More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 2 - November 5, 2021
I learned to work with anxiety and panic so that I didn’t worry or freak out about having more panic attacks, which kept anxiety at bay and kept me from developing a true panic disorder.
In fact, when you don’t know what you are talking about, the more words you use, the greater the chances are that you will dig yourself into a hole, and when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging, right?
We even showed that app-based training could target specific brain networks related to smoking. Yes, with an app!
A problem can’t be solved by the same consciousness that created it. —INTERNET MEME ATTRIBUTED TO ALBERT EINSTEIN
Anxiety is like pornography. It’s hard to define, but you sure know it when you see it. Unless of course, you can’t see it.
the case for my patients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), who wake up anxious, worry their way through the day, and then continue their binge-worrying late into the night, fueled by thoughts of Why can’t I get to sleep?
“being human” as a condition. When “conditions” happen, I think of the mind/brain as more akin to a violin string that has gone slightly out of tune.
For example, to meet a threshold for a diagnosis of GAD, someone must have excessive anxiety and worry about a “variety of topics, events, or activities,” and this must occur “more often than not for at least six months and is clearly excessive.”
Putting a label on what seems quirky in isolation but is blazingly clear as a pattern was a lightbulb moment for her.
Yet both she and I can sense the times when she’s anxious, often being clued in by her focusing on something in the future and starting to plan.
To the nervous, that lack of structure screams anxiety.
“You feel like you’re going to die, but you won’t. This is your brain playing games with you. You decide what happens next.” I learned how to deep-breathe my way out of an attack and focus my thoughts intensely on the very act of calming down.
We all get anxious—it’s a part of life—yet how we deal with it is critical.
Speculation proliferates as to why this is. For example, having our basic needs met may provide more idle time to let our survival brains look for something to be threatened by or worried about, leading some to dub this population the “worried well.”
And anxiety doesn’t just come out of the blue. It is born.
anxiety and its close cousin, panic, are both born from fear.
Anxiety is born when our PFCs don’t have enough information to accurately predict the future.
Without accurate information, our brains found it easy to spin stories of fear and dread, based on the latest reports that we had heard or read.
Immediate (milliseconds) Acute (seconds to minutes) Chronic (months to years)
In other words, this fight/flight/freeze reaction keeps you alive long enough to get to the next phase and actually learn from it.
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.
When virtually anyone can post anything that they want to and are rewarded not for accuracy, but instead for humor or outrage or shock value, the web quickly fills with so much information that we find it nearly impossible to wade through it all.
Alexander Chernev and his colleagues at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University even identified three factors that significantly diminish our brain’s ability to make choices: higher levels of task difficulty, greater choice set complexity, and (surprise!) higher uncertainty.
contradictory (and potentially purposely misleading) information naturally leads to higher uncertainty.
The less certain the information, a state usually accompanied by an urge to editorialize (which adds more to the volume of information to be waded through), the more your PFC starts spinning faster and faster, taking whatever substrate is available
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.
Like COVID-19, anxiety is also contagious. In psychology, the spread of emotion from one person to another is aptly termed social contagion.
Panic can lead to impulsive behaviors that are dangerous; anxiety weakens us mentally and physically and also has more long-term health consequences.
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”).
It can even be true for thoughts, like politics, romance, or the need to keep up with the latest news: dating apps and news feeds are increasingly engineered to have itch-inducing features and headlines designed to be “clickbait.”
Reward-based learning is based on positive and negative reinforcement.
The second everyday addiction maximizer in the modern world is immediate availability.
Time is critical for allowing all of that excitement to wash over us (oh, new shoes, how fun!), and importantly, go away.
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.
Depending on how large the threat is, uncertainty can feel like a mental itch, saying to us, “Hey, I need some information. Go get it for me.”
when you’re stressed or anxious, you distract yourself. And when the distraction doesn’t work, you’re left with having to come up with another solution.
Worrying is doing something, after all. Even if you can’t observe it as a behavior, it’s happening. Mental behaviors still count as behaviors and can have tangible results.
if the worrying mind doesn’t come up with a solution, worry triggers anxiety, which triggers more worry, and so on.
When they can’t find anything specific, they start getting in the habit of worrying about just about any old darn thing in the future, whether it warrants worrying or not.
I’m starting to think that over the years I’ve tricked myself into believing that anxiety is productive—even a reward.
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
(a shot of whiskey—his drink of choice—has over a hundred calories, so he was kicking back close to a thousand calories in alcohol alone each day) and was showing signs of liver damage.
TED talks can be inspirational and informative, but often they’re just that, and we must be patient with the process to see results.
instead of pushing against it, you can harness its power to do the work for you. That way, your mental muscles don’t get sore and it doesn’t have to hurt.
That lack of resolution is like sitting down in the woods for a rest during a long hike and suddenly realizing that you’re sitting on an anthill.
your old brain eats cupcakes until you feel better and your new brain comes back online.
Several labs studying priming an environment have found that people with good self-control tend to structure their lives in such a way that they don’t need to make self-control decisions in the first place.
Staying out of habit mode frees up the new brain to do what it does best: make rational and logical decisions.
One fascinating observation I’ve made is how attached people are to the notion that anxiety is critical for success.
people romanticize their anxiety and/or stress. They wear it like a badge of honor, without which they would be a lesser person, or worse, lose a sense of purpose. To many, stress equals success. As she put it, “If you are stressed, you are making a contribution. If you’re not stressed, you’re a loser.”
