Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.
I often tell my clients who suffer from anxiety disorders that they are the lucky ones. They are lucky in the sense that, unlike most people whose anxieties can be tolerated, their anxiety is too serious to ignore. They have a motivation to seek help.
This book will show you why you can’t control your anxiety. Indeed, it will show you that the very things you’ve been doing to try to control your anxiety are actually what maintain your anxiety. Resisting, avoiding, and distracting yourself from your anxiety are behaviors that send the wrong message to your brain. These behaviors fuel a cycle of anxiety that always leads to a bigger dose.
For thousands of years, sages have likened the human mind to a monkey — leaping into thin air from one branch of thought to another, never content, never at rest. Worries echo in our heads like so much monkey chatter. Powerful emotions have us jumping at anything that promises a little relief. Yet somehow relief always lies just beyond our reach.
We cannot relax and be at peace unless we feel safe. Humans and all other creatures, regardless of species, are first and foremost survival machines. Maintaining safety is, by necessity, our highest priority. When we feel that our safety is at stake, everything else — appreciating the beauty and wonder of life, pursuing our heart’s desires, or simply being “present in the moment” — becomes expendable.
All experience — everything you see, smell, hear, touch, feel, or think — passes through the amygdalae like travelers passing through airport security. There in the amygdalae each experience is instantly and automatically screened for threat.
Your hear is pounding and your hand is shaking so hard your coffee is spattering on your sleeve. This is the fight-or-flight response, and while you may not enjoying the feeling, it has kept us alive for thousands of years.
This early warning system is so quick and powerful that it overrides the rest of your brain. Whatever else you were focusing on falls away so dealing with the threat can take center stage.
Your ancestors’ social status within their families and tribes was crucial to their survival.
In order to protect your social status, your monkey mind is always watching and listening to those around you, looking for signals telling whether you are respected, whether you are loved, and whether you belong.
These two ever-present possibilities — death, and losing social status or being kicked out of the tribe — are universal, what I call primordial threats.
How you react depends on how you’ve learned to react in the past. You might stand frozen in fear for a few moments, waiting until others cross safely. You might avoid that corner in the future, or you might white-knuckle your way across the street, shaming yourself for your fear, muttering This is ridiculous!
When the monkey uses its trump card, usually whatever we do is ridiculous. Once your fight-or-flight reflex is activated, the chemicals, hormones, and emotions at work in your body hijack the rest of your brain.
When you attempt any task, you can fail. When you open your mouth to speak you may offend someone. But life doesn’t stop when threats manifest as reality. We cope. We recover. We can learn from our mistakes and move on.
Our anxiety is a call to action generated by the monkey mind’s perception of threat.
As I reached for the keyboard my heart began to race and my stomach clenched up. I’m not really sure how to say what I want to say, I thought to myself, adding, and an author should be. Looking at my fingers hovering above the keyboard, I noticed that my nails needed filing.
- Intolerance of uncertainty: I must be 100% certain.
- Perfectionism: I must not make mistakes.
- Over-responsibility: I am responsible for everyone’s happiness and safety.
The truth is the opposite. No amount of preparedness can control every outcome. Live always provides adversity, for which we need flexibility and resilience. And life also provides pleasant surprises — joyous and peaceful moments that we can’t anticipate. These are wasted, sadly, on those of us who are only open to what we can be certain about.
The perfectionist strives to be the best, thinking that when you are the best nobody can criticize you. But since there is always someone who is better, or threatening to become better, you’ll always have something to prove. So you compare yourself to others, hoping to find that you are as good or better.
Perhaps you’ve been aware that you are doing too much and tried to set limits with others. If they seem disappointed, do you feel guilty or selfish for your assertiveness? If others get upset with you, do you think it’s your fault that they feel this way? Even when others are upset about something you had nothing to do with, with an over-responsible mindset you think it’s your job to do something about it.
While you can try to make others happy and you can try to keep them safe, you cannot change them. They will continue to rely on you as long as you keep it up. Bottom line: if taking care of your own needs is a casualty of taking care of others, you’re being over-responsible.
In my case it would mean continuing to write despite the anxiety I was feeling. If I were able to do that long enough, over time the monkey would get the message that I can handle writing a book, and tolerate the risk involved.
Eric’s safety strategies were keeping him not only from making a less-than-perfect choice, but from making any choice. Monkey logic dictated, Because I delayed the decision, I did not make a mistake and am safe.
What am I afraid of?
What’s the worst thing that could happen if this comes true?
What would this mean about me, my life, or my future?
Thinking with the monkey mindset is like being an archer who thinks she must hit the bull’s-eye. The rest of the target counts as a miss. It’s an all-or-nothing mentality, and we usually wind up with nothing.
Doesn’t the monkey mind realize there is more to life than just surviving?
The truth was, writing the book would actually help me clarify my message, and even if it wasn’t especially book-worthy, I would survive. The threat was only a perception of my monkey mind, a perception I confirmed when I worried. The more I worried, the more I joined with my monkey. Together we agreed that writing a book was dangerous — it could lead to me losing status in my tribe.
It is important to remember that safety strategies, both behavioral and mental, do actually alleviate anxiety in the short term. They keep us safe from the monkey’s perceived threats, and the anxiety that perception triggers.
Like the quest for certainty, the quest for perfection can include overplanning and list making. It can mean spending too much time on clothing and grooming, as well as decorating and cleaning.
Have you been doing more than your fair share for so long that you’ve become irreplaceable?
Distraction is not a problem in and of itself. For example, a hobby like quilting, photography, or playing guitar can distract you from the normal pressure of daily life.
A distraction becomes a costly safety strategy when it is done in response to a perceived threat. This perceived threat could be in the form of a thought, a negative emotion, and / or a situation.
We didn’t realize that trying not to feel anxious sensations — even the extremely uncomfortable ones like the pounding heart, dizziness, tightness in chest, tingling or numbness, nausea, blushing, sweating, or shaking you feel during a panic attack — only confirms the perception that they are dangerous.
If your relaxation is an attempt to reduce or avoid anxious thoughts and feelings, that message is, You are right, little monkey, feeling anxious is dangerous. Thank you for alerting me that I need to relax. The more you try to relax, the more impossible relaxing becomes.
Once can easily decide to adopt a new way of thinking within the sanctuary of a therapist’s office, while meditating at the top of a mountain, or while reading a self-help book. Maintaining that way of thinking is another matter. The first time something comes along that triggers a perception of threat, we’re slammed with anxiety and our resolve is shattered.
You’ve spent your lifetime feeding and reinforcing your present mindset. Any new one you adopt — without a new expansive cycle to maintain it — will last about as long as a New Year’s resolution.
What I’ve found in my practice, both professional and personal, is that before your new mindset can become the default, it needs to be informed with new experience.
There is no substitute for actually “doing it.” You may dream of running marathon, but you won’t actually start to believe you can until you’ve put some serious mileage on your Nikes.
An expansive strategy is the active ingredient in your recipe to break the cycle of anxiety. Expansive strategies enable you to have new experiences that counter the perceptions of the monkey mind and solidify a new mindset.
Expansive strategies are easy to come up with because they are usually the mirror opposite of safety strategies. For example, one safety strategy popular with shy people at social gathering is to position themselves in one spot and wait for others to approach them in conversation. This strategy ensures that whomever you talk with is interested in you and thus not likely to reject you. Every time someone else takes the initiative and you are not rejected, your monkey gets fed and your cycle is maintained.
To break that cycle, your new, expansive strategy at a social gathering might be to simply approach someone and say “Hello.” Do you need to be smart and funny, the life of the party? No! That would be a bull’s-eye. By simply putting yourself out there you are right where you belong, on the target.
Be aware that if you employ a new strategy with an old mindset — I need to sound confident, show no signs of anxiety, in other words be perfect — you will not make progress. You must create an expansive mindset to go with your expansive strategy. Something like, I can sometimes be boring or sound stupid. I don’t need to hit the bull’s-eye; I just need to be on the target.
Of course, thinking about a bigger world is going to mean greater anxiety. If you are feeling anxious right now, good! That means you are getting it. Yes, you will be more anxious when you drop a safety strategy and replace it with an expansive strategy. But in the short run, becoming more anxious is exactly what you need. You are standing up to your monkey mind by saying, I choose to be more anxious. I am willing to be imperfect.
Monkey mindset: What I don’t know could kill me. I must predict and plan for what might go wrong.
Expansive mindset: It is more important to live life fully in the present moment than to spend time predicting what might go wrong in the future.
Eric also wanted to do something about his social perfectionism. He felt self-conscious about his weight and shyness, and was avoiding situations that might expose him to the judgment of others. He was in a cycle that kept him alienated and alone. Eric decided on a new strategy: to accept any invitation or opportunity to spend time with others.
Monkey mindset: I believe that if someone I care about is not making a good choice, it is my responsibility to do something about it. If I don’t, I am partly responsible for the consequence.
Expansive mindset: I believe that people are responsible for their own lives and the choices they make. Consequences of their actions are not my fault.
Because safety behaviors bring quick, reliable relief, they give us the illusion of control. We think, If I do something, I won’t have to feel this. Doing something provides only temporary relief and keeps us trapped in a cycle. Trying to control necessary feelings is exactly what maintains them. As the saying goes, what we resist persists. Yet we cling to this illusion of control because the alternative, feeling pain, is so counterintuitive and has no short-term rewards.
When you don’t feed the monkey, you get the banana. You get new experience and learning that creates new neural pathways in your brain. You are learning that the content of anxious thoughts is not important and you don’t need to act on them. Those pressing what ifs and what abouts that once echoed in your head are beginning to sound more like what they are: Woo-woo-woo. Monkey chatter.
In those tender moments we first realized that the joys of self-expression come at a cost. The price of creativity is the judgment of others.
If we cannot tolerate the primordial fear that others’ judgments trigger — that of being kicked out of the tribe — we learn to anticipate those judgments and internalize them. We put the crayons down. We stop singing. We proclaim that we don’t have any talent.
Values out of context are only words with little meaning.
People are responsible for their own lives and choices they made. Consequences of their actions are not my fault.
My primary responsibility is for myself, not others.
It has been estimated that on average, up to 25% of a plane’s fuel is burned during takeoff and ascent. This is due to the drag of the earth’s atmosphere — at higher attitudes air travel becomes more efficient. Right now in this moment you are sitting in your practice plane at the beginning of the runway. Your atmospheric drag will be all of the habits and momentum of your past.
The line to my left was moving much more quickly than mine, and the people who were behind me before were now ahead of me. I noticed feeling resentment toward them, as well as some shame for my stupidity choosing the line I did. My monkey was definitely on the job. Others were getting ahead of me, “threatening” my social status.