Unmasking Anxiety's Tricks
By Max Maisel, PhD Clinical Psychologist and Founder of Beachfront Practicing in Redondo Beach and Los Angeles, California
Your anxiety does not play fair. It will use every trick in the playbook to get you to engage in behaviors that will maintain and increase your worry and discomfort. This isn't because your anxiety is trying to harm you in any way. In fact, it's doing the exact opposite! Your anxiety stems from a small, almond-shaped part of your brain called the amygdala. It is one of the oldest, lizard-like parts of the human mind that is purely based on survival. When a threat is registered, your amygdala will do everything it can to keep you safe, which usually involves triggering the release of chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol that make you feel like something bad is going to happen. You can think of the amygdala as computer hardware that was installed in the human brain when our ancient, cave-dwelling ancestors lived in a world where there was danger around every corner. Unfortunately, your brain's ancient wiring does not match up to modern-day society, where you are generally safe and free from the threat of being gobbled up by a saber-toothed tiger. Read on to learn the three most common ways your amygdala can trick you into experiencing much more anxiety than you need to.
1. You take your thoughts too seriously. How many thoughts run through your mind every day? Thousands? Tens of thousands? Almost constantly, you are subconsciously choosing which thoughts to listen to and which thoughts to dismiss or ignore.
However, when you are anxious or stressed out, it's as if the thoughts running through your mind turn into a constant reminder about all the bad stuff that could happen. The narrative is often one of dread, doom, and catastrophe, leading you to feel incredibly on edge and fearful. You probably respond to these anxious thoughts by either trying to distract yourself, trying to think your way out of it, or giving up due to feeling too overwhelmed (or maybe a combination of the three). Your brain's primary job (when anxious) is to get you to listen and respond to the scary stories of your mind. Unfortunately, any engagement in these worries will likely reactivate the amygdala, causing even more anxiety and worry. One powerful way to counteract this trick is to take a step back when anxious, look around, and ask yourself these two questions: "Is there a real problem happening right now?" and "If so, is there anything I can do about it?" If the answer is yes to both of those questions, you are not dealing with anxiety…you are dealing with a real threat or problem! So, take action and solve the problem! If the answer is "no" or "maybe" to either one, you are dealing with anxiety and worry, so the trick is to turn away from the thought. Even though it doesn't feel like it, you must treat the scary thought like a broken radio playing in the background, one that is none of your business. You can tell yourself, "Okay brain, thanks for the story. Keep 'em coming," and then gently shift your attention back to the present moment. You can still expect to feel discomfort in your body, as the adrenaline running through your blood will take some time to dissipate. However, if we stop treating anxious thoughts as if they are a signal to take action, and instead treat them as irrelevant noise, over time your brain will learn to see anxiety and intrusive thoughts as "false alarms." This will massively depower the intensity and frequency of worry and fear.
2. You take your feelings too seriously: This is a thinking error psychologists call "emotional reasoning", which essentially means that we interpret a situation as dangerous because we feel like it's dangerous.
For example, when defending my dissertation for my PhD, I thought I was at risk of failing because I felt like I wouldn't do a good job, even though there was no evidence to back that up. Just because we feel like something bad is going to happen does not mean it will. Bad things happen in life, whether we feel like they will or we feel like things are totally safe. If we treat our scary feelings as true dangers, then the most likely outcome is that the range of responses you will have for any given situation will be limited, and your anxiety will have an upper hand against your values and relationships. A helpful tip to push back against "emotional reasoning" is to gently ground yourself in the reality of your situation (taking into account the facts and the feelings), with a lot of compassion. For instance, "It's okay to be anxious. I am under a lot of stress. Just because I feel like I'm being judged does not mean that's the case. In fact, there really is no evidence of this."
3. You allow your mind to ruminate. Ruminating is the nastiest habit that nobody talks about. When we anxiously ruminate, you are essentially trying to solve an unsolvable problem by overanalyzing, reviewing, or replaying.
While it might seem harmless, the act of ruminating is what we call "negative reinforcement", which basically means it alleviates some anxiety or uncertainty (temporarily) by giving you a sense of control. Unfortunately, over time your brain is going to want to ruminate more and more, to the point where it stops feeling like a choice altogether. For many anxious and worried people, ruminating is a core feature of their anxiety that can spread an intrusive thought across days or months (when typically intrusive thoughts last for seconds). The trick to stopping rumination is to allow anxious thoughts to exist without engaging in them. It's the practice of observing thoughts in the same way you might watch leaves floating on a river or clouds passing by in the sky, allowing them to come and go without trying to make them go away or figure them out. If you ruminate often, you will probably feel incredibly anxious and uncomfortable when you turn your attention away from an anxiety problem, including a strong urge to overthink it. However, the more you can practice refraining from mental problem-solving (and allowing the anxiety to exist), the easier it will become over time. This is the key to long-term mental tranquility.
To learn more about ways that you can outsmart your worry and anxiety, please reach to Beachfront Anxiety Specialists by calling (213) 218-3080 or by sending a message through the Contact Page. Clinicians treat anxiety online or in-person in our offices in Redondo Beach and Los Angeles, CA.