3 Psychological Reasons You’re Always Anxious

Anxiety 

 

Let them go and peace of mind will follow

 

Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

 

Nick Wignall

Sep 8 · 7 min read

We all get anxious from time to time. But living with chronic anxiety is another thing entirely…

• Constantly worrying about the future and imagining the worst
• Never being fully present in conversations because you’re always worried about what the other person is thinking of you
• Feeling tense, on-edge, and exhausted all the time
• Dreading that your next panic attack is just around the corner
• Constantly second-guessing yourself, seemingly unable to make even small decisions confidently

While there are obviously many things that lead us to feel anxious, here’s the key insight most people miss:

Whatever caused your anxiety in the past, it’s your habits in the present that are maintaining it.

If you can learn to identify these anxiety-producing habits in your life, you can work to undo them and eventually free yourself from constant worry and chronic anxiety.

1. Avoiding uncertainty

It’s human nature to want to avoid feeling uncertain. When you first show up to a dinner party, for example, you quickly scan the room for someone you know, then gravitate toward them.

Of course, there’s a good reason for this: Our ancestors who were better at minimizing uncertainty probably survived longer than the ones who weren’t afraid of it. In other words…

We’re wired by evolution to prefer the familiar and safe to the uncertain and potentially dangerous.

But even in modern life, it’s often good to minimize or avoid uncertainty:

• Not sure if your upcoming presentation is going to be received well? Practice in front of a few friends and get feedback on the parts that don’t work so well.
• Not sure if the person you’ve been dating for two months is “the one”? Maybe date a little longer and reduce some of that uncertainty.

But here’s the thing: While we are all wired to avoid uncertainty, and frequently benefit from doing so, it’s a mistake to get in the habit of alwaysavoiding it… After all, what kind of a life is it if you never take risks, never try new things, or never push yourself outside your comfort zone?

Unfortunately, it gets worse… Aside from your life becoming increasingly boring and uneventful, there’s an even bigger problem here:

Avoiding uncertainty gives relief from anxiety in the short-term, but it intensifies it in the long-term.

Here’s a simple example:

• A good friend texts you and invites you to a dinner party she’s hosting. But after hearing that most of the other guests will be people you don’t know, you begin to feel anxious.
• You worry about feeling awkward and uncomfortable explaining your boring job, for instance. You dread the idea of small-talk and superficial get-to-know-you chatter.
• The more you think about it, the more anxious you feel.
• At this point, the option to decline and make up a white lie about a previous engagement is getting pretty tempting because not only would it save you the potential anxiety of an awkward dinner party with people you don’t know (uncertainty!), but it would also immediately alleviate all the anxiety you’re feeling right now.
• So you text your friend that you won’t be able to make it. And sure enough, you immediately feel relieved.

The problem here is that while you’ve escaped uncertainty and anxiety in the present, you’ve actually made it more likely that you’ll feel anxious in the future.

Here’s how it works…

The fear center in your brain is always on the lookout for danger. And when it spots something, it makes you a little anxious (physiologically, anxiety is just adrenaline and your fight or flight system activating).

But critically, it also watches how you respond to that initial threat and hit of anxiety:

1. Escape. Do you confirm your fear center’s initial assessment that the uncertainty of the dinner party is a threat to your survival by trying to escape it? If so, you will feel less anxious in the moment. But you’ve taught your brain that dinner parties with unfamiliar people are a threat to your survival. Which means the next time a similar opportunity shows up, you’re going to feel even more anxious and be more tempted to avoid it. See where this vicious cycle is going…?
2. Approach. Or, you could dis-confirm your fear center’s initial assessment that the uncertainty of the dinner party is a threat by approaching it and going anyway, which would give your brain valuable feedback that just because it feels uncomfortable doesn’t mean it literally is dangerous. And while this might make you more anxious in the short-term, your brain would be less anxious the next time a situation like this came up. See where this virtuous circle is going… ?

Here’s the take-home message:

Avoiding uncertainty leads to short-term relief and long-term anxiety. Welcoming uncertainty leads to short-term anxiety and long-term confidence.

Choose wisely.

2. Avoiding helplessness

If there’s one thing human beings tend to avoid more than uncertainty it’s helplessness.

We absolutely hate feeling helpless.

For example:

• Feeling scared that your upcoming interview won’t go well and not being able to do anything about it now that it’s almost here.
• Being afraid of your son’s first airplane flight alone and not being able to do anything about it.
• Hearing your spouse talk about how depressed they’ve been feeling and knowing that you can’t make them feel better.

Of course, like uncertainty, some amount of helplessness is unavoidable in life because we just can’t control everything (and everyone). But here’s the thing: The urge to try and control the uncontrollable is surprisingly strong.

So strong, in fact, that we end up doing some surprisingly irrational and harmful things in order to maintain the illusion of control:

• You build up excessively high expectations for people in your life because, hey, if I can’t make them do well, telling myself that they should do well feels kinda close….
• You get overly involved in other people’s lives even though they’ve asked you not to (and it stresses you out).
• You replay mistakes and regrets in your head over and over again because even though you know intellectually that you can’t change the past, ruminating on it at least feels like you’re doing something productive and not totally helpless.

With a little self-reflection, you can probably think of many areas in your life where you try to control something that’s actually not under your control.

But there’s one big form of unhelpful (and anxiety-producing) control that most people miss:

You worry about things you can’t control because it temporarily makes you feel in control.

By definition, worry is unhelpful negative thinking about hypothetical or future problems. And as every chronic worrier will admit to, it leads to A LOT of anxiety. In fact, as I’ve made the case before, worry is the engine of anxiety.

But what’s weird about worry is that often when you’re worrying, you probably know intellectually that it’s not actually helpful. And that it’s only making you anxious and stressed.

And yet, you keep worrying… Why?

Well, just like we tend to eat junk food despite knowing that it’s bad for us, we worry because for a few brief minutes or seconds it feels good.

Worrying gives us something to do and makes us feel in control when we would otherwise feel helpless.

And because worry is so similar to problem-solving and planning, it’s easy to rationalize it. But in the end, worry is all side-effects and no benefit: It makes you incredibly anxious and doesn’t actually fix anything.

But because it temporarily feels good, we get addicted to it. Because it temporarily alleviates that terrible feeling of helplessness, we come back to it over and over again despite all the anxiety it generates.

Which is all to say that if you want to feel less anxious, you must learn to control your worry habit.

3. Avoiding boundary-setting

One of the most subtle but powerful causes of chronic anxiety is unhealthy boundaries:

• Always saying yes to your manager’s request to do “a little” extra work over the weekend
• Always “going with the flow” and agreeing to what your spouse wants to do for vacation
• Always answering your sister’s phone calls and listening to her vent and complain about her toxic relationship

I mean, think about it:

If you’re constantly taking on other people’s problems, and never have time to address your own wants and needs, how could you not be anxious!

But if it’s so obvious that unhealthy boundaries lead to anxiety, why do we struggle so much to set healthy boundaries?

While there are many, many reasons, one of the most important is this:

You struggle to set boundaries because you’re afraid to communicate assertively.

Now, a lot of people hear the term assertive and they think rude or pushy. But in reality, assertive communication is the healthy middle ground between aggressive and passive.

• Aggressive communication is when you try to get what you want but in a way that’s rude and disrespectful to others.
• Passive communication is when you’re disrespectful to your own wants and needs because you’re overly concerned with and accommodating of other people.
• Assertive communication means asking for what you want and saying no to what you don’t want in a way that’s respectful to yourself and the other person.

This isn’t the time or place to get into all of the nuances of how to be more assertive. But what’s key to realize is this:

If you’re unwilling to stand up for yourself, you’ll be unable to maintain healthy boundaries. And without healthy boundaries, your anxiety will skyrocket.

If you want to start feeling less anxious all the time, practice communicating assertively.

Anxiety Is in Your Body, Not Your Mind

Anxiety 

 

Why you might want to stop talking about your anxiety and try this instead

Photo by Uday Mittal on Unsplash

Emma Pattee

Let’s back up 50,000 years or so. Imagine you’re a Neanderthal taking a leisurely stroll through the fields. Suddenly, in the nearby bushes, you hear a tiger. In a nanosecond, your entire body starts reacting. Your pulse quickens, your breathing gets shallow, your eyes dilate, your body starts producing adrenaline.

Everything happening in your body is good; you’re prepared to survive this tiger encounter. There’s just one small problem. It wasn’t a tiger. It was a tiny prehistoric weasel. Now your body is primed for fight-or-flight, your heart is racing, you’re totally jacked up on adrenaline… but there is no danger.

This is your body on anxiety. Replace the (nonexistent) tiger in the bushes with social media, traffic, politics, Covid-19, money, childcare, climate change, work stress, family drama, and you can quickly see why anxiety is the most common mental illness in America, affecting nearly 20% of the population. Modern-day humans are basically a bunch of freaked-out Neanderthals in fight-or-flight mode 24/7.

“Anxiety is an impulse in our body that says, ‘I’m not safe right now,’” says Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, the author of Widen The Window: Training Your Body and Brain to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma. “It’s automatic, really fast and unconscious.”

Your survival brain vs. your thinking brain

In her work, Stanley makes the distinction between the thinking brain, our neocortex, responsible for decision-making, reasoning, ethics, conscious memory, learning, and the survival brain — the limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum — which handles our basic survival, emotions, implicit memory, and stress arousal.

One of the survival brain’s most important functions, according to Stanley, is neuroception, an unconscious process of rapidly scanning the internal and external environment for safety and danger. When danger is spotted, your survival brain sends an instantaneous stress arousal message to your body by turning on the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in the release of specific hormones that lead to certain physical sensations related to our heart, breathing, and digestion. “Whatever’s happening in the survival brain has these tremendous ripple effects through our body,” Stanley says.

As Stephen Porges, PhD, a psychologist and the creator of the Polyvagal Theory, explains in an interview with PsychAlive, “These responses are not voluntary. Our nervous system is picking up information in the environment, not on a cognitive level, but on a neurobiological level.”

Importantly, when we’re caught in a defensive response, the thinking brain is the last to be aware that something is wrong.“The thinking brain isn’t what decides whether we’re stressed, whether we’re feeling threatened or challenged, whether we’re going to turn stress on, whether we’re going to turn emotions on,” Stanley says. “Stress arousal and emotions belong to the survival brain.”

So if you want to track your anxiety, your body, not your thoughts, will be your most accurate map.

The talk therapy trap

Unlike our prehistoric ancestors (who might have dealt with anxiety by running, panting, or shaking like a dog and letting the cortisol work through their system, according to Stanley), modern anxiety sufferers turn to their trustworthy friend, their thinking brain. “Most people identify anxiety by their thoughts because most people identify with their thinking brain,” she explains.

The problem is that when it comes to regulating our nervous system after a stress response (read: anxiety), our thinking brain is the absolute worst tool for the job. That’s because, according to Porges, even after becoming aware of the physical response, we often don’t know what has triggered that response. For Stanley, a veteran who was diagnosed with PTSD, this realization was a huge turning point. “Recovery from stress and anxiety is a survival brain job.”

We are a cerebral culture, which makes us very equipped to deal with problems that require reason and logic — think moral dilemmas — and less equipped to deal with problems where cognitive reasoning can just make them worse. Having a “fight or flight” response to running late to brunch may seem like an overreaction, but sitting in traffic, you are physiologically experiencing it all the same. We use our thinking brain to try and decide if the issue is “worth” being anxious about, and then we try to force our nervous system to comply. “Our consciousness gets disconnected from our body in those moments,” says Stanley. Your thinking brain decides that you have nothing to feel anxious about, so you spend your days walking around telling yourself that everything is fine while still feeling the physical symptoms of anxiety throughout your body. Even worse, your thinking brain may start to criticize and shame you for still being anxious even after it’s told you that everything is fine.

If you, like me, have spent a few decades (and the equivalent of a house down payment) in talk therapy analyzing all the reasons you’re anxious, this is probably a hard pill to swallow. Not only did all that talking not do much to alleviate anxiety, but it could also even have made it more acute. “Our survival brain wants to keep us safe, but when we disregard our body and its signals because we’re so caught up in our thinking brain’s stories and thoughts, the survival brain actually perceives that as even more threatening,” says Stanley. “Like a toddler, it’s going to tantrum louder until its message gets through. And that’s why it becomes such a vicious cycle.”

Take, for example, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, one of the most common forms of talk therapy. According to the Mayo Clinic, “CBT helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.” Sounds great, right? While this kind of analysis could be profoundly helpful when dealing with family issues or working out an ethical question, when it comes to anxiety, which doesn’t take place in your thinking brain, it places the focus on the thought (“I thought there was a tiger!”) and not the physical response which preceded, and even caused, the thought (“my heart is racing and I’m full of adrenaline and I need tools to calm down”).

“We don’t necessarily want to be aware of and feel the discomfort in our bodies because anxiety in our bodies is uncomfortable. Instead, we want to try and fixate it and give it this external object,” explains Stanley. But if the external object didn’t cause the anxiety, then fixing it won’t alleviate the anxious feeling.

A bottom-up solution for anxiety

While talk therapy and medication are still the mainstream solutions offered for chronic anxiety, other modalities exist that offer a body-first approach. And while these modalities are still considered “alternative,” an increased interest in “brain science” and neurobiology along with continued research on mindfulness and mind-body connections are shifting our psychological understanding from focusing only on the mind to seeing the brain and body as a cohesive unit.

Part of the challenge, according to Pat Ogden, PhD, the creator of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, is that you need to close the loop that was started when your body first went into a stress response. Ogden uses the example of a client who is Black and frequently stopped by the police without cause. When this happened, the man understandably felt himself getting angry and his body tightening up: a “fight” response. As part of their work together, Ogden helped him identify and act out the physical de-escalation his body needed in order to return to a regulated state, in this case getting to strike out and defend himself within the safety of a therapy session. “We want to complete that impulse in mindfulness so that his brain is integrated and it’s not held in his body anymore,” says Ogden.

Ogden points out that part of the limitation of talk therapy is that anxiety is often related to a dysregulated response connected to an implicit memory, which then gets incorrectly pinned on a current experience or thought. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the current content,” says Ogden.

Stanley, who offers a mind fitness training course to help people build resilience, focuses on mindfulness techniques. And while at this point it’s a cliché to tell anybody with anxiety to take 10 deep breaths, her course has helped thousands of people, including active-duty military. “The military is very experienced in stressful situations, and they’ve trained themselves to turn on the survival brain but don’t always know how to turn it off,” says Stanley. Studies funded by the Department of Defense showed that Stanley’s method significantly helped improve cognitive performance during stress, lower perceived stress levels, increase regulation, and foster a faster return to baseline after stress arousal.

When your body is having a stress response, the first thing is to become aware of objects that help the survival brain feel safe, like what you can see and hear. “One of the best ways to help the survival brain feel grounded is to bring attention to where our body is in contact with our environment,” Stanley says. She suggests focusing on the contact between your feet with the floor, or your body in your chair. As soon as the survival brain perceives groundedness and safety, it automatically starts the recovery process.

Obviously, when you’re caught in a moment of severe anxiety, trying to breathe deeply or be mindful can feel almost impossible. In those situations, what you need is to get the adrenaline and cortisol out of your system. Stanley suggests jumping rope or running up and down stairs. After 10 minutes, try a mindfulness exercise again.

Is there any role for talk therapy, or trying to think logically about your anxiety? Absolutely. But only once your body is regulated, Stanley says: “After we have helped our survival brain feel safe and stable, then we can work on our thoughts. Otherwise, our cognitive response continues to be biased by our stress and emotions.”

Emma Pattee

Writer from Portland, Ore. Words in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Cut, Glamour, Marie Claire, Elle, and others. emmapattee.com

What to Do When You Are in a Negative Thought Spiral

 

Negative thoughts

 

Photo by Michael Hardy on Unsplash

My mind would not stop talking to me this afternoon.

You see, I ordered a multi-tiered plant stand for my office a few weeks ago. If you’re like me, video calls have become a staple in your work life. And in a moment of inspiration (insanity?), I decided a multi-tiered plant stand would look great behind me as I sat on those video calls.

But this multi-tiered plant stand came in one million pieces with one million screws. So as I sat there wrestling with an Allen wrench for an hour, my mind was in a completely different space, uncoupled from the task at hand.

I had talked to a friend earlier in the day. She offered to reconnect me with an old colleague who might have some consulting opportunities. My work is a delicate balance between staying engaged in the work for current clients while keeping my eyes open for other opportunities.

So while my hands were occupied, I had a nonstop stream of words running through my head. And none of them were good.

Nothing will come of this.

That old colleague will never remember you.

Even if he does remember you, he will be very unimpressed with the work you’ve done since you parted ways.

You better not get your hopes up, you know how that always turns out.

And I sat there, drowning in these terrible, mean, unnecessary thoughts. Listening to them like they were true and valid points. Uh huh, I mentally nodded along, thanks for pointing that out. You’re right.

I accepted these thoughts until I reached a point where my heart started jumping around. I wanted to blot out all my feelings with a giant chocolate chip scone. I made my way to the kitchen to discover, for better or worse, my 10 year old had finished the scones before I had the chance.

My scone expedition thwarted, I decided to try to manage the thoughts instead of trying to blot them out.

I have done a lot of research on this topic, because I have had negative thought spirals for most of my life. So I used a few of the things that I know are proven to work.

Separate the Facts From Your Brain’s Projections

Often when I first hear those negative thoughts in my head, I don’t even realize what is happening. That I am spiraling. I assume that the voice in my head is simply reporting the news.

So for me, the first action to take is a step back and say, wait a minute, are these true facts going through my head? Or have I gone down a rabbit hole on this topic?

When I am in the vortex, I am doing what psychologists call rumination. According to Kambara, et al, rumination is:

…conscious thoughts that revolve around and recur to an intrusive [extent] that indicates a discrepancy between current state and ideal outcome.

In other words, I am fixated on what happened and how it isn’t exactly what I wanted to happen.

In my case, I wasn’t focusing on my version of a previous event. Instead, I was ruminating on all the possible future negative outcomes and possibilities.

But that was an important distinction to recognize. I thought I was passively accepting as the news. What I was actually listening to was my brain anxiously filling the space between the present moment and the unknown future.

Scientists call this abstract processing versus concrete processing. According to Watkins et al, 2015, abstract processing means

focus on causes, meanings, implications, significance, and consequences of feelings and events

(And by the way, this comes from an article called …Heightened Ruminative Disposition is Characterized by Increased Emotional Extrapolation. Which means if you overthink like me, you’re going to whip yourself into a frenzy trying to predict the future).

What these researchers propose is instead to shift your thoughts to concrete processing. This is a focus on:

Direct, detailed concrete experience and the mechanics of how such events occur.

Which is to say, what actually happened? What parts of the story I’m telling myself are empirically true?

If I focus on the factual events that occurred, they are: 1) I spoke to a friend, 2) she brought up an old colleague and offered to re-connect us, 3) I said that would be great.

Nothing else happened.

It is true that there were networking opportunities in the past that did not end with a new consulting gig. So my brain focused on using that data to extrapolate what would surely happen again this time.

I love to use old patterns to apply them to future events, but the truth is, my mind is not a fortune teller. I don’t actually have any facts to tell me what will go on in that old colleague’s mind when he hears my name. Or what will happen after that.

Focusing on the concrete, it allows me to retell the story at least in a neutral way. This is what happened. The uncertainty of the unknown future might still provide me with some angst. But at least I can piece apart what is really going on and stop beating myself up for what might happen but hasn’t actually occurred.

Find Something To Organize

This one is tricky for me. I do find organization very soothing. Studies show that exerting some control over your space can help you feel as if you have some control in the world. As Dr. Ethan Kross wrote in his new book Chatter: The Voice In Our Head, Why It Matters, and How To Harness It:

When we experience chatter, we often feel as if we are losing control. Our thought spirals control us rather than the other way around. When this happens, you can boost your sense of control by imposing order on your surroundings.

There are some members of my family that take organizing to what is probably an unhealthy extreme. As a way of coping with their anxiety. So I know first hand that, like any tool, this one can go too far. But I also know that I have a healthy relationship with organizing.

With the plant stand completed, I started organizing my office space. I hadn’t done that since the start of the pandemic. I enjoyed throwing away the snowdrifts of old papers and putting some of my books in order by color (something I had previously only seen on Instagram). And the activity redirected my thoughts from a negative sprial to a feeling of accomplishment. Sometimes it’s nice to have tangible results. And the truth is, it took about 20 minutes.

I think the plant stand turned out pretty well, don’t you? And in the end, setting it up was very satisfying.

Photo by author.

Seek Out Nature — Even If Its Only In Photos

There is a lot of clinical and anecdotal evidence that exposure to the outdoors — sunlight and nature — have a positive impact on mood.

But there is also research to show that exposure to nature reduces rumination. Even if it’s only looking at photos or videos online.

In a study by Beute et al called Stopping the Train of Thought: A Pilot Study Using An Ecological Momentary Intervention with Twice-Daily Exposure to Natural Versus Urban Scenes to Lower Stress and Rumination , they found that showing people a 3 minute slideshow of nature photos twice a day decreased worrying and rumination. So the photos alone were enough to calm people’s mental spirals.

My particular thought spiral took place at the end of the day, once it was already dark. But I am a regular runner, and had already planned a run the following morning. I am fortunate to live in a place where I have easy access to nature and the outdoors and use them frequently as a way to calm myself and boost my mood. But the study shows that even photos would be helpful if you don’t have the same kind of access.

In the end I was able to use my tools to pull out of the thought spiral. I was able to set my mind’s focus aside and move on to the rest of my evening. I stepped back and teased out the facts from my projections and I organized my space.

Nothing is foolproof, and I will likely revisit this topic in my mind at some point soon. But I know what helps me calm the tornado in my mind. It will never be perfect, and I will never completely stop ruminating. But acknowledging what is going on and actively trying to find a way to stop the cycle go a long way. They bring my mind space back to the present moment. They help me acknowledge the good right in front of me. Instead of the bad that might happen in a murky, uncertain future.

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Deb Knobelman, PhD

If Your Brain Feels Foggy And You're Tired All The Time, You're Not Alone

Brain Fog 

 

In recent weeks, Dr. Kali Cyrus has struggled with periods of exhaustion.

"I am taking a nap in between patients," says Cyrus, a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University. "I'm going to bed earlier. It's hard to even just get out of bed. I don't feel like being active again."

Exhaustion is also one of the top complaints she hears from her patients these days. They say things like, "It's just so hard to get out of bed" or "I've been misplacing things more often," she says.

Some patients tell Cyrus they've been making mistakes at work. Some tell her they can "barely turn on the TV. 'All I want to do is stare at the ceiling.' " Others say they are more irritable.

While some people who have had COVID-19 report brain fog and fatigue as lingering symptoms of their infection — what's known as long COVID — mental health care providers around the U.S. are hearing similar complaints from people who weren't infected by the virus. And many providers, like Cyrus, are feeling it themselves.

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Pandemic's Emotional Hammer Hits Hard

This kind of mental fog is real and can have a few different causes. But at the root of it are the stress and trauma of the past year, say Cyrus and other mental health experts. It's a normal reaction to a very abnormal year.

And while many people will likely continue to struggle with mental health symptoms in the long run, research on past mass traumas suggests that most people will recover once the coronavirus pandemic ends.

"We know that the majority of people tend to be resilient," says Lynn Bufka, a psychologist with the American Psychological Association. "They may have struggled during the time of the challenges but generally come out OK on the other end."

In the meantime, Bufka and other experts say that there are things we can do now to fight the mental fog and exhaustion.

How stress and sleep are linked

"Exhaustion can be a symptom of many things," says Cyrus.

For one, it can be a symptom of stress.

"We know from other research that people will talk about fatigue as something that they experience when they're feeling overstressed," says Bufka.

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A recent survey by the American Psychological Association found that 3 in 4 Americans said that the pandemic is a significant source of stress.

Millions of people have lost loved ones, have become ill themselves and/or have lost income as a result of the pandemic. The threat of COVID-19 alone has been stressful for most people, as has all of the upheaval that the pandemic has brought, says Bufka.

Stress "keeps our mind vigilant and our nervous system vigilant, and that uses more energy," says Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. That's one reason that prolonged stress can leave us feeling drained.

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Another way that chronic stress makes us feel exhausted is by interfering with sleep, says Bufka. "When we're feeling stressed, our sleep can get disrupted, which naturally leads to feelings of tiredness and exhaustion," she says.

"We really rely on sleep to recover each day," explains Epel. "And so for many of us, even though we might think we're sleeping the same number of hours, it's not the same quality. It doesn't have the same restorative ability, because we're getting less deep sleep, and we think that is tied to this chronic, subtle uncertainty, stress."

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Chronic stress also triggers low-grade inflammation, she adds.

"We have this inflammatory response when we're feeling severe states of stress that can last. It's subtle, it's low grade and it can absolutely cause fatigue and a worse mood."

A year of anxiety, grief and trauma

The fatigue and fog so many are feeling now also could be symptoms of other mental health issues that flared over the last year, says Dr. Jessica Gold, a psychiatrist at Washington University in St. Louis. "After this long, most people have had some degree of anxiety, depression, trauma, something," she says.

As studies have shown, rates of anxiety and depression in the population have gone up during the course of the pandemic.

I think that because so many people are struggling with this and because it is so normal, everybody has something to say. If we could just get to the point where we could be talking about the stuff more openly, we'd feel a lot less alone.

Dr. Jessica Gold, psychiatrist

Long-term anxiety can also exhaust the body, says Gold.

"We evolved as creatures, people that run from predators in the animal kingdom, right? To have anxiety as a way to predict and run from threat," she says.

When we're anxious, our hearts race and our muscles tense up as we prepare to fight a predator or run from it. But "you can only run a 100-yard dash for a short amount of time. Not a year, and not a year where they keep moving the finish line," says Gold. "We can't do that. Eventually our muscles and our body say, 'No, I'm tired.' "

njoy.

How Anxiety Hides in Your Habits

Anxiety 

 

Before you try any tips to reduce anxiety, you have to understand your own anxiety routines, a new book argues.

By Kira M. Newman | March 11, 2021

I don’t know about you, but I’m a little tired of reading the same tips over and over about how to calm down and destress. I’m tired of trying to slow down my breathing when my chest feels heavy, and question the worst-case scenarios running around my head. 

That’s why psychiatrist Judson Brewer’s new book Unwinding Anxiety is so refreshing. Yes, it has some tips—but they don’t come until much later in the book. In fact, his whole point is that tips alone won’t help those of us who struggle with anxiety. 

Brewer shows how anxiety exists inside the habits that make up our everyday lives, and habits are sticky. They won’t go away just because we tell ourselves to breathe— because, as crazy as it sounds when talking about anxiety, our brain is attracted to these habits because they create some sense of reward.

Implementing tips and tools skips an important step, Brewer argues. Before we can try to change anything, we have to spend some time observing our anxiety-related habits. Only then—by showing our brain viscerally how unrewarding these habits are—can we move to actually creating new ones. 

Unwinding Anxiety offers a three-step process to help you do exactly that, backed up by Brewer’s extensive habit research. While many well-being books can feel overwhelming, his approach is reassuring in its simplicity but different enough to feel like it just might work.

Step one: Map out anxiety habits

If you struggle with anxiety, it’s likely that anxiety has become a habit for you, writes Brewer. Many of our habits have developed to help us reduce stress or satisfy emotional needs, he explains, even if they don’t always benefit us long-term. Our habits exist in loops that consist of a trigger, a behavior, and a result. For example:

Trigger: Feel anxious
Behavior: Eat something sweet
Result: Be distracted from anxiety

Sometimes anxiety can trigger a habit loop, but it can also be the result in a habit loop:

Trigger: Feel unmotivated at work
Behavior: Read news
Result: Feel anxious about the state of the world

But the most pernicious anxiety-related habit is this basic pattern, which many of us fall into, where anxiety reinforces itself:

Trigger: Feel anxious
Behavior: Worry (ruminate on what’s wrong, what could go wrong, etc.)
Result: Feel more anxious

What reward could we possibly get out of a self-perpetuating anxiety cycle? Well, Brewer explains, the act of worrying can sometimes feel good—or at least better than just sitting with our anxiety. Worrying sometimes (rarely) allows us to come up with solutions, which makes it seem productive; we think we’re solving problems. Some of us are afraid we’ll be unprepared for the future if we don’t worry, and worry can give us a sense of control over the situation, even when all we do is go over and over the same fears.

In one of Brewer’s studies (currently under peer review), becoming aware of worry habit loops made people less anxious—and, for doctors, reduced their burnout and cynicism. But mapping out your habits is just the first step.

Step two: Work with your brain’s reward system

As Brewer explains, our brain stores a “reward value” for different people, places, and things we encounter. The more rewarding our brain thinks a behavior is, the stronger the habit around it will be.

Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind (Avery, 2021, 304 pages)

But reward values can become skewed or outdated. For example, we might have developed a passion for cake as an anxious teen—but in adulthood, we now find ourselves in a queasy sugar coma after three slices.

“The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value,” writes Brewer. That means taking a fresh look at how a habit is affecting us now. And we need to do this over and over, each time we repeat the habit in our daily life, until our brain updates its reward value and stops being drawn to the habit.

What does this mean in practice?

Once you’ve identified your habits that support anxiety, you need to be mindful when they occur. If you’re anxious and you start worrying about the future, make a mental note; observe the tightness in your chest, the lump in your throat, how little you get done at work that afternoon.

The good thing about this approach is that moments of anxiety become an opportunity to learn about yourself, not something to be afraid of, and not a failure in your quest for Zen. (Self-judgment, apparently, seems to go hand in hand with anxiety.)

If you have trouble being aware of habits in real time, you can also look back on your day or your week to see the effects of a particular behavior. If your anxiety made you snap at your partner, how did that feel? Rather than analyzing it, just try to re-experience it in your body.

Over time, Brewer suggests, our brain will naturally become disenchanted with our anxiety habits without us having to use so much willpower, allowing more space for new habits to form.

Step three: Create new habits

This step is where most other advice begins: the healthy habits and behaviors that we want to engage in. But it makes sense that there isn’t much room for these new behaviors until our brains detach from the old ones.

Brewer suggests a variety of mindfulness-related behaviors that you could insert into your habit loops when a trigger arises, many of which may be familiar to you already:

• Curiosity and mindfulness: Rather than judging yourself for being anxious, or getting obsessed about where your anxiety is coming from, just get curious. What does it feel like, and where? How does it change? Brewer even recommends saying “Hmmm!” out loud to yourself, to encourage that sense of curiosity.
• Breathing: Tune in to the breathing sensations in your body. Breathe into places where anxiety shows up, and breathe out anxiety. See how things change.
• RAIN: This is a mindfulness practice where you Recognize and relax into the present moment; Accept and allow it to be there; Investigate your bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts; and Note what is happening.
• Noting: This is a practice of labeling what experiences are predominant in your mind moment to moment, including any of your senses (hearing, touch, sight), thinking, or feeling.
• Loving-kindness: The practice of sending kind, caring thoughts to people, including yourself, and feeling that sense of warmth in your body.

To reinforce these habits, Brewer explains, you can apply techniques from step two—but this time, instead of observing the detrimental effects, you observe how good it feels in your body to be curious or generate loving feelings.

Brewer is a habit expert—much of his research has focused on smoking and eating disorders—and although his book is about anxiety, the overall framework could apply to many habits in our lives. His insights reveal why so many of our good intentions to exercise, meditate, and otherwise self-improve don’t translate into action. Brewer’s book gives us the tools to work with our brains, rather than constantly feeling like we’re fighting against ourselves.

Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

 

About the Author

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Kira M. Newman

Kira M. Newman is the managing editor of Greater Good. Her work has been published in outlets including the Washington Post, Mindful magazine, Social Media Monthly, and Tech.co, and she is the co-editor of The Gratitude Project. Follow her on Twitter!

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This is How to be Less Distracted By Having Fun in Tedious Tasks

Distraction 

 

 

 Photo by Chrales Deluvio

 

From comic books and radio programs to TV shows and Atari games, the world has always been full of things that distract us. Today, most of us blame our phones or, more specifically, social media, Words with Friends, or Netflix as the reason we can’t get anything done.

Yet these aren’t the real culprits. Instead, our distraction is usually driven by our desire to escape discomfort, including boredom, fear, and anxiety — or tasks in our work calendar that don’t sync with how we value our time (see How to Get the Most out of your Calendar). When you binge on The Office rather than doing your taxes, watching Michael, Pam, and Dwight is your (understandable) way of avoiding an activity you deem to be a tedious task. The secret to staying focused at times like these is not to abstain from The Office — you’ll just find another distraction — but to change your perspective on the task itself.

Ian Bogost studies fun for a living. A professor of interactive computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Bogost has written 10 books, including quirky titles like How to Talk About Videogames, The Geek’s Chihuahua, and, most recently at the time of this writing, Play Anything. In the latter book, Bogost makes several bold claims that challenge how we think about fun and play. “Fun,” he writes, “turns out to be fun even if it doesn’t involve much (or any) enjoyment.”

Huh? Doesn’t fun have to feel good? Not necessarily, Bogost says. By relinquishing our notions about what fun should feel like, we open ourselves up to seeing our daily activities in a new way. Play can be part of any difficult task, he believes, and though play doesn’t necessarily have to be pleasurable, it can free us from discomfort — which, let’s not forget, is the central ingredient driving distraction.

Given what we know about our propensity for distraction when we’re uncomfortable, reimagining difficult work as fun could prove incredibly empowering. Imagine how powerful you’d feel if you were able to transform the hard, focused work you have to do into something that felt like play.

Is that even possible? Bogost thinks it is, but probably not in the way you think.

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Don’t Sugarcoat It

We’ve all heard Mary Poppins’s advice to add “a spoonful of sugar” and turn a job into a game. Well, Bogost believes Poppins was wrong. He claims her approach “recommends covering over drudgery.” As he writes, “We fail to have fun because we don’t take things seriously enough, not because we take them so seriously that we’d have to cut their bitter taste with sugar. Fun is not a feeling so much as an exhaust produced when an operator can treat something with dignity.”

“Fun is the aftermath of deliberately manipulating a familiar situation in a new way,” Bogost says. The answer, therefore, is to focus on the task itself. Instead of running away from our pain or using rewards like prizes and treats to help motivate us, the idea is to pay such close attention that you find new challenges you didn’t see before. Those new challenges provide the novelty to engage our attention and maintain focus when tempted by distraction.

TV, social media, and other commercially produced distractions use slot machine-like variable rewards to keep us engaged with a constant stream of newness. Bogost points out that we can use the same techniques to make any task more pleasurable and compelling. He gives the example of mowing his lawn. “It may seem ridiculous to call an activity like this ‘fun,’” he writes, yet he learned to love it.

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There is Novelty in Even the Most Tedious Tasks

“Pay close, foolish, even absurd attention to things,” he says. Bogost soaked up as much information as he could about the way grass grows and how to treat it. Then, he created an “imaginary playground” in which the limitations actually helped to produce meaningful experiences. He learned about the constraints he had to operate under, including local weather conditions and what different kinds of equipment can and can’t do. Operating under constraints, Bogost says, is the key to creativity and fun. Finding the optimal path for the mower or beating a record time are other ways to create an imaginary playground.

While learning how to have fun cutting grass may seem like a stretch, people find fun in a wide range of activities that you might not find particularly interesting. Consider my local coffee-obsessed barista who spends a ridiculous amount of time refining the perfect brew, the car buff who toils for countless hours fine-tuning her ride, or the crafter who painstakingly produces intricate sweaters and quilts for everyone he knows. Of course, these people don’t find these activities to be tedious tasks at all; to them, they’re the most fascinating and enthralling things in the entire world. But you can try bringing their mindset — their love of minutiae, their pride in mastery, their eternal yearning to do better — to some of your most dreaded tasks.

For me, I learned to stay focused on the sometimes tedious work of writing books by finding the mystery in it. I write to answer interesting questions and discover novel solutions to old problems. To use a popular aphorism, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” Today, I write for the fun of it. Of course, it’s also my profession, but by finding the fun, I’m able to do my work without getting as distracted as I once did.

Remember: Finding novelty is only possible when we give ourselves the time to focus intently on a task and look hard for the variability. The great thinkers and tinkerers of history made their discoveries because they were obsessed with the intoxicating draw of discovery, the mystery that pulls us in because we want to know more. Whether it’s uncertainty about our ability to do a task better or faster than last time or coming back to question the unknown day after day, the quest to solve these challenges is what can turn the discomfort we seek to escape into an activity we embrace.

Excerpted from the book Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal.

This article also appeared on Ted.com.

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