Transcription
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Hey guys, Dr. K here. Now, I want to talk a little bit about anxiety and hopefully help you all understand a little bit more about what is anxiety, how does it actually function, and once we understand what it is and what it's supposed to be doing, we can start to get a sense of how to overcome it.
So, anxiety is essentially our brain's capacity to predict danger and warn us about it. It gives us the opportunity to look into the future, see or anticipate problems, therefore we can take corrective actions now to prevent bad outcomes. That's essentially what anxiety is. Consider being worried about looking stupid at a party, or afraid that you're going to fail a test, or being afraid that you're going to get rejected from a job interview. All of these things are examples of our mind looking into the future, examining things, analyzing things, and warning us about danger so that we can do something about it. And so, essentially, what happens when our mind worries is it's making predictions of bad outcomes in the future in a hope that it can warn us about it, we can kind of do something to correct or prevent it. So, anxiety is essentially our ability to see problems and consider consequences.
Anxiety is when our mind has thoughts of the future, usually associated with negative consequences. It involves predicting the impact of current actions into the future, and specifically how painful the future will be if we act in a particular way. Now, we tend to talk about anxiety like an illness, but if we look at the fundamental function of worry, let's not forget that most of the time, worry isn't a bad thing. It's actually a good thing. We're wired for it. It's something that our brain is telling us to do. So, let's try to unpack anxiety a little bit further, and we're going to go through two examples kind of as we sort of analyze anxiety. And those two examples are going to be being afraid of looking dumb or offending people at a party, or being afraid that we're going to do poorly on a test.
So, the first thing that we need to look at is both of these examples involve you. Right? So, anxiety involves thinking about you and the consequences that you may or may not take. Usually, you start with yourself and you look into the future. The reason you do this is you try to figure out all the possible solutions to prevent bad outcomes. And so, anxiety tends to focus on some kind of insecurity, oftentimes with you, but it could be an insecurity about someone else, your sense of your own capability, or what you're not good at.
So, in the case of looking dumb or offending people, you may not have confidence in yourself as a person. Somewhere along the way, you discover that people may not like you very much, or that the only time they like you is if you kind of put on a particular mask or you put on a show, and that they like that version of you, but not the real version of you. You may believe that you're just not as charismatic as other people. You may find yourself comparing yourself to a lot of other people. But at the end of the day, there's an insecurity about your likability as a person.
In the case of studying, you may be afraid of failing or fear that you haven't studied enough. You may recognize that other people can be confident. Once again, there's going to be comparison there, but something just makes you worried that you're not going to do good enough, or you're afraid of doing good enough, or you're afraid of being good enough.
Sometimes people consider anxiety as stemming from the past. Now, I sort of say that anxiety is the future-focused mind, but people will say, "But I have anxiety about the past." Let's just tunnel down into that tangent for a second. People will say, "Oh, I messed up last night, and if people, you know, people are gonna dislike me today because I was dumb yesterday at the party or yesterday in class, I asked a stupid question. So now everyone is gonna think I'm stupid." And so they pause for a second, and they kind of look back, and they say, "Oh, I made a mistake yesterday. I'm anxious about that." But if you really look at it, what they're doing is they're looking at an event in the past and they're still projecting the consequences into the future. So, all anxiety involves looking into the future, and even though you can be worried about something that happened in the past, if you really pay attention, what you're really looking at is you're worried about the consequences that could evolve from actions that happened in the past.
So, we see that anxiety is about predicting possible problems that arise. And now we get into another interesting tidbit about anxiety. Is that since anxiety is about making predictions, the smarter you are, the more computing power you have to make predictions. And this is really, really unfortunate because what I find time and time again as a clinician is that the smarter you are, the worse or more crippling your anxiety can be. The more that your mind is able to compute potential futures, the more potential problems that your mind will tell you to worry about. And so, it's really unfortunate, but generally speaking, the smarter you are, the worse your anxiety is.
And so, now that we kind of sort of dug into a little bit about the "you" component of anxiety, let's look at what the mind does with responding to anxiety. So, what does the mind do when we actually experience anxiety? How do we deal with these worries in the future? The short answer is that uncertainty is really frightening. So, what we try to do is to remove the uncertainty. Most of anxiety involves an "if, then" sort of statement. So, we see the "then" portion. "If I say this, then people are going to think this." Right? "If I go to the party and I speak up, people are going to dislike me." "If I don't study enough, I'm going to fail the test." And so, it's kind of like an "if, then" statement. And so, what we try to do is we try to fix the "then." Right? We try to alleviate our anxiety by essentially controlling something in the future.
And we may think a little bit about overcompensating. So, let's take the example of, you know, I cracked a joke about someone and maybe they're upset by it. Let me just apologize just in case. Even if you didn't say anything offensive, a lot of times people with anxiety are so concerned about it that they'll overcompensate and try to control that future. In the event that this person is offended, let me remove that uncertainty and just apologize just in case.
The other thing that we try to do to sort of control the future or remove the uncertainty is to not trigger it at all. Right? So, if we avoid the situation entirely, then we can control any potential negative outcomes that happen. So, if I don't even show up at the party, I can't misspeak, I won't, people won't think I'm stupid. And so, how about I just don't go? I can control that worry completely by avoiding the situation entirely. And for people who are worried about failing a test, they'll study extra hard because they're so afraid of failing. And so, they kind of do as much as they can to control the uncertainty of the future by sort of changing something in the here and now.
And this may sound like sort of a good thing in a sense, right? Like, if I'm studying extra for a test, like, isn't that a good thing? The problem is that oftentimes our solutions for anxiety, our desire to exert control, is very restrictive and actually causes us to suffer. So, if we think about the social example, like, sure, if I don't go to the party, no one can think I'm dumb because I'm not there. But then I never go to parties, and so I actually narrow the scope of my life and I start to restrict the kind of things that I can do. And even in the case of studying, we're so paranoid that we're going to fail a test that we skip parties or social events or don't hang out with friends, or we stay up way too late, or we wake up way early in the morning. We miss out on a lot of fun that you can have when you're a student by studying way too hard.
And this is the really damnable thing, which is that anxiety oftentimes has positive benefits. Let's not forget that anxiety is actually there for a reason, and the reason it exists is because generally speaking, it helps us out. So, for example, if you look at medical students, a lot of medical students have high levels of anxiety, and that's part of the reason they got into medical school in the first place because when everyone was out partying, they were the ones who were on a Friday night at 10 p.m. in the library studying for a test. And so, even though the event, anxiety, could be advantageous for us at times, generally speaking, we want to be really careful because if we give into it and we try to control those uncertainties, it actually restricts us or causes us to suffer, even though it may give us some kind of material advantage in life.
The other issue is that oftentimes with anxiety, since we're so concerned, we actually end up overcompensating, which can make the problem worse. Right? So, if we're concerned that people don't like us and we apologize too profusely, then what can happen is we can actually be kind of annoying and make people not like us because we're afraid, or we're trying to fix the fact that they don't like us. That creates a really dangerous loop. "I'm afraid someone doesn't like me. Let me apologize." Since I'm apologizing too much and inappropriately, I annoy them, and then they end up not liking me. Right? It's this weird self-fulfilling prophecy or vicious cycle. And so, it's our solution to the anxiety that actually causes our suffering, makes our life a little bit more restricted, and actually creates problems.
And the last really, really sad and unfortunate thing about anxiety is that sometimes, if we give into it, other people can take advantage of our insecurity. So, if you are super anxious, sometimes you can behave a little bit like a doormat, right? You're apologizing all the time. And sometimes you're going to run across people who never want to admit that they did anything wrong, and so they're more than happy to have someone around who is always apologizing for things that aren't their fault. Makes it a super convenient bearing. So, it can be really dangerous because sometimes our anxiety results in people taking advantage of us.
And so, how do we deal with this, right? So, sure, we've got this issue of, okay, anxiety is our mind's predictive capability focusing on particular problems in the future based on our on a sense of uncertainty and insecurity, usually in ourselves. So, what do we do about that, right? So, I'm insecure in myself, and I'm predicting all these problems, and I'm a smart person, so I make a lot of predictions, and then I try to control that uncertainty by avoiding parties or restricting what I do. So, how do we break out of this? What do we do about it?
The first thing to understand is that anxiety is literally the mind thinking in the future. If we can bring the mind to the present, it's literally impossible to be anxious. I know it sounds completely crazy, but if you look at the experience of anxiety, your mind is thinking about the future. And so, anytime you're thinking about the present or focused in the present, you can't be anxious. Good examples of this are like, let's say you take a bath or like a nice hot shower, and if you're immersed in the experience of taking the shower or the bath, you won't be thinking about other things, and you can't experience anxiety.
And we deal with anxiety in all kinds of ways by bringing our mind to the present. Some of these can actually be harmful, but we can see this in things like games or watching videos or watching TV shows or movies, or even substances. When we play video games, for example, our mind stops thinking in the future and starts focusing on the game, and then what happens to our anxiety? It melts away. If we get engrossed in a TV show or something like that, then once again, we're not thinking in the future, and we're not thinking about ourselves, we're thinking about something else, and so the anxiety falls away. Sometimes people will use substances like marijuana or alcohol, and those certainly help with anxiety as well. And how do they help with it? They sort of keep our mind, it's a biological substance that helps our mind focus a little bit more in the present. Right? And so, I'm not advising that these things are actually good. In fact, I think all three of these are poor choices to deal with anxiety. But let's try to map out a full spectrum of how we do deal with anxiety, and then we can sort of start to shift gears a little bit towards healthier methods of coping with anxiety.
So, the key thing still remains that anxiety literally cannot exist if you're not thinking about the future. And a good example of this is sometimes people will have, you know, anxiety about, let's say, going to a party or failing a test. And if you really look at people's experience, once they sit down and they start to study, right, once you get engrossed in the act of studying, then the anxiety sort of melts away. Once you actually show up to the party and you stop kind of thinking about it and you start engaging with people, for those of you that are a little bit lucky and can focus in those experiences, then the anxiety disappears, right? We can also use like stage anxiety or performance anxiety is a good example that you're really, really worried when you go up on stage, but once you actually get up on stage, hopefully you start to feel way better. Another great example of that is jumping into a cold swimming pool, where before you jump into the water, "Oh my god, oh my god, it's gonna be so cold, it's gonna be so cold, it's gonna be so cold." It's paralyzing you. But once you actually jump into the water, generally speaking, the anxiety was far more paralytic than the reality of jumping into the water. And so, if we can sort of engage in the activity, then the anxiety will actually start to melt away.
So, the second thing to kind of think about. So, just to summarize, you know, if we can bring our mind to the present, if we can actually go ahead and jump in the water, if we can engage in an activity, if we can move away from the future, if we can train our mind to focus in the present, then anxiety literally cannot exist. Staggering.
Okay, the next thing to think about is that remember, anxiety is rooted in some kind of insecurity, right? So, if we think about the cases in which we're not anxious. You may not be anxious hanging out with your dog. Well, why is that? It's because you know you have confidence that your dog likes you as a person. If you think about even like playing a competitive video game, why aren't you anxious when you go into the game? It's because you have confidence in your skill in the video game, even that you may win or you may lose, but you're kind of confident with your ability to face that uncertainty. It's kind of weird, right? Because in a game, you don't really know whether you're going to win, you don't know whether you're going to lose, but you have faith in yourself or your skill in the game, and so therefore you can face that uncertainty.
So, the second big way to focus on or fix anxiety is not just to kind of bring the mind to the present, but it's to focus on the insecurity itself. And what do I mean by that? It's to develop confidence. So, let's think about what confidence really means. So, confidence is literally believing that you have the capacity to deal with the unknown. And let's kind of think about that for a second, right? Because if we think about how anxiety functions normally, what we do is there's uncertainty in the future, and so what we try to do is we try to control that uncertainty, right? We don't face the uncertainty, we try to remove the uncertainty. And so, every time that you remove the uncertainty, you lose the chance to build confidence because confidence comes from when you face something and overcome the challenge, not taking the challenge away.
And so, a lot of our solutions to our anxiety about controlling our future actually prevent us from developing the confidence that we need to really overcome anxiety. And I know this sounds absolutely crazy, but when we start to control certain circumstances of our life, we actually make our anxiety worse because we decrease our confidence because we're never actually facing anything. We just avoid playing the game entirely. And so, the other big solution really is to sort of learn how to develop some confidence, and we can go into more detail with that down the road, but essentially resolve that personal insecurity that you have. And then as you resolve that personal insecurity, you're able to face uncertainty without needing to control it. And when you don't need to control your life, then your life becomes less restrictive, and you become more free.
So, to summarize, anxiety is essentially the future-focused mind that revolves around a particular insecurity. And the smarter you are, the more problems you begin to see out in the future. And generally speaking, what people do with anxiety is they try to distract themselves, or they try to control their future, they try to remove uncertainty from the equation. And so, generally speaking, what we want to do is be really, really careful because a lot of our solutions for anxiety actually make our anxiety worse. And what we want to wind up doing instead is actually learn how to focus our mind in the present. Right? So, if we can bring our mind to the task at hand, then anxiety literally can't exist because anxiety, by definition, is us thinking about the future. So, you can unplug into anxiety entirely by focusing on the present.
The second thing that you can do is develop confidence in relation to your insecurities. And what that helps us do is the more confident we become, the more that we can face the uncertainty of anxiety. Because remember, anxiety is "if, then" statements. "If this happens, then what am I going to do?" "If this happens, then what am I going to do?" "This happens, and what am I going to do?" And if you become confident yourself, you're like, "Okay, if that happens, I'll handle it. If this happens, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. And if I offend someone and they don't like me, well, then they don't like me. And if I did something wrong, I'll apologize. And if I didn't, then no big deal. Not everyone has to like me." Terrifying thoughts for someone with anxiety. But our goal here is to try to help you guys learn a little bit more about anxiety and a little bit more about how to develop these solutions so that you can ultimately conquer it and it doesn't have to plague you all the time.
So, I hope that was helpful. Thanks for listening, and adios from Dr. K.