thinking about how you could apologize for an offense you’re not even sure you committed, staying up all night trying to figure out how you are going to pay your bills and where you are going to live after your boss fires you for messing up the presentation, or obsessively looking around for something — anything — to blame for your looming sense of panic and dread. Instead, you must step back and help your insular cortex relabel your experience of anxiety, not as a reasonable reaction to an obviously threatening situation, but rather as a sign that your fear circuits in your brain are misfiring. Instead of running around trying to figure out how you can fix something going on around you, you must instead figure out how to control your brain and body. Then, and only then, will you be able to correctly assess what to do about the situation itself.
Step Two: Reattribute (and Relax)
Once you have determined (however tentatively) that the situation triggering your anxiety is not the source of any imminent, immediate danger, the second step is to relax your body. As I indicated above, instead of continuing to tell yourself that “I am anxious because X (non-life-threatening event) happened” you must reattribute the anxiety you feel to a “pinched nerve” in your brain that results in the misfiring of your fear-threat system. You can then intentionally shift your focus away from the concerning event for the time being (we’ll come back to it in a minute) and refocus on relaxing your body and getting your fear-threat system back under control.
I want to be clear. In stating this, I am not saying that your anxiety is not real. It is very real. Because anxiety hijacks the fear-threat system, you are feeling genuine fear, perhaps even a crushing amount. What you are reading here should not be interpreted to suggest that your anxiety isn’t a serious problem. In fact, what I am asserting is that more than some figment of your imagination, problems with anxiety are always serious physiological events. The good news, however, is that rather than being made fearful because of some situation that is largely outside of your control, your anxiety is actually being caused by a process that, with practice, you can learn to control.
Anxiety is controlled by two different systems in the Autonomic Nervous System, the neurological system that is responsible for things like heart rate, respiration, blood vessel constriction, temperature, etc. The sympathetic nervous system (your “speed up” system) acts like a gas pedal. Stimulating it makes your bodily systems race. By contrast, the parasympathetic nervous system (your “slow-down” system) is like a brake pedal. These two systems function in harmony with one another, but they can also function independently — just like the gas and brake pedals on your car can be used separately or simultaneously depending on what the situation calls for.
When you feel anxious, your “speed up” (sympathetic) nervous system is being hyper-activated. In essence, the gas pedal is floored and stuck. The good news is that you can unstick the gas pedal by tapping the brake, i.e., activating the parasympathetic nervous system. At first, your metaphorical engine might continue racing, even after you’ve applied the break. But within about fifteen to twenty minutes, your brain should re-regulate and sync back up again. With practice, it’s possible to learn to get this process to happen within seconds. There are actually a few simple ways to do this.
One of the most effective, yet simplest, techniques involves consciously speaking and acting more slowly than you feel like you want to. Often, when we are anxious, our thoughts and speech automatically race. On top of this, because our brain is preoccupied with being anxious, we stop paying attention to what we are doing. Both of these symptoms are signs that our sympathetic (speed-up) nervous system is over-engaged.
But we can learn to reach down and “unstick” the gas pedal by intentionally activating our parasympathetic nervous system (slow-down system). Intentionally speaking a little slower than we want to, acting a little more slowly and intentionally than we naturally prefer in that moment, and forcing ourselves to pay attention to what we are doing taps the brake pedal. This creates little bit of a jarring sensation as the speed-up and slow-down nervous systems try to sync up with each other. They don’t like to be at odds with each other, so consciously depressing the brake on the slow-down nervous system unsticks the gas pedal and forces the speed-up nervous system to stop racing.
We’ll discuss more sophisticated interventions later in the book, but here are a few other simple techniques that can help you consciously regain control of your runaway speed up nervous system.
Deep breathing exercises can be tremendously helpful for getting your sympathetic nervous system unstuck. Here is a simple one. Place one hand on your stomach and one hand on your chest. Close your eyes. Breathe in through your nose for the count of four, hold your breath for the count of seven, and blow out through your mouth to the count of eight. Repeat for at least five minutes or until the anxiety passes.
To someone struggling with anxiety, suggesting that they should breathe deeply can seem remarkably stupid and banal, but it turns out there is solid science behind it. Recent research by scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine found a small patch of 175 nerves, deep in the brainstem, that act as an emotional pacemaker. These nerves monitor how quickly you are breathing and relay that information to a different part of the brain that monitors your state of mind. It turns out that you can trick these nerves into thinking that you are calmer than you actually feel by intentionally breathing deeply and slowing down your respiration rate. Although you might be tempted to dismiss the power of simple suggestions like “take a deep breath” for relieving anxiety, science shows you may be missing out if you do.
Reflective prayer (as opposed to “Help! God, save me!”) is also very helpful to “tap the brake” and slow down your brain and body. We’ll discuss spiritual interventions for anxiety in more depth later, but a simple way to employ prayer is to close your eyes and intentionally recall the times God has been faithful to you or carried you through a difficult time. Take a moment to praise God for these things. Your heart won’t be in it at first, but that’s okay. It’s what Saint Paul called a “sacrifice of praise” (Heb 13:15), and it helps to remind you of the fact that if God has been present to you so many different times in the past, he isn’t going to fail you now. It also reminds you of all the other times you were sure your life was going to irreparably fall apart, but miraculously it didn’t.
Grounding is another simple way to “tap the break” on your slowdown nervous system. Grounding reconnects you with your body and the present moment instead of letting you fly away with your thoughts. Count five things you see, four things you hear, three sensations you are feeling in your body. Identify two people who care about you, and one simple thing you could do to feel even a tiny bit better right now (for instance: have a hot cup of tea, listen to your favorite music, do something you enjoy for a few moments). This technique works because anxiety wants your thoughts to race ahead to anticipate all possible future problems. Forcing yourself to re-focus on the present moment, especially at this level of detail, activates your para-sympathetic nervous system and slows the anxious brain’s tendency to race ahead.
Finally, reconnecting with others can be tremendously important. Go to your spouse or a good friend and ask them to give you a hug. Don’t be quick about it. Relax into the hug until you feel yourself exhaling the stress. Hugging actually syncs your heart rate to the other person and increases the presence of oxytocin, a powerful “calm down” hormone produced through interpersonal bonding.
Each of these simple exercises, alone or together, have been shown to have a powerful impact on the autonomic nervous system, causing it to let up on the gas and depress the brake and at the same time rapidly decelerate the stress response.
The problem is, most people think doing any of these things is nonsense. “How is breathing and getting a hug going to stop me from losing my job when I screw up my presentation? Don’t be an idiot!”
Remember, unless there is an immediate threat to your life
