Tame Your Anxiety

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  So what is the alternative?

  Stop blaming the world for your feelings and notice how you create them. This doesn’t mean blaming yourself. You can practice self-acceptance. You are a mammal with a big cortex. You urgently want to survive, yet you know you are mortal. You want to spread your unique individual essence but you don’t always prevail. You enjoy social trust, yet common enemies are what spark it. These impulses are easy to see in others. When you see them in yourself, you have power.

  Remember:

  Your new tame pathway is only useful if you exit from your old anxiety pathway in a timely manner. You can build an exit ramp that helps you do that. Make an awkward physical gesture when you notice the urge you want to change, and you will build a pathway that helps you flow into your new choice.

  The disease view of emotions is historically new. It rewards you with a sense of community, an expectation of reward, and a sense of being special. But in the end, learning to manage your horse benefits you more than giving the reins to someone else.

  Self-protection is like armor—it helps you feel safe, but it weighs you down and it’s hard to take off. Well-known varieties of psychic armor are muscle tension, boredom, anger, perfectionism, and procrastination. You can feel light and flexible if you take off your armor. To build confidence in your unarmored self, practice distinguishing real pain from anticipated pain, and real survival threats from anticipated survival threats.

  Social comparison causes misery because the mammal brain sees the strength of others as a survival threat. When you ignore your mammalian urge for social dominance, you believe others are putting you down. When you understand your mammal brain, you see that you are a participant in mammalian social rivalry and creating your own feelings about it.

  Puberty brings myelin which paves neural pathways, so the experiences of adolescence build the lens through which we see the world. Natural selection built a brain that responds vigorously to everything that affects your ability to find a partner and protect children. No conscious intent to reproduce is necessary for our chemicals to respond to the variables that promote reproductive success, such as a healthy appearance, a network of social alliances, and a willingness to take risks.

  The hell-in-a-handbasket mind-set is popular because it triggers good feelings: that you know what is going on, and that we’re all in the handbasket together. Expectations of decline feel true because they’re socially reinforced and because the cortex finds evidence that fits expectations. But hell-in-a-handbasket thinking feels bad in the long run. When you know you are creating it, you can create an alternative.

  9

  Food and Anxiety

  A nap would give you a boost, but that seems impossible. A call from the lover who dumped you last year would give you a boost, but that seems impossible. A brownie is possible.

  Hunger was a huge threat for most of human history. Our brain is good at looking for food because that relieves the threat. When you are anxious, you may find yourself looking for food. Then you may get anxious about what you eat. This thought loop can ensnare you. One minute you’re longing for something to nibble on, and the next minute you’re fearing the consequences. This chapter helps you escape that loop. We’ll see how food stimulates the happy brain chemicals, and how you can redirect yourself toward new ways to stimulate them.

  Food triggers dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphin, which is why it’s so motivating. When you understand these motives, you can enjoy the good feelings without overeating.

  This chapter is not aimed at weight loss. It aims to tame anxiety. But since eating is both a cause of anxiety and an effect, it may help you step toward new eating habits. We must understand our natural food impulses in order to manage them, so let’s start with a close look at why our brain responds so intensely to food.

  Why We’re So Focused on Food

  Watch monkeys at the zoo and you will see that they’re constantly looking for food. They are not even hungry, because zookeepers feed them, but their eyes are constantly scanning the ground for potential snacks (both insects and leftovers). Sometimes they see another monkey score, which increases their vigilance. A bit before feeding time, they shift their vigilance to the door where their meal will appear. I used to lead zoo tours and would tell people to think of these monkeys when they find themselves in front of the refrigerator wondering how they got there. Zoos are not a perfect reflection of natural behavior, but if you could see chimpanzees in the wild, you would see even more excitement about food.

  We care about food because it works. It really does boost your peak power. Research shows that people make better decisions when their blood glucose isn’t low. When your blood glucose falls, you give in to temptation more easily. (This is known as ego depletion.) The problem is that once your blood glucose is back up to normal, you don’t get additional power from additional food. But you expect to get it because you got it before. This is why you think of food when you need a boost.

  Our brain is designed to focus on unmet needs. Food doesn’t meet an unmet need if you’ve already eaten, so the relief value of food requires a bit of explaining. Let’s say it’s afternoon and you’re dreaming of buying a brownie. You need a boost, and it’s the best way you can think of to get it. A nap would give you a boost, but that seems impossible. A call from the lover who dumped you last year would give you a boost, but that seems impossible. A brownie is possible. So even though you’re not really hungry, you get up and buy a brownie. And it works! The act of getting and eating the brownie interrupts the thought pattern you were having when you started dreaming of it. The threat you were imagining is gone, if only for a few minutes. This teaches your brain that a brownie relieves threats.

  Let’s say you make good use of your break. You get back to work and tackle the problem that was worrying you. Hooray! But with that threat out of the way, your brain looks around for the next potential threat. You feel the brownie in your stomach and imagine it going to your arteries. You think about calories, additives, gluten, partially hydrogenated fat and high-fructose corn syrup. Your cortisol surges.

  We evolved to see food as a reward, but today we often see it as a threat. You read about dietary health risks and hear scare talk from family and friends. Cortisol builds a pathway that triggers fear when you eat, or just think about eating.

  Fear is an ancient regulator of food choices. Our ancestors lived in fear of running out of food before the next growing season. They feared food shortages due to drought or pestilence or war. Each bite they ate was one less bite that would be available in time of need. Our ancestors managed their food intake the way you might manage your water bottle on a long hike. You weigh the reward against the risk before you open your mouth. Today, we are less fearful of food shortages. We have replaced that fear with the fear of a suboptimal diet. Fear remains our guide because it’s a powerful motivator of self-restraint. So, we have gone from scarcity to abundance without relaxing our fear. The challenge of the next generation is to eat sensibly with joy instead of with fear.

  In a world of abundance, overeating is a real threat. To relieve it we must restrain the food-seeking urge that evolved in a world of scarcity. But self-restraint is a cortisol circuit built by fear of consequences. This leads to the predicament of cortisol-if-you-do and cortisol-if-you-don’t. How can we make good food choices without constant fear?

  You can enjoy your steps toward meeting your needs. You can maximize the pleasure of food when you’re hungry and be prepared with other pleasures when you’re not hungry. We’ve seen throughout this book that the happy chemicals are your brain’s signal that a need has been met. You keep striving to stimulate them because it relieves the bad feeling that your survival is threatened. The more ways you can stimulate happy chemicals, the less tempted you are to overeat. Negativity about food is not the path to a healthy diet. You can preserve the pleasure of food and still tame the impu
lse to reward yourself with food. You can do it one happy chemical at a time.

  The Dopamine Value of Food

  The joy of food is one of your first experiences in life. A newborn baby enjoys a surge of dopamine when it first tastes milk. The baby doesn’t know what milk is, or what nutritional needs are, but the brain releases dopamine when milk relieves low blood sugar. That builds a pathway that says, “This is the way to feel good! Get me more of this!”

  But a baby doesn’t know how to get it. The next time it is hungry, it surges with cortisol and crying is its only way to “do something.” Then it hears a sound. Suddenly, its dopamine is triggered because that sound was heard during a prior dopamine release. So, at one day of age, a brain is already drawing on past experience to feel good. A baby expects to feel good when it hears its mother’s voice, though it doesn’t know why.

  Whenever a bad feeling suddenly changes to a good feeling, it means you have relieved a threat and met a need at the same time. That builds a huge pathway because it’s a huge survival boost. Huge pathways create the expectation that food will relieve your woes. If you fall and hurt yourself and someone gives you a cookie, it feels like cookies have magic powers.

  Dopamine motivates steps toward food as much as it motivates eating itself. A huge investment of effort was necessary to get food in the past. The good feeling of dopamine motivated that effort. Our ancestors migrated to better hunting grounds and planted fruit trees because anticipated rewards triggered dopamine, which triggered action. Today, you may find it hard to get a parking spot near your favorite donut shop, and your dopamine surges when you see a place to park.

  If you were a pioneer on the Oregon Trail and ate nothing but jerky and biscuits, you would be very motivated to reach the ripe berry bushes farther down the trail. Today, variety is so easily available that it’s less exciting. Thus, we find other ways to stimulate the excitement of dopamine with food, such as cooking a dish that takes all day, reading restaurant reviews, planning holiday meals, scouting for rare ingredients, and growing vegetables. Watching cooking shows is an extremely popular option. These quests for food have no calories but they feel good because our brain evolved to forage. You may think food quests are a dangerous prelude to overeating, but this is often not true. Many Food Network fans have a healthy diet. We can find new sources of excitement to replace the excitement of noshing.

  When I was young, I was always on a quest for new ice cream flavors. Travel in Europe thrilled me with new ice cream horizons. I didn’t overeat; I just enjoyed the quest. But as the decades went by, I ran out of new flavors to discover. Then I learned that Europe has two-hundred-year-old cafe/pastry shops. This triggered my cream circuits and my history circuits and my travel circuits at the same time. I was thrilled to have a new quest to replace the old one, and planned a tour of the historic pastry shops of Vienna. When I got there, I spent a lot of time looking at the pastry before I chose one. I even photographed a lot of them. When I finally ordered a pastry, I cut it in quarters. I’d save half for the next day, and a quarter for dessert that night. I didn’t have to overindulge because I was enjoying the quest. I most enjoyed the pastry at the cafe where Sigmund Freud had his breakfast and read his newspaper.

  The joy of the quest makes more sense when you understand the difficulty of meeting food needs in the state of nature. You could not eat a nut unless you invested effort in gathering, shelling, and roasting them. You would not overeat because the investment of effort is more than the reward. Today you can eat shelled nuts out of a bag. The whole bag costs a tiny amount of labor to buy, even at minimum wage. You pop nuts into your mouth because it’s a big reward for a small effort. The reward is minor if you’re not hungry, but nuts have fat, protein, and salt that are rare in the state of nature. So, from your mammal brain’s perspective, it’s still a reward. The easy availability of food is the crux of today’s challenge. This is widely overlooked because of the misguided belief that food comes effortlessly in the state of nature. The truth is that a huge share of energy went into meeting food needs in the past, which is why we have extra energy today.

  We look for good ways to invest our energy because that’s what our brain is designed to do. We evaluate these investments with pathways built from past experience. That’s why baking bread is a reward to one person and a pain to another person. Maybe you feel rewarded by hiking to pick wild herbs or discussing at length the subtle qualities of a wine. Maybe not. It depends on the associations you have built in your past.

  Our food fears are learned from experience as well. You have surely noticed that your food fears differ from the food fears of others. If you think about it, you can identify the experiences that created these fears.

  Our dopamine responses have much in common despite our unique experiences. For example, variety stimulates dopamine. Our ancestors ate the same thing much of the time. When they had the chance to try a rare food, they became excited. Variety triggers dopamine because it helps satisfy unmet nutritional needs. You can stimulate dopamine with variety. You can increase the reward value of your breakfast by trying a new cereal or your salad by adding different ingredients. And I love to increase the reward value of beer by sampling a few different tiny beers.

  Color also increases the reward value of food. In the statue of nature, color triggered dopamine because colorful foods were typically scarce and high in nutrients. Today we have learned to make our food colorful without artificial chemicals. Restaurants and cooking shows have learned to compete by emphasizing natural color. Assembling foods with attractive color has been elevated to such a high art that it has come to be known as “food porn.” You can choose ingredients with visual appeal and enjoy more dopamine from less food.

  If you don’t make an effort to enjoy food in new ways, automatic impulses easily take hold. The first bite of a cookie feels so good that it builds a big circuit, inviting your electricity the next time you look for a way to feel good. But after a few bites, the thrill is gone and you worry about the consequences. The bad feeling sends you looking for another quick boost. This thought loop can make you miserable. Fortunately, food stimulates other happy chemicals, and this gives you other alternatives.

  The Oxytocin Value of Food

  Whatever triggered your oxytocin in youth built a pathway that turns it on today. Food is usually linked to that circuit because it’s linked to your early social experience. If you enjoyed social trust around a table in youth, that will activate your sense of safety today. If your table was full of conflict, you have some different associations. Most of us have a combination of positive and negative associations for shared meals, which is why food can evoke social pain and the joy of belonging at the same time.

  Every mammal seeks safety in numbers. If we count on food to trigger that feeling, we may eat too much. There are other ways to enjoy the sense of acceptance we naturally crave, but they’re easy to forget when we expect to get it through food. Such expectations are reinforced by the images of shared meals we see around us. In the past that might have centered on village festivals and visits to relatives. Today, movies and media present images of convivial meals, and restaurant windows display them live. Your brain easily links food to social support.

  The social solidarity of other times and places is widely idealized. The reality is that group meals were necessary before technology simplified food prep. People embraced alternatives to group meals as soon as they emerged. In our idealized image, mealtime meant sharing your deepest hopes and dreams and getting unconditional approval from everyone assembled. The reality was often quite different. Expectations were rigid, and if you failed to meet them you would be excluded from the shared meal. That meant hunger, so you kept your big ideas to yourself. When a gazelle eats with the herd, it gets poked by other gazelles, but it eats with the herd to avoid predators.

  In our Hollywood images, meals are prepared with love, and crops are grown with love. Our illusions
about collective eating are fueled by the cooperative farms celebrated in fiction and nonfiction. The bad news is often left out. Most cooperatives dissolve from conflict. Food preparation took a huge amount of drudge work in the past, and resentment was sometimes an ingredient. When you idealize the community of the past, you feel like your life is missing something. It helps to be realistic about the past.

  When I visited Asia, a colleague invited me to a meal with her family. Everyone served themselves from platters in the center. My friend told me that everyone notices what everyone else takes, so you grow up learning to watch what you eat. I suddenly realized that shared meals had helped people restrain their food intake for most of human history. The end of that lifestyle brought two new challenges: finding new ways to build social trust, and finding new ways to restrain food intake. I was reminded of the moment in my first semester at college when I realized I could choose food without another person’s judgment. We often long to free ourselves from the judgment of others, but then our survival depends on the quality of our own judgment.

  You need social trust in your life, of course. In the past, your choices were limited, so you had to sustain trust with the people you had. Today, there are numerous options, but sustaining trust is still hard for any group of mammals. You can choose to build trust around food or to build it in other ways.

  Your brain is longing for real trust, rather than fake trust. Real trust requires reciprocity over time. Sharing food can be a stepping stone to real trust, but it is not a substitute. The more you recognize your real oxytocin needs, the less you expect to meet them by eating.

  The Serotonin Value of Food

  Children sometimes fight over food the way monkeys do. By the time we reach adulthood, we learn to restrain that impulse, but the longing for power doesn’t stop when you stop grabbing other people’s bananas. We look for ways to stimulate that one-up feeling, and food often gets involved. Your mammal brain finds ways to be special and fill your belly at the same time.