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January 31 - February 7, 2024
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.
Fear + uncertainty = anxiety.
Like COVID-19, anxiety is also contagious. In psychology, the spread of emotion from one person to another is aptly termed social contagion.
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.
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.
definition of anxiety is “a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.”
Pulling out a smartphone and checking a news feed or answering a few emails might give some brief anxiety relief, but this just creates a new habit, which is that when you’re stressed or anxious, you distract yourself.
observing is really the only necessary “action,” and ironically the most effective one.
One fascinating observation I’ve made is how attached people are to the notion that anxiety is critical for success.
[Mindfulness is] the awareness that arises through paying attention in the present moment, on purpose, nonjudgmentally.
When we are sad or anxious all the time, that sadness or anxiety becomes familiar, a place that we gravitate toward, something like a morning routine or a regular route to work.
Any deviation feels unfamiliar, perhaps scary or even anxiety-provoking.
People who are depressed perseverate about the past. People who are anxious perseverate about the future.
One might give an avoid type an assignment requiring a high level of precision and attention to detail because such a person loves to focus in on figuring things out and thrives in those situations.
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.
You can probably see the irony here—old habitual behaviors are based on outdated data, yet because they are old, they are familiar; and because they are familiar, we trust them (change is scary).
“Running away from any problem only increases the distance from the solution.”
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.
If you notice you are getting afraid while you are working with a fear-based habit loop, or if mapping out an anxiety habit loop makes you anxious, see if you can distance yourself a little from the feeling.
They found a range of 18 to 254 days for behaviors to reach “automaticity.”
At peak curiosity, dopamine pathways in the brain fired with increased intensity and there was a stronger connection between reward centers and the hippocampus, a brain area associated with memory.
With deprivation curiosity, getting the answer is rewarding, but with interest curiosity, the process of being curious feels good.
As Einstein put it, “Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”
Curiosity (the interest type, not the deprivation type) fits all of the third-gear conditions perfectly: it is an internally based (and thus always available) BBO behavior that enables us to step out of our old habit loops in a sustainable way.
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.
Get curious. Where does the feeling originate in your body? What does it really feel like? Is it tightness in your chest? Is it a burning feeling in your belly? Is it a restlessness that urges you to do something—like run away?
RAIN Recognize what is happening right now. Allow/Accept it: Don’t push it away or try to change it. Investigate body sensations, emotions, thoughts: Ask, “Hmm, what is going on in my body right now?” Note what is happening in your experience.
It doesn’t matter what triggers worry or anxiety, but it does matter how you react to it.
We can become identified with more than just habit loops; we can even become so wrapped up in our own thoughts, emotions, and stories that we can’t see what is real anymore. Wound up tight as a spring,
As the musician Randy Armstrong put it, “Worrying does not take away tomorrow’s troubles. It takes away today’s peace.”
Also known as being “in the zone,” flow is the mental state in which a person is fully immersed in an activity, experiencing a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process.
