(Originally featured on Social Work Today)

In the American Southwest, there’s a little guy called the trapdoor spider. It sits all day in the small tunnel it dug into the earth with specially adapted teeth. It chose this space, seeing it as best suited for its purposes and freely available. It did the work of digging, closed its silk-hinged trap door, and now it waits.

Time passes, its prey creeps across its doorstep, and it strikes. It’s quick, and to our eyes violent, but also natural. It’s smooth. It’s the way of the world.

The tree in the woods did not select its spot. But it too works with the parts it has evolved on the ground that it found available. Time passes, and the storm winds rise up. The many branches of the tree bend and give way; the wind moves on. Maybe it appears violent to our eyes, but it is also natural, smooth, and the way of the world.

Some trapdoor spiders may starve, and some mighty trees may fall. But the tree does not attack the wind, and the trapdoor spider does not run around the ground in a panic. They do not force these actions because they know intuitively they won’t work. They do not force these actions because they lack anxiety.

Anxiety can be a beautiful thing. In large part because of anxiety, we do not have to live with our bodies or roots hiding in the ground. We can venture out across the earth safe in the knowledge that, to a strong degree, we can react to trouble and threats. Our blessing is that our reaction switch is always set to “on.” Our curse is that we can never turn it off.

Reaction will always be our default. Reaction is controlled by our amygdala, the almond-shaped bit of brain that sits near where the brain connects to the rest of the body.

When we feel, see, smell, or taste things, that information passes through our amygdala first before moving on to the rest of our brain. If we see a bear’s paw swinging at us with claws out, our amygdala will direct the body to dodge it before we even recognize with the rest of our minds that it is a bear’s paw.

The amygdala is so wonderful when it is functioning properly. When we have suffered a trauma, have suppressed a lot of emotion, or are under considerable stress, the amygdala can be like a malfunctioning fire alarm. It will scream out to us, “Something is wrong! We need to take action now!” Action, action, all the time. This is anxiety.

The amygdala reacts. But it knows its abilities are limited, and that it has an ally in our skull in our higher brain. The prefrontal cortex. The place where we do our higher thinking. This is the part you are using right now to comprehend and consider these words.

The amygdala reacts and asks our higher brain to take action. It sends up stress signals like the Bat Signal. It makes us physically uncomfortable so we will act. When we act, we feel comfortable again for a while. If there are no actual threats that can be addressed, we may turn to our default coping strategies. We may rearrange the furniture, seek out some reassurance, or throw a tantrum.
Afterwards we feel better.

Unfortunately, in searching for short-term relief, we often do long-term damage. Our actions, when there was no real immediate threat, fed back to the amygdala the message that it was right to get all worked up and send out those stress hormones. The amygdala then thinks it should see more things as threats and make us even more anxious next time.

The solution then is the most counter-intuitive thing imaginable in the moment. Unless the bear’s paw, the tornado, or the city bus truly is barreling toward us, the best thing we can do is take inaction. It is to sit there with the pain, watch it swell up like a wave in our mind and body, reach its crest, and then recede. Because it will recede. It will not drown you.

As the stress hormones taper off, you will find that you survived, that your life was never actually at risk.

After the initial reaction of our amygdala, our actions are within the control of the higher mind. When we ride the wave of anxious discomfort to its conclusion, we are then able to respond rather than react to what is going on.

With practice this becomes easier, and we grow more skilled at working with our anxiety. Eventually we can even learn to appreciate our amygdalas, which do so much good for us. We can learn to love them because they are part of the beautiful experience of being alive.

​We can learn when we need to respond. Or, like the patient trapdoor spider or the tree on a peaceful day, we may find that no action is required at all but to be.

Satellite View on Anxiety

When we are in a highly anxious state the world closes in tightly. It’s kind of like being in Google Street View. We’re locked in place and all we can sense is our immediate surroundings. Our brain is scanning the area around us because it perceives threats. We can see detail in every direction, but only about 40 feet out.

But that 360 degree bubble is not the only place life exists. Our anxiety is so concerned with the moment that we lose sight of that. If we are able to zoom out we see that the moment is a small part of the whole. There is the town, the county, the state, the nation, and it is all happening on this green and blue orb.

If we can catch ourselves in the moment, and click that (-) button to zoom out, we can be better off for it. Oftentimes the people that know us best are already there, viewing our life from 40,000 feet. It may be worth asking them what is actually going on in the wider view, help adjust your perspective.

The Overnight Attendant
The brain is like a good hotel. It is all efficiency. During the day bellhops zip up and down elevators, maids toss white linen in the air, and a team of workers at the front desk process weary travelers. We can take on most challenges in the daytime.

At nighttime things change. Staff go home to their houses and apartments. Come 3 AM there is no one around but the Overnight Attendant. That one lone person manning the front desk in the unlikely case someone is needed. The staff need rest, so they rest while the rest of the world is at rest.

We need, uh, rest too. We can run a whole operation during the day. We can hold conversations while operating vehicles. Listen to podcasts while cleaning. It is amazing what the brain can do! The cost of being human is that such an amazing piece of machinery as the neocortex cannot run at full power, 24-hours a day. At 3 AM it wants to be asleep.

So if we are awake at 3 AM, the hotel is not at its best. The anxiety we experience then is like a group of teenagers broke into the swimming pool area, someone clogged the lobby toilets, a surprise tour bus just pulled in, and oh by the way the building is on fire. The Overnight Attendant is not equipped to handle all this. What brain is awake at 3 AM is not equipped to handle problems. The best possible answer is to lock the doors and say “I am going to figure this out tomorrow when I am fully staffed again.”

Hope Loan

This one is dorky, but it can work. It’s called the Hope Loan. Sometimes in life we know we are in a pinch point, where life is coming at us from different angles. Perhaps the kids are at a really tough age, while simultaneously we are overwhelmed at work. Or you are in some major transition. A divorce, grieving a loss, an emptying nest. 

What all of these situations have in common is that they are not permanent. They are tough times, but the pain we are feeling in those moments won’t last. There are better times ahead. It’s hard to imagine that in the moment, of course. But the moment is emotional, not logical. Logic is clear: periods of pain are followed by periods of not-pain.

We all are familiar with loans at this point. A loan is a bet on yourself. It’s saying “I am gonna be worth enough in the future, I just need a lump sum to help me in the present.” A hope loan says the same thing. “The future is gonna be alright, so I am gonna take a lump sum of those good vibes now.”
​
Hope loan: like a regular loan, but no monthly payments!

Marilynne Robinson said "depression may be the inability to sustain narrative." This is a fancy way of saying that when we are in the depths of depression it is hard to remember that we are in the middle of an ever-changing story. We view that how we are is permanent.

Depression says at least one of these three things: "I suck, the world sucks, and nothing is going to change." This flies in the face of the facts of the world though. The only thing constant is change. And the world or ourselves cannot be simplified to just 'sucking'.

If there is one thing common in all times of depression I have seen or experienced, it is this feeling of certainty. Depression is famous for black and white thinking. We might believe that things are wonderful for others and terrible for ourselves, with no room for either to be only partially true.

It is so important then to catch ourselves in these moments. If we have thoughts that sound so certain and definitive, we need to apply the hand brake. We have to recognize that we are thinking more in our emotional mind and not our rational mind. And then we can question whether any conclusions we have drawn about ourselves or the world are really 100% true.

(Read more about applying the brake to our thoughts here)

(And a trick on how to think differently here)

When we have BIG feelings like anxiety, anger, and sadness, or when we are just feeling overwhelmed, we tend to get stuck in our head. Our fight or flight reactions are triggered and we start to narrowly focus on whatever caused the problem or the pain.

This can be a healthy reaction to things if the problem is we are being physically attacked, but thankfully modern life is not as often like that. Instead the best thing we can do is come out of that mental state, so we can think with a clear head again.

The 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 Method (not my invention) can be helpful with this. It involves using all five of our senses to reconnect us with the world outside of our head. And of course if you lack one or more of these senses, feel free to adapt it how you see fit.

The idea is to acknowledge 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste. If I am in a position where there is not much around me to see or smell (such as laying in bed) I will think about things I encountered that day.

The benefit of this technique is to remind you that the rest of the world exists, and that it isn't falling apart. It also takes time to run thru the process, giving our mind-body a chance to slow down the release of those nasty hormone chemicals.

(More about those chemicals here!)

I like to not only name the object I can sense, but also think about the object. For example if I see a chair, I like to think about why the chair is shaped the way it is, who could have designed it, what I like about it, why we have chairs at all, etc. By the time I am done with this I am curious about the world again, and not lost in my own problems.

Ever catch yourself feeling angry and wish you could just shut it right off? If only it were that easy.

When something makes us angry, our amygdala -the almond shaped mass in our brain responsible for fight or flight- says "my time is now." Before we have a moment to think it over, the amygdala commands our body to produce and rapidly fire chemicals such as adrenaline throughout our body.

Unless we are in the rare position of actually fighting off a real attacker, this is not a mental state we want to be in. Prolonged anger can lead to health problems like heart disease and significant damage to relationships.

(Click here for more on couples counseling)

Ideally we would stop anger like stepping on a car's brake. At the size of a common vehicle we can go from 60 to 0 pretty rapidly. But anger is not like that. Anger is like a 100-car train flying down the tracks. In the cab of the train's locomotive the engineer pulls the brake lever to stop. The brakes are applied, but that of course does not stop the train 'in its tracks'. With all that weight behind it, it can take a large train well over a mile to stop.

Adrenaline is like that. Once you notice it moving in your head, the brake lever needs to be thrown immediately to head off disaster. The force of the adrenaline will want to keep the train moving. That is why it is important to not let up on the brake when the adrenaline urges you to.

Whatever method you use to calm - breathing, mindfulness, walking away - do it and stick to it as soon as you notice the nasty chemicals flowing.