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