Tame Your Anxiety Read online

  A species can only survive if each generation learns to meet its own needs before its elders are gone. Children who lose their parents have a very low survival rate in the state of nature. So despite our early vulnerability, we had to wire up as fast as possible. You may think early experience is a bad foundation on which to build a neural network, but that’s the system built by millions of years of evolution. You may think of your childhood as inconsequential junk that you have deleted, but you can think of it as an evolutionary marvel instead.

  Recognizing Your Own Operating System

  Your core pathways were built in your first seven years of life because that’s when myelin is abundant. After age seven, myelin plateaus, which promotes survival in a different way. It’s slightly harder for a child to build new branches onto its neural network, which encourages a child to build on the pathways it has. This motivates a child to reference its existing stock of knowledge and locate new inputs in the context of past experience. You can test this for yourself by telling a six-year-old child that the moon is made of green cheese and then telling an eight-year-old. A six-year-old brain is inclined to absorb the information as a fact, while the eight-year-old tends to check it against their stored experience before accepting it as fact. Lower myelin motivates children to add leaves to their neural trees instead of always building new branches. Their brain relates new experience to past experience instead of seeing the world as a newborn each morning. In the state of nature, parents often died young. By age eight, a human child has enough sense to meet its own survival needs in case of emergency.

  Myelin spurts again in puberty. This is why the experiences of puberty impact your lens on life so heavily. The myelin of puberty has survival value of a different kind. In the state of nature, mammals leave home at puberty to avoid inbreeding. Animals are not consciously concerned with genetics, of course. They leave their natal group to improve mating opportunity or because they get kicked out. Once they leave, they have to learn new skills to survive in a new setting. The myelin of puberty helps them do that.

  An adolescent monkey is terrified when it leaves. We know this from cortisol samples taken in the wild. (In some mammals, all the males leave home at puberty, while in other species, all the females leave). Anything that relieves distress and meets needs builds a pathway that’s easily myelinated. What works for you in puberty builds a pathway that wires you to meet your needs in that way in the future.

  Throughout human history, people joined new groups or explored new turf around puberty because it improved their mating opportunity. They had to learn new languages, new social norms, and new ways to get home in the dark. When they found rewards or escaped harm, their happy chemicals flowed. Myelin wired them to seek rewards and escape harm in the same ways in the future.

  After puberty, myelin dips, and you only have enough to repair the insulation you already built—on a good day. This is why we’re all so dependent on our adolescent wiring. It’s easy to see this in others. It’s harder to see in yourself. You may cringe at the sub-optimality of your adolescence because you are looking at it from the perspective of your adult refinements. We are all in the same boat, trying to meet our needs and feel good with an operating system built in puberty.

  Our reactions to the world depend on the circuits we built in youth. Our reactions have a lot in common because our early experiences have a lot in common. When we differ, our own perceptions feel real because real chemicals are being triggered.

  The point is not to find fault with your past and your brain. The point is that everyone reaches adulthood with an operating system that needs updates. Your ability to make updates is your superpower.

  How to Grasp Your Brain Power

  It may never feel like the right time to drop what you’re doing and face your chemical impulses. One excuse leads to another and the day is gone without spending one minute building your new tame trail. You know you can do it, but somehow you don’t. Let’s look closer at how we make choices so you can grasp your power to choose differently.

  In each moment, we choose between allowing our electricity to flow into our autopilot, or putting on the brakes and finding an alternative path to flow into.

  We often jump to the conclusion that the “rational” brain makes the good choices and the mammal brain makes the bad choices. This is simply not true. The fact is that the mammal brain makes all the choices, and the rational brain is simply there to help you define your alternatives instead of whooshing through life on autopilot. This new view of choice is beautifully illustrated by the literary neurologist, Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. He describes a follow-up appointment with a patient who had a severed connection between his limbic system and his cortex. The patient was recuperating nicely and Dr. Sacks asked him to choose the date of his next appointment. The man started debating the pros and cons of alternative dates, but he could not arrive at a conclusion. Dr. Sacks gave him as much time as he wanted to learn about the man’s thought process. A long time went by, and the patient simply could not choose. He could skillfully analyze the pros and cons of each alternative date, but he could not generate a subjective preference for one date over another. You may think a preference comes from logic, but it ultimately comes from connecting a positive feeling to one particular option.

  Preferences come from your limbic system. You are always responding to information as either “good for me” or “bad for me” by releasing a pleasant or unpleasant chemical. If you want to have a different response to the world, you need to change the pathways that turn on your chemicals. For example, if you want to quit smoking, attach a positive feeling to an alternative self-soothing strategy. That will work much better than the usual approach of using logic to terrorize yourself about the consequences of smoking.

  We have two brains because we need both. The cortex is good at gathering detail, but you only draw conclusions from the detail by releasing a chemical that says “this is good for you, go toward it,” or “this is bad for you, avoid it.” You may think your conclusion came from logic because your mammal brain doesn’t talk to you in words. You think your verbal inner voice is the whole story. But your mammal brain literally connects your cortex to your body. You need it to act.

  You will not tame anxiety by squashing your mammal brain with the power of your intelligence. You tame it by redirecting your mammal brain onto a new path. This seems hard because the moment of choice passes so quickly. You make thousands of tiny decisions each day without noticing them. You can choose the road less traveled in your brain if you build your power to stop at the moment of choice to give yourself time to notice alternative paths.

  Even a goat can do this. I saw it myself in a clicker training class that I took as a zoo docent. A goat was being trained to walk across a see saw to get a reward. The goat rushed to the top of the see saw, but it froze in terror as soon as it felt the shake at the fulcrum. I froze too as I looked into its eyes. Suddenly, the goat burst into action and walked down toward the expected reward. Then it quickly climbed back up to get another reward, and crested without the hesitation this time. I was thrilled to have such an up-close and personal look at a mammal brain conquering anxiety and building new skills.

  The better we understand that moment of choice, the more power we have over it. So let’s zoom in and take a closer look.

  When an ocean liner changes course, no turn is visible for twenty minutes. It takes a huge investment of energy to turn a ship. Imagine investing all that energy without seeing a result for twenty minutes. If sailors limited themselves to actions that got immediate results, ships would never turn. Navigation is possible because sailors trust their skills and wait for their efforts to take effect.

  It’s the same way with your brain. You may not feel a dramatic change in the moment when you stop and change course. The results will become visible later, but only if you invest the effort now.

  So how do
you master that moment of course correction?

  Your Peak Power

  You have the power to redirect your electricity. You have done it many times, but you don’t know how you do it. Let’s look closer at this power so you can use it to tame anxiety.

  Your senses are constantly taking in information from the world around you and sending patterns of electricity to your brain. Those patterns depend partly on the facts of the world and partly on the neural pathways you receive them with. When the world fits your template, electricity flows easily.

  Sometimes, the world doesn’t fit. Then you have a choice. You can “go with the flow,” and let your electricity move into the best available match. Or you can stop the action and reexamine the pattern that is actually triggered. For example, if you see a movie marquis that says, “Star Wa2s,” you could interpret that as “Star Wars,” or look for a meaning for the details actually reaching your eyes. In this case, defaulting to the familiar pattern seems so reasonable that you barely notice the difference between the actual input and the old pathway. But if you are on a country road at night and one light is coming toward you, jumping to conclusions is dangerous, so you stop to consider alternative possibilities.

  All day every day, you are matching incoming patterns to the patterns you stored from past experience. Life is easy when you decide that a new input fits an old template. You feel like you know what is going on. This is why we rely on old pathways even when they make us feel threatened.

  Why is it so hard to take a closer look instead of defaulting to your automatic impulse? To answer this we have to zoom in even closer. Neurons do not literally connect. There is always a gap or synapse between one neuron and the next. Your electricity can only flow if it has enough power to jump across the synapse. That’s easy for myelinated pathways. It’s easy for inputs that are big and loud. And it’s easy for synapses that have already seen a lot of action. Experienced synapses can ferry electricity more efficiently. It’s as if they have more rowboats ready to transport an electrical charge to the other side.

  Without these advantages, an electrical signal may fail to jump across the synapse, and you lose the information. Sometimes that’s good. You don’t want to waste attention on every detail around you. Ignoring the irrelevant helps you interpret the relevant. This is how our brain is designed to work. But it’s also why we tend to ignore things we’re not already wired to notice. We feel safer on the trails that are well-stocked with rowboats.

  Fortunately, you add new rowboats to your fleet when you repeat a new thought or behavior. Your brain adds new receptors to your synapses when you use them a lot. That makes it easier to notice the information you used to overlook. But those receptors disappear if you don’t use them. In short, your brain molds itself to the inputs you feed it. If you feed it a lot of positive inputs, it becomes more skilled at processing positive information. If you don’t, positive information is easy to ignore.

  If you feed your brain with a diet of negative information, you are very good at processing that. This is natural. We are designed to focus on survival information. A gazelle that smells the flowers may miss the smell of a lion. So don’t be too hard on yourself when you fear leaving those old roads. But you can become the superhero of your own life by leaving the anxiety road and blazing a new trail.

  It’s easier when you plan the new trail because reusing a path develops it faster. For example, if you want to quit smoking, plan an alternative self-soothing strategy instead of focusing on what you are giving up. Each time you feel the urge for comfort, focus on the new choice and the synapses will soon have more rowboats. Your electricity will start to flow and it will soon feel natural.

  Your power lies in the instant when you stop coasting and choose a new trail. This is a rather limited kind of power. It would be nicer if you had the power to move the highway so you could keep coasting. But you don’t and you can’t, so you can either embrace the power you have, or be powerless.

  It’s easier to seize that moment when you expect to get a reward. The goat at my zoo expected raisins, which are very rewarding to an animal designed to eat grass. In the long run that sugar would be unhealthy, but goats have no long-run access to raisins. Humans, by contrast, have access to unnaturally large rewards every day of our lives. Such rewards bring added risk, which adds to your anxiety. Let’s see how you can design a self-soothing strategy based on healthy rewards.

  Remember:

  Myelin is a substance that coats neurons, turning them into super-efficient conductors of electricity.

  Whatever you do with your myelinated neurons feels natural and easy because electricity flows there so easily.

  Myelin is abundant before age eight and during puberty.

  We can build new neural pathways in adulthood, but it takes a lot of repetition. And it takes a big investment of energy to send electricity down an unmyelinated pathway.

  Our brains wire from experience. The rewards and pain of youth built the pathways that tell you where to expect rewards and pain today.

  The bigger an animal’s brain, the less it is wired at birth, and the more its wiring is built from experience. We humans are extremely helpless and vulnerable at birth, and take a comparatively long time to build our core neural networks.

  Your cortex and your mammal brain are designed to work together. Your cortex cannot make decisions. It can arrange data in different ways, but no decision is made until your mammal brain releases a chemical that tags an option as good for you or bad for you.

  Your cortex has the power to redirect your electricity from the path of least resistance to a new path of its choosing. But it takes a big investment of energy.

  Each time a neural pathway is activated, it flows more easily, though far less easily than a myelinated pathway.

  5

  Design the Tool That’s Right for You

  You can construct the good feeling of approaching rewards instead of waiting for rainbows to find you.

  There is no one right way to tame anxiety because each brain is built from life experience. You can design the anxiety-taming circuit that works for your unique collection of happy and unhappy pathways. This chapter shows you how.

  You will learn to define what you want in a way that motivates your mammal brain as well as your verbal brain.

  You will learn to distract your inner mammal from threat signals in healthy ways.

  You will learn to take a step that triggers happy chemicals and wires in the expectation of feeling safe.

  You may think it will be hard—even impossible—to steer your inner mammal toward these new steps. This chapter concludes with a practical guide to using carrots and sticks to steer your inner mammal. We are all familiar with the concept of motivating horses with carrots and sticks, but most of us shy away from using this powerful tool. Your verbal brain shuns it, insisting that you don’t care about carrots and you’re too peace-loving to use a stick. These illusions deprive you of your most powerful tool for managing your inner mammal. You can harness the power of rewards and pain to train your two brains to cooperate instead of going in different directions.

  Step One: Define What You Want in a Way That Motivates Your Mammal Brain as Well as Your Verbal Brain

  Set your timer for one minute and ask yourself what you want in this moment. It may feel awful at first as your mind floods with past disappointments and anticipated future disappointments. Your desires may seem out of reach. But if you stick with it for a whole minute, you can target your greatest unmet need in this moment, and define it in a way you can actually step toward.

  Listening to your needs helps you feel safe because neglect of your needs makes you feel threatened. You may have been taught to focus on the needs of others and deny your own. Or you may have learned to expect others to meet your needs, and now you feel powerless to do it yourself. These beliefs tell your inner mammal
that its needs will not be met, which feels like a survival threat. You may not know where that threatened feeling is coming from, but when you listen to your needs, your inner mammal feels relief.

  What if you want something harmful or out of reach? You don’t have to go there because you know what your inner mammal really wants: dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin. You can design practical steps to stimulate them. You can construct the good feeling of approaching rewards instead of waiting for rainbows to find you.

  Your brain defines “rewards” as anything that meets a need. It knows that a need has been met when a happy chemical is released. But old pathways control the happy chemicals, and that limits your expectations about rewards. You can access a new universe of rewards by building new pathways. New oxytocin can be stimulated by creating moments of social trust. New serotonin can be stimulated by seeing yourself in a position of strength. New dopamine can be stimulated by stepping toward a new way to meet a need. Here are some examples.

  To spark serotonin, give yourself permission to take pride in something you’ve done. You may think it’s wrong to applaud yourself. You may crave the applause of others. But if you wait for the world to applaud you, you may never take a step. Instead, you can be impressed with yourself for a minute a day instead of always being impressed with others. That will build the pathway to turn on the good feeling more easily. You may be very critical of yourself, but you can praise yourself once a day. And don’t ruin the pleasure by resenting others for failing to see your brilliance. Just take a step you can be proud of and feel good about it. A good feeling today is worth more than grandiose illusions about the future. You can train your inner mammal to feel safe with tiny moments of power that you can repeat.