Hidden Brain - A Better Way to Worry

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion, which is why most of us try to avoid it.  But psychologist Tracy Dennis-Tiwary says our anxiety is also trying to tell us something. This week, we explore how we can interpret those messages and manage the intense discomfort these feelings can generate. Did you catch our recent episode about how to break free from either-or thinking? You can find it  here.  And if you like our work, please consider a financial contribution to help us make many more episodes like this one. 

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. When you build a home or design a building, there are many alarms you might want to install. We have devices that beep and blare when something is wrong. They notify us about problems. They alert us to threats. In the long course of evolution, nature has built similar alarms into us.

Warnings go off inside our heads when we are about to do something that can be dangerous. I part 3 2 1! Our internal alarm systems can also be activated by situations that are not dangerous, but are still stressful, like performing at a piano recital, or public speaking, or going to a party where we don't know anyone. Quarantine was good, though. No. Great. But recently, I have been going to dinner again. Did I just say I've been going to dinner again? Should I give them more details or should I die?

The paradox, of course, is that the alarms meant to help us can also sometimes destabilize us, especially when they become deafening. This week on Hidden Brain, learning to listen differently to the alarms inside your head. Life is full of adversity, challenge, and uncertainty. Think back to the last time you had a child come to you in tears or a friend who had just received a difficult medical diagnosis. Think back to the last time you were worried about something. So worried, you could barely think straight. At City University of New York Hunter College, psychologist and neuroscientist Tracy Dennis Tawari studies these voices of alarm inside our heads and how to deal

with them. Tracy Dennis Tawari, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you, Shankar, it's great to be with you. Tracy, some years ago you found yourself teaching your son how to ride a bicycle. I understand you were in upstate New York. Can you describe what the day was like and your hopes when you set out? Right, so that's my son, Covey, and he was about nine years old at the time. And we're raising our kids in Manhattan, and so, you know, he's a city kid, and we had not gotten around to teaching him how to ride a bike. Now, we were upstate, and so I just thought, okay, now is the time. And I said, okay, Covey, let's go out and start learning. And he seemed game for it.

Our friend's Raj and Laura had lent us an old Gremlin BMX. So we had this big old clunky bike. I took him to a gravelly hill. And I just started trying to teach him. And he was doing great. He was riding. And he was really doing it. But he started to say, you know, I'm afraid,

I'm going to fall and he really wanted to throw in the towel. So he's staying upright on the bike, but he's also very nervous and unbeknownst to you, your phone happens to be recording while you're giving him a pep talk about his ability to ride this bike. Now it was a windy day, but I want to hear some of the exchange that you had with your son, and I think it's fair to say that you were frustrated. Alright, let's go up, Kubby. You know what? I'm going to start giving up. I'm doing my best to be supportive and you're nothing but a grouch.

I'm enjoying you. No, Kubby, you're doing great. You're just complaining every second of the way. I love you, Charlie. You're doing great. You're just complaining every second of the way. You're doing amazing. Why are you so negative about it? You're in on go. Bring it up. That's cool. You are not scared.

There's nothing to be scared about. You did it perfectly. You haven't fallen once. I should knock you down. I think you're falling. Get over it, Covey. Honestly, there's nothing. You're just talking to yourself.

You're being scared. You're right. And I don't know why. You're crushing it. You're so good. You're so good at it. And you're just talking yourself into this crazy, like I'm scared. You're not. You're doing awesome. You haven't even fallen. You haven't even gotten the silver rose. Come on. I think you have lots of love here. You've got to get your head together, man. So at one point, Tracy, he says, I'm scared and you say you are not scared. I want you to put yourself back in your shoes that day. Now, I know you may have revised how you were thinking after you heard this clip, but I want you to put yourself back in your shoes that day in that moment.

Paint me a picture of how you were trying to help your child deal with his fears. Oh, yes, and that was very painful to listen to. When he was working on riding the bike, it was so puzzling when in the face of success, he kept on expressing fear and anxiety and wasn't able to track his gains he was making. And the more fear and anxiety he expressed, the more anxious I was becoming. And I think I felt like this was a sign that, oh gosh, is he going to have a hard time persisting through other challenges or things that make him scared? And so I think essentially, I was anxious that his anxiety, learning to ride a bike, was going to reflect or play into some larger vulnerability in his life. So like any parent, I felt concerned for his well-being and I think that was driving my frustration and my strong reaction to him.

So as we were researching this episode, we came by the work of the author Julie Liddcott Haymes. She's a former dean at Stanford University and one of her best-selling books is titled How to Raise an Adult, a Break Free of the Overparenting Trap, and Prepare Your Kid for Success. Here's something she wants said. If the world is less safe, which it really is not statistically, but even if it was, don't we need our kids to be stronger and more capable to face what awaits them outside of our homes? If things are less safe out there, we need to be raising warriors, not fragile, weak pieces of veal, who will

be slaughtered by what the world brings to them. So Tracy, I heard you trying to do this for your son. He was telling you that he was scared and you were telling him be a warrior. That's exactly right. And those, you know, her words really resonate, I think, with, you know, me thinking back to how I was feeling in that moment, I think it resonates with many of us parents who see that the world is very different in many ways from the world we grew up in, and we're deeply concerned that we can help launch our children into this new world in a way that sets them up for success and happiness and well-being. So, this is one way in which our culture recommends dealing with the alarms that go off inside our heads.

We say, you know, be brave, ignore the alarms, full speed ahead. But there's also another way, and you've come by this yourself in your work as a college professor. I understand Tracy starting a few years ago, you noticed a change in your students in terms of how they were handling challenging situations. Can you talk to me about that? I've been a professor for moving up on 20 years now, and really I think it was just maybe over the past five, six, seven years. There seemed to be quite a shift in how students were reacting to challenges.

And especially with our graduate students, and especially in the field of clinical psychology, that is, people who are becoming our future therapists and clinical researchers, when I was getting my degree, there was this idea that you throw yourself into these challenging situations, whether it's science or therapy. And you have to push through, and you have to show that there's a level of grit and determination that you can build on and sort of, you know, slowly become a professional. And what I noticed in this era of students is there was less belief in their ability to

cope with some of these challenges that were being thrown their way. I think you see this trend really being crystallized in the idea of safe spaces. One way that students have tried to create a more comfortable environment for themselves is to really argue that, well, you know, if there is an offensive opinion, if there is an upsetting content, if, you know, we see this on campus is all over the country that there are speakers who might come to campus and have some, you know, for some really offensive opinions or there's a very vigorous debate that a speaker or a number of speakers might be taking part in. I see students much less prepared or interested or motivated to actually go and take part in these debates

in these difficult conversations and these uncomfortable experiences and emotions and instead really ask to be shielded and protected from them. At one point, Tracy, I understand that a professor at your university was alleged to have engaged in inappropriate behavior and he eventually resigned. Can you tell me what happened and the effect it had on students? It was a very painful experience for our community and part of the pain of that experience was that there was awareness and there was not enough advocacy and protection of the students.

And one thing that I was, as we were processing this as a community and really tried to engage in those conversations, one thing that I noticed that surprised me in some ways is that there were direct requests from some students to not give them information without first sort of filtering it for them. from some students to not give them information without first sort of filtering it for them. For example, there was an article that was published,

and some students felt very let down and unsupported because we faculty did not tell them that this article was coming out or helped them process it before they were able to read it themselves. And this really struck me because it occurred to me that what students were asking for was a sort of way of processing emotions so that they didn't have to actually process it out of the social support net. It seemed to me that the emotions they might experience

in reading this article and being exposed to uncomfortable and painful information, that they felt that those emotions might do them harm. So the students were looking essentially for a trigger warning? In a way, it was a trigger warning. And of course, trigger warnings began as a way to really help folks who were struggling

with post-traumatic stress disorder, who had a trauma in their past. And when they were exposed to trauma-related information, the thought was, well, let's give them an opportunity to prepare and avoid the information, if necessary. But even as our students were asking for safe spaces and trigger warnings, Tracy had one eye on the scientific research on the effects of these accommodations. The data are still coming in, but in one study from 2021, people were brought in and they were asked to actually read about a scenario

that may have been challenging, emotionally challenging, or upsetting for some people. And half of that group, they gave a trigger warning about it that you might be reading about something that will upset you and the other half did not receive that warning. What you found in this study was that people who received the trigger warning actually showed higher levels of anxiety, especially if they held this belief

that emotions can do them harm. I mean, doesn't that raise questions about the efficacy of trigger warnings? It certainly raises questions. And there's a very strong possibility that by giving trigger warnings, the message we're actually sending to people is that there's something upsetting coming up. We don't think you can necessarily handle it. And if you feel difficult emotions, they might do you harm. So that the very fact of trigger warnings

is creating this narrative, this story around difficult emotions. That most emotion science and clinical science will actually say is counterproductive. American culture, and increasingly cultures around the world are torn between two competing narratives. One says, if you're frightened about something, the way to get your fears under control is to eliminate the thing that's frightening you.

The other narrative says, dismiss your anxiety. If you feel anxious, tell yourself, I'm not anxious. Get over it. When we come back, Tracy explores the science of how we should deal with the alarms inside our head. You're listening to Hidden Brain,

I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Tracey Dennis Tawari is a psychologist and neuroscientist at CUNY Hunter College. Like many other observers, Tracey has noticed two schools of thought when it comes to dealing with our fears. One says, let's keep people safe. The anxieties people have pointed to the threats they are confronting.

If we want to reduce the anxieties, we should reduce the threats. The other school of thought says, the problem is not with the world. The problem is with you. Your alarms are too sensitive. You should ignore the alarms. Now there's no question that many people suffer from anxiety related mental disorders, but Tracy's focus was less on clinical conditions and more on the way we think about anxiety as a culture.

So you started to do a lot of thinking and research about these two models and you came to an important insight about whether anxiety was a character flaw as one school of thought would have you believe, or it was an unbearable trauma as another school of thought would have you believe. What was your insight Tracy about the nature of anxiety? Emotions are fundamentally functional. They have adaptive functions. And we actually, this is not a new idea. It so happens that a third of Darwin's theory of evolution has actually devoted to emotions. It's the third book in his trilogy is called the expression of emotion in man and animals. So think about the double-edged sword of both positive and negative emotions.

So, when you apply this functional model to the study of anxiety, how did it change the meaning of anxiety for you? It changed it radically because I'd fallen into this language trap that I think many of us have, which is that when I say, oh, I have anxiety or this person has anxiety, I'm actually communicating that someone has an anxiety disorder. So I'm completely conflating the emotion of anxiety with a disorder. And this was really the moment of my big insight because the emotion of anxiety is not a disorder. Anxiety is an emotion and it can very long a spectrum from butterflies in our stomach to strong feelings of panic.

An anxiety disorder is only diagnosed when our ways of coping with anxiety over time are causing functional impairment. So that the actions we're taking to handle that anxiety are causing more harm, causing us to have problems at work, have problems in our relationships, our affecting our health choices. Maybe, maybe you're self-medicating with drugs, you're doing a series of things to cope with anxiety. That's really causing more harm and is getting in the way. That's when we're diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. So when we say we have a crisis of anxiety in our society right now,

what we really mean is that we have a crisis in the ways that we're coping with anxiety. Tracy came by some research that asked, what happens if you stop thinking about anxiety exclusively as a disorder and start thinking of it as an emotion to be worked with? And this is the work of Ellie Liebowitz and his colleagues at the Yale Child Study Center. It's this idea that when we have a child in our family who's anxious, there is a strong tendency, I think upwards of 97% of the time, we will try to accommodate that anxiety.

And that means we want to reassure that child. We want to help them avoid the anxiety provoking situations because of course we parents, except apparently when we're teaching a kid to ride a bike, for me, we parents, you know, we just want our kids to feel better, we want to comfort them, we want to reassure them. But this accommodation when it comes to anxiety has a price tag.

Instead of making kids less anxious, the accommodations seem to make the children more anxious. So the researchers tried something new. And so, LEBowitz and colleagues created a new intervention called space, support of parenting for anxious children. And they did something really elegant. They had a group of kids with anxiety disorders, diagnosed. And to half of that group, they gave them gold standard cognitive behavioral therapy,

which is one of the best therapeutic approaches for anxiety disorders. To the other half of the group, they gave the kids no therapy. And instead, they taught parents to stop over accommodating their children's anxiety and to start helping their children work through anxiety. What does that mean? A accommodation for a child who's socially anxious and doesn't want to go to school anymore, doesn't want to sleep alone at night, you know, you say, ah, you know, the school makes them so upset, let's let them stay home today.

And oh, you know, they're scared of the dark. Let's let them sleep in the parents bed tonight. And this accommodation is repeated over time. And so what parents in the space intervention we're taught to do was to stop the accommodation and instead slowly and steadily help their kids to engage with these anxiety-provoking situations and slowly work through them. So that slowly, the child is helped to get back to school. Slowly the child is helped and supported to sleep in their own bed alone at night. And at the end of this study, when you compared the children's anxiety severity,

if you compare the group that the children received CBT directly versus the group of kids who receive no therapy, but their parents received the space intervention, those kids showed exactly the same level of gain in terms of reduced anxiety symptoms. The parents felt less stress, and the parents did indeed show less over accommodation of childhood anxiety. Our stock responses when we hear a blaring alarm is to do one of two things, turn it off or run in the opposite direction. Tracy said, instead of trying to suppress it or flee from it, what happens if you engage

with your alarms with curiosity? What happens if you tell your anxiety? I see you are trying to tell me something important. I really want to hear you out. Help me understand you. In other words, Tracy asked what happens if you treat anxiety like a friend. happens if you treat anxiety like a friend. That's right. So anxiety is apprehension about the uncertain future. Now it feels like fear and we often equate the two. But while fear is about really certain knowledge that there's a present threat you're facing, anxiety in contrast has nothing to do with the present. What it does is it makes us into mental time travelers into the future where something bad could happen,

but something good could also happen. It's still possible. So I might have anxiety, maybe I'm out camping, and I know that there are bears that have been cited in this part of the wilderness. And so anxiety would actually give me the information that there could be danger, but also safety. And then it primes me with that information, it primes me to prepare and to do something about that potential danger and to optimize the chances

that I can be safe from that bear. And that I don't wander into a cave where there's a bear with her cups. You know, I'm reminded of that adage from former Intel CEO Andy Grove. He says, in business, only the paranoid survive. And to some extent, it's the same idea, isn't it, which is that anxieties keep you focused on on both threats, but also on possibilities, and turning off your anxiety is in some ways like dismantling your smoke alarms because they feel upsetting to you.

That's right. Anxiety actually has to feel bad to do its job because it has to make a sit-up and pay attention. And the smoke alarm analogy you bring up, if we hear a smoke alarm go off in our house, it really wouldn't be wise to put earplugs in, or to just ignore the signal and move to another part of the house. What we do when we hear a smoke alarm

is we make sure there's not fire. We might even check the batteries to make sure that's not off, but we don't ignore it. An anxiety is an emotion that wants to be heated, that wants to be honored. It's telling us that there's this future uncertainty that we're facing, and I'm here to help you navigate it. I'm going to prepare you with information about what's coming, and to do everything you possibly can to make sure that those outcomes you hope for

become your reality. Tracy was reminded how anxiety could be her friend when she was pregnant with her first child, her son, Kavi. I went in for the mid-pregnancy ultrasound, and we found out that my son was going to be born with a congenital heart condition, called tetrology of flow.

And this condition requires open heart surgery to repair it. And with this disease, you can have genetic abnormalities that go along with it. You have very disparate kinds of outcomes. I mean, children do survive this, but sometimes it can be very risky. And of course, anytime you're doing open heart surgery on an infant, it's very frightening. So we found this out and I just crawled into bed. I felt such anguish, anxiety and you know, and a little despair was had a good cry, I got on to PubMed, and I learned within the space of a few hours as much as I could about this disease. I then followed that with more information gathering.

My husband and I called up every doctor we knew. A couple of them happened to be cardiac specialists, and they helped us figure out that, okay, you need to get to this surgeon and this practice. So what I started to realize is I was information gathering and I was already preparing. We were really receiving a blessing that we found out about this disease before my son was born so that we could have things set up as well as possible to get him the best care we could. And in some ways, you now credit your anxiety with helping get you and

coming in the family through the surgery and its aftermath? Oh, 100%. I mean, we needed to make sure at every stage that we had the proper care set up, that we were monitoring once he was born, he was going to go into heart failure, that was guaranteed, and he did like kind of like clockwork actually about a month in. He then had failure to thrive. He wasn't strong enough to be able to breastfeed or take a bottle. And so we had to give him food through a tube that was put down his nose. It was very challenging time.

But it was my anxiety that kept me really focused on this future, where I knew that if we did everything we could, that we had a very strong possibility that he would be just fine. So, this is the same kid who a few years later you were telling you need to be a warrior and stop being afraid. Well, our cardiologist did tell us that after the surgery that we should never treat him like a sick child, so there you go, I took it to heart. So I understand that researchers have found empirical evidence of the same phenomenon

among adult patients with heart failure. What is the role of anxiety here, Tracy? It was mother and colleagues who, you know, as doctors and medical professionals, they were very interested in how to really promote positive health outcomes for people who were in line to receive a heart transplant. And so common sense suggests that if a patient has higher anxiety or depression, their health outcomes might be worse and they might not respond as well to the heart transplant. But they found something very interesting. Patients who had higher levels of anxiety and depressed mood actually had better health outcomes and were more likely to receive

a transplant than patients who had lower levels of those emotions. And what they really interpreted this as reflecting was that particularly those patients with higher levels of anxiety, they adhered to treatment recommendations more. They saw their doctor more regularly as they were waiting for the heart transplant. They were a little more anxious and persistent in taking care of themselves and following all the recommendations of their doctors. And in some ways it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I'm anxious about something.

My doctor says you need to do ABC and D to make sure this bad outcome doesn't happen. And it's because I'm anxious that I listen super carefully when my doctor tells me to do those things and I actually follow up and do them. If I didn't have the anxiety, presumably I might not have the motivation, the executive control to actually do those things that my doctor is recommending. That's right. But when we talk about anxiety, the first thing we think is, oh, we better sue that. We better immediately make it go away. But when we listen to anxiety as information, and we can use it to say, focus more, persist more, you know, know that this is important. Instead of avoiding what makes us uncomfortable, you can see immediately how anxiety is going to be a help me in these kinds

of arenas. There's something of a paradox here, Tracy, the feeling that drives many of us to want to flee from anxiety, which is the excruciating discomfort we feel when we're anxious. I think what I'm hearing you say is that it's this discomfort that is also the feature of anxiety that prompts us to reap its benefits. That's right, and that's why anxiety has to be uncomfortable. Not only do we have to sit up and pay attention to it, but there's what's called a negative reinforcement cycle in anxiety, too. So when we tune into anxiety, it's priming us to prepare, to focus, and once we're on the right track, once we're in the conversation,

or maybe we've done a little preparation ahead of time, anxiety naturally diminishes. And that is a very reinforcing experience. So the discomfort of anxiety it rises, and then when we're doing the right things to take actions based on the information anxiety is giving us, then anxiety naturally diminishes. And that tells us that when we take action and response to our anxiety, we feel better and we're going to keep doing and taking those actions. It's almost like a compass isn't it? It's actually giving you a sense of direction to say, you're off course or you are, you're on course. I love that because we're only anxious when we care. We're not anxious about things that don't matter to us.

So anxiety is a wonderful compass for pointing us to things that matter to us, that have implications for our lives and the lives of our loved ones. It tells us that it's also something in the future that we believe we can still work towards. So anxiety from that perspective is not only important information, it's essential and crucial information. All of us have voices of alarm inside our heads, but not all of us have learned how to properly listen to those voices. That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

When a smoke alarm goes off in your kitchen, the intensity of the alarm can be upsetting. In fact, the intensity of the alarm is designed to be upsetting. It's trying to make you stop whatever else you're doing and investigate if there is fire behind the smoke. whatever else you're doing and investigate if there is fire behind the smoke. At City University of New York Hunter College, Tracy Dennis Tawari has found that if we are to reap the benefits of our anxieties, we need to find ways to manage the intense discomfort they generate. Tracy, you've written that anxiety wants to be our friend. It wants to be recognized and acknowledged and listened to and cherished and heated. It feels terrible because it's trying to tell us something important that we draw

than out here as a good friend often does. You know, we talked earlier about how one school of thought in our culture says you should ignore anxieties and another says you should eliminate threats from your life that make you anxious. In important ways, the emerging scientific picture that you're painting would suggest that both schools of thought are wrong in important ways. Can you elaborate on that, Tracy? As usual, any black and white propositions are not quite right. And I think that's especially the case when it comes to anxiety,

because this whole, you have to be a warrior, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps approach, ignores the fact that before we can do that, we have to listen to anxiety, we have to tune in and leverage it. And so really the metaphor here is that anxiety and other difficult emotions are like waves. And when you have a wave, it's pushing us forward, but you can drown in a wave. So you have to learn to swim. You have to build skills and the ability to work with these emotions, with these feelings. And so when we talk about anxiety as dangerous, or when we put it the emotion of anxiety in the category of disease, we now are primed to avoid and eradicate those feelings.

But we know that anxiety and negative and difficult emotions only are amplified when we avoid it, or we steamroll over them. So I love what you said a second ago, which is that we need to learn to listen to anxiety as a source of information. But of course there are ways of doing that. And there's a way of thinking about this kind of response as a skill that is to be learned. And I want to try and look at some of the different elements

of this skill. You recently had the opportunity to listen to your own anxiety after having an argument with your daughter and then waking up in the middle of the night, replaying the argument in your mind. Tell me what happened in the middle of the night to you, Tracy. This was one of those early morning worry wake-up calls that I think all of us have experienced. It's usually around 4 a.m. for me. And I woke up with just a yucky feeling.

And when you apply this idea that anxiety is actually information, it primes you to do what I actually tried to do in the moment. I took a breath. I had these free-floating thoughts and worries. And I just waited for a moment. I waited for something to rise to the surface. And what I found when I took that breath and gave anxiety a moment is that this disagreement,

this fight really that I had with my daughter the night before was on my mind. And she'd been upset about something and did something I really wasn't happy about. And I'd yelled at her, you know, and it was bothering me. So when you listen to anxiety, the great thing about this information is that it can prime you to take action. And so I decided right there, as I'm sort of half a week, that I was going to say two or three things that I felt would really address the mistakes I'd made the night before.

And once I made this plan, even though I was half asleep, I noticed that my anxiety immediately started going down. I started to relax. It was a signal to me that I was on the right track that this is the action that I need to take. And yeah, this was the worry that woke me up. And in some ways, your experience is demonstrating, I think, the importance of making a plan when we're dealing with anxiety, not just simply thinking about it, worrying about it, but actually coming up with concrete, positive things that we can do. That's right, and that's really how we leverage anxiety, because if anxiety is information and preparation, we need to then put that preparation into action.

and preparation, we need to then put that preparation into action. Once you've either taken an action or maybe figured out there's not that much action you can take, we can in those moments do something that can allow us to be back in the present moment, whether that's, you know, taking some deep breaths, you know, try to relax a little bit, or taking a walk, speaking with a therapist, exercising. These are all things that in this cycle of anxiety, in this learning how to ride the wave of anxiety, these are skills that we can build, even when we're struggling with very strong or debilitating anxiety. Another thing that can help us listen to anxiety without allowing it to destabilize us, in other words, too, as you're in your metaphor to sort of ride the wave or swim the wave

as opposed to being drowned by the wave, is social support. Can you talk about this idea that we can help others listen to their alarms and others can help us listen to our alarms if we are giving and receiving social support? It may surprise people to find that anxiety and our social instincts are actually very closely bound. One way that anxiety is linked up with social connection is that when we're anxious, it actually increases levels of oxytocin. In our bodies, an oxytocin is the social bonding hormone, which primes us to seek out social connection.

And so our brains actually evolve to outsource emotional challenge to draw on the tribe on our social networks to actually cope with anxiety and stress and all these things. And we do better when we're in social groups. And so in some ways, anxiety with this sort of beautiful fractal symmetry almost contains some of its own solutions within itself.

There was a study out of the University of Wisconsin some years ago, I believe, where volunteers were told they were about to receive electrical shocks as they were put into a loud claustrophobic MRI machine. But some of the volunteers were allowed to hold the hands of their loved ones and others were not. Tell me about that study and what it found, Tracy. They have three conditions where people were assigned to either be alone during this difficult and anxiety-provoking task to hold the hand of a stranger or to hold the hand of a loved one. And then what they did because they were already in the MRI machine is they imaged the activity of the anxiety-related circuits in the brain. These areas of the brain that

are activated when we're trying to cope with this challenge in monitor threats. And folks who were alone, that circuit in the brain was working very hard. It was kind of lighting up when you looked at the FMRI readout. And then you had the people who were holding the hand of a stranger. And what you saw is that this circuit in the brain seemed to be somewhat soothed. It was actually less active, a little more efficient. And then, of course, what you saw in the group that was allowed to hold the hand of a loved one is that the anxious brain, so to speak, the circuit that should have been highly activated was much calmer, was well-regulated, and was really operating very efficiently. And I think they also found in this study that the closer your relationship or the more

satisfying your relationship, the stronger this effect was of holding the hand of a loved one. I understand that in your own life, your family experienced a crisis that called upon you to exercise what you had learned about the science of anxiety. Your husband's career faced a sudden challenge some time ago. Tell me about that, what happened to him, and how you responded Tracy. My husband is a Broadway producer, as well as across other platforms. And he had spent the past decade launching with his whole team, bringing to Broadway and Lana's Morissette's Jagged Little Pill. And this was really this huge achievement. It was highly anticipated and wonderfully received musical.

And about four months later, the pandemic happened. And so this decade of work, you know, this passion project was now closed down. And of course, it was very much out of our control, as we all experienced during the pandemic, these kinds of changes. And as he was struggling, I found that I myself was struggling really a lot with handling my own anxiety about what the future held for his career for our family, but also struggling with how to help him work through this very real uncertainty and anxiety. One thing that I did is I tried to just be a listening ear to what he was going through

and to suspend judgment, really. As a psychologist, maybe just as my personality, I'm a problem solver. I like to go in, I like to fix it. And you know that's also a great anxiety management tool. So, but here I am, and I know that there's not really anything we can do right now. This is, there's some things that are uncontrollable, and right now what he needed to do was process what he was going through before he could take any action. And so really my task was to suspend judgment, suspend this impulse to solve problems.

And when we got through those early stages of worry and loss and all those feelings, he ended up actually going in a different professional direction that has been immensely beneficial and satisfying to him. But it's also the case, I think, you know, your response to him was different than your response to your son. And I'm trying to understand how and why that happened. And I think what I'm hearing in some ways is that, you know, when your son was expressing

these concerns, in some ways you were catastrophizing about how, you know, his concerns about riding a bike might affect him later as an adult, and you were, you were spiraling. And instead of simply listening to your anxiety and saying, let me take in this information and see what to do with it, you were trying to get rid of the anxiety as quickly as possible by telling him that he shouldn't be afraid. And with your husband, it sounds like you were better able to say, yes, it's uncomfortable, yes, this is anxiety provoking. Yes, I'm a problem solver and this is a problem I cannot solve.

But you were patient enough to sit with the discomfort. And surprisingly, this was actually what your husband needed. I think it's just what you say. My anxiety for my son was so great, but it was prefaced on this idea that he was fragile in some way, that I couldn't control. And I think I had a level of belief in faith that my husband had what it took to go through this, that I think allowed me to do better as a partner to my husband in that moment than I did for my son.

So Tracy, I can imagine that there are people who have anxiety disorders, clinically diagnosed anxiety disorders, who would say, hang on a second, what I have is a medical, biological, psychiatric problem, and that's not going to get fixed by merely following Tracy's advice to listen to anxiety as information. What would you say to these people? I really honor that perspective because what we do know about anxiety is that there are many, many causes of anxiety disorders. There are many biological and medical causes that can make our struggles with anxiety much, much worse. And these vary from

nutrition, lifestyle choices, and even the over-prescription of medications, including benzodiazepines, which over time, we know can actually increase baseline levels of anxiety, unfortunately. So I acknowledge that there are many, many determinants and factors of anxiety disorders. At the same time, by being curious and open to anxiety, understanding that it's information to listen to

and to leverage and then to gain skills and letting go, that stance can actually help us tune into when there might be these biological and lifestyle factors that are leading to debilitating anxiety. It can help us benefit more from therapies when we do receive them. And I think it can help us also have more hope and believe that anxiety and feeling anxiety it doesn't indicate that we're broken or that we have a malfunction or failure.

But rather that it's really part of this messy work of being human, and we can gain skills and we can find solutions. So I think this stands, if taken in the spirit that I hope it's received, it can really be empowering to people, even who are suffering from debilitating anxiety. I understand that you have a story of how you once initially pursue this tough love warrior model that you pursued with your son.

You also pursued it with your daughter, Nandini, before recalibrating. Can you tell me how you initially responded to her fear of insects and how that changed over time, Tracy? So, this was after the bike riding incident. You think I would have learned, but. So, so this was, I think within that first year of the pandemic, she was about seven or eight at the time. And my daughter, Nandini, was a girl who loved being out in nature, she had taken part in these eco science camps

where she just had bugs crawling over her all the time. And now here we are in the pandemic and all of a sudden, she's expressing a lot of concerns and anxieties about insects and particular flies and ladybugs were her, were her bugaboo's. And I knew that around ages eight and nine, a lot of kids actually start to develop new fears. And so I even had this framework, okay, this is expected.

But one day day we were in the bathroom, and I think she was brushing her teeth, and there was a fly, a big fly that got stuck in the bathroom. And she screamed at the top of her lungs. And so I in my mind decided, okay, now's the time to expose her to this fear of bugs, and we'll work through it. And I'm going to be a great parent. So I closed the door and locked it. She's banging on the door and I'm sort of trying to talk to her and say no we need to you know let's catch the fly and put it outside and she wasn't in a sort of low or moderate state of anxiety. She was really panicking and she and she'll tell me this now to this day that she actually thinks that was the moment

that she became really scared of bugs because Mama locked her in the bathroom with a fly. No, luckily it's not the end of the story. So, and I acknowledged that this was not the most productive way to work through her anxiety. And so what I started doing, and really again, and sort of collaboration with her was talk about her anxieties, her, you know, what was it about? Insects, you know, I think I should have gotten a little more Freudian and thought, huh, we're in the middle of a pandemic where there's this virus, which we think of as a bug, and it's put the entire world off-kilter, and she's developed a fear of bugs. But anyway, I really, as I course corrected, tried to talk with her more and make a plan to say,

listen, we're going to be around bugs. They're inescapable. How can we get you gradually to be more comfortable with bugs? And so, you know, we'd spend a little time in that area where we saw some bugs. We talked about strategies she could use to calm herself when she felt anxious about those bugs. And we sort of took this gradual exposure approach.

And then just this past summer, her heart was set on attending a camp with some of her friends up in Maine. Now, this would be in the middle of the woods, on a lake in Maine, which equals bugs, many, many bugs. But now she had this real passion and motivation to try to figure this out. And so we talked about, okay,

there are going to be bugs there. What kinds of bugs do you think you'll see? How do you think you might feel? If you feel anxious, how do you want to work with that anxiety? How can you cope with it? And we sort of made this plan, but then she went and she wasn't she was feeling nervous. When she got there, she wanted to be part of the fun. And she soon realized that if she was too afraid to get into the lake because the bugs that

might be there, she would be missing out on getting badges and swimming and being with her friends. And so she literally just started working on it very actively and pretty soon. She was the one who was first in the lake. And when we picked her up a few weeks later, she said, want to swim in a pool. Pools are boring lakes. I'm a lake swimming girl. Tracy Dennis Tawari is a psychologist and neuroscientist at CUNY Hunter College. She's the author of Future Tense, why anxiety is good for you, even though it feels bad. Tracy, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much, Shankar. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Brigitte McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quarelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For today's UnSunk Hero, we turn the mic over to you, our listeners. This segment is brought to you by OnStar. OnStar advisors are now with you everywhere, on the app, in your car, and at home. Today's story comes from Alexandra Middlewood.

She's a professor of political science at Wichita State University. During the fall 2021 semester, Alexandra began hybrid teaching, with some of her students in masks in front of her, others on Zoom. So, wearing a mask for a 75-minute lecture, while wearing a microphone, while trying to make sure that my students who are on Zoom are engaged, my students who are in the classroom are engaged, while also trying to, you know, navigate PowerPoint

and my own lecture notes and writing key concepts on the board, I don't know how I'm going to do this all semester. I don't know how I'm going to try to navigate teaching to two classrooms essentially. One Monday morning, three weeks into the semester, Alexandra was feeling especially overwhelmed. So I was lecturing on the material. I had just finished writing something on the whiteboard and I turned around and I looked up and I have this room full of students. You know most of them are you know, maybe not as engaged as I would like and I noticed there's this one student who is notting

along with what I'm saying and looking directly at me. And not just nodding in a way to signal that he's paying attention, but nodding emphatically in a way, at least that it seemed to me that what I was trying to teach was resonating with him and his life experiences and that he was understanding these concepts.

And then I felt really reinvigorated. And it was the most excited I had been to be there in a classroom for a really long time. I remember thinking to myself, this, I've really missed this. this. I've really missed this. This right here is why I love my job. And I hope that students will now be able to do that for their professors. And even those of us who, you know, we sit in meetings for work all the time, we can now think about what little gestures like nodding may mean to someone who's presenting material to us or who's leading a meeting or whatever that situation may be. Political science professor Alexandra Middlwood, she lives in Wittaker, Kansas. This segment was brought to you by OnStar.

OnStar believes everyone has the right to feel safe everywhere. That's why their emergency advisors are now available to help, not only in the car, but wherever you are. On your phone, in your car, and at home. OnStar, be safe out there. If you liked this episode and would like us to produce more shows like this, please consider supporting our work. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, if you find our work to be useful in your life, do your part to help us thrive. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.