Super Brain (16 page)

See that instincts are a necessary part of your life.

Be patient with fear and anger, but don’t indulge them.

Don’t try to argue yourself out of your impulses and drives.

Don’t repress thoughts and feelings out of guilt.

Be aware of fear and desire. Awareness helps to balance them.

Just because you feel impulsive, don’t always act on impulse. Higher parts of the brain must be consulted, too.

SUPER BRAIN SOLUTIONS
ANXIETY

Anxiety creates a false picture of the world, piling on things to be afraid of that are in fact harmless. The mind adds fear. If the mind can undo the perception of fear, the danger will vanish.

To begin with, life cannot exist without fear, and yet fear creates paralysis and misery. The two aspects, one positive, the other negative, meet inside your brain. For people who suffer from free-floating anxiety (one of the most common complaints in modern society), the short-term solution is a chemical fix-it: tranquilizers. We’ve already warned about the flaws of chemical fixes, in terms of side effects, but the most basic problem of all is that drugs don’t cure mood disorders, including anxiety. Just as being sad is universal while depression is abnormal and unhealthy, fear is universal while free-floating anxiety gnaws away at the soul. As Freud pointed out, nothing is more unwelcome than anxiety. Medical studies have found only a few things that the mind-body system cannot adapt to: one of them is chronic pain, the kind that gives no remission (shingles, advanced bone cancer), and another is anxiety.

Free-floating
means the thing you fear is not a specific threat. In the natural scheme, our fear response is physical and targeted. Victims of crime report that during the act, as the weapon of their assailant loomed large in their visual field, they went into a state of hyperalertness, their hearts racing. These aspects of the fear response come automatically from the lower brain, and the things that cause you worry and anxiety are thought to be programmed in the amygdala. That doesn’t tell us enough, however. Once you become anxious in a pervasive sense—as happens, for example, to chronic worriers—the whole brain gets involved. Fear is targeted and specific;
anxiety is pervasive and mysterious. People who suffer from it don’t know why.

What they experience is like a bad smell that stays on the edge of their awareness no matter how hard they try to pretend it isn’t there. To heal the anxiety, they can’t attack it as one thing; the bad smell has seeped everywhere. In other words, their reality making has gone awry. Anything or nothing can trigger anxiety in them. They always have something to be afraid of, a new worry or threat. To find the solution, they must learn not to fight the fear but to stop identifying with their fears.

Achieving detachment is only possible if you can get at what makes fear so sticky. In its positive, natural state, fear dissipates after you run away from the saber-toothed tiger or kill the woolly mammoth. There is no psychological component. In its negative, pervasive state, fear lingers. Its stickiness has a number of aspects.

HOW ANXIETY BECOMES STICKY

The same worry keeps returning. Repetition makes the fear response stick in the brain.

The fear is convincing. When you believe in the voice of fear, it takes over.

The fear stirs a memory. What you fear resembles something bad in your past, which brings back the old response.

Fear leads to silence. From shame or guilt you don’t speak your fear, so it festers.

Fear feels bad, and you shove the pain out of sight. But repressed feelings endure. What you resist, persists.

Fear is crippling. You feel too weak to do anything about it.

Earlier we talked about the depressed response in terms of a behavior that turns into a habit. That’s one way to describe stickiness when it comes to emotions; the points we made about how depression turns into a habit are worth going back to, since they also apply to anxiety. What we are adding here is the multidimensional aspect. Fear reaches out with many tentacles, and every attachment is unhealthy. To undo fear, we need to break its reality down. Each part, taken on its own, is manageable. You can dismantle it for the simple reason that you are at the center of reality making.

1. The same worry keeps returning. Repetition makes the fear response stick in the brain

Repetition deepens the rut that keeps any response fixed. If you have to walk through a dangerous part of town at night after work, doing it over and over makes the threat feel worse. Sometimes you grow used to it. Children who live with angry parents can predict fairly well when to expect another blowup. But repetition is never simple. The same children will find, usually many years later, that the abuse that their angry parents dole out affected them badly. In the case of anxiety, they internalized the repetition. You turn into the abuser, delivering the same “be afraid” message over and over.

It helps to realize that you are playing this double role of abuser and abused. Chronic worriers can’t see it. They repeat the same worries (
What if I didn’t lock the house, what if I lose my job, what if my child is on drugs?
) and actually think they are being helpful. The irritated reactions of family and friends don’t end the delusion. If anything, the worrier steps up her worry because no one else is paying attention. It’s her responsibility, then, to worry for everyone else.

The mind, trapped inside itself, can’t look far enough to see that chronic worry does no good. It doesn’t recognize the repeated, obsessive assault of fear as negative. It becomes a kind of fix. You endure a little nagging pain in order to ward off huge threats that could bring disaster. A kind of magical thinking is involved, also.
The worrier is chanting a kind of incantation that is supposed to keep the threat away. (
If I worry about losing all my money, maybe it won’t happen
.)

To end the influence of repetition, awareness must come into play, by consciously thinking thoughts like the following:

I’m doing it again.

I feel bad when I worry.

I need to stop at this moment.

The future is unknown. Worrying about it is pointless.

I’m doing myself no good.

A woman caught up in a bad marriage was afraid for herself, constantly worrying about her future. She feared being alone. She was afraid that her children would side with her husband, that he would destroy her good name with their friends, and that her work would be affected. A state of high anxiety resulted. She assaulted herself every day with a mounting crescendo of worries.

But the facts spoke otherwise. Her children and her co-workers loved her. She did fantastic work. Her husband, although he wanted out of the marriage, provided a large settlement without complaint. He wasn’t even bad-mouthing her or forcing their friends to take sides. The actual problem was far simpler than it looked: She became anxious every time she thought about the future. Luckily, she had a confidante who had insight into this pattern. No matter what worry the anxious woman brought up, her confidante said, “You get afraid every time you think about the future. Just stop. I’ve known you a long time. The things you worried about two years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, all worked out. They will this time, too.”

Of course, this reassurance didn’t sink in at first. The woman’s repetitive worry had become a habit; by bringing the same warnings to mind over and over, she felt she had a kind of control over fear. But her confidante persisted. No matter how anxious the woman
acted, her confidante would say, “You get afraid when you anticipate the future. Stop it.” Several months passed, but eventually the tactic worked.

People who are stuck in self-destructive worrying know the old pattern doesn’t work from the get-go. They break out of it not by learning to stop the mental process but by overriding it with an emerging awareness that says, “The fear isn’t real. I’m the one creating it.” The anxious woman became aware that she was abusing herself through self-induced fear. She learned to stop herself when the merry-go-round of worry started to whirl.

2. The fear is convincing. When you believe in the voice of fear, it takes over

If you think that something is true, it sticks with you. This goes almost without saying. We all want to believe the words
I love you
if they come from the right person; the memory can reassure you for years, if not a lifetime. But being convincing isn’t the same as being true. Suspicion is a prime example. If you suspect that your spouse is cheating on you, no amount of proof that he or she is not will persuade you otherwise. You are too convinced by your suspicions. Jealousy is suspicion taken to a pathological extreme. When lovers are in its grip, all are unfaithful, and when such stickiness exists, the actual facts might as well not exist.

Anxiety is the most convincing emotion of all, in part because evolution has hardwired the brain to react with the fight-or-flight response. If you are in battle staring into the mouth of a cannon, your racing heart tells you in no uncertain terms what you must do. But when the condition is free-floating anxiety, the voice of fear isn’t telling you the truth. It is using the power to convince you, even when you have nothing to be afraid of. Detachment has healing abilities here. If you can say to your fear, “I don’t believe you. I don’t accept you,” its power to convince will diminish.

Here the mind must lead the brain. If the brain is exposed to a
terrible outside event (e.g., an airplane crash, a terrorist attack), it reacts with fear, but pictures of that event or any other strong stimulus that brings it to mind will evoke the same reaction. Reflex reactions speak to us; they have a voice. But the mind exists to sort out the real from the unreal. When the mind is leading the brain out of anxiety, it has thoughts like the following:

Nothing bad is happening to me. I can handle the situation.

Worst-case scenarios are extremely unlikely to occur. This isn’t one.

I am not alone. I can turn for help if I need it.

My anxiety is just a feeling.

Does this feeling make sense?

Things are okay, and I am okay, right now.

By putting the voice of fear in its place this way, you make it less convincing. Each time you do it, repetition comes to your aid instead of undermining you. Every realistic appraisal makes the next one easier. Anxiety has no power to convince when you see that reality doesn’t match your state of alarm.

3. The fear stirs a memory. What you fear resembles something bad in your past, which brings back the old response

Reality making occurs here and now, but no one lives in isolation. As much as you try to live in the present, your brain stores and learns from every experience by comparing it with your past. Memory is immensely helpful—it enables you to get on a bicycle and ride without having to learn how every time. This is the natural, positive use of memory. The destructive side, which fuels anxiety, makes you a prisoner of the past. Impressions of old wounds and traumas shouldn’t have such a strong psychological component. But they do; hence their stickiness. (As Mark Twain wittily put it, “The cat, having
sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.”)

For
cat
, substitute the word
brain
, because it is just as trainable. Once it is exposed to a painful experience, the brain gives a privileged pathway to remembering the pain if it should come up in the future. It’s a useful evolutionary trait, which is why a small child doesn’t put its hand in the fire more than once. But the reflex is thoughtless, so old memories get blurred into present experience where they don’t belong. For example, child psychologists make a distinction between telling a child what to do and telling him what he is. The child easily forgets the first kind of statement—which of us remembers to look both ways before crossing the street? But the second kind of statement lingers. Once a child is told “You’re lazy” or “Nobody will ever love you” or “You’re just plain bad,” he will grow up with those words in his head, often for life. We rely on our parents to tell us who we are as small children, and if what they say is destructive, there is no escape without consciously healing the old memories.

Bringing awareness to the stickiness of memory requires new thoughts like the following:

I’m acting like a child.

This feeling is how I felt a long time ago.

What could I feel now that fits the situation better?

I can view my memories like a movie without buying into the story they tell.

All that I’m scared of is a memory.

What’s actually in front of me?

Memory is the ongoing story of your life, and it does no good to keep reinforcing the story unconsciously. You need to step in and add something new, however small. Memory is incredibly complex, but it tends to trigger a simple reaction:

A is happening.

I remember B, something unpleasant in the past.

I’m having reaction C, just the way I always do.