The Anxiety Getaway. Craig April, Ph.D
release, can be triggered by unfamiliar situations, it’s the false danger labels we assign these situations that encourage anxiety. For example, eager actors who are about to go onstage for the opening night of a play experience adrenaline. But they don’t call it “panic,” or consider it “dangerous” or “wrong.” They call their adrenalized experience “butterflies.” And their “butterflies” label is based on the manner in which they accept the excitement of the evening along with the uncertainty over how the play will be received. Performing in front of a crowd is their jam!
How you label your adrenaline experience is key. Trouble arises when you label an adrenaline surge as “wrong,” “bad,” “terrible,” or just something that should most definitely not be happening. Granted, when your system is flooded with adrenaline in a situation that most would agree does not warrant it, there can be confusion. It doesn’t seem to make sense. This confusion propels the mind to ask, “Why? Why am I feeling this way? What is happening to me?” For instance, if you’re driving home from work on a route that you’ve taken daily for years and, suddenly, your system is flooded with adrenaline, it’s natural to question it. Unfortunately, the untreated anxiety sufferer attaches a self-defeating label or scary story to this surge—the opening line likely being some version of, “Oh no. Something is definitely wrong.”
To repeat, although your biological inclination is to avoid discomfort, it’s your “scary” labeling of the uncomfortable experience that sets this whole anxiety monster in motion. The biological inclination is part of what makes us human. The error is indulging it with your anxious creative narrative in the face of misperceived danger.
Jeffrey, a man in his late twenties, feared the night. He said he just didn’t like the way it made him feel. This began one evening when he became ill. He said it might’ve occurred after eating a cheeseburger. All he remembered was that he felt sick, it was uncomfortable, it was night, and he didn’t like it.
What Jeffrey didn’t know following this short, mysterious illness, was that he taught his brain to fear the night by avoiding going out after sundown.
BOOM! Hello, nighttime anxiety, or so-called fear of the dark (a.k.a. nyctophobia).
The more Jeffrey avoided going out at night, the more he taught his brain that night was “bad.” Night was dangerous. And, more specifically, that night would make him ill. You might ask, “Why didn’t he develop a fear of cheeseburgers instead?” It’s anybody’s guess. This is the nature of irrational fear. Because Jeffrey believed the discomfort of feeling ill was intolerable, he sought an explanation and fell on “the night,” due to the timing of his illness. And like brains do when lacking more specific, relevant data, Jeffrey’s brain gave him an unfortunate assist by making a quick association. Though seemingly efficient, this energy-saving brain tactic often leads to errors.
Beyond his perspective, why would Jeffrey label “feeling ill” as horrendous, rather than just unpleasant? Objectively, there was no emergency. No major threat to his survival. So what gives?
First, based on a longstanding pattern of avoiding discomfort, Jeffrey had developed a low frustration tolerance. Feeling ill was uncomfortable, and this discomfort for Jeffrey was intolerable. So he searched for a way to run from it.
But more importantly, the unknown itself can be uncomfortable. Ability to tolerate the unknown is a major factor in the degree of anxiety struggle for any individual. Think about a person you know who rarely struggles with anxiety. A person who almost never seems anxious. Typically, they have a strong ability to tolerate the unknown (we’ll discuss how this can be cultivated soon).
Jeffrey had a limited ability to tolerate the unknown, due to his pattern of fighting experiences where he was uncertain of the outcome. Of course, certainty of an outcome is never an option. Even when we expect an outcome based on a consistent result pattern, it can still change. For years, I fed our dog dry food. Then one day he refused to eat without my adding some wet dog food to the mix. I was certain that wouldn’t happen. It never had before, therefore it wasn’t supposed to happen at present. Try telling that to a hungry, salivating canine!
There is no certainty, just varying degrees of uncertainty. For Jeffrey that night, the uncertainty was, “Why do I feel ill?” He searched and searched for an answer, to no avail. When no clear cut answer was available, he fell upon “night,” led by his overwhelming desire to make the unknown…known. And when he avoided going out one evening for fear of feeling ill again, he taught his brain that “night” was a dangerous experience. That darkness was a hazardous and probable risk to his survival. The more he avoided it, the worse his fear of night became.
Avoidance is the Enemy
Whenever you avoid what you fear, you forge a neural pathway within your brain that associates the fear-inducing stimuli with a threat to your survival. In other words, you are erroneously teaching your brain to protect you from that stimuli via your survival instinct’s fight-or-flight response. The more you avoid what you fear, the deeper that groove in your brain becomes (a deep groove, but definitely not groovy!). The deeper the groove of this self-created neural pathway, the more often it takes you to a place of anxiety whenever triggered by the fear-inducing stimuli to which you’ve now developed an association. This is all unintentional on your part, of course. No need to start beating yourself up. It won’t help anyway. You were simply adhering to your biological inclination to seek pleasure and avoid pain. However, now it’s time to turn your life around and claim your calm. Enough of these needless fears with their time-wasting anxiety symptoms!
One of the biggest challenges in overcoming fear is that, although the brain learns lessons quickly, it does not unlearn lessons quickly. Ever traveled by train? On every trip, trains obey the direction of the tracks. If an engineer wanted to take the train in a different direction, but lacked the track, it would not be possible. New tracks would be necessary to divert the train onto a new course. And once a train has a destination on a track, it churns with momentum. The challenge lies in laying the new track. Like most goals in life, it would take patience, effort, and commitment to build that new path.
There is a similar challenge in facing anxiety and changing your brain’s chemistry. In other words, creating a new neural pathway that is unafraid of what you currently fear is going to take some effort. But it can absolutely be done. You can change your brain’s response to your anxiety-provoking stimulus by creating a new neural pathway (or laying new brain train tracks).
This might seem daunting. But just as all of our brains can be taught fear, they also have the capacity to unlearn fear. Our brain’s ability to do so lies in its neuroplasticity. For over forty years, there have been research studies proving the brain’s neuroplasticity, which is defined as the brain’s ability to affect changes in brain regions, neuron linkages, and associations. Research has even proven over time that the brain can engender new neurons by a process called “neurogenesis.”10 So what does this mean for outsmarting your brain’s false fear messages? It means you can generate calm in the face of your anxiety by changing how your brain perceives and experiences its triggers via specific actions—the very actions we’ll be discussing in short order!
Generally speaking, if you set something in motion in one direction, you can send it in another direction, too! Remember “the law of inertia” lesson in high school? I, myself, may have been asleep during that one. Let’s refresh: In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton (of gravity fame) proved that a body or an object will continue moving in the direction it’s moving until it is acted upon with force to redirect its movement.11 So to overcome anxiety, you’re going to have to expend some effort redirecting rather than avoiding.
The Seductive Nature of Avoidance
Anxiety isn’t sexy, but its avoidance is seductive. How do you stop yourself from avoiding anxiety when it feels so good in the moment? Most people would agree that when you avoid the very experience that brings you terror, you obtain great relief. Problem solved… Not! There is no real relief and no problem solved when avoidance is involved (Go ahead and sing this phrase, you know you want to!).
Avoidance is made of smoke and mirrors. Magicians often use smoke and mirrors to hide their tricks from the audience and blur reality. Should the audience