Variety can also expand the pleasure of social trust. If you rely on the same people all the time, you may eventually feel disappointed. No one can understand you on every issue and agree with you on every choice. If you expect that, you will just end up resentful and undermine whatever rapport you have. Instead, you can seek understanding from a variety of people. You can find one person who understands you in one aspect of life, and others who understand you in other aspects. You will weave a mature feeling of being understood instead of wallowing in a childlike sense of abandonment. The world cannot provide the complete sense of security that we long for at birth. You have to knit that sense together for yourself.
Of course it’s hard to try something new in a moment of distress, so it’s useful to start your exploring when you’re feeling good. I do my exploring around dinner time, when my productivity is off-peak but I still have some focus. The time you invest in discovering new rewards will pay big dividends in the future. Variety replenishes your anxiety-taming toolbox so you can always meet your needs.
4. Laugh
Laughing is the sustainable way to get endorphin into your life. Real laughs are what trigger it because they activate intrinsic muscles that are sometimes ignored. You can have more laughter if you make it a priority. This is hard, you may say. The world may not seem very funny. You’re busy. You can’t force it. But there are some things you can do to get more laughs in your life.
Redefine Laughter
You may be restraining your laughs for one reason or another. Maybe you think they look silly. If you start to see laughter as a strength, rather than a weakness, your laughs will be released.
Laughter is a sudden relief of perceived threat. Physical comedy is relief from a physical threat and verbal comedy is relief from threats perceived by the verbal brain. Comedy reinterprets a potential threat so it’s safe to lower your guard. Laughter is the sudden relief of muscle tension that a lowered guard allows. You may think lowering your guard is dangerous due to real past experience. The endorphin of laughter can retrain your brain to feel safe when your guard is down.
Make Time for Comedy
If you say you have no time for comedy, it’s like saying you’re too full to eat vegetables. You need to make room.
You may think most comedy is “not funny.” I agree. Each of us has to shop for the comedy that appeals to us. That takes time, so you need to make time in order to have something funny in your pantry when you need it. In a busy world, it seems strange to devote time to shopping for comedy. But the expression, “There’s never enough time to do it right, but there’s always enough time to do it over,” reminds us that “There’s never enough time to laugh, but there’s always enough time for anxiety.” In the long run, laughter makes time for itself.
Prioritize Your Own Sense of Humor
Humor that appeals to your friends and family may not appeal to you. If you concede to their taste all the time, you deprive yourself of laughter. You need to make space for your own sense of humor regardless of who else it appeals to.
I dislike the angry, bitter kind of humor, but I found an improv theater that always cracks me up. I was eager to bring everyone I know to this theater and was surprised when my guests didn’t like it. Sometimes their displeasure ruined my fun, so now I just go with my husband. We appreciate having something we love instead of worrying about other people’s taste.
5. The Rubber Ducky Method
I was surprised to learn that software engineers relieve threats with “the rubber ducky method.” When a coder confronts a tough debugging problem, they are advised to explain the problem to a rubber ducky. Literally. A solution often emerges in a few minutes.
I loved hearing this because it gave me a word for something I already did. My husband is my rubber ducky. I vent to him when I can’t get an app to work, and the answer usually comes to me while I’m speaking. Then I’m embarrassed to have bothered him, so I explain that I was absolutely stuck before I called him. My husband doesn’t know the apps I work with, so he usually can’t help anyway. But when he hears a scream from my office, he kindly offers to help. Now that I understand my brain, I just say, “Can I please explain my problem to you because it often helps.” It’s hard to believe that it works, since I truly feel like I’ve tried everything before I call him. But it works so well that now he uses me as his rubber ducky.
This method helped me solve a bigger emotional problem. I used to feel sad about not having a herd. For most of my life, I thought others had “a great support system,” and I somehow missed out. I know this is an old pattern from my childhood. My mother felt bad about her lack of support and modeled this for me. I also know that everyone longs for more support because we’re all born vulnerable. And I know that people who sell “support” are marketing the belief that others have a cozy support system. But for all my insight, my inner mammal felt like something was missing. Then I heard about the rubber ducky method and started thinking more realistically. If you can get support from a piece of yellow plastic, then support is just a feeling you create in your own neurons.
The support of a rubber ducky is the best kind of support in certain ways. Human beings might easily be offended if you don’t take their advice. And I might be offended by their failure to understand my problem. A rubber ducky doesn’t create these problems. It makes me grateful for my freedom to choose my own solutions instead of being pressured into solutions I dislike. It’s hard to trust my own wisdom when I’m stuck, but talking to a rubber ducky helps my inner mammal and my verbal brain trust each other. Then they can work together on a solution.
Of course I would love to have someone who knows the right answer about everything. But that is the longing of a child. In adulthood, my problems are too specific for another person to see from my perspective, just as I cannot see other people’s problems from their perspective. If I depended on someone to solve my problems, I would end up stepping toward what that person wants rather than what I want. So I am glad I have the chance to call my own shots. Instead of wasting energy on a quest for the perfect adviser, I invest my energy gathering different opinions and connecting the dots for myself.
The rubber ducky method helped me understand why so many people long for support and then resent the support they get. When you have a problem, you are embedded in the details of that problem. No one can understand it the way you do. Getting upset about that is futile. You might just as well get angry at a duck-shaped piece of plastic.
6. Self-Expression
An infant must express itself to get its needs met. Relief comes when it makes a noise, which wires the newborn brain to expect relief when it makes a noise. A child soon makes more complex sounds in its quest to get relief from others. Self-expression is our core tool for feeling safe.
Maturity increases your ability to meet your own needs, but your brain still expects to get relief by communicating your needs to others. Sometimes you get the support you seek and sometimes you don’t, yet you still connect self-expression to relief because the circuits are so well developed.
Humans have always sought comfort in self-expression, though our ways of doing it change with time. Prayer was a popular strategy for most of human history. Writing letters or poetry was popular in centuries past. Social media is popular today. We are influenced by the self-expression strategies of those around us.
You may romanticize the self-expression of the past. Heart-warming images of people telling stories around the campfire are widely conveyed. We imagine these people having perfect mutual understanding, but if you lived in that world, you would be bored with hearing the same stories since you were born, and you would be frustrated when other people’s stories got more attention than yours.
The same is true for letter-writing and poetry. These pre-electronic social media are idealized today, but the people who wrote them were like us. They appealed for the support of others and got ignored
sometimes, despite their great eloquence. They felt obligated by the long-winded appeals for support from others. If you like low-tech forms of self-expression, no one is stopping you from writing poems and telling stories around a campfire. Maybe it seems like no one will listen and you blame that on technology. But if you were born before technology, your message would be competing with everyone else’s in whatever media were available.
The real problem is the urge to be heard in a world where everyone else has the urge to be heard. And that is only a problem if you make it one. Instead, you can accept your natural urge for attention. Sometimes your self-expression will be drowned out by the expressions of others, and this will feel like a threat. When you know the cause of this threatened feeling, you have power over it. When you deny your natural urge for attention, you don’t know where the threatened feeling is coming from, so you think it’s a real threat.
People have always competed for attention, with whatever technology emerged when they emerged. People have always struggled to be heard because it stimulates serotonin or oxytocin. These good feelings are soon metabolized, so people are always seeking more. If you don’t get it, your happy chemicals droop. This droop is not a crisis; it’s the motivational mechanism built by natural selection.
As we grow in experience, we learn to modify our message to improve our chances of getting heard. There are always difficult trade-offs between the expression that comes to you naturally and the expression you expect to get results. With maturity, you can make these trade-offs consciously.
There is no perfect choice between authenticity and results. Doing the popular thing may get results, but you end up feeling stifled. Authentic self-expression brings more relief but may fail to be heard. You want both, so you constantly adjust your message in hopes of getting the pleasure of authenticity and the pleasure of recognition at the same time. But you fail. When you get recognition, you feel a stifling pressure to conform to expectations. When you focus on your own mind-set and ignore the mind-set of others, you feel a scary disconnection. Your brain focuses on the unmet need, so it always feels like something is wrong. You can retrain yourself to focus on what is right instead of what is wrong. You can enjoy recognition when it happens and enjoy authenticity when that happens. You can enjoy the act of expressing yourself regardless of the immediate response.
Children are often rewarded for modes of expression that undermine their rewards in adulthood. Some children get rewarded when they scream, and other children get rewarded when they censor themselves. Both of these patterns have drawbacks in adulthood. It’s foolish to think others got the perfect training and you got shortchanged. There is no perfect self-expression strategy. We all scream at times and censor ourselves at other times. We all keep fine-tuning our self-expression. Old pathways can limit that, so it’s great to find your power to build new pathways.
Our ancestors found comfort in self-expression even when their direst appeals went unanswered. They appealed to rain gods when drought threatened their survival, and consulted shamans to target their message more effectively. It’s easy to sneer at these strategies today, but most of us have not lived with the threat of starvation or annihilation. Instead of enjoying our good fortune, we equate small disappointments with annihilation. Anxiety is the result. We can relieve it by learning from the rituals of darker days. Our ancestors prayed to rain gods but they also developed irrigation and food storage methods to meet their needs. We are safe from hunger today because our ancestors expressed their needs and then took steps to meet them.
The animal perspective helps to clarify our drive for self-expression. As noted in chapter 3, when you hear animals calling out, most of the time they are saying, “I’m here, where are you?” and waiting for a reply of “I’m here, where are you?” This is what makes a mammal feel safe. If you did that, people would think you were annoying. Instead, you have to work hard to get the world to respond in the way your inner mammal longs for. When you don’t get it, your mammal brain releases survival-threat feelings. It’s hard to make sense of these feelings because your verbal brain won’t admit that it cares. When you understand this chemical sense of urgency, you can enjoy self-expression despite the inevitable risk.
7. Reward Yourself with Free Time
Free time may be the reward you want more than anything else, and you have the power to get it. But you may be absolutely convinced that you can’t have it because you are too busy for a break. People who refuse to have downtime often resort to unhealthy ways of taking a break. You reward yourself with something bad for your body or bad for your mind when you would have been happier to just have some free time.
Smoking is a classic example. When people smoke, they take a break and breathe deep, often in the company of others they trust. When they try to quit smoking, they deprive themselves of these breaks. What if you took the break and the breaths and the company without the cigarette? Designing a smoke-free break makes it easier to quit, but most people forget to reward themselves with free time.
We resist free time because it feels weird at first. Your brain goes to dark places when you are suddenly free. This is why people strive to stay busy, as much as they complain about it. They only take breaks in the context of a habit that keeps their mind busy. You can free yourself of that habit if you practice the skill of taking unstructured time. It’s scary at first when anxiety rushes in to fill the vacuum. But with practice, you will be able to avoid dark places without the pressure of external demands.
“I have no free time,” you may insist. Your life seems like an endless stream of obligation. This is a circuit you built from experience. Maybe you were rewarded for looking busy when you were young, or punished for taking a break. That wired you to expect calamity if you take a break today. You can replace that circuit with a new one focused on the value of recharging your metabolic batteries.
8. Do One Thing Different
Anxiety surges when you feel like you’ve tried everything. You have nowhere to turn, so you feel trapped. Of course you haven’t tried everything because you only try things you expect to work. Such expectations are limited by past experiences, so what if you tried something you did not expect to work? If that fails, you can try something else that you don’t expect to work.
For example, if you are locked in an anxiety-provoking conflict with someone at work or at home, you may insist that the person needs to change because you have tried everything. But you have no power over the other person. You only have power over yourself. If you do one thing different, the whole situation might change. If it doesn’t, you can do one other thing different.
This may seem foolish because the changes you can make are so small. It feels even more foolish to do something you don’t expect to work. It feels dangerous too, as you imagine the criticism you would get for not “knowing what you’re doing.” A better way to look at it is that you know something will work, but you don’t know what. So you experiment. And instead of judging by immediate results, you make small investments and monitor the returns.
We are used to hearing advice mongers insist on right answers and point fingers of ridicule at those who do otherwise. You may have pointed fingers yourself. We end up believing that right answers exist, and wrong answers are very risky. You run out of options quickly with such limits. You are stuck if you believe these limits are imposed on you by the external world. When you realize they are imposed by your fears, you can give yourself permission to try one thing different—even if you don’t know why it should work.
This tool is most valuable when you are in a conflict with another person. You can’t predict what will work because you can’t see the world through the other person’s lens. But if you do something different, your adversary is likely to do something different as well. If not, then try another thing different. Your power to experiment frees you from the feeling that the other person controls your destiny. When you take a minute to define what y
ou want, you can find a way to meet your needs despite the tribulations of others.
9. Reciprocity
Reciprocity is the social glue of the mammal world. If you pick bugs out of someone’s fur, it helps you get the bugs out of yours. If you admire someone’s artwork, someone is likely to admire yours. When you want to cry into your beer, the way to get heard is to listen to someone else do the same. That can leave you in a puddle, but then you can find an exercise buddy, an addiction-recovery buddy, and a career-advancement buddy.
Reciprocity is not appropriate when it violates the rule of the law. Waiting your turn is better than bribing the maitre d’. Doing your own homework is better than cooperative cheating. I’ve lived in countries where bribery was the norm for traffic violations and public services. When I returned home, I was grateful for the rule of law. We benefit when our surgeons and pilots are accountable to standards rather than to private deal making. We are all challenged to manage our mammalian reciprocity impulse in healthy ways.
Research shows that wild baboons are curiously skilled at tallying favors given and received. They make careful decisions about which group members’ fur to groom. Sometimes they are disappointed, but they focus on their next step. Reciprocity helps a mammal invest in options with good potential reward. You may think it’s wrong to do something because you expect something in return. You have been told to give freely and expect nothing. But your inner baboon is keeping track, and it is not happy. Anxiety results when your verbal brain snubs your inner baboon. Accepting your mammalian urge for reciprocity helps you navigate between the extremes of isolation on the one hand and enmeshment on the other.
Tame Your Anxiety Page 12