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.

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.

Importantly, like zebras who jump and kick, or dogs who shake their bodies after surviving stressful situations, 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.

Like a seed needing fertile soil, the old survival brain creates the conditions for anxiety to sprout in your thinking brain (chronic). This is where anxiety is born. Fear + uncertainty = anxiety.

The more inaccurate the information your PFC incorporates, the worse the outcome. And as the scenarios become more worst-case (which tends to happen as the PFC starts to go off-line, ironically due to the ramping up of the anxiety), your fight/flight/freeze physiology can get triggered to the point that just thinking about these possible (but highly improbable) situations can make you feel that you’re in danger, even though the danger is only in your head. Voilà! Anxiety.

With each bit of uncertain information, the brain spins out every conceivable what-if scenario. This is the planning brain trying to think through all of the contingencies in an effort to help out.

Yes, anxiety is an evolutionary add-on. When fear-based learning is paired with uncertainty, your well-intentioned PFC doesn’t wait for the rest of the ingredients (e.g., more information). Instead, it takes whatever it’s got in the moment, uses worry to whip it together, fires up the adrenaline oven, and bakes you a loaf of bread you didn’t ask for: a big hot loaf of anxiety. And in the process of making the loaf, your brain stores a bit of the dough—like sourdough starter—away for later. The next time you plan for something, your brain pulls that anxiety starter out of your mental pantry and adds it as an “essential ingredient” to the mix, to the point where that sour taste overpowers reason, patience, and the process of gathering more information.

Logically, we know that we don’t need to store a six-month supply of toilet paper in our basement, but when we’re running through the grocery store and see someone’s cart piled high with Charmin, their anxiety infects us, and we go into survival mode. Must. Get. Toilet. Paper.

To hack our brains and break the anxiety cycle, we must become aware of two things: that we are getting anxious and/or panicking and what results from anxiety/panicking.

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.

there are two main downsides to worry. First, if the worrying mind doesn’t come up with a solution, worry triggers anxiety, which triggers more worry, and so on. Second, if worry is triggered by anxiety alone, there might not be something specific to worry about.

First gear is all about recognizing our habit loops and seeing the different components clearly: trigger, behavior, and reward.

First gear is first gear: intellectually knowing how habits form and play out in your life builds speed and momentum so that later, when you have all of the tools in hand, you can change them.

Concepts don’t magically become wisdom with the wave of a wand. You actually have to do the work so the concepts translate into know-how through your own experience.

TED talk (“A Simple Way to Break a Bad Habit”)

“Changing habits is hard work but doesn’t have to be painful.”

When you tap into your willpower reserve, your new brain is supposed to tell your older brain to take a hike and simply order the salad instead of the hamburger, right?

Second, while willpower may be fine under normal conditions, when you get stressed (saber-toothed tiger, email from the boss, fight with a spouse, exhaustion, hunger), your old brain takes control and overrides your new brain, basically shutting the latter down until the stress is gone. So exactly when you need your willpower—which resides, remember, in the prefrontal cortex/new brain—it’s not there, and your old brain eats cupcakes until you feel better and your new brain comes back online.

Staying out of habit mode frees up the new brain to do what it does best: make rational and logical decisions.

[Mindfulness is] the awareness that arises through paying attention in the present moment, on purpose, nonjudgmentally.

Mindfulness is not about stopping, emptying, or ridding ourselves of anything. Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations are what make us human. And thinking and planning are both crucial things to master. If I wasn’t able to use my thinking brain to take a clear clinical history and make a solid diagnosis, I would have one heck of a time providing good care for my patients. So rather than changing or not having the thoughts and feelings that make up our experience, mindfulness is about changing our relationship to those thoughts and emotions.

People who are depressed perseverate about the past. People who are anxious perseverate about the future. Regardless of content (past/future), mindfulness jumps in and helps to dismantle the process of perseveration—so much so that the National Health Service in the United Kingdom has adopted one type of mindfulness training (mindfulness-based cognitive therapy) as a first-line treatment for depression.

You must let the pain visit. You must allow it to teach you. You must not allow it overstay. —IJEOMA UMEBINYUO

habits free up our brain to learn new things. But not every action becomes a habit. Your brain has to choose what to lay down as habit and what not to do again. Remember, you learn a habit based on how rewarding the behavior is. The more rewarding a behavior is, the stronger the habit. This is important, so I’m going to repeat it: The more rewarding a behavior is, the stronger the habit.

By paying attention to the results of behavior in the present moment, you can jolt your brain out of habit autopilot and see and feel exactly how rewarding (or unrewarding) the habit is for you right now. This new information resets the reward value on the old habit and moves better behaviors up in the hierarchy of reward value, and, eventually, into automatic mode

Behavior doesn’t change if the reward value of that behavior stays the same. And the reward value can change only when you bring awareness to bear and see the actual reward value.

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.

Life is going to throw all sorts of stuff at you, and either you get sucked into creating habits of indulgence, distraction, and numbness through clothes and pills, or you can learn to roll with the punches, even leaning into them as a way to grow

Keep going with the habit loop practice. Map out a habit loop (first gear); ask yourself, What do I get from this?; and pay attention to the body sensations, thoughts, and emotions that come as a result of the behavior (second gear). Repeat.

Learning and making progress are rewarding unto themselves.

Take a moment now to see if you can recall a recent habit loop. Map it out in your mind (first gear). Ask yourself, What did I get from this? Check to see if you are closing down or judging yourself (fixed mindset), and instead imagine it as a teacher (growth mindset). Ask yourself, What can I learn from this? and feel into those results (retrospective second gear). Repeat.

Planning is like chocolate—a little tastes good, but too much of it can be counterproductive, as it can induce anxiety about what can go wrong.

Watch your thoughts. They become words. Watch your words. They become actions. Watch your actions. They become habits. Watch your habits. They become character. Watch your character. It becomes your destiny.

“Forgiveness is giving up hope of a better past.”

Curiosity will conquer fear even more than bravery will. —JAMES STEPHENS

Children are born scientists. . . . They do everything scientists do. They test how strong things are, they measure the falling bodies, they’re balancing themselves, they’re doing all kinds of things to learn the physics of the world around them, so they are all perfect scientists. They ask questions, they drive parents crazy with why, why, why?

When you use hmm as a mantra, you bring out your childlike fascination, especially if you haven’t used it in a while. Hmm helps you drop right into your direct experience, instead of getting stuck in your head trying to do something about those pesky habit loops or to fix yourself.

Also, curiosity naturally moves you from a fixed mindset into a growth one. The greater your curiosity and openness to your experiences, the greater the reserves of energy you have to explore. The function of curiosity is to help you learn, and you can do this only through active participation.

Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana.)

The more you become aware that urges and cravings are just body sensations taking you for a ride, the more you can learn to ride them out.

RECOGNIZE/RELAX into what is arising (e.g., your craving). ACCEPT/ALLOW it to be there. INVESTIGATE bodily sensations, emotions, and thoughts. NOTE what is happening from moment to moment.

There are three parts to the loving kindness practice: The use of some loving kindness phrases to help you stay centered Seeing the image of the being to whom you are sending loving kindness Recognizing a feeling of kindness that arises in your body as you do the practice

“May you care for yourself with kindness,” breathe it in; “may you care for yourself with kindness,” breathe it throughout your body.

As before, repeat these phrases silently at your own pace. Use the phrases and the feeling of warm, expanding, unconditional love in your body as anchors to keep you in the present moment. When your mind wanders, just note where it has gone off to and return to repeating the phrases and noticing any feeling of warmth or expanding in your chest. If you notice resistance or tightness or other body sensations, get curious, hmm, tightness, interesting. Simply note these and return to repeating the phrases.

I started testing what would happen to my contraction (and attitude) if, instead of yelling at the cars, I used their honks as a trigger to practice loving kindness. First, a phrase to myself, “May I be happy,” and then a phrase to the driver, “May you be happy.” This helped break the habit loop cycle of self-righteousness and the contracted feeling that went along with it.

“Whenever you notice a why habit loop developing, take three deep breaths. Breathe in deeply, and on the exhale, say to yourself, Why doesn’t matter.”

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.”