When appropriate, you can share your anxiety-taming practice with a person you want to help. You can share thoughts about what you want, include that person in your distracting activity, and bounce ideas about your next step. Your pleasure in that step will spark the other person’s pleasure, building positive expectations about the next step.
Whether it’s appropriate depends on your relationship with the person you want to help. Professional relationships have limits, and personal relationships have limits. But with a bit of strategic thinking, you can design effective mirroring opportunities for the person you want to help. Instead of modeling a behavior yourself, you might help a person locate situations where the desired behavior is on display. These efforts will be well-rewarded because mirroring penetrates the mammal brain in ways that verbal preaching does not.
Undesirable behaviors are always on display too, of course. If you are trying to lose weight, everyone else seems to be licking an ice cream cone. But if you stand in front of an ice cream shop, you are causing that undesirable modeling. You can help others notice when they are standing in front of an ice cream shop. You can show them how different the world looks a few feet away. When people say “everybody does it,” they think it’s a fact because of their mirroring choices.
When a person feels anxious, it’s easy to say “everyone is anxious.” You can help a person discover a new universe of behaviors to mirror.
The power of mirroring is interesting to see in horses. When a group of horses runs together, the leader is in the center rather than in the front. The other horses are mirroring it. You may think the leader is in the center because of high-minded motives, but the leader is in fact only promoting its own survival. The center position is the safest from predators, and ungulates invest their strength in a quest for a more central position. When a threat is perceived, a strong and confident individual chooses its steps and others mirror it. This is how a horse leads from the center. When you take calm, confident steps, you are leading from the center.
People mirror what you do rather than what you say, of course. Their mammal brain zooms in on how you get rewards and how you avoid pain. If you do one thing and say another, you teach people that insincerity is a way to get rewards or avoid pain.
If you tell someone to relax but you are not relaxed yourself, you will not help that person tame anxiety.
This happens a lot, of course. We try to calm others because it helps us meet our own needs. When we make others responsible for our anxiety, we teach them to abdicate responsibility for their feelings. This is probably not what you want. With careful planning, you can model a tame response. It’s worth the effort, because mirroring can carve new paths in the backroads of the mind.
Carrots and Sticks
It’s hard to change emotions because they rest on pathways built from past experience. New pathways can be built from new experiences, but activating new experiences with old pathways is a challenge. Carrots and sticks can help. Carefully planned rewards and pain will trigger new chemicals, which build new expectations.
This strategy is controversial. The stick is no longer acceptable, and even the contingent use of carrots is widely seen as objectionable. I am not advocating actual sticks, of course, but social pain is very powerful. You don’t want to inflict social pain on others, but they are already shaped by the social reward structure of the world around them. You are already rewarding some behaviors and not others. You can pay closer attention to the reward structure you are creating and fine-tune it to align with your anxiety-taming goals.
Often, we reward bad behavior without realizing it. We give more attention and respect to behaviors we don’t want than behaviors we want. Despite good intentions, we teach people that bad behavior gets social rewards. With more awareness, you can direct your attention and respect toward behaviors you want to encourage.
This is often harder to do than we expect. I was reminded of that when I took my husband horseback riding. I had gone on trail rides with my father when I was a kid, and I learned that a trail horse expects to be fed when it returns to the barn. If you let it feed on the trail, it has no incentive to keep stepping. My husband had never been on a trail ride, though his father grew up on a farm, while mine was from Brooklyn. He let his horse munch on grass whenever it wanted. Our group leader told him not to do that, but my husband couldn’t bring himself to discipline his horse. Soon, the horse refused to budge and our whole group was stuck. Finally, the group leader came and took over the reins. My husband learned to fear trail rides, but he did not learn to discipline a horse.
We are all tempted to reward bad behavior because it feels so good in the short run. 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.
You have probably heard that rewards are bad because they undermine intrinsic motivation. The studies that purport to prove this have a problem, however. They talk about “intrinsic” motivation without acknowledging that such motivation was produced by the child’s past experience. A child who was rewarded for bad behavior in the past will revert to that when left to follow their “intrinsic” motivation. They need to experience a new reward structure in order to escape that loop. They need to enjoy new carrots for new behaviors and lose old carrots for old behaviors.
We often hear that “the squeaky wheel gets the grease.” It makes sense to grease a squeaky wheel, but greasing a squeaky human has unintended consequences. If you are nicer to the angry person than you are to the pleasant person, you teach people that anger gets rewarded. If you are nicer to the anxious person, you teach people that anxiety gets rewarded. You can help others by scrupulously noticing your social rewards, and resisting the urge to reward bad behavior.
Foreign languages are best learned through immersion because you have to speak the language to get rewards when you live in another country. You get food and make friends when you speak the words, and your brain links the words to the good feeling of meeting your needs. Real rewards are more motivating than books and tests. This doesn’t work if you meet your needs in your native language while immersed in a foreign land. Our brain learns from the behaviors that actually get rewarded.
Rewards are valuable because they can motivate small steps that add up to big steps. Animal trainers call this “shaping.” They reward tiny steps as long as they are steps in the right direction, and soon, a complex behavior has been “shaped.” For example, a pigeon will spin in a circle if you reward it every time it turns its head in one direction. The pigeon keeps repeating the head turn to get another reward until it has completely spun around. If you tried to teach a spin from the start, the pigeon would not understand what behavior is needed to get the reward. You have to break the desired behavior into steps that are within its experience.
You must be consistent in your use of rewards to avoid the problem known as variable reinforcement. A gambler at a slot machine is a well-known example of variable reinforcement. So is a child having a tantrum or a criminal planning another heist. When a behavior gets rewarded some of the time but not always, the mammal brain tries harder instead of giving up. Research on pigeons, rats, and monkeys makes this clear. Thus, if you reward bad behavior occasionally, the bad behavior gets entrenched. You must resist rewarding bad behavior all the time in order to change expectations.
Carrots and sticks have power. You can help a person with carrots and sticks by carefully planning your contingencies and sticking to them.
You may long to “help” a person by granting a reward whether or not the person executes the appropriate behavior. You may hate to withhold rewards from anyone. You may even pride yourself on finding new ways to justify rewards. This does not help the person you purport t
o help. It only helps you.
When “Help” Doesn’t Help
The world is full of would-be “helpers” who reward bad behavior. Parents, teachers, managers, and public servants reward bad behavior more than they realize. They want to meet their own needs and feel like a good person. They want approval, even from those they purport to help. So they perpetuate a dysfunctional incentive structure and ignore the consequences.
If you truly want to help, look carefully at the behaviors you are rewarding. It’s hard to violate your sense of magnanimity in the short run, but you can focus on the long-term benefits. Imagine all the future pain you are relieving by helping a person build healthy expectations about rewards.
Let’s return to the uncomfortable topic of sticks. We do not use sticks in today’s world, even for animals. But pain can contribute to a healthy reward structure in other ways. The pain of hunger motivates a horse to return to the barn. Feeding a horse when it strays from the path causes problems. A rider must make careful decisions about rewards and pain in order to reach a destination.
You can help others by withholding rewards until they have met explicit criteria. Maybe you’d rather protect them from the pain of disappointment, but that would not help them. By holding them accountable, you help them build a skill, find their power, and enjoy the pleasure of their own steps. When you reward bad behavior, you make it harder for them to find their power.
When other people reward bad behavior, you notice. It’s easy to criticize the perverse incentive structures effected by managers, parents, teachers, leaders, and counselors around you. But when you reward bad behavior, you feel like you are just being a good person. You end up reinforcing the expectation that bad behavior is a good way to meet needs. You would help more by doing nothing.
The urge to rescue others is natural. It puts you in the one-up position without risking your acceptance and belonging. You stimulate serotonin without losing oxytocin, which is hard to do in other ways. No wonder it’s so popular.
For most of human history, it was so hard to survive that you had limited energy to rescue others. Today, many people have a lot of energy left after meeting basic material needs. They have more energy to invest in the quest for social rewards. Thus, we have a lot of people looking for someone to rescue.
The urge to rescue is easier to understand in a historical context. In past centuries, sailors couldn’t swim; even ships’ captains couldn’t swim. If you lived in those times, you might dream of rescuing people by putting life guards on every ship. You might imagine a huge global program with massive funding for life guards. You might not think of teaching sailors to swim because that skill was not widespread in your experience. And you wouldn’t want the sailors to feel blamed or judged for not swimming. You just want to help.
If you really want to help, teach someone to swim instead of providing life guards.
Remember:
Anxiety is hard to tame with words because it’s hard to find the connection between the verbal brain and the chemical brain. You can help people discover their nonverbal impulses through the act of finding words to associate. You can help them access the verbal brain’s power to look at an impulse from different directions.
You can help others activate the feeling of confidence in their steps, and repeat it until the pathway builds. With conversation, you can help them locate that feeling in their past experience and understand the need for repetition.
Positive expectations relieve anxiety. You can help others identify their expectations so they have power over them. You can help them recognize the adolescent experiences that built their expectations.
Mirror neurons activate when we see others get a reward or risk pain. You can help people discover new rewards by experiencing those rewards in front of them. If that’s outside the bounds of your relationship, you can help them find useful models.
We are always making choices about what we mirror. You can help others notice their choices and redesign them.
Pay careful attention to the behaviors you are actually modeling, because the person you want to help is likely to be mirroring them. Your actions count more than your words.
The brain learns from whatever gets rewarded. We often reward bad behavior, despite our best intentions, because it helps us meet our own short-run needs. You can help others by carefully aligning your rewards with desired behaviors.
Rewarding small steps toward a desired behavior can shape a big new pattern.
Rewards must be consistent. If bad behavior is rewarded some of the time, it will persist. Variable reinforcement motivates a mammal to work harder to get a reward it has gotten in the past.
It feels good to rescue others and it feels bad to withhold rewards from others. You must understand your own feelings about helping others in order to truly help.
Epilogue
As I write this, I await the arrival of my first grandchild. Her parents want her to be happy, and so do I. But I have learned more about the brain since my kids were young. I will not rush to pick up a toy that my granddaughter drops. I know she will be happier in the long run if she picks it up herself.
The urge to protect children from distress is very strong. We want to give them what we want, and we want relief from distress. We fear terrible consequences if we fail to relieve their distress. And if the Joneses protect more, we hate to protect less. I am not advocating neglect, of course. I am advocating new insights into what makes a child happy in the long run.
The best thing children can have is confidence in their own skills. To build those skills, they need experience. The best gift we can give them is respect for their ability to manage their experience.
No one is born with the skill of feeling safe. Each brain must build self-soothing skills from its own experience. Having perfect experiences is not what creates a sense of safety. It happens when a child builds trust in its ability to meet its needs. Each time a child decides what it wants and takes steps to get it, the circuit builds. When a baby’s ball rolls away, it figures out how to crawl because it wants the ball. A child needs to want something to release the chemicals that motivate action. With repeated action, confidence builds.
The best way to help a child tame anxiety is to tame your own. Mirror neurons are nature’s teaching tool. Face disappointment with calm confidence and your child will do that too.
My grandchild cannot be born with confidence in her steps. She can only build confidence in her steps. She has to build the neural pathways that choose her steps and the pathways that trigger positive expectations about them. She’ll need repeated experience to build those pathways. Fortunately, she can enjoy the experience. I can’t wait to see her figure out what to do when her ball rolls away.
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Keep in Touch
Loretta Graziano Breuning is founder of the Inner Mammal Institute and author of The Science of Positivity: Stop Negative Thought Patterns by Changing Your Brain Chemistry and Habits of a Happy Brain: Retrain Your Brain to Boost Your Serotonin, Dopamine, Oxytocin and Endorphin Levels. She is professor emerita at California State University, East Bay. The Inner Mammal Institute offers resources for rewiring your mammalian neurochemistry. Breuning writes the blog Your Neurochemical Self: Getting Real with a 200-Million-Year-Old Brain on PsychologyToday.com. She has been interviewed on NPR, The Matt Townsend Show, and the Ask Altucher podcast, and her work has been featured in Psychologies, Real Simple, the Dodo, Independent Voter Network, and the School of Life in London. Breuning currently lives in Oakland, California. She wants to hear about your success in taming anxiety. You can write to her at [email protected].
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