Tame Your Anxiety Read online

  Serotonin is released when a mammal sees itself in the one-up position. It’s not aggression but rather the nice, safe feeling that you can meet your needs in the face of rivals.

  Neurons connect when serotonin flows, which wires a brain to expect more one-up feelings in situations that triggered them before.

  Endorphin is released in response to physical pain. It masks pain with a good feeling for a few minutes so you can take steps necessary to promote survival.

  Cortisol has a half-life of twenty minutes. Your body eliminates it as long as you don’t trigger any more. But it’s easy to trigger more because cortisol tells your cortex to look for threat signals.

  To avoid triggering more, find a non-distressing activity that fully engages your mind.

  Cortisol tells your brain to “do something” to meet a need or avoid harm, so you relieve cortisol when you do something. Just a step toward meeting a need or avoiding harm is enough as long as you have the expectation of further steps.

  4

  Your Power over Your Brain

  A gazelle that smells the flowers may miss the smell of a lion. We are designed to focus on survival information.

  A rider has limited power over their horse, yet a rider can guide a horse to an intended goal. You have limited power over your brain, but you can guide your brain to an intended goal.

  A rider often believes they’re in charge, so they’re surprised when they lose control. Your verbal brain may believe it’s in charge, so it’s surprised when it loses control of your emotions. Your next step is hard to navigate when this happens. In this chapter you’ll find out why your emotions and your verbal brain go in different directions sometimes, and how you can help them work together like a skilled horse and rider.

  Our story starts with myelin, the substance that turns neural pathways into superhighways. Myelin coats a neuron the way insulation coats a wire, so it conducts electricity up to a hundred times faster than regular neurons. Whatever you do with your myelinated neurons feels natural and easy because electricity flows there so effortlessly.

  Myelinated pathways make it easy to walk and talk, as long as you stick to your usual ways of walking and talking. You built those pathways from repeated efforts in youth, though you don’t remember doing it. The repeated experience of youth also built myelinated pathways to your cortisol and happy chemicals. These pathways turn on emotions so effortlessly that you don’t know how you’re doing it. It feels like the world around you is turning on the emotion by presenting threats or rewards.

  Myelin is abundant in youth. This abundance allows us to build new pathways without conscious effort. You may have heard the news that neurons build throughout life. The problem is that the new neurons are not connected to anything. It takes a lot of repetition to connect them in adulthood, and even then, you just get tiny new trails. This is why we depend so heavily on the pathways we’ve myelinated in youth.

  You may or may not feel relieved to know that myelin peaks at age two. It remains high until age seven, however. Then it spurts again in puberty. This may seem shocking. Why would a brain that evolved for survival build its superhighways in youth? And how can you redirect your brain when highways built in youth inevitably lead you astray?

  This chapter shows you how your autopilot got created, and how you can make adjustments to it. The short answer is simple: you can blaze a new trail in your brain if you get comfortable with the back roads instead of coasting on the highway.

  Your Superpower

  Imagine you’re in the Amazon rainforest and you want to see a special grove of monkeys and orchids. You look at the map and see that the highway doesn’t go there. So you set out on a small road, which leads to a smaller trail, which suddenly ends. The only way you can reach your destination is to blaze a new trail. You start slashing at the undergrowth, and tremendous effort is needed just to advance one step. You realize with dismay that the trail will soon grow over so you will have to slash it again on your way back. But you forge ahead, and you’re thrilled when you get there—so thrilled that you go back every day. The next day the trail is slightly easier to slash, and in a few weeks, a small path is established. It’s not a highway, but it goes to a better place than highways go.

  You have the power to reach a better place in your brain if you blaze a new trail through your jungle of neurons. It may not seem like a superpower, but this is the power you have. It’s a superpower compared to endlessly following your myelinated roads and blaming others for that choice. Will you embrace this power?

  “Hacking” the brain has become a popular topic. Trailblazing is somewhat different. A “hack” is a fast, easy way to change, without all the bother of defining a healthy step and repeating it a lot. If a hack existed, I would have embraced it on page one. You have probably tried a few hacks already. Maybe you’re willing to try trailblazing instead.

  Many people don’t. They have good reasons, according to their verbal brain. Here are some reasons we hear a lot, and how you can overcome them.

  1. My Brain Should Be Fixed by an Expert

  In today’s world, you get the idea that an expert can fix your brain the way they fix your car. You don’t mess with the insides of your car, and your brain seems even more daunting.

  Your quest for an external fix is disappointed, alas. You have more access to the control panel of your brain than any expert has because you control your thoughts and actions. Your power is limited, but it’s more than an outsider has. Your quest for an external fix can distract you from your internal power.

  “Getting help” is the solution we hear most about today. The meaning of the word help is often misconstrued. Help can assist your steps, but it cannot substitute for your steps. It cannot replace the work you do to install those steps outside of your helping sessions. If you forget that, help doesn’t help.

  When help doesn’t help, you are told that you didn’t get “the right help.” So you shop for better help. You fight for better help. The fighting, shopping, and blaming consumes energy that could have been invested in trailblazing. Responsible experts know this and encourage you to take internal action instead of just expecting an external fix. But they also want a satisfied customer and a renewal of their license. If you believe in an external fix, and the expert’s licensing body does too, the expert must live within those expectations.

  The more you believe in an external fix, the harder it is to take internal action.

  Internal action is hard anyway, of course. It’s scary to leave the comfort of old highways. It’s exhausting to struggle with every step. It’s tempting to return to the effortless old road, despite its familiar potholes.

  Here’s a more comfortable way to look at it. Imagine you’re riding your horse in a competition. You see other riders who seem to guide their horses effortlessly. You want to be like them. Suddenly, your horse starts bucking out of control. You’re so flabbergasted that you want to hand the reins over to someone else. Anyone! But no one has as much control over your horse as you have because you are sitting on it. You want to build your skill at managing the beast, but that’s hard to do while it’s bucking. And when it stops, you’re too tired. But you promise yourself to make it different this time. The next morning you start researching the tools that the other riders use. You discover that they are constantly training with the help of coaches. A few coaches in some cases. You start training too. The competition arrives, your horse bucks, and you look for your coach so you can hand over the reins. But after a few competitions, you realize that your relationship with the horse is what matters. You can manage whatever the horse does, and it feels natural.

  2. I Aspire to Something Higher

  The word survival has gotten a bad image. People tell you to focus on a higher purpose rather than mere survival. That sounds nice, but it doesn’t tame your mammal brain. It just leaves you feeling like your survival is threatene
d when you see an obstacle to your higher purpose. If you think you must perform in Carnegie Hall and rescue orphans from war zones, you end up feeling like your survival is threatened a lot.

  When you understand the mammal brain, you know how you construct these feelings instead of seeing them as real threats.

  For example, you are taught that serving others is all that matters, so you make it your goal. Serving others is the only socially acceptable way to seek serotonin in the modern world. You feel good when you serve others because it’s your chance to feel important. You enjoy dopamine with each step because you anticipate the serotonin reward. You enjoy oxytocin because you feel like you belong when you serve others. You’ve learned to meet your needs with this service project. And then something goes wrong.

  Every threat to your service project threatens the happy chemicals that tell your brain you are safe. If your project loses funding, it feels like a survival threat. Any risk of losing funding is a survival threat. If one person makes one comment that could hurt your funding, your threat chemicals turn on.

  Your brain is always focused on meeting your needs. A higher purpose doesn’t tame anxiety unless you reassure your inner mammal that your needs will be met.

  Many people look to a higher purpose for anxiety relief. When it doesn’t work, they make it higher and higher. They end up with great expectations that are often disappointed. Disappointment triggers cortisol, which they interpret as a real threat. You can manage this threatened feeling if you know where it is coming from. And that means admitting that your own rewards are at stake.

  3. This Seems Weak

  Maybe you see yourself as a conquering hero rather than someone who writes small steps on a calendar. Maybe you want to lead the charge against evil instead of distracting yourself with fun stuff. You want to slay dragons, but without anxiety.

  Unfortunately, the brain doesn’t work that way. Exposing yourself to danger will turn on your natural alarm system. You have to escape the danger to relieve it. Drowning out the alarm sound with adventure doesn’t work. Your alarm keeps blasting until you do something about the danger. So whether you are doing something dangerous or just terrifying yourself with bad thoughts, you need to address the danger at the source instead of just hacking the alarm system.

  Strength is a valuable skill on the road to taming anxiety. But it’s important to define strength in a way that feels safe. Strong means solving problems. Strong does not mean ignoring problems. If you are ignoring problems, your mammal brain will keep blasting you with a “do something!” feeling.

  In the animal world, strong individuals make more surviving copies of their genes, but it doesn’t make them happy. They are on the “live fast and die young” track. They face predators and rivals and live with a lot of cortisol between the moments of glory. When they lose their social dominance, they don’t last long.

  We have inherited a brain that aspires to greatness, but feels alarmed on the path. This paradox is absolutely natural because both feelings promote the survival of your genes.

  But we long for a better way. We want to enjoy the great feeling of strength without the bad feeling of threat. This dilemma has plagued humans since the beginning of time. The ancient Greeks addressed it with the fable of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise seems weak so it’s easy for us to identify with the energetic hare. You want to win, but not by being a tortoise.

  We take pride in our strength because pride is serotonin. But we define strength with pathways myelinated by the serotonin experiences of youth. Young people take more risks because they have less accumulated experience with threat. When you get older, those risky serotonin strategies trigger anxiety. You need a new serotonin strategy to feel safe, and you need to acknowledge your mammalian urges before you can design it.

  Why This Will Work

  Your power over your brain is limited, so you need to exert it in the right spot to get results. This taming tool helps you leverage your power to redirect electricity from an unhappy pathway to a happier one. You can redirect your horse instead of pretending your verbal brain is in charge.

  Your power starts with knowing why your brain doesn’t always do what you want. Each brain sees the world through a lens built in youth. You don’t consciously decide to use that lens or even remember the experiences that built it. On the contrary, we prefer to think we’ve left that youthful vulnerability behind and reinvented everything after leaving home. We think we can tame old anxiety by denying that the old lens exists. When you learn to notice it instead, you know it’s a pathway built from a random collection of experiences rather than a fact about the world around you.

  Your lens is hard to notice because electricity flows into it so effortlessly. You can flow from one automatic response to another without noticing your power to flow in a different direction.

  But if you stop what you’re doing for a whole minute and ask yourself what you want, your electricity has the chance to find its way into a tiny gully instead of the usual river.

  You will not look for the new path if you insist that you don’t care about your selfish needs,. That leaves you stuck on the old path because your brain focuses on meeting your needs, whether you think it should or not.

  Your old path makes sense when you know how it got there. Three forces are involved: repetition, emotion, and youth.

  Repetition builds a path that you don’t notice, the way a fish doesn’t notice water.

  Emotion paves a pathway because that’s the job it evolved to do.

  Youth paves huge pathways because a young brain is full of myelin.

  So whatever happened to you repeatedly, emotionally, in youth built the superhighways of your brain. These highways tell you when to expect rewards and when to expect harm. This is not at all what you are telling yourself with your verbal brain. It’s so easy to ignore these pathways that it’s essential to know the universals of how they get built.

  Your Lens on Life

  Beneath our individual experience we have a lot of common experience. We are all born powerless. We all feel the pain of gravity when we fall. We all struggle to meet social needs with the equipment we’re born with.

  A newborn baby knows the pain of hunger before it knows what its mother is, or even what milk is. Low blood sugar triggers cortisol, which triggers crying. That brings relief, which triggers dopamine. Thus a newborn gets wired to expect relief in that way in the future. Soon, it stops crying when it hears footsteps because it anticipates relief—without even knowing what footsteps are. It gradually learns to seek relief by making a noise instead of crying. No conscious thought is necessary. Good feelings wire the brain to expect good feelings from a similar pattern of inputs.

  A child’s circuits build with each experience of pleasure or pain. These circuits trigger expectations that motivate steps to meet needs and relieve threats. For example, a child’s first steps trigger dopamine, not because it intends to walk but because it approaches a reward. Imagine the first time you discovered a way to approach a reward on your own instead of waiting for it to come to you!

  Alas, with that joy comes the frustrations of leaving your secure base. Over time, you learn to anticipate the rewards and threats you’ve experienced. Anything that relieved bad feelings wired you to expect relief in that particular way. The urge to feel good motivates steps that wire in more knowledge about how to feel good.

  These pathways fail to bring good feelings sometimes. For example, if a child steals a cookie from another child, it enjoys a moment of social power, but the reward wires in a behavior that hurts in the long run. Many parents say “No, no, no,” but they let the child keep the cookie. The young brain learns from the cookie because it is a big reward. You may hate this idea. You may hate people who steal cookies. Yet you may reward bad behavior in this way because you want to be nice.

  No one reaches adulthood with a flawless autopilot.
The random experiences of youth cannot possibly wire you for every adult eventuality. This is why we resist the idea that our brain is wired by the random chance of early experience. It helps to reexamine it in evolutionary perspective. The larger a species’ brain, the longer its childhood. Reptiles have no childhood at all. They run away from home as soon as they’re born. A mouse has a month-long childhood, which is infinitely longer. A monkey has a year-long childhood, and an ape is dependent for about four years. From that perspective, a human childhood is extremely long.

  A newborn gazelle can run with the herd minutes after it’s born. A newborn mouse will be a parent at two months of age and a grandparent at four months. A newborn ape has the power to cling to its mother as she swings through the trees. Humans remain helpless and vulnerable for an extremely long time by contrast.

  Being born helpless does not seem like it would promote survival. The longer it takes for a newborn to meet its own needs, the more parental investment is necessary and the fewer offspring its mother can have. Mother reptiles have hundreds of babies and invest little in each one. Mammals cannot do this because a warm-blooded body is so much harder to gestate. So mammals have relatively few offspring and do their darnedest to keep each one alive. They invest their eggs in very few baskets. This further limits their ability to spread their genes. So how do big brains promote survival?

  Neurons consume a lot of energy, which makes it harder to survive rather than easier. Extra neurons only promote survival if they’re hooked up in a way that brings a big survival bonus. Connecting them from experience is what gives them value. It frees each newborn to learn from its own experience instead of being hardwired with the experience of its ancestors. The more neurons you have, the longer it takes to wire them up in a way that promotes survival.

  A reptile can leave home at birth because its neurons are already connected in ways that trigger survival behavior. A mouse needs a couple of months to polish these skills. An ape needs a few years. The bigger the brain, the less wired it is at birth. Our extreme lack of survival skills at birth evolved in a simple way. When our pre-human ancestors managed to find more protein, their fetuses developed bigger brains, which helped them find more protein. This spiral would not work if the fetus’s head got too big for the birth canal. So a bigger brain must be born at an earlier stage of development. As brains grew in size, infants got born with fewer circuits but with the ability to build circuits activated by experience. A chimpanzee is born with limbs and senses already hooked up, but a chimpanzee born prematurely looks eerily human except for its small brain.