You may not use the word “legacy.” You may think it sounds pretentious. But your anxiety abates when you promote the survival of your unique essence. “Changing the world” stimulates that legacy feeling, which makes it very alluring. But it’s a two-edged sword, because every obstacle to your desired change now feels like a survival threat.
It helps to look directly at the link between legacy and happy chemicals. Serotonin is triggered by the social importance your contribution is expected to bring. Oxytocin is triggered by the sense of belonging your legacy gives you. Dopamine is triggered by the anticipation of serotonin and oxytocin. You don’t need to be a tribal chieftain or a celebrity superstar to enjoy this feeling. Your brain scans for whatever legacy options you can find because it feels good.
No matter what choices you make, someday there will be a future that you will not be part of. The world will spin on without you. This thought is so distressing that cortisol is often triggered by thoughts of the future. You hear talk about decline and collapse in fiction and nonfiction, and it feels true because it fits the pattern you have already activated. Thoughts of cosmic decline divert you from more distressing thoughts of your own decline. But declinism is a big source of anxiety. You can relieve this anxiety by focusing on your own legacy.
The Empty Space
When you lose something that met your needs, threatened feelings grow. If it’s a sad loss, like a death or divorce, the bad feeling makes sense, but we often feel threatened by happy losses, like graduating, retiring, or watching your child become independent. An empty space leaves you without your usual way of masking cortisol.
If you were fighting cancer, you’d feel great when you won. But then you would have an empty space, because your needs would no longer be defined by the fight against cancer. This feels surprisingly bad. The same is true if you’re escaping a war zone or training for a marathon or searching for a life partner. You think you will be happy forever when you reach that goal, but now that you’re there, your next step toward good feelings is hard to define.
For much of life, your next step seems so urgent that you don’t have to think about it. You rush to prepare for the next exam or put the next meal on the table or put out the next fire. When the rush is over, it’s hard to choose your next step because you are not in the habit of choosing. And without a next step to focus on, cortisol gets your attention. You may see the cortisol as a real crisis and rush to mask it in unhealthy ways. But when you know how your brain works, you realize that your distress is caused by an empty space. You can use the three-step taming tool to rebuild your sense of direction.
The Fall from Grace
Sometimes life hands you a big drop in status. You can say you don’t care about status, but it feels surprisingly bad.
Sometimes your fall from grace has an obvious cause, like lost love or a financial setback. But sometimes the cause is so subtle that you don’t consciously notice. Perhaps you did something you know is wrong and lost your sense of moral superiority. Or you compare yourself to someone who has just had a big jump in status. What matters is your own perception, not the labels used by others. When you feel like you’ve taken a fall, your serotonin takes a beating.
The mammal brain cares about status because that promotes survival in the state of nature. Higher-ranking monkeys have more surviving offspring, and natural selection has built a brain that has life-or-death feelings about its status. This is why a fall from grace can drench you in cortisol, even when your life is better than the wildest imaginings of your ancestors.
To escape this distress, create a frame of reference that puts you in the one-up position. You may think this is crude or delusional, but you have already created a frame of reference that puts you in the one-down position. That is depriving you of serotonin. Your grief is caused by an abstraction, so you need to replace it with a healthier abstraction. For most of human history, getting revenge was the automatic way of restoring one-upness. It has taken millennia to stop the revenge cycles that resulted. Today, we look for healthy, nonviolent ways to raise our status. You can say we shouldn’t compare ourselves to others, but the mammal brain keeps going there. So choose a path you can be proud of and start taking steps. (More on this in chapter 8 on pitfalls.)
The Perfect Storm
Multiple setbacks can assault you at the same time. Your power is hard to feel when it’s drained in many directions. Fortunately, it only takes one step toward rewards to spark chemicals that ease the next step. You can find this step if you take a full minute to define your needs, twenty minutes to metabolize your cortisol, and a minute to define a step to take right now. Small drips of good feelings build a circuit that expects more good feelings. You build trust in your ability to meet your needs, which is what makes a mammal feel safe.
It’s harder to do this if you are surrounded by an anxiety mind-set. The people who are “helping” you may support your anxiety instead of supporting your steps to relieve it. In the short run, this kind of “help” can reward you with the oxytocin of social trust. It can also give you serotonin if it puts you in the one-up position. And it brings dopamine if this is the only reward path you know. In the long run, alas, the anxiety mind-set means endless pain. You are better off with the three-step tool than with help that doesn’t help. (More on this in chapter 10 on help.)
Remember:
Our brain habituates to the rewards it has. It stops noticing them, so it takes something new to trigger happy chemicals.
Losing a habitual reward triggers cortisol, so you can feel anxious about losing something that didn’t make you happy when you had it.
When your physical needs are met, your brain looks to social rewards. But the brain habituates to social rewards as it does for physical rewards.
Steps toward one happy-chemical reward may undermine your prospects for another reward. Our brain evolved to manage these uncomfortable trade-offs.
Habituation means you don’t actually get the good feelings you expect from rewards you have enjoyed before. But you are still motivated to seek those rewards because the pathway is still there.
Addiction is the expectation of big rewards built from past experience of big rewards. Habituation diminishes the reward, but you keep expecting it because the big experience built a big circuit. The solution is to build new reward circuits by experiencing new rewards repeatedly.
Alcohol is produced naturally by rotting fruit. It helps protect animals from the threat of eating rotten fruit.
If you sit with a bad feeling for one minute, you teach your brain that the bad feeling doesn’t kill you.
Our happy chemicals are not designed to surge all the time. They are designed to droop after they surge. This neutral state is when a mammal chooses the next unmet need to step toward.
The pleasure of dopamine lies in the sweet spot between too familiar and too unfamiliar. All pleasures become more familiar over time. To replace them, we must invest effort in something unfamiliar until it reaches the sweet spot.
The human brain is aware of its own mortality. Creating something that survives helps to ease our existential angst. But we pay a high price for this comfort, because every threat to your legacy now feels like a survival threat.
Your happy chemicals are especially responsive to activities that promote the survival of your unique individual essence.
An empty space allows anxiety to get your attention, whether the empty space is caused by a happy loss or an unhappy loss.
A loss of status triggers threatened feelings in the mammal brain. Thoughts that raise your status will relieve these threatened feelings.
It only takes one step toward rewards to spark chemicals that ease the next step.
7
Stock Your Pantry with Anxiety Tamers
The world cannot provide the complete sense of security that we long for at birth. You have to knit t
hat sense together for yourself.
You have probably learned to stock your home with healthy food so you don’t yield to junk food in a moment of weakness. You can do the same with non-food rewards. Stock your life with healthy anxiety tamers and you will be less tempted by harmful junk. (Food is discussed separately in the following chapter.)
A healthy reward is something that feels good in the short run and doesn’t have bad consequences in the long run. You may think healthy rewards are scarce! That’s because they are only rewarding if you build circuits to appreciate them. Unhealthy rewards feel good effortlessly, by contrast, because our brain evolved to respond to them.
Pleasure is the brain’s signal that you are meeting a need. A person who takes pleasure in bird-watching does not meet a primal survival need by indulging in that activity, but something in that person’s past has connected bird-watching to primal needs. Bird-watching can stimulate oxytocin if it connects you to others. It can stimulate serotonin when you enjoy a sense of accomplishment. It stimulates dopamine when you scan for an expected pattern and then find it. And it can relieve cortisol by distracting you from perceived threats. Yet most people do not enjoy bird-watching. I don’t either.
Each brain defines rewards with circuits built from experience. It’s easy to wire yourself for unhealthy rewards because nature gives you a head start. But you can build new circuits to enjoy new rewards. You can find pleasure without harmful long-run consequences. This chapter introduces a universe of possibilities.
This chapter is not about exercise and nutrition, although these rewards are popular strategies for relieving anxiety. If they work for you, great. But many people do not find them rewarding. This chapter will help you find rewards you actually enjoy so you can turn to them in a moment of distress. You still need exercise and nutrition for your physical health, but you need pleasure for your mental health. Diet and exercise should be on your to-do list, but an endless to-do list does not relieve anxiety. So alongside your list of things that are good for you, you need a list of things that are fun for you.
1. Work Your Body and Mind Together
An activity that works mind and body together is a very effective way to redirect your energy. Many popular pastimes do this, such as crafts, cooking, playing a musical instrument, playing with a pet, art, sports, and gardening. When you synchronize mind and body, you activate so many circuits that you can’t dwell on threats. You literally forget to worry.
In the past, mind-body activities were essential to survival. You baked bread because there was no other way to get bread. You planted beans in order to eat beans. Today you can meet your basic needs with less physical activity, but your brain needs this activity to feel good. Many people focus on physical activity that’s not fun, like optimizing your heart rate at the gym. You can find a way to add fun to your physical activity. It may not be aerobic but it drains your stress circuits.
What’s fun for you depends on the circuits you have and the effort you are willing to invest in circuit-building. A good place to start is an activity you always wished you had time for. But once you make time for it, monitor your state of mind. Can you do it without getting too frustrated? Can you do it without dwelling on anxieties? Some people love a walk in the park, but other people spend the whole time stewing over past annoyances, or finding fault with things they see in the park. If you do that, find a different activity.
Keep experimenting until you find an activity that fully engages your mind. Can you bake a cake without replaying family dramas in your mind? Can you play pool without dwelling on work tensions? Can you do yoga without critiquing the world and yourself while you’re holding a pose? The more complex the activity, the better it absorbs you. Complex activities spark more circuits, but those circuits take time to build.
My favorite taming tool is to watch something in a foreign language while stretching. I understand Romance languages if I read the English at the same time, but it takes so much focus that I completely forget whatever was on my mind. Instead of sitting still while I watch, I stand and twist, kick, bend, jump, and flail for twenty minutes. A physical therapist recommended this movement strategy, and I thought it was stupid at first. Now, it’s a very welcome diversion from my day at the keyboard.
Be sure to have a mind-body activity you can do away from home as well. My favorite is listening to a comedy recording while walking up and down stairs. When I go to a stressful meeting, I know I can always head for the staircase, prepared with a recording that drains my electricity away from anxious thoughts.
When your brain is half busy, stressful thoughts can easily drift in. When you listen to music, for example, one thought can lead to another and you can find yourself spiraling before you realize it. If this happens to you, add movement to your listening. If it happens while you lift weights, listen to something uplifting while you lift.
Keeping it fun is essential. You have the rest of your life to work on your abs or impress the world with your art. You need to give yourself twenty minutes to excrete cortisol by engaging in something you like. Whether you tend cactus plants or crochet socks, what matters is that you like it. Then you will have a positive feeling as you move into your next step. And you’ll do it without calories, legal trouble, or impairing your ability to operate heavy machinery.
2. Mirror a Tame Person
Our brains have special neurons designed to mirror others. These mirror neurons only activate when you see another individual get rewards or suffer pain. They trigger the same pattern you would experience if you got the reward or suffered the pain yourself, though with less intensity. This activation makes it easier for you to initiate the steps needed to get that reward or avoid that harm yourself.
It’s easy to see how this works with monkeys. In the monkey world, eating a nut is a huge reward because it’s a huge nutritional boost. They don’t know that, but the fat and protein trigger a huge dopamine surge. Cracking open a nut is very hard for monkeys, alas. And no one cracks them for you, even your mother. So a monkey has to build cracking skills before it can get the nutrition necessary for strong muscles. Monkeys learn to crack nuts by mirroring others. Sometimes it takes them years to learn the skill. Each time they fail, they stare at others that succeed. They literally get the feel of it without need for words.
You have been mirroring people all your life. You see people get rewards and avoid harm, and it activates your brain. The behaviors you mirrored repeatedly in youth built big pathways. Some of those pathways are helpful today, and some need a bit of redirection. You can help yourself do that by choosing new people to mirror. Find a tame person and observe. You will spark a circuit for a tame response.
For example, I had a bad reaction when my dentist told me to floss. I couldn’t imagine doing such a difficult thing late at night. Then I married my husband and saw him floss. He acted like it was effortless. I couldn’t believe that was possible until I saw it myself. Suddenly, I felt like I could do it too. I didn’t do it exactly his way. I created a routine that met my own needs. I made it fun by doing it at 9 p.m. in front of the television with flavored floss. Soon it became a habit and my dentist sees a big improvement.
You will not find a perfect person to mirror because we are all bundles of strengths and weaknesses. You can mirror one trait in one person and another trait in another person. As you shop for behaviors to mirror, keep an eye out for people who are good at defining their needs, engaging in de-stressing activities, and taking action steps. If they can do it, you can do it.
Mirror neurons work without cognition. Your verbal brain doesn’t “know” how the other person does it, but somehow you “know.” A baby monkey doesn’t “know” that it needs nuts. It just sees others get eager about an object in their hand, so it picks the crumbs left in their shells. That triggers dopamine, which enhances the expectation of reward. So they watch and try and watch and try until they get it.
We have a
ll been exposed to some undesirable behaviors in youth. You told yourself “I will never do that,” but sometimes you are shocked to find yourself doing it. A child has limited control over the people available to mirror. Now you have a choice. When you understand mirror neurons, you make careful decisions about whose behavior you expose yourself to. Don’t surround yourself with raging anger or quiet despair. Find yourself some calm confidence to mirror. It may not be everywhere, but you can find moments and build a circuit.
Mirroring can aggravate your social-comparison impulse if you let it. You may feel like everyone else is getting nuts and you are left out. You may end up with a cortisol surge that only detracts from your nut-cracking skills. Fortunately, mirroring can improve your cortisol-management skills as well as your reward-seeking skills. The following chapter will address the social comparison pitfall in more detail.
3. Variety
We have seen that habituation erodes pleasure. Variety is the best way to restore it. For example, if you drink coffee every morning, you take it for granted and hardly notice. You long for a second cup, and maybe a third. If you only had coffee every other day, you would really notice it when you had it. This is a way to enjoy coffee without overdoing it. On the no-coffee days, you can find an alternative pleasure. It takes some effort to wire in alternative healthy pleasures, but the reward is worth the effort.
This strategy can work with alcohol or snack foods as well. Limiting yourself to one drink or one cookie on alternate days can help you control that urge for more. Variety can also enhance the pleasure of your entertainment or athletic activities. Explore new pleasures before the old ones feel dull. Sample new sports, books, entertainment, hobbies, or foods to give your brain variety. Dig the well before you need the water! (It bears repeating that I am not advocating intimacy with strangers, since that has well-known drawbacks.)
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