How to stop feeling anxious about anxiety | episode 05
let's talk about feeling anxious
about anxiety
[Music]
in this video we're going to talk about
how anxiety is different than stress
the neuroscience of anxiety what it
really means
and how understanding the neuroscience
of anxiety
can give you some tools and we're going
to offer a bunch of
highly effective strategies that you
probably haven't seen somewhere else
to help you manage anxiety and use
anxiety as something positive
instead of something negative one of the
most frequent online searches in this
topic
is is my anxiety normal
or might there be something wrong
anxiety is confusing
because it's a word we use for a feeling
and it's also
a word we use for brain illness when
people are struggling with an anxiety
disorder
their chemistry is out of balance
and the strategies that can help all of
us with anxiety
are not going to be enough some people
talk about it like trying to fill a
bucket
with a hole in it if you're struggling
with anxiety
and it's negatively affecting your daily
life
for multiple days in a row please get
help
i heard a child psychiatrist describe it
this way
if you have this many reasons to be
anxious but your anxiety is this big
it may mean you have an anxiety disorder
and if it's persisting over time and
it's causing you
to lose quality of life then it's worth
checking out and talking to a mental
health professional
to find out if you have an anxiety
disorder because you can get help with
that
and even if you have an anxiety disorder
the strategies that i'm going to share
in this video can help you
but they're really designed for all of
us with
normal anxiety it's a feeling that means
that there's a generalized threat
where fear is connected with a very
specific
danger and stress is connected with a
specific
problem anxiety is generalized and it's
a sense
that there's something out there one
thing that's useful to understand about
anxiety
is that humans are social animals and
we're really at the top of our food
chain in most places
and so the stressors in our lives are
not really
are we going to get eaten as social
animals
danger is most frequently connected with
being
outside of the group and so many sources
of anxiety are connected with
social uncertainty not knowing where we
stand
not feeling psychologically safe not
knowing if we have allies
not knowing whether people are going to
like us or not
and that might sound trivial but at a
neurobiological level
we are adapted for survival
this is deep in our architecture and if
we aren't connected with the group
it's dangerous for us and so things like
do i get enough likes on social media is
triggering this foundational visceral
reaction
social media algorithms know this and
developers have actually created
their systems to trigger this anxiety
so that we get more dependent on using
these tools
but of course that fuels social anxiety
it's one of the reasons that loneliness
is such an important
indicator of mental health challenges in
the world
and loneliness is at an all-time high
people don't feel connected and when
they don't feel connected
these social triggers of anxiety have
more intensity
and are harder to deal with cigna one of
the world's largest
insurers did a massive study in 2018
and found that among adults loneliness
is so high that it's reaching epidemic
levels
61 of adults report being lonely
that's almost a 20 increase in one year
and we know that with the pandemic and
other factors such as climate change
people are feeling even more
disconnected now what this
means is three in five people in the u.s
are feeling loneliness and it's even
worse in many other places in the world
all of this is to say that we're in a
condition that causes the social anxiety
reactions
to become more volatile more intense
let's talk a little bit more about the
differences between stress
and anxiety mental health first aid
offers
a useful distinction that stress is
triggered by something outside us
and anxiety is something that's going on
inside us
sometimes people describe stress as a
physiological
or physical condition and anxiety as an
emotional condition
stress tends to be more specific anxiety
tends to be more general
and very importantly when the causes
of the problem are reduced stress
reduces but often anxiety persists
anxiety is frequently a byproduct of
stress
or chronic stress seems to trigger and
reinforce
anxiety what we're looking at
is this feeling of anxiousness
which is a message that there's some
kind of problem out there
and because anxiety is generalized we
don't necessarily know
what the problem is and the helpful
function of anxiety
is to make us more vigilant to help us
look around to tell us
we need to find out what the problem is
and we might need to make some change
and this is the real benefit of anxiety
it's why we have it
anxiety can help us to mobilize us
into action action against climate
change
action to have more social connectedness
action to do things different in our
lives
so there's benefits of anxiety but only
if we can really understand it
and work with it so let's talk about how
it actually works in the brain
in some of our other videos we've talked
about the amygdala
and the trigger of the threat response
the anxiety response is fairly similar
anxiety is connected with the same kind
of neural hormones that we experience in
stress
and it's one of the reasons that stress
and anxiety are often confused
cortisol and epinephrine or adrenaline
are two of the key neural hormones
involved
when we begin to feel anxious what's
happening is our amygdala is being
triggered
to identify a potential threat our
hypothalamus starts producing these
neural hormones and then under the
direction of the thalamus which is like
a master regulatory valve
we begin to arouse the amygdala response
and release these chemicals that are
affecting our brain and our bodies
there's a kind of first reaction which
is this chemical response system we've
talked about in our videos about
why emotions last for about six seconds
and then because often the threats that
cause stress and anxiety
are longer lasting with a secondary
system
using the autonomic nervous system the
autonomic nervous system ans
is what regulates all kinds of
unconscious responses on our body
herbert benson
who started the mind body institute at
harvard medical school back in the 1970s
was one of the first physicians in the
us to start talking about this system
and understanding that there's an
emotional connection with our biological
health
and our heart health dr benson describes
the ans having two components
a kind of accelerator in the car the gas
pedal
and the brakes the sympathetic nervous
system is the gas pedal
when the sympathetic nervous system is
triggered it turns on the gas
otherwise known as the hpa axis the
hypothalamus starts producing
neural hormones that trigger the
pituitary glands and the adrenal system
and we start to produce additional
adrenaline technically called
epinephrine
and cortisol and these two chemicals as
i mentioned are connected with the
threat response
to stress and also to this emotional
reaction
called anxiety cortisol has a number of
beneficial functions
it is a form of energy production and it
helps
get our muscles ready for faster
reactivity
it helps close down the capillaries in
the surface of our skin
so that more blood stays in our trunk
and cortisol
helps us pay attention to threats by
blocking
serotonin uptake serotonin helps us feel
calm and cortisol blocks that
so that we remain vigilant and that's a
good thing when there's danger
and when we're not really sure what that
danger is the case of anxiety
it's important for us to be vigilant and
look around and assess
and be in this state of readiness for
some problem that might come
one of the interesting things about
cortisol is that it's also connected to
learning and memory
it actually takes some stress in order
to activate our learning brain
and one of the really fun tools that we
have in the eq store is called a bio dot
and when the bio dot is green it
indicates you have some stress
but green is correlated with the
readiness for learning
cortisol helps us say hey something's
happening here i need to pay attention
but it blocks some of our more nuanced
memory
and ability to recall details such as
trying to remember somebody's name at a
party what's happening is that our
our brains are shifting into this fight
flight or freeze mode
causing us to pay attention to big
things and lose track of little things
we've shared in other videos about some
of the physiological effects of stress
so i'm not going to get into that now
but cortisol has
some downsides that we really need to
pay attention to and it's one of the
reasons why anxiety is often connected
with issues with your circulatory system
as well as your digestive system
okay so remember the autonomic nervous
system has two parts we've talked about
the gas
but let's talk about the brakes the
parasympathetic nervous system
one of the important discoveries at the
harvard medical school mind body
institute
is that herbert benson found that we
could trigger this relaxation response
we could trigger the parasympathetic
nervous system
by changing our breathing by changing
what we're paying attention to by social
reappraisal and feeling more connected
but i'm going to get into that in a
minute when we go into strategies
for managing anxiety more effectively
so let's talk about strategies for
managing anxiety
first of all remembering that anxiety is
connected
with the social brain functions it makes
sense that
many strategies for mitigating anxiety
are going to be connected
with social activation increasing your
social supports
reaching out to people feeling gratitude
for the people you're connected with
recognizing that you're not alone and if
you are alone
doing the challenging work of building
relationship
is going to be an important part of
reducing anxiety and making it work for
you better
i have five emotional intelligence
strategies for helping you with feeling
anxious about anxiety
the first is to validate your feeling
to recognize that this feeling is there
and that maybe even it's there to help
you
a lot of times when we have difficult
feelings we push them aside
and there's some interesting research
that was done with
women who were pregnant and worried
about zika virus
where they tried a whole bunch of
different strategies and
none of them worked very well but
interestingly when they tried to
suppress their feeling
it made the fear more intense
so there's something about denying this
experience of anxiety
that causes it to rear its head and say
hey
you really need to pay attention to me
dan siegel says name
entertainment if we can understand our
feelings
and acknowledge them and maybe even make
friends with them
we can start to have a better
relationship with all of our feelings
including anxiety if you think about
validating your parking ticket
somebody goes and puts a stamp on it
they're actually putting value
on your ticket so when you're validating
your feeling
it's not just acknowledging it but
actually considering
that it might be there to help you
anxiety tells us that there's some kind
of problem and we need to figure out
what it is and this really brings us to
the second strategy
which is about narrowing focus one of
the challenges with anxiety is that it's
generally not connected
with a specific problem and so we start
to have this
sense that there's a threat all around
us
and that we become increasingly worried
about everything
and often when people are feeling a lot
of anxiety what they'll do is they'll
try to control something
which isn't the thing they're really
anxious about but to have this sense of
control
and that can go awry because you end up
getting into a power struggle or you end
up working on something
that's not really what the problem is so
one of the first questions that i
suggest you ask yourself is
is this even my problem is this
something that i'm responsible for is
this something that matters to me
or am i you know carrying a lot of
shoulds or
guesses or expectations am i making
assumptions about what i'm supposed to
be doing or supposed to be feeling
if this really is my problem then i can
tune in and say
is it within my sphere of control or my
sphere of concern
most of us have a much larger sphere of
concern than sphere of control
and saying if it is my problem is it
something that i'm concerned about
but can't really do anything about or is
there something i can
actually do something about and focusing
on the things that we want to take
responsibility for
that are in our sphere of control or in
our sphere of influence
we're able to do something about it so
narrowing the focus down to say what
part of this is mine
and what part of this can i actually
take action on
that develops a greater sense of agency
which is an important part of
handling anxiety in a positive way
in other videos you've heard me talk
about exercising optimism
and exercising optimism is a very
powerful tool that can help you with
this
the idea of agency i just talked about
is connected with exercising optimism
but so is suspending judgment
oftentimes when people are feeling
anxious what they'll do
is they'll awfulize and they'll do that
as a way to protect themselves and
they'll say
this is going to be so bad and all these
negative things are going to happen
and it's a way of again having a kind of
illusion of control
by saying well if i think how bad it is
i won't be surprised when something
negative happens
of course what that ends up doing is
making you miserable about
everything in your life and that fuels
pessimism
and that increases stress which
increases the anxiety
so rather than just saying okay it's
going to be fine
which you kind of know it's not you also
don't really know how bad it's going to
be
so what i would encourage you to do is
just suspend
judgment to stay in a state of data
gathering
to say i don't really know if this is
going to be good
or if this is going to be bad and
because i don't know
i'm not going to jump to a conclusion
i'm going to be curious
if you can replace anxiety with
curiosity
it will help take that vigilance that
you're feeling and that need to look
around and find what the problem is
and really understand it in a deeper way
in one of our articles about anxiety
we'll put it in the show notes there's a
strategy
about shifting from anxiety to say
what's important here because when we
feel anxious
it means that there's something going on
we're perceiving some kind of a problem
but we don't exactly know what it is and
generally speaking when we feel a lot of
anxiety
it's because we're perceiving a very big
problem
or something's not quite right
because something is important and so
tuning in to what's important is a
strategy for you to stay
out of that conclusion state and in that
curiosity state
because we're trying to see all of our
feelings
as allies and we're trying to make
friends with our emotions
and and not be in reaction to our
feelings
instead of trying to suppress the
feeling or push it away
one of the things you can do is shrink
it and
visualizing the feeling getting lighter
so as you imagine if you kind of sit
back and maybe close your eyes
and you imagine this feeling many people
who are feeling anxious will imagine it
as this
like dark cloud with lightning and
it's very intense and instead of saying
i want that to go away
try just imagining it getting a little
bit lighter
a little bit smaller a little bit
further
away from you you're not trying to get
rid of it
you're trying to step back from it and
take some perspective
you can couple this with breathing going
for a walk
drinking water and you have a number of
strategies that help you
produce more serotonin including
laughing smelling flowers
and just appreciating what's good in the
world even if it's just a tiny thing
the goal isn't to get rid of the anxiety
the goal
is to move away from it a little bit so
that you can understand it better
think about it like this you could have
a song that's playing
and you turn up the volume so high you
can't even figure out what the words are
and and maybe it's a song you even like
but unless you get a little bit of
distance from it
it's hard to make sense of it so if you
think about that anxiety in that same
way that it's maybe not a negative thing
but maybe it's just too much
and can you turn the volume down a
little bit or can you lighten the color
of it
or you can step back a little bit from
it so that you can hear
the message and not just the noise the
last one
is to clean up your clutter and there's
some interesting research that found
that
when somebody is in a cluttered
environment
their bottom-up neural processing which
is basically our
automatic processing that's happening
without conscious control
becomes distracted by the clutter and
this was particularly true for women by
the way
in this more cluttered environment our
brains are having trouble
sorting out what's important and that
increases our sense of anxiety
and in this particular study it also
increased
people's tendency to eat unhealthy foods
we can take this idea of
decreasing the clutter both to the
physical clutter
but also to the mental and emotional
clutter in our lives
most of us have a lot of things that are
not resolved in our lives
most of us have a lot of things that
we're thinking about sometimes just
making a list
organizing our ideas deciding there's
some things to let go of
there's some relationships that we need
to repair or
cleaning up our physical environment or
simplifying our days
there are many kinds of clutter in our
lives and again this clutter becomes
like
noise which makes it harder for us to
figure out
what is really important in this
situation and what we should be paying
attention to
so in addition to the improving social
conditions
the five strategies are to validate your
feeling
to narrow the focus to suspend
conclusion
to shrink it instead of suppress it and
to clean up the clutter
when people are struggling with anxiety
it can be incredibly painful
each quarter we publish an eq cafe and
we have people around the world
who volunteer and hold these events in
hundreds of cities
and a couple of years ago we did an eq
cafe on anxiety
and we asked people to give us metaphors
for what it's like to feel anxious
and for some people it is crippling for
some people it's paralyzing
for some people it's difficult to get up
in the morning
because their anxiety is so overwhelming
want to remind you that you can get help
and you deserve help
and that all of us can benefit from
making friends with our anxiety
and trying out strategies to use it in a
way that's positive
hi i'm josh friedman thanks for watching
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