Life Kit - Coronavirus Panic: How To Get Your Thinking Brain Back Online

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Shame spirals, toilet paper panic and bingeing on news — it's easy to worry, but harder to stop. Psychiatrist Judson Brewer explains why panic can be as contagious as a virus and shares simple ways to recenter yourself when you get carried away by anxious thoughts.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, my name is Rachel. I'm from Pennsylvania and I am currently a preschool teacher who is home with her preschooler. A tip that helped yesterday, we found that one of the best things that we did was we went for a walk with a dog and we called it a letter walk, where we had to find different signs outside and find letters on the signs. So we searched for the letter A and the letter L because my daughter is obsessed with the letter L currently. Good luck to all the parents who are home with their young ones. Hopefully you're not watching too much TV.

Have a good one. Today's update is about how to use this situation to set good mental habits instead of creating or adding to unhealthy ones. I couldn't have said it better myself, Dr. Judd. This is Life Kit, and I'm Shireen Marisol Maragi. My guest on this episode is Dr. Judd Brewer. He's a neuroscientist and psychiatrist that specializes in anxiety and habit change. I'm so anxious right now I'm having a hard time sleeping and eating and maintaining a healthy relationship with my husband.

And I don't want to list all the bad things that we have to worry about these days because you know what they are and you're probably just as anxious as I am about all of this. But what I do want to do is provide you and me a way to find a moment of peace. Dr. Judd, everyone, including me, has been saying, take a deep breath or I need to take a deep breath way more lately to the point where I feel like it's becoming a little bit cliche. But you're like, no, this actually works. Yes, this is how our brain works. You know, fear is a normal adaptive response, but fear plus uncertainty makes our brain spin out in anxiety. And the best way to get our physiology calmed down and our thinking brain back online is literally to take a deep breath. You know, if we can understand why fear is a helpful adaptive response, we can understand how taking a deep breath can help.

And, you know, a simple example would be, you know, fear helps us learn. So if we step out into the street, we almost get hit by a car, we step back onto the sidewalk, and that fear response says, hey, you know, remember to look both ways before crossing the street. Right. You know, why do we get all revved up? Well, we get revved up when the newer parts of our brain, the thinking and planning parts of the brain don't have accurate information, and they start spinning out in these what if worry loops. You know, what if this happens? What if that happens? So if we can notice that we're starting to spin out, step back and see, oh, this is my brain just trying to get control where there's, you know,

there's uncertainty. Oh, let me try taking a deep breath or just feeling my feet as a way to ground myself in my direct experience. And can I see if that can help me literally calm my nervous system down so I can get my thinking brain back online? You've talked about how the prefrontal cortex in our brains needs very clear information. And we're in a place right now where, you know, information is coming at us from various angles, and then it changes really rapidly. So what's going on there in that prefrontal cortex while all of this is changing? Well, sometimes there's not a lot going on in the prefrontal cortex. So if we are afraid, so let's say we're anxious, and let's add on top of this,

maybe we go on social media to try to get information, but in fact, people are just saying, oh, this is happening. No, this is happening. No, this is happening. And nobody really knows what's going on. That actually makes our prefrontal cortex shut down. And we, as we start to panic, we can actually catch something that's even more contagious than a virus, which is, you know, panic and fear. So that can actually spread through social contagion, which is simply the transmission of affect or emotion from one person to another, you know, where you can, you can catch a virus from somebody by being near them. Somebody can sneeze on your brain from anywhere in the world. We can also see this playing out not only on

social media, but when we say go to the grocery store. So somebody goes to the grocery store with a list of things to buy. Then they see somebody, you know, hoarding toilet paper. Let's use that as an example. So suddenly their scarcity brain kicks in and says, oh, maybe I'm not going to have enough toilet paper, even though they probably have enough at home. And so they run to the toilet paper aisle and buy all the rest of the toilet paper. Then somebody sees them when somebody else walks in the store and they think, oh no, there's a run on toilet paper. So this scarcity mode kicks in and can also spread panic and fear through social contagion as well. It's also just people trying to control this situation that we absolutely have no control over, right? Like I'm just cleaning everything that I can get my hands on.

I'm never stopping. It's making me feel like I have some sort of control over everything. Is trying to control things in the way that we can helpful? Well, it depends on what we're doing. So if we're afraid or panicked and we try to control things, we're going to actually fall back on old habit patterns. And so, for example, if our habit pattern is to clean, we might start cleaning obsessively in a way that's not helpful.

It could use up cleaning supplies. It could do other things that aren't going to actually prevent the spread of contagion. We start cleaning our house and nobody's been in our house for a week. The likelihood that something infectious is going to suddenly magically show up on our countertops is pretty low. So here, if our brain is anxious and our thinking brain is offline, the likelihood that we're going to have any wisdom show up there is pretty low. So again, it comes back to grounding ourselves, and then asking ourselves, okay, what am I about to do? Is this actually helpful? So for example, in my psychiatry training, I learned this great phrase, don't just do something, sit there. Which is, you know, play on the don't just sit there and do something. But the idea is if I'm sitting with a patient and they're anxious, I could catch their anxiety through social contagion.

I become anxious. And then I try to do something to fix them to make myself feel better. When in fact, the best thing that I could be doing is simply sitting there and listening to them. And I think that applies to all of us. Yeah, you know, I mean, all of this feels simple, and fairly easy, like taking deep breaths, feeling your feet. But how do we make this stuff into a habit? That's a really good question. So there's this phrase, short moments many times. If somebody is going to create a habit of anything, they need short moments of repetition

and they need to repeat it over and over and over. So it's not just about trying to force ourselves not to check the news. That actually fails. You can't think your way out of a bad habit. But we can tap into the strongest parts of our brain, which are these reward-based learning parts. And what they'd feed on is reward. And so can we see really clearly, what's it like when I worry? Well, I just get more anxious. What's it like when I calm myself, take a few deep breaths, feel my feet, and go pet my pet or give my family member a hug or

something like that? that feels much better. For people who are listening to this and maybe aren't plagued by anxiety, but they know someone who is and is maybe a loved one. For example, when I'm having really bad anxiety, my husband usually says something like, babe, you're spiraling, stop spiraling. And I just really like to give him some more concrete ways to calm me down besides, you know, stating the obvious, which he does over and over again. So yeah, so for people who are listening to this that are like my husband who live with somebody who is incredibly anxious, what can they say to that person to help them or what can they do for that person? I love this. Wouldn't it be great if we could just somebody could just tell us to relax and then we relax or tell us to stop worrying and then we stop worrying. That's not how our brains work. Exactly.

So that's the first thing I would the advice I would give them is, hey, I know you mean well, but you trying to tell me to stop being anxious actually just makes me more anxious. And so they can potentially stop doing that. Yep. The other thing, so once they can help with that piece is they can step back and maybe ask a question like, oh, what do you need right now? And then it can help us self-reflect and be like, huh, I'm feeling anxious. What do I need? Am I worried about the future? I really like that advice. I'm going to make him listen to this. Nico. I'm like that advice. I'm going to make him listen to this. Nico,

I'm talking to you. Getting back to the don't just do something, sit there. I'm wondering, how are you talking to people to make them feel better about just sitting at home, about staying at home? What are you telling people to make them feel empowered when they're not allowed to leave the house, basically? Two pieces that I'm seeing here are guilt and shame. So guilt is feeling like, oh, we should have been doing something or we could be doing something when everybody else is doing something, which can then lead to shame about ourselves. So guilt is about a behavior. Shame is about ourselves. Oh, I should have done something. Oh, I'm a bad person because I didn't do it. There's guilt and shame, that one-two punch. So I think, again, the first place here is to recognize, oh, what's going on here? Am I feeling guilty? Am I feeling shame? Is that leading

to a shame spiral where I'm beating myself up and then just going down a rabbit hole? Well, again, this makes our thinking brain go offline. We tend to do things not helpful when we're not thinking. So can we start by grounding ourselves, seeing what our mind is doing, step out of that process so that it then helps us be able to think and say, okay, wait a minute, the best thing I can be doing is staying home, right? Because that's what's going to stop the spread of this virus. And, you know, running out there and trying to do something

could actually make this worse. So even just stopping and saying to ourselves, wait a minute, what's it feel like for me to be doing the right thing? Because this is the right thing to be doing. Oh, I'm actually helping. Oh, that's helps me step out of that shame spiral. That also brings our thinking and creative brains back online. So we can then ask, oh, well, what, what, you know, what skills and talents do I have where I can be helpful? For me as a psychiatrist, I'm probably not the best person to be in the ICU intubating patients. I haven't done that since residency.

But maybe this is why I'm putting out YouTube videos, because that's where I can be helpful and also literally not spread contagion that way. That's great. You mentioned that you're doing these YouTube videos because that's your way of helping. And you're calling them coronavirus anxiety updates. And I've watched them. You always end with something uplifting or calming,

something that your viewer can think about that will help make them feel better. And sometimes it's a page or two from a children's book. Sometimes it's poetry. And I thought because it's poetry month, maybe you had a poem on hand that will help people listening to us right now. I'd be happy to read something. So one of my favorite poems is by the sage and poet Rumi. It's called The Guest House. Many people may be familiar with this. So I'll just read this one because I love it. This being human is a guest house. Every morning, a new arrival, a joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all,

even if they're a crowd of sorrows who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture. Still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. That is so perfect. Yes. So can we greet anxiety? Can we greet our fear? Can we greet our self-judgment? Can we greet any of these emotions and welcome them in so that we can learn from them? Thank you so much, Dr. Judd. This has been amazing. My pleasure. So just to wrap up here, remember, taking a deep breath really does work. If you find yourself feeling anxious throughout

the day, take a deep breath, pay attention to your feet, take note of how they feel, and then pay attention to how you feel after you've done that versus the way you felt before. Wash, rinse, repeat until it becomes a habit. Short moments, many times. For more episodes of Life Kit, go to npr.org slash Life Kit. We have episodes on all sorts of topics from how to start therapy remotely to how to compost at home. And if you love Life Kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash Life Kit newsletter. Also, we want to hear your tips. What are you doing to cope right now? Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us at LifeKit at NPR dot org. This episode was produced by Claire Schneider. Megan Cain is the managing producer and Beth Donovan is our

senior editor. I'm Shireen Marisol Maragi. Thanks for listening.