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

by Judson Brewer MD PhD

You see, anxiety hides in people’s habits. It hides in their bodies as they learn to disconnect from these feelings through myriad different behaviors.

Seeing this connection, I could now help my patients understand how they had formed habits around everything from drinking too much alcohol to stress-eating to procrastinating as a way to deal with anxiety. I could also help them see why they were struggling so much and failing to overcome both anxiety and their other habits. Anxiety would feed the other behaviors, which would then perpetuate their anxiety, until all would spiral out of control, landing them in my office.

We all get anxious—it’s a part of life—yet how we deal with it is critical. If we don’t know how anxiety shows up or why, we might get caught up in temporary distractions or short-term fixes that actually feed it, creating bad habits in the process (have you ever eaten ice cream or cookies when you’re stressed?).

For example, if we step out into a busy street, turn our head, and see a car coming right at us, we instinctively jump back onto the safety of the sidewalk. That fear reaction helps us to learn quickly that streets are dangerous and to approach them with caution. Evolution made this really simple for us. So simple that we need only three elements in situations like this to learn: an environmental cue, a behavior, and a result.

Instead, I start by teaching them how their brains work so that they can understand how uncertainty weakens their brain’s ability to deal with stress, priming it for anxiety when fear hits. Learning that uncertainty triggers anxiety, which in turn can lead to panic, allows them to be on the lookout. And simply knowing that this is their survival brain kicking into high gear (even if it is a little misguided because it doesn’t have enough information) helps put my patients a little more at ease.

With that trigger, you can step back and notice if you are starting to worry as a mental behavior (“oh no, I touched my face—maybe I’ll get sick!”). Instead of panicking, you can take a deep breath and ask yourself, “When was the last time I washed my hands?” Just by taking a moment to pause and ask such a question, you give your PFC a chance to come back online and do what it does best: think (“oh, right! I just washed my hands”).

At times when your mind starts to spin out in your worry du jour, you can pause and take a deep breath while you wait for your PFC to come back online. Once it’s up and running again, you can then compare the feeling of anxiety to that of calmness and think clearly.

Put simply, you want to do more of the things that feel good (positively reinforcing) and less of the things that feel bad (negatively reinforcing). This ability is so important and evolved so far back that scientists can see it at play in sea slugs—as I mentioned earlier, organisms with only twenty thousand neurons in their entire nervous system (a discovery so big Eric Kandel won the Nobel Prize for it).