Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind

by Judson Brewer MD PhD

Fear teaches us to avoid dangerous situations in the future through a brain process called negative reinforcement.

Anxiety is born when our PFCs don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future.

Notice how fear itself does not equal anxiety. Fear is an adaptive learning mechanism that helps us survive. Anxiety, on the other hand, is maladaptive; our thinking and planning brain spins out of control when it doesn’t have enough information.

you need to learn how to safely discharge the excess energy associated with that “I almost died” adrenaline surge, so that it doesn’t lead to chronic or post-traumatic stress and anxiety. Simply talking to someone doesn’t count here; you may really have to do something physical, like shout, shake, dance, or engage in some type of physical exercise.

Life in the age of 24/7 information availability brings with it greater complexity due simply to sheer volume.

The rate of change in our world over the last twenty years far outstrips all the changes in the previous two hundred years. Our brains and bodies haven’t kept up, and it’s killing us.

In the name of convenience and efficiency, the modern world is increasingly designed to create addictive experiences.

Hate to also tell you this, but . . . your smartphone is nothing more than an advertising billboard in your pocket. What’s more, you pay for it to advertise to you constantly.

Remember, our brain’s job is to help us survive, and because at some point it linked problem-solving with worrying, it thinks worrying is the best way to go.

Even if you aren’t solving any problems—just spinning out of control by worrying more—that feeling of doing something can be rewarding in itself. Worrying is doing something, after all.

The adage “don’t just do something, sit there” also serves as a powerful reminder that being is the doing.

After years of research and clinical practice, I’m thoroughly convinced that willpower is more a myth than an actual mental muscle.

Avoid: You tend to be clear-thinking and discerning. Your intellect allows you to see things logically and identify flaws in things. You are quick to understand concepts and tend to keep things organized and tidy while getting things done quickly. You pay attention to detail. You might even have a stiff posture (that is to say, you walk stiffly and hurriedly). At times you might notice that you are overly judgmental and critical. You may come across as a perfectionist.

One of the worries that often drives procrastination is a fear of failure or inadequacy.

To change a behavior, you can’t just focus on the behavior itself. Instead, you have to address the felt experience of the rewards of that behavior. If all we needed to do was to think our way out of a behavior, we’d just tell ourselves to stop smoking, stop eating cake, stop yelling at our kids when we are stressed, stop being anxious in general, and snap! it would work. But it doesn’t. The only sustainable way to change a habit is to update its reward value.

We need to give our brains new information to establish that the value they had learned in the past is now outdated.

Your brain has lumped together all of the times that you relaxed and ate chips while watching TV and combined them into a single reward value of chips + TV = relaxation. Your zombie-like behavior of mindless eating gets triggered the moment you walk in the door. That de-stress reward value doesn’t get updated until you start paying attention right in that moment. So of course you keep repeating this behavior over and over, wondering why you can’t just tell yourself to stop.

Something magical happens when you rub your brain’s proverbial little nose in whatever your proverbial little habit might be: you start to become disenchanted with the behavior.

If you really pay careful and close attention—without making any assumptions or relying on past experience to guide you—and you see that a behavior is not rewarding right now, I promise you that you will start to get less excited about doing it again.

Every time you pay attention to your actions, you become more aware of what you actually get from them.

Trigger: See solution (to anxiety, habit, problem) Behavior: Want problem to change immediately Result: Frustration that it isn’t gone

After this little first and (retrospective) second gear exercise is over, often there is a realization: “So that binge wasn’t a total failure.” “Not if you can learn from it,” I say. That’s retrospective second gear in a nutshell. As long as that replay of the loop is fresh enough in the memory, it can help build disenchantment.

Our mindset or world view can be so habitual that it colors how we interpret events, influencing what choices we make and how we learn.

Fixed-mindset individuals dread failure because it is a negative statement about their basic abilities and a reminder of their inherent limitations. On the other hand, growth-mindset individuals don’t mind or fear failure as much because they realize their performance can be improved; indeed, learning comes from failure.

Dweck advises, “If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, seek new strategies, enjoy effort, and keep on learning. That way, their children don’t have to be slaves of praise. They will have a lifelong way to build and repair their own confidence.”

Changing your attitude toward even the simplest tasks can have a huge effect on your life.

If it’s a habit that you desperately want to break, you can’t tell, force, or wish it to stop, because these likely don’t have an effect on its reward value.

You can’t think your way out of a bad habit or into a good one. As much as we all have wishes and plans for our habits, our feeling body (which is where behavioral outcomes register) trumps our thinking mind.

Don’t trust your thoughts (especially the shoulds). Thoughts are just mental words and images that come and go and should be viewed with a healthy skepticism.

By beating ourselves up, we think we are learning because, after all, we are doing something, but that something isn’t learning. It’s just pulling that hand grenade pin again and again as we relive the situation, thinking that self-flagellation will magically fix the past.

You don’t try to think yourself out of a situation; the situation simply unfolds, following the natural principles underlying how your brain works to help you learn.

States such as meanness, stress, anxiety, and craving not only feel worse (i.e., are less rewarding) than kindness, wonder, joy, and curiosity, but they also feel more closed down while the others feel more open and even expansive.

When we move out of our comfort zone, our survival brain starts warning us that we’re moving into parts unknown—there could be danger out there.

The more we can learn to lean into the discomfort of difference—recognizing that we might be nervous simply because something is new to us—the more we make ourselves at home in our growth zone.

All this curiosity can help us break free and step out of our old habit loops (it’s amazing how comforting worrying is, isn’t it?) as we learn to explore sensations in our bodies and minds and see them for what they are: thoughts and sensations that simply come and go.

Once you’ve found where you notice your physical sensations of breathing, you can simply continue paying attention to your breathing, or if that gets boring or becomes challenging, amp up the curiosity by watching your body’s natural processes that determine your breathing cycle, such as when the inhale/exhale stops and reverses course, or how long your body pauses between the in and out breaths. (Trust me—it’s truly fascinating to watch yourself breathe!)

Use your curiosity to check in and see where that anxious feeling or the urge to correct your coworker’s last statement feels strongest in your body. Now slowly breathe in through your nose, right into that body part (don’t worry about being anatomically correct here, just go with it). Let that breath go right into that feeling of anxiety or urge and hold it there for a few seconds before letting your breath out. If it doesn’t sound too woo-woo to you, when you exhale, some of that feeling flows out with your breath.

The next time you are frustrated or anxious, try this. Stop and simply name the emotion (e.g., “Oh, that’s X emotion”). Check to see how narrow or wide your eyes are. Open your eyes wide (and perhaps add in a hmm) as a way to jump-start your curiosity. Keep them wide for ten seconds and notice what happens to the anxiety (or whatever difficult emotion you’ve just identified). Does it get stronger or weaker? Does it change in character, or shift in some other way?

Being curious helps you hack your reward-based learning system, replacing habitual reactions with awareness and flipping the reward from “contracted, feel a little better,” to “expanded curiosity, feels pretty good.”

An untrained mind is going to drive off in any direction that it wants, usually steering itself into trouble along the way.

So yes, all we have is now. And what we make of this moment creates that bead that we add to our necklace. Past predicts the future in the present. This is important so I’m going to repeat it: what we do in the present sets our course in life. If we’re anxious now, we create a bead of anxiety. If we do this a lot, we make an anxiety necklace that we wear (sometimes with pride) and take with us wherever we go.

as much as self-righteous anger may feel empowering in the moment, being kind feels better and more empowering than being mean,

In other words, when I’m fully aware, I can’t force myself to purposefully be mean to someone else. Why? Imagining the results of my actions (i.e., being mean to someone) puts a big pain in the pit of my stomach. It feels awful simply to imagine doing it.