dopamine would surge when you saw an oasis in the distance. Dopamine motivates you to scan for signs of an oasis, and trudge toward it despite your exhaustion.

  Dopamine surges in a lion when it sees a gazelle it can catch. The good feeling releases the reserve tank of energy, which gives the lion the energy it needs to prevail.

  Dopamine motivates a monkey to crack open a nut, even if it takes hours of trying.

  Your dopamine is released when you anticipate a new way to meet a need. It could be the finish line in a marathon or the doorbell of a pizza delivery. You may think these don’t meet “real” nee
ds, but once your basic needs are met, your brain keeps looking for new ways to trigger it. Any time you anticipate a reward—perhaps a promotion or the attention of a special someone—you are releasing dopamine. Your brain is always scanning the world for opportunities to meet needs and enjoy the dopamine.

  In a world where we have water without trudging to an oasis and nuts without cracking shells, dopamine is a challenge. Our immediate needs are met, so we focus on future needs. Each step toward a future need triggers the good feeling now, whether it’s training for a marathon or ordering a pizza.

  If you bake a loaf of bread, dopamine surges when you smell it in the oven. Dopamine drove you to shop for the ingredients and knead the dough as well. That first bite of fresh-baked bread thrills you with a huge dopamine surge, but a few minutes later, the need is met and the dopamine stops. Then you have to take a new step toward a new need to get more of it. If you buy bread at a store, you only get a dopamine moment when you cross it off your to-do list. But store-bought bread saves your energy for other ways to stimulate dopamine.

  Neurons connect when dopamine flows, which wires your brain to expect more of the good feeling the next time you see something similar. This is how each brain learns when to release it and what rewards to seek. This is how a baby gazelle learns to find food when mother’s milk is not enough. Your brain got wired by your past dopamine experiences, whether you remember them or not.

  Dopamine is the brain’s signal that an investment of effort is likely to be rewarded. Rewards are not always predictable, of course. But if you don’t try, you get nothing, so the brain relies on its dopamine pathways to make the best possible prediction. An elephant can only find water in a drought by making a prediction about which path is likely to be rewarded. It relies on the dopamine pathways built by treks that got rewards in the past.

  The mammal brain promotes survival by constantly trying to anticipate the best investment of your effort. It releases dopamine when it sees a good opportunity, and the good feeling motivates action. A surge of dopamine gets your attention when you stumble on a good opportunity. We are not meant to release dopamine all the time for no reason. It evolved to promote survival, not to make you happy all the time.

  Our ancestors did not have a refrigerator or a pantry. They had to keep finding resources to survive. Dopamine made the endless quest feel good. The good feeling starts as soon as you anticipate the reward. The first step of a thousand mile journey triggers dopamine as long as you anticipate a reward at the end. Each step of the journey triggers more dopamine as long as you see yourself getting closer to the reward. A child who decides to become a doctor faces thousands of steps, but dopamine motivates them if the child anticipates a reward. For example, a child who sees a doctor save the life of a relative might enjoy a big dopamine surge that builds big expectations about this particular way to meet survival needs.

  A monkey enjoys dopamine when it climbs toward a juicy mango high in a tree. Its dopamine peaks when the mango is within its grasp. That peak dopamine wires the monkey’s brain to find reachable mangoes more easily in the future. But the monkey does not expect to feel peak dopamine just from lying around. If it did, it would soon get hungry. That would motivate it to scan for food it can reach. A trickle of dopamine motivates the scanning, and each step closer to a reward triggers more. Monkeys stimulate dopamine by meeting their needs, not by looking for “hacks.”

  When a reward is more than expected, extra dopamine is released. That builds an extra-large circuit triggering extra-large expectations in the future. For example, if you win at gambling, or taste an amazing new food, or ingest an artificial stimulant, you are enjoying extra-large reward. That wires your brain to seek and find more of the same.

  Each of us seeks dopamine with pathways built from our unique individual experience. There are no perfect pathways. No one gets dopamine all the time, but we keep seeking it because our brain evolved to do that.

  You Want Oxytocin

  Oxytocin is the nice safe feeling of social trust. A gazelle feels safe with its herd because its oxytocin is flowing. A herd is an effective threat detection system. A gazelle can let down its guard a bit when surrounded by others. Oxytocin is the good feeling of lowering your guard in the safety of social support. Even lions seek social alliances, because hyenas steal their kill when they’re alone. Elephants need a herd to protect their babies from lions. If they lose a baby, it takes twenty-two months to gestate another, so the survival of their genes depends on social trust in the face of a common enemy.

  Today, we have idealized expectations about social support. We like to think gazelles have altruistic feelings toward each other. But in truth, gazelles constantly push their way toward the center of the herd because that lowers predator risk. As they weaken with age, they end up exposed on the fringes, but if they’ve played their cards right, their genes are already passed on. Herd-following reduces a mammal’s chances of being the one that gets eaten. Life in a herd is not all warm and fuzzy, but sticking with the herd improves survival prospects, and oxytocin makes it feel good.

  When a gazelle sees greener pasture, it’s tempted to wander off. Its needs are easier to meet in a place with less competition from other hooves. But a gazelle’s genes get annihilated if it’s too independent. Natural selection built a brain that rewards you with a good feeling when you stick with the herd.

  A herd only improves your safety if you run when your group mates run. We humans hate the idea of following the herd, but a gazelle that refused to run until it saw the lion for itself would soon be eliminated. Mammals survive by constantly monitoring their group mates and doing what it takes to sustain the bond. Most of the animal noises you hear are the species’ way of saying “I’m here. Where are you?” Their herd mates continually respond, “I’m here. Where are you?” If you don’t hear the expected response, your cortisol rises. That alerts you to reconnect with your support base, which triggers oxytocin and relieves the cortisol. We have inherited a brain that constantly monitors the availability of social support. We feel curiously threatened without it, even if we’re frustrated by the herd when we’re with it. Oxytocin rewards you for finding the social trust that promotes survival.

  But how?

  Neurons connect when oxytocin flows, which wires you to expect that nice feeling when you do things that triggered it before. The sights, sounds, and smells of your oxytocin past turn it on today. Those experiences may have included pain as well, which is why we sometimes seek things that trigger pain. We are all challenged to stimulate oxytocin while avoiding the frustrations of mammalian social groups. Your body quickly metabolizes any oxytocin you manage to stimulate, which is why we seek it again and again. When you understand your natural urge for oxytocin, you can find creative ways to meet this need.

  Baboons have big brains compared to gazelles, and they have a big repertoire of oxytocin-stimulating strategies. They groom each other’s fur, and the touch triggers oxytocin. That builds trust bonds among individuals who have plenty of conflict in the daily course of meeting their needs. Baboons often cooperate to drive off predators. They even take risks to protect their grooming partners. But research shows that they do this when it benefits their genes in one way or another.

  Mammals do not enjoy the kind of all-for-one-and-one-for-all social life that you might wish for. But they keep seeking social support because their brain rewards it with oxytocin.

  You Want Serotonin

  Serotonin is the good feeling of social importance. Your brain is releasing serotonin when you feel special. You hate to admit that you care about this, but your mammal brain cares about being special as if your life depends on it because in the state of nature, it does. An animal gets more food and mating opportunity when it is more powerful than the individual next to it. That leads to more surviving offspring, and natural selection built a brain that rewards you with the good feeling of serotonin when you have a moment of
social power. But the serotonin is soon metabolized, alas, and it takes another moment of social power to trigger more. We mammals strive for social importance because serotonin makes it feel good.

  You have probably never heard this view of serotonin or motivation. Nice people don’t talk about it or report on the biology. But humans have observed the dominance-seeking behavior of animals for millennia, and ethologists documented it in the twentieth century. They described status-seeking behaviors in animals that are curiously reminiscent of daily life. Animals don’t seek status consciously. They simply do what it takes to meet their needs. When an animal sees that it is weaker than the individual next to it, it anticipates pain and restrains its urge to reach for food or a mating opportunity. It must find a safe opportunity to assert in order to survive. Serotonin is the brain’s signal that it’s safe to assert.

  It would be nice to have this feeling all the time, but serotonin evolved to do a job. If you released it all the time, you might assert yourself unwisely and end up worse off. Your brain is designed to reward you with serotonin when you find a position of strength.

  You have probably learned that dominance seeking is bad. We are taught to restrain this impulse, and to blame it on “our society.” It’s hard to think of cute furry animals competing for food and mating opportunity. But whatever you believe consciously, your brain craves serotonin and looks for ways to get it.

  Neurons connect when serotonin flows, which wires you to expect it in ways that worked before. Such expectations are often disappointed, alas. Your brilliant contributions often fail to get the response you hoped for. It feels like a survival threat to your mammal brain, even though you are perfectly safe. This is why people invest so much energy in the quest for the next social advantage once their basic needs are met.

  Animals seek social power without conscious intent. They just look for ways to feel good and avoid harm. The mammal brain does this by constantly comparing itself to others. When a mammal sees that it’s in a position of weakness, cortisol is released and it withdraws to protect itself. When a mammal sees that it’s in a position of strength, serotonin is released and it acts to meet its needs. Serotonin is not aggression. It’s confidence in your power to meet your needs in a world of rivals.