Anxiety gives you an advantage. Unlock it with neuroplasticity

Anxiety is a normal human emotion

We all have it, okay? So you're never gonna get rid of it. And we all have it because it is protective

It evolved to protect us. And so my whole book, Good Anxiety

is teaching us to look at anxiety in a different way, to really flip the script on anxiety

and use neuroscience and tools from psychology as well to learn how to take advantage of anxiety and learn about the gifts or superpowers that come from it

It's great to start with a simple definition of anxiety. So anxiety is the feeling of fear or worry typically associated with situations of uncertainty

So it makes perfect sense why our global levels of anxiety have gone up over the last two and a half, three years with a global pandemic

Nobody knew how to deal with this, a brand new, very, very scary, uncertain situation, but kind of reel it back into everyday life

Obviously, it pops up with lots of uncertain situations that many of us deal with every single day

But it's important to realize that this human emotion anxiety, this normal human emotion anxiety, exists on a really, really, really wide spectrum

It goes from everyday anxiety that can be from mildly annoying to kind of really, really annoying and really a drain on you

But then it goes all the way up to clinical levels of anxiety

That becomes a different beast. That becomes something that you must go see a medical professional to deal with

All of the techniques and the neuroscience that I talk about in my book, Good Anxiety

were really written for everyday anxiety. Now, that doesn't mean that somebody with clinical anxiety can't use those techniques

It's just not the only thing that one should use if you have clinical anxiety

You should absolutely go see a medical professional. But I just wanted to make that clarification because there is a difference

And all of the approaches that I'm talking about are really for those of us, just everybody

that has everyday anxiety. One thing that trips essentially all of us up is something called the negativity bias

which says that we are more prone to see the negative sides of things than the positive side

Why? It's a safety mechanism. You want to be extra careful if you are going to be

you know, in a dangerous situation rather than say, oh, I'm going to be just fine

And so it is a protective evolutionary safety mechanism. But what happens is if you're tired

if you're stressed, if lots of problems are coming up, you will tend to see the world

Oh my God, they hate me. This person hates me. I'm never going to get the job. I'm never going to

lose the weight that I want to lose. All these things come up as part of that negativity bias

And that becomes part of what I like to call the big kind of stone of anxiety that you wear

around your neck every day, kind of dragging along with you. Part of that is the negativity bias

There are many, many different brain areas that get activated with anxiety, but simplistically

there's one that we know that is particularly activated in the similar emotions of fear and

anxiety, and that is a brain structure called the amygdala. The amygdala is one that is kind of

automatically activated when there is a possibility. You hear that bump in the

night that launches your anxiety. And the brain area that could help that calming that might happen in that situation is the prefrontal cortex the area that involved in executive function It helps you kind of order your day But

unfortunately, in situations of high stress, high anxiety, what happens is not only is your

amygdala activated, but your prefrontal cortex gets shut down too. So that makes the situation

even worse. And so that's part of what can happen when one can kind of devolve into a really serious

situation or case of anxiety. Brain plasticity is the brain's extraordinary ability to change

and rewire itself in response to the external environment. And probably the most common form

of brain plasticity that you've done today, I've done today already, is new learning. Every time

you learn something new, there's a change in my favorite brain structure, the hippocampus

that allows for the laying down of that new memory. This is something we're doing all the time

every day. But I've, in my work, tried to use and explore the boundaries of brain plasticity

to address some very challenging issues that have come into the society, particularly our high

anxiety levels. I use brain plasticity as the core of my entire research program. Memory

I started out studying memory as a form of brain plasticity. The effects of exercise on the brain

exercise is one of the best examples of positive brain plasticity. But when I started getting into

anxiety, I realized how critical brain plasticity was to address anxiety. When I started writing this

book, Good Anxiety, it was because I noticed in my students and my friends, my colleagues, myself

higher levels of anxiety. And this was well before the pandemic started. And so I started to write

about what I knew about neuroscience and psychology that could really help us understand and address

anxiety. But in the middle of writing the book, there was something that happened that completely

changed the book for me and changed my attitude towards anxiety. And it wasn't, it included

anxiety, but it was really a really situation of grief and something that all of us, unfortunately

have to go through. In the period of three months, I lost my father and my younger brother

both of heart attacks. And I can tell you, it was one of the most difficult times I've ever

gone through in my whole life. And so it was impossible to write my book about anxiety. I put

on the side. I just had to deal with all these feelings of grief, of sadness, of anxiety. Am I

going to feel better? And it was rough. And it took a while to come back. I used all the tools

that I knew. I exercised, got myself into exercise. I reached out to my friends. I did my regular

meditation. And I remember one day I was doing a video exercise, which is what I do every day

And I hadn't seen this video before, but the trainer that day said something that helped me so much

And that was, in the context of physical activity, she said, with great pain comes great wisdom

And I thought, oh, my God, that is what's coming from the great pain of the grief, including anxiety mixed in, that I'd gone through

What is the great wisdom? The great wisdom was that underlined that, that it was so painful and so acute because there was so much love behind that emotion

And I thought that is the thought and the intention that I need to help me get out finish my emergence from this grief that what behind that was so much love and that you know it the flip side of love

which is this great grief if your loved ones pass away. And that was so helpful for me

at this moment. And then I realized it was transforming the way that I was thinking

about this anxiety book. Because if that terrible emotion, negative, horrible emotion of grief

had this silver lining of wisdom, what about anxiety? Could anxiety be helpful? And was my

book just going to be about techniques to reduce the big bad anxiety? Or was I going to approach it

as something that could be beneficial? That's when the book changed for me. It became a quest

that I needed something to put my mind on. And I dove into trying to find gifts or superpowers or

or beneficial elements from all the different kinds of anxiety that I read about, that I

experienced, that I was writing about already. And that's how I came up with the six gifts or superpowers of anxiety

They would not have come to light if I didn't go through this experience in the middle of

writing this book. But it shifted the way that I thought about anxiety

It shifted the way that I was able to recover from this

And it shifted my thoughts about human emotion in general. In good anxiety, I talk about six superpowers, but let me mention my top three

The first one is a superpower of productivity. Did you realize that your own form of anxiety could be a superpower of productivity

And it works like this. it focuses on one of the most common forms of anxiety that we all suffer from

I certainly suffer from it myself, which is that what if list

What if you didn't do that? Or what if you did that and you didn't do it right? And for me, it hits me right before I'm going to go to sleep and it disrupts my sleep

So what do you do? That is your anxiety welling up. And so here is the trick that anxiety is focused on things that are important to you in life

That is the key. You don't get up in the middle of the night worrying, oh my God, I didn't finish that

last episode of the Netflix series I'm watching, right? It's about the project you're working on, about a really important relationship

So these are things that are important to you. And so the way to transform it is to turn that what if list into a to-do list

Take each one of them and do an action, you know, put an action on each one of them, whether

it's asking a friend for help, doing something, Googling something, and go tick through them

one by one. How does that help? It helps because evolutionarily, anxiety evolved to have us put an action on it

Typically, 2.5 million years ago, it was either you fight the danger that was causing anxiety

or you run away from it. That is the fight or flight response

And so you can help alleviate that form of anxiety by putting an action on it

Even if it is, I'm gonna ask a friend. I'm going to spend 30 minutes of detailed work

on this thing that I'm worried about. That is how you get productivity from your anxiety

And that is superpower number one. Superpower number two is the superpower of flow

And this one I'm very proud of because all the data out there says that anxiety can eliminate flow

So flow is a psychological state. I like to think about it as it's those moments that you're doing something that you're really

good at and it's really exceptional. Time stands still. You know it like you moving in slow motion and everything is just going beautifully And I always think I a student of the cello I always think of Yo Ma who playing the Bach solo cello suites you know not every single time

but that one time at Carnegie Hall, the sound was just so beautiful. He was in flow. And so I knew

I wanted to talk about flow, but I couldn't just say, well, sorry, if you have anxiety, no flow for

you. And so I was experiencing writer's block. I didn't know how I was going to bring this concept

in without being very just depressing about it. And so to alleviate my writer's block

I went to yoga class, a yoga class. So I go to yoga class. I'm doing my up dog

my down dog. I flip the dog. I was doing really well. And then I get to the end of class and I go

into my favorite pose, which is, of course, Shavasana. Laying down in Shavasana. And it hits me

that I am flowing in Shavasana, that I am laying on the ground still better than anybody has laid

down on the ground still. At least I feel like I'm flowing in Shavasana. Okay, maybe it's not

classic flow. Maybe it's micro flow. And so I came up with this concept of micro flow

And then I realized that my micro-flowing shavasana was even sweeter. Why

Because I had writer's block. I had that anxiety about what was going to happen

I didn't know. That uncertainty was coming in. And so that I realized that your own anxiety can make your own moments of micro-flow

which we all have during the day, even if you don't realize you do, make them even sweeter

And so it's kind of a realization that your own anxieties helping those moments of microflow be

even, as I like to say, flowier. That's superpower number two. Superpower number three that comes

from your own anxiety is my favorite of all the superpowers. And it comes from my own evaluation

of my own anxiety, my own history of anxiety. And I was a very, very shy young girl growing up

So, you know, hiding behind my mom's legs. I was always interested in class, but always had this

fear of asking questions in class. Why? For the same reason, everybody's afraid. You're afraid

you're going to say something stupid and you're going to look like an idiot in front of the whole

class. So I had that fear all through my very, very long educational process

but I was interested in teaching and in academia. So one day I find myself at the front of the classroom

and here's what I realized. I didn't realize it then, but I realized it later

that that lifelong anxiety of shyness and being afraid to ask in class

gave me a superpower of teaching in that classroom because I knew instinctually

that there were maybe 10 times as many people that had questions that didn't have the bravery to lift their hand up, but they were just having

silent questions in their brain. So I always came early, stayed late, made sure that I had a moment

of private time to answer questions for everybody. And so that became my superpower, but here's how

it works for everybody. Think about that anxiety that is most familiar to you, your most common

form of anxiety. You know what it feels like. You know what it looks like. All you have to do

is turn that anxiety to the outside and notice when others might be suffering from that same

form of anxiety. And here's your superpower. All you have to do is give a kind word

a simple helping hand in that situation. That becomes your own superpower of anxiety that's

based on your own form of anxiety. And I love this superpower because I can't think of anything

that we need more in the world today than higher levels of empathy