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September 16 - October 5, 2025
but the best tools for living with anxiety involve learning to be self-compassionate, connect with others, and increase our capacity to tolerate adversity, discomfort, and uncertainty.
anxiety itself is not a problem, and nothing is wrong with you for having anxiety. The mere experience of anxiety is normal—in fact it is a positive thing, as we shall see later in this book—and certainly anxiety is nothing to fear. Once we realize that, we never need to catastrophize about anxious feelings.
our culture cannot tolerate uncertainty. We would prefer to predict the future and be completely wrong than to admit we have no clue what’s going to happen!
Without anxiety, little would be accomplished. The performance of athletes, entertainers, executives, artisans, and students would suffer; creativity would diminish; crops might not be planted. And we would all achieve that idyllic state long sought after in our fast-paced society of whiling away our lives under a shade tree. This would be as deadly for the species as nuclear war.
people have a fear reaction that is disproportionate to the actual level of threat, that’s anxiety.
“When people have an excess of life demands over and above the resources they have to meet those demands, that creates stress,” I
In many cases, the anxiety-like symptoms that come from high stress are the canary in the coal mine—they are a first indication that something is wrong. In fact, feeling uncomfortable due to stress can save your life.
However, fear is not the same as anxiety. In contrast with fear, anxiety involves the experience of a fight-or-flight response without the presence of an actual reason to be afraid.
completely took me by surprise, but fortunately I knew what to do. I overcame my instinctual reaction to panic and judge myself, and instead I could hear myself say in my mind: Okay, time to practice what you preach. Just accept it and let it ride. Don’t fight it.
When you think about it, though, if you feel bad about yourself, that’s precisely the best opportunity to be compassionate. In one sense, it’s the only opportunity to practice self-compassion. After all, if you take care and reward yourself only when you deserve kindness because of your accomplishments or successes, that’s not self-compassion at all.
Take a break when you don’t deserve it. Whether you deserve a break is irrelevant. If you need a break, take one—simply because you’re human and you need it. Doing so will help increase self-acceptance and is a step toward building a positive spiral.
Do yourself a favor. Make a list of things you need, or even just things you like, and do one thing each day—especially on days when you mess up or feel you don’t deserve it.
However, self-judgment is an ineffective tool for correcting anxiety. Indeed, self-judgment is exactly what sends us into the anxiety spiral after the initial experience of stress or fear. Judging yourself for feeling anxious is like beating someone up when they are on the floor in order to get them to stand.
How can we hold ourselves accountable while being self-compassionate? The first thing to do is to wait a couple of days after making a mistake, to give yourself time to cool down. Don’t try to criticize yourself in the heat of the moment. Set a reminder in your phone or put it on your calendar to have a conversation with yourself about what happened within the next forty-eight hours.
Remember that your fight-or-flight (sympathetic nervous system) response has an equal and opposite reaction called the rest-and-digest (parasympathetic nervous system) response. Over time, your anxiety will fade as adrenaline wanes and acetylcholine makes its way through the nervous system.
Do not fight your anxiety! Don’t suppress or curtail or try to decrease it in any way. Simply accept it and let it ride. Let your anxiety wash over you. Allow yourself to experience anxiety without trying to change it. Simply observe the feelings, even if they are uncomfortable,
Accept yourself. Don’t judge yourself for feeling anxious. Anxiety is a normal response that all of us have. Furthermore, everyone who experiences anxiety has a reason why they are anxious—that could be something in the past, or a current stressor, or another factor. Don’t judge yourself harshly or self-criticize. Thrive with anxiety by learning to be more accepting of who you are.
To overcome one’s deepest anxieties, including panic attacks, specific phobias (such as fear of flying, elevators, spiders), or social situations, we need to build up our courage by facing these situations until they no longer elicit an anxiety response.
and inaccurate. Facing your fears isn’t pleasant. But to me, there is no greater kindness a clinician can provide a patient than to believe in their abilities. I would even say that failing to push patients to face their fears is tantamount to infantilizing them—saying that they cannot handle things.
When a disturbing emotion or event triggers your amygdala, the hippocampus joins in and deeply encodes your memory of the triggering experience. That
By purposefully activating your fear response to ramp up your emotional involvement, you are learning to inoculate yourself against future cognitive threats. When you activate your fear response instead of running away from your fear, it becomes a catalyst for change and growth.
This is actually an important clinical factor: in order to encode a new set of thoughts of spiders into her cortex, Darlene needed to activate her amygdala and hippocampus to the same extent (or higher) than when she had encoded her original fearful memories. In this sense, the more the midbrain “heats up” through the experience of intense emotion during exposure therapy, the more readily the new memory will be scorched into your brain.
The goal of exposure therapy is to get to the point where you tell yourself, in effect, I don’t give a damn if I feel anxious! I’m going to do this anyway. Even if my anxiety makes me feel uncomfortable, I’m not going to let my fear stop me. I’m a soldier, and I’m going to keep marching through the swamp!
Avoidant actions maintain the link between fear and anxiety.
Conversely, if you sit upright and look people in the eye to exude a sense of confidence externally—even if you feel small inside—you will change your thinking and be more likely to have opportunities for professional growth,
the annual risk of being killed in a plane crash for the average American is about one in eleven million, whereas the annual risk of being killed in a motor vehicle crash is only about one in five thousand.13 So if you have fear of flying, it isn’t because you looked at a mortality table.
Avoidance reinforces these false anxiety beliefs and makes them a part of your personality.
People who are triggered by financial anxiety may avoid balancing their checkbooks, reading their credit card statements, or even paying bills.
All of these avoidances are maladaptive because, along with perpetuating the initial anxiety, they actually make things worse.
The more a person avoids dealing with their finances, the more likely life will compel them to pay even more attention to finances when their credit card is declined or the electricity is shut off. If you fear going to the dentist because you are extremely uncomfortable with dental procedures, you may end up needing even more uncomfortable procedures—instead of getting a tooth filled, you suddenly learn that you need a root canal!
Worrywarts use worry to avoid having a truly overpowering and uncomfortable emotional response, and as a result, the worry reinforces the anxiety instead of alleviating it.
Exposure therapy is now used to treat people with obsessive worry by having them detail specific high-level concerns more intensely than they have ever thought about before. To achieve escape velocity from generalized anxiety, we need to turn on our emotional rocket boosters and engage the amygdala-hippocampus connection.
It is infinitely easier to relate to others when you have experienced distress yourself.
our own suffering can heighten our compassion for others. I’ve seen this especially in the work I’ve done with patients who have social anxiety disorder.
If only we could recognize that the high levels of anxiety many of us feel today can be a catalyst to connection. Anxiety can help us be more aware of others’ complexities and struggles. Anxiety can help us pay attention to other people’s feelings and experiences.
you can reduce your anxiety by getting outside of yourself, noticing the needs of others, and then responding to them. This
when rhesus monkey babies were given the choice of a cloth mother (who did not provide milk) or a wire mother (who did provide milk), they would choose the cloth mother and cling to “her” for comfort.10 Together, these studies produced groundbreaking empirical evidence for the seminal importance of the parent-child attachment relationship and the value of maternal touch in infant development.11
It is now abundantly clear in the literature that attachment is a key predictor of physical health, including lower levels of inflammation, cortisol, and cardiometabolic risk across the lifespan.
I have never met an anxious child who did not have at least one anxious parent.
The Chinese sage Confucius wrote, “When you see a good man, think of emulating him. When you see a bad man, examine your own heart.”23 That’s one way of saying that instead of focusing on the perceived faults of others, we should first look for the presence of those same faults within ourselves.
When we get out of our heads and focus on accurately seeing and responding to others’ feelings, we can recognize that we are all in this together and that our suffering is shared with many others.
Significantly, this approach does not require eradicating our anxiety. On the contrary, it involves harnessing our anxiety to better understand others and learning to thrive because of our distress, not in spite of it.
Take a few minutes to make a mental inventory for someone in your life. It could be a coworker, friend, family member, intimate partner, or even a complete stranger (for the latter you may need to take some poetic and creative license to complete the exercise). Provide at least one example of each of the following that the person may be experiencing at present.
we need other people to thrive and even to survive.
All of our relationships are with imperfect people. In
Why would we expect connections to be perfect? We are all far—very far—from perfect. We are all subject to biases, lack of information, problematic character traits, and selfishness, and we all make mistakes—serious mistakes.
We must learn to accept that just because those we are connected to are also flawed and struggling, that doesn’t mean that they can’t be good confidants or companions. If we catastrophize about the imperfections or issues in our relationships, or judge others for being imperfect, we turn potentially solid connections into dysfunctional ones.
When dealing with someone who struggles, ask yourself: What sort of life experiences did they have that brought them to be so flawed? How would I fare today if I had had those life experiences?
But those who have worked on their anxiety know that control is vastly overrated.
It’s okay to be uncomfortable. Good things come when we accept our discomfort—it makes us stronger and more resilient. All great relationships require some degree of discomfort.
