Tame Your Anxiety

by Loretta Graziano Breuning

  Status food is an obvious example. Everyone has seen the iconic image of a wealthy big shot with a bib on, eating a lobster. Each generation creates its own food-based status symbols. In tribal societies, you would get status by providing a banquet for everyone you know. Such banquets were the only chance to eat meat for many people. When my mother was a child, meat was such a luxury that having a slice of ham in your cheese sandwich was a status symbol. Today, status foods come and go, but you know what they are.

  In a world of food abundance, the biggest status indicator is being thin. Many people starve themselves to achieve this status. They enjoy the serotonin but starvation triggers constant cortisol.

  Food can stimulate serotonin in many other ways. You may feel special when your diet is healthier than the average. If it’s more ethical as well, you get extra bonus points.

  The one-up feeling is also released when you can get others to honor your dietary preferences. Opposing the food habits of others does it too. It’s not surprising that people invest so much energy negotiating their food rules, whether in a family, a social group, or the public forum.

  We don’t like to acknowledge this aspect of food. We don’t like to acknowledge the mammalian urge for social power at all. But serotonin rewards you with a good feeling when you get it, and your inner mammal feels threatened when you don’t.

  The quest for serotonin is hard for everyone because it’s quickly metabolized, so you have to keep stimulating it. Also, your brain habituates to any status you have, so new and improved status is what it takes. This leaves us eager for one-up opportunities no matter where we are in life. And since we are eager for food as well, the two goals often overlap. Food creates frequent opportunities to assert yourself and feel important.

  Yet every opportunity can lead to disappointment instead. No matter how slim your waistline, someone will have a slimmer one. No matter how perfect your dinner party, someone’s will be better. No matter how ethical your diet, someone’s will be more ethical, and however high your soufflé, someone’s will be higher. Of course, these quests go too far sometimes, but you don’t see that when you’re in the grip of social comparison. Thus, the mammalian urge for social dominance can permeate your mealtime.

  You may say you don’t care about social dominance, but if you find yourself mindlessly shoveling snacks into your mouth, think about what happened in the last few hours. You will probably find that you have experienced a threat to your social dominance. We all struggle with the feeling of powerlessness because we are all born powerless. Food choices are a popular way to relieve those feelings of weakness. We do it in myriad ways, depending on our life experience. However you got wired, you can build new pathways to feel pride in good food choices without stewing over other people’s food choices.

  Endorphin

  Hot pepper triggers a bit of endorphin, but habituation means you have to eat hotter and hotter to stimulate it.

  Chewing triggers a bit of endorphin, because it exercises your jaw muscles. The appeal of chewing gum or a nice bowl of popcorn rests in part on the endorphin. The historical significance of chewing is fascinating. Before the invention of cooking food, our ancestors had to spend a huge portion of their day chewing food to get enough nutrition. Chimpanzees spend a huge part of their day chewing. Elephants and gazelles spend almost their whole day chewing. Cooked food enabled humans to swallow more nutrition in less time, leaving us more time for other things. Today, it’s nice to spend some of that time chewing.

  Starving triggers endorphin too. It also triggers cortisol, of course. The joint neurochemical message effectively promotes survival in the state of nature. Cortisol alerts a forager to the urgency of its food needs, and endorphin masks hunger pain so it’s easier to forage. Hunger only triggers endorphin when you’re at the point of distress. And even then, you habituate, so it takes more distress to stimulate it. Starving for endorphin is thus dangerous and foolish and absolutely not recommended. It is only mentioned here for the sake of insight. We are designed to honor our natural urge to eat.

  Food Trade-offs

  In this book we have seen that our brain makes constant trade-offs between rewards and pain. It also trades off one reward against another, and old reward pathways against new ones. You have more power over these trade-offs when you understand them. Food choices can help you recognize your thought habits because the rewards are tangible instead of being abstract.

  Food seeking interrupts negative thought patterns, and that’s a valuable tool in some situations. But if you rely on this tool too often, you do yourself harm. You must keep assessing the trade-offs to get what you want.

  You can enjoy the reward value of food without overindulging. You can stop seeing food as a threat. When you understand the reward value of food, you can enjoy the rewards without adding to your anxiety. You are always doing this with the circuits you have, but with effort, you can build some new circuits.

  When I was a kid, my mother brought us to an ice cream parlor for sundaes when report cards came out. Today, rewarding children with treats is considered bad, but I did not become a sundae junkie. I only have one or two a year, and only small sundaes after a big investment of effort, which is eerily similar to my early experience. Recently, I made a trip to my hometown after living three thousand miles away for a long time, and I was eager to check out the old ice cream parlor. As you may guess, it was a huge disappointment. The historic character was gone, including the metal dishes. I didn’t consciously care about the metal dishes, but with each spoonful, I missed the familiar clink of metal against metal. This was a great reminder of the way our experience of food is shaped by old pathways. When we understand the power of these old pathways, we can appreciate the effort it takes to build new ones.

  Remember:

  Hunger was a huge threat for most of history, and our brain evolved to look for food to relieve the threat.

  The good feeling of relief builds a pathway that expects relief from food even when you’re not actually hungry.

  People make worse decisions when their blood glucose falls. But once a bit of food brings your blood glucose back up to normal, you don’t get additional power from additional food.

  Historically, fear of food scarcity helped people restrain their urge to eat. In today’s world of abundance, fear is likewise an effective motivator of restraint. The challenge of the next generation is to eat sensibly with joy instead of with fear.

  You can learn to maximize the pleasure of food when you’re hungry and be prepared with alternative pleasures when you’re not hungry.

  The good feeling of dopamine motivated our ancestors to migrate to better hunting grounds and to plant fruit trees. Higher expected rewards trigger more dopamine.

  The excitement of noshing can be replaced by the excitement of zero-calorie food quests, such as watching cooking shows, growing vegetables, reading restaurant reviews, planning holiday meals, scouting for rare ingredients, or cooking something that takes all day. Variety and color stimulate dopamine too.

  If you enjoyed social trust around a table in youth, that will activate your sense of safety today. 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.

  Your brain is longing for real trust rather than fake trust. 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.

  Food can stimulate your mammalian urge for social dominance in many ways. Every generation has its status food. And you may enjoy a one-up feeling when your diet is healthier or more ethical than someone else’s diet.

  People invest a lot of energy negotiating food rules in a family, social group, or public forum, because social dominance stimulates serotonin.

  Endorphin is trigge
red a bit by hot pepper and by chewing.

  Food-seeking interrupts negative thought patterns, which is a valuable tool in some situations. But if you rely on it too often, you do yourself harm. Your brain is designed to keep assessing trade-offs to get what you want.

  10

  Help Others Tame Anxiety

  When you offer acceptance or respect to an angry or anxious person, you feel like a good guy. When you withhold it, you risk being branded a bad guy. Thus, you are really focused on your own needs when you reward bad behavior, even as you invoke a higher purpose. It takes a strong focus on long-term goals to transcend this impulse.

  The urge to help others is strong, but your power to help others is limited. You cannot access the command center of someone else’s brain. You can only help a person if that person activates the neurons. You can help others tame anxiety by

  talking to them about their inner mammal,

  modeling a desired behavior for their mirror neurons to receive, and

  rewarding the behavior you want, rather than the behavior you don’t want.

  This chapter is intentionally last because you shouldn’t try to tame others until you have tamed yourself. It’s tempting to start with others because it always feels like they are the cause of your anxiety. You think everything will be good when others change. This focus on others diverts you from the central task of finding your own power. Worst of all, blaming your anxiety on others teaches others to blame as well. So tame your own anxiety before you read on.

  There are good reasons to want to help, of course. When someone you care for is suffering, you feel it. When your herd is happier, you are happier. And, truth be told, you feel important when you help someone, and that serotonin signal of social importance feels safe. You stimulate dopamine when you help someone because you approach rewards with them, and you stimulate oxytocin when it builds your sense of trust and belonging. Helping feels good.

  Being honest about these motivations is important because “help” doesn’t always help. Sometimes, we do things in the name of “help” that make things worse for the person we want to help. This chapter explores a better way to help. You can help others master their brain in the long run instead of just having feel-good moments in the short run.

  You can help someone learn the three-step taming tool. But talking about the tool is not the same as using the tool. You know it was difficult to get it into your own brain, so you can appreciate the challenge for others. You can help them do it with talk, mirror neurons, and a careful use of carrots and sticks. Each of these has limited power, but used together they can help. Here’s how to manage these tools, whether in a professional capacity or a personal capacity.

  Talk, Talk, Talk

  Telling an anxious person to relax doesn’t help. Pointing out the bright side of a situation often fails too. Anxiety is hard to tame with words because it’s hard to find the connection between the verbal brain and the chemical brain. It’s like hearing a foreign language. When you hear a word in a language you don’t speak, it has no meaning because you don’t have a circuit connecting it to other experiences. A person needs the experience of feeling safe in order to evoke it with words. This leaves us with a chicken-and-egg problem: how can you help others activate a feeling they haven’t lived?

  You can help them find a new trail in their brain and activate it repeatedly. This is hard, like learning a foreign language. We don’t know why it’s hard to learn a new language, since we seemed to learn our native language effortlessly. In the same way, we learned our old emotional responses effortlessly, but new ones are curiously hard to learn. The truth is that early learning involved an enormous amount of repetition, and a lot of myelin. In adulthood, the myelin is gone, so repetition is even more important.

  Anyone can learn new tame responses by repeating them a lot, but people are rarely eager to do this. When they don’t learn quickly, they think something is wrong with them. It is very helpful for people to know that repetition is necessary for everyone.

  Learning a new emotional response is harder than learning a new word. You can associate a new word with an old meaning, but you may not have an association for a new emotion. Your electricity doesn’t flow there if the neurons aren’t connected. You can help a person make new connections by activating nearby circuits. For example, this book has used animal analogies to help access impulses that we rarely put into words. You can design analogies and word pictures that are meaningful to the person you are trying to help. However they have experienced confidence in their own steps in the past, you can help them find and reactivate those circuits.

  Breaking abstractions into smaller chunks is another way to help a person activate a new circuit. For example, when two fishermen talk to each other about their day, they can say a lot in a few words because they have a shared vocabulary. When they talk to non-fishermen, they have to break things down into concepts that are familiar to people. It’s the same when you explain the concept of feeling safe to a person who does not feel safe. You break the concept into chunks: the natural urge to survive, the chemicals that create the good feeling that our survival needs are met, and the pathways that control the chemicals.

  You can help others notice their expectations about meeting their needs. These expectations are the source of our safe and unsafe feelings. It’s hard to put our expectations into words, but we have power over them when we do. Talk is a tool that expands our awareness of our nonverbal impulses. Talk helps our horse and rider understand each other. In daily life, only a small part of your experience gets put into words. So, when your horse gets triggered, your rider has trouble finding the reason. When you talk, your rider stops doing other things and focuses on the horse’s perspective. Your verbal brain discovers the patterns being activated in your mammal brain. Once your verbal cortex gets hold of a thought, you have more power over it. The cortex can turn things around and look at them from different directions. You can look at something in a way that feels safe.

  We all have old patterns we’d rather not talk about. Talk can activate the pain of the original experience. We avoid pain, so we are good at avoiding thoughts of past pain. The bigger the pain, the bigger the circuit we build to detour around it.

  Such detours are easy to imagine for dramatic traumas like a near-fatal accident or early abuse, but small irritations build them too if they’re often repeated in youth. For example, if you repeatedly felt put down when you were young, every detail of that experience can trigger your pain circuit. In adulthood, you find yourself avoiding such details and don’t know why. Just the thought of approaching them feels extremely threatening. You presume the threat must be real because the feelings are so strong. Talk can help a person uncover the powerless child who stored the reactions, and reexamine the situation as a powerful adult. Talk helps you chart the roads so you can build the extensions you need.

  A simple example is the pain caused by the adolescent urge to be “cool.” No one likes to think this motivates them in adulthood, but big circuits build because the mammal brain creates life-or-death feelings about social importance. These big circuits get in your way when you need to do something that’s “uncool” by the standards of your adolescence. Going to bed early, for example, triggers your adolescent pain circuits. You can end up harming yourself with a sleep deficit because your mammal brain is so motivated to avoid being “uncool.” This loop is hard to escape when you can’t admit that it’s happening.

  You can help a person discover his or her adolescent circuits and redirect them. While it’s hard to talk about this vulnerability, it’s easier to talk about it in monkeys. Adolescent monkeys didn’t go to your high school, yet their challenges feel curiously familiar. At a certain age, elder monkeys withdraw protection and a young monkey must meet its own needs. It faces competition from stronger individuals. It has a sense of urgency about social rivalry because its genes are annihilated if it fa
ils. It is not thinking about its genes; it is trying to feel good and avoid feeling bad. Anything that feels good is very motivating.

  You have to get comfortable with your own adolescent template before you can help someone else. We are all sensitive about the suggestion that we are shaped by our adolescent reward structure. We blame our fear of being uncool on society, or we ignore it entirely. You can help others make peace with their adolescent template by presenting it in a safe way. You can help them understand the navigation system they wired in long ago, with all its superhighways and detours. You can help them find their power to build new pathways by stepping in new directions. It’s hard to do this with mere words, so we are fortunate to have nonverbal tools as well.

  Mirroring

  We all mirror others without conscious awareness. We choose what we mirror instead of mirroring everything. A fascinating study with monkeys explains how we do it. Scientists showed monkeys an image of a person’s hand grasping a mug of juice, and the monkeys’ mirror neurons activated. But when the monkeys saw an image of a hand in the same grasping position but no mug of juice, no mirror neuron activated. Obviously, it’s about the juice. Our mirror neuron system evolved to notice the rewards and pain experienced by others because that information promotes survival. It has become fashionable to call this “empathy,” but it’s essential to know that your brain seeks information relevant to your own survival.

  You can help others discover new rewards by experiencing rewards in front of them. When you take pleasure in vegetables, or cleaning your desk, or socializing without artificial stimulants, you help others activate that pleasure. If you tame anxiety with the three-step tool, you help other learn to focus on what they want, give their cortisol time to dissipate, and take their next step. “Actions speak louder than words” is an old saying with a sound neurological basis.