Reducing Anxiety

After having realized that a lot of my troubles over the previous months are rooted in anxiety rather than the circumstances themselves, I started to search how to relieve the core issue. After a bit of research I came across the book Unwinding Anxiety by Judson Brewer1. Personally I found the book quite enlightening! The gist of the book can be summarized as follows.

Premise: Anxiety is learned automatic behavior

The premise of the book is that anxiety or worry is an automatic thought pattern. The important part is that this thought pattern is a result of reward-based learning. In the book the mental framework of Trigger-Behavior-Result is used for that. A trigger is something like an unpleasant emotion or a situation. The Behavior is something like worry (or smoking, etc.). And the Result is what comes from that behavior - short term relief or more anxiety, etc.

What is really intriguing is that even something as unpleasant as anxiety triggers the reward-based learning circuit in the brain to set up automatic thought patterns. This seems to be the case because doing something feels better than doing nothing.

The problem is that as this automatic worry behavior uses the automatic (old) system of the brain one can not “reason” oneself out of the worry loops. The same old system must be used to unlearn anxiety.

Unlearning anxiety

In order to unlearn the automatic behavior one has to prove to one’s brain over and over that the current behavior is actually not that great after all. And for this, pure reason does not help.

First, one has to see clearly what kind of habit loops one engages in. For example

  1. Facing some difficulties at work
  2. Getting anxious about performance
  3. Being unable to concentrate (exacerbating 1)

Having done that, the next time after having engaged in the same automatic behavior again, one needs to check in with ones body and situation to see how useful the behavior actually was. For anxiety usually the anxiety causes drops in performance which again causes anxiety. If one can actually experience the negative consequences of that behavior, the automatic part of the brain learns to reduce the behavior.

The final step is to replace the current suboptimal behavior with something better. The author recommends to be curious of the current moment and practice loving kindness.

Thoughts

For me the book was quite the eye-opener. Usually my first reflex would be to “think through” emotions and get to the root of why I was anxious. This might work for some kinds of anxiety, but in my case the anxiety itself was the problem. For this instead of relying on willpower to “not be anxious” having some tools to retrain the brain in the moment was really revolutionary.

Also - once again - it was a reminder that actually putting the knowledge into practice and not falling trap to the GI Joe fallacy of thinking “I read it so I can now do it” is really important2.

Sources and Annotations

Footnotes

  1. Brewer, J. (2022). *Unwinding anxiety: New science shows how to break the cycles of worry and fear to heal your mind. *Penguin. ↩

  2. Kristal, A. S., & Santos, L. R. (2021). GI Joe phenomena: Understanding the limits of metacognitive awareness on debiasing (No. 21-084). Harvard Business School Working Paper. ↩