CHAPTER 1

Why We Worry

That the birds of worry and care fly over your head, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.

—Chinese Proverb

Marie wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding. Is someone trying to open the kitchen door? No. It’s the plumbing. Her husband snores softly beside her, but she feels utterly alone in the dark as her mind starts racing. Instead of drifting back to sleep, watching pleasant dreams unwind, she’ll now lie awake for hours, viewing an endless slide show of the big and little things she worries about all day: two kids struggling through adolescence; the possibility that her husband might lose his job, leaving her as the sole wage earner; her aging parents requiring more care than their fixed income provides; and the house—it’s turned into a money pit they’ll never climb out of.

By the time we met Marie, the strain of her incessant anxiety and sleepless nights had begun to take their toll. She was perpetually exhausted, her husband complained she was snippy, she had no patience with her children, and life was starting to look joyless and gray. And when she tried to imagine the future, all she could envision was more of the same. When we asked Marie what she thought might be the first step toward feeling better, she said, “Sleep. Sleep used to give me a break from that B-movie in my head, but now....” She shrugged wearily, her eyes bloodshot and pleading. “How do I turn it off? How do I stop worrying about all these things I have to do and be and—worse yet—all these pointless things that are either out of my control or haven’t even happened yet?”

We asked her what she wanted. “I want to control my mind,” she said. “I want to be more relaxed and confident. I want to believe things will work out so I don’t feel we’re on the edge of crisis all the time.” She added reluctantly, as if it might be too much to hope for, “I would love to do some things for myself, like walk by the ocean and watch the seagulls soar over the water.”

Disbelief washed over her face when we told her we could help. She was about to discover how to use her brain to create the life she yearned for.

You can, too.

You picked up this book. You read the first page. That tells us you want to change. You want to free yourself from worry. You want to end the spin cycle that keeps you awake at night. You want to open your eyes in the morning with a surge of hope and joy. You want to blaze through a productive day uninterrupted by a mental horror show of dour possibilities and impending obstacles.

You’ve already taken the first step. We’re here to help you with the rest of the journey.

Believe in Your Abilities

You didn’t always worry, right? In fact, you most likely came into the world with a sense of fearlessness and expectation. If life went well, you had no lack of self-confidence and were enormously curious about life and how it worked. Consider when you began to walk: You mastered a complicated motor activity that took patience, resilience, and the willingness to literally and figuratively stand on your own two feet. You had to master balance, shift your weight, move forward without falling, and notice potential obstacles in the way, all at the same time.

Simultaneously, you learned a variety of emotional tasks. By learning to walk, you had to learn courage, the guts to try something you had never done before. You learned persistence, getting up every time you fell down, pushing through the pain. You learned how to take a risk, knowing you might fall but trying again anyway. You learned how to face your fears and walk through them. And you learned how to make a commitment to a goal.

You unconsciously recorded all of these accomplishments so you could draw from them for the rest of your life. They are there within you right now, ready to give you all the strength and support you need.

So then why are you worried all the time?

The Consequence of Mistaking a Lion for a Rock

The answer has to do with the fact that our world has evolved faster than we have. Early humans developed the ability to quickly perceive and respond to threats. Physical survival was uncertain, and when in doubt assuming danger increased their odds for survival. If they saw a rock and mistook it for a lion, adrenaline shot through their bodies and prepared them for potential danger. If they saw a lion and mistook it for a rock, they were lunch. Erring on the side of caution was the safe alternative, and not harmful because our ancient ancestors performed more physical labor than we do and worked the stress chemicals out of the body.

Fast-forward 15,000 years.

In our world, physical threats are less likely, while emotional pressures are more complex. But we still have that baseline “fight or flight” instinct, just like our ancestors. This “dog-eat-dog” world we live and work in stimulates our primitive fears and survival skills. But living at a perpetual code-orange level of threat and hyper-alertness often causes a cascade of over-arousal, triggering fear chemicals that age the body and keep the mind in a constant state of tension and worry. This intense stress response may contribute to heart attacks, lowered immune response, cancer, and conflict in social relationships.

What you think, feel, and believe impacts the genetic expression in your body on a daily basis. You are your own genetic engineer. You can influence your health and longevity, or your illness and degeneration. Without learning to regulate your internal environment, you can trigger toxic chemical processes in the body that can have devastating effects.¹ DNA is not destiny, but negative thoughts can actually turn on any one of 1,200 stress genes, many of which can lead to chronic illness, depression, and despair.

Your brain can highjack your emotions in a second. Perhaps your early life experiences taught you that it was safer to live in a hyper-alert state and by now, it only takes a little setback or unpleasant surprise to find yourself right back in the middle of anxiety and worry. When this happens often enough, deep within you the cycle you’ve lived with for so long begins to spiral out of control: You worry about a perceived threat, fear causes you to overreact, making the situation worse, which makes you worry more, which makes you overreact, which makes the situation worse.

And the whole time, that lion you were so worried about was probably just another rock.

We Worry Because of the Brain’s Negative Bias

Now you understand why your brain is designed to worry first and think through situations second. We tend to scan the environment for danger, even when we meet friendly people or are in a safe situation. Our brains have the tendency to perceive threat and react to negative input more strongly than positive input. In fact, it’s easier to give more attention to negative feelings than positive ones because we tend to overexamine the FUD factor: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. This is called the brain’s negative bias.

Your brain reacts so quickly it will tell you if a person is trustworthy in a fraction of a second, even if you don’t consciously see the person’s face. In a study to test this ability, real and computer-generated faces were flashed at a speed below conscious perception. The results showed that the brain recognizes whether a person looks trustworthy.² We quickly form negative judgments of others when we decide they don’t—even though there is no confirming data. This perceptual capacity connects to our ability to manage fear and anxiety. When you recognize someone is trustworthy, you feel calm. When you perceive someone is untrustworthy, you feel threatened and anxious.

Worry is the tendency to dwell in anxiety and uncertainty over real or imagined problems, cutting straight to the negative judgment, often without pausing for a reality check. The resulting agitation will cause you to incessantly problem-solve and search for different outcomes without ever finding relief. If you are a worrier, you may find yourself attempting to explore all the possible things that can go wrong so you can be prepared. Think about the dour old saws that push you in that direction:

Forewarned is forearmed.

If you want something done right, do it yourself.

Trust no one.

The problem with this approach to life is that you will never feel completely ready for those imaginary bad outcomes. So you keep worrying. “What if...?” is a common question worriers ask themselves, and they fill in the blanks with the worst possible future.

Rumination is a more intense form of worry: an obsessive and repetitive review of distressing factors without the ability to focus on solutions. You might tell yourself that developing contingency plans for possible disasters makes you feel more in control of your life, but chronic rumination—constantly running your own personal Stephen King horror movie marathon in your head—can lead to physical problems such as headaches, gastrointestinal issues, insomnia, and generalized body pain.

How Worrywarts Are Born

Identifying danger is helpful in a crisis where there’s an actual threat, but when you develop a worry pattern based on habitual states of overarousal, your sympathetic nervous system turns on high, increasing heart rate, body inflammation and muscle tension, elevated blood pressure, and creating an internal jittery sensation.

Under prolonged negative stress, the brain loses access to its resting states, so it’s difficult to fully relax, to sleep deeply, and nearly impossible to come back to a calm emotional center. Your body tenses, your mind ruminates, and you generally feel out of sorts. In this state the brain forms new neural pathways, creating roadmaps for future perspectives, emotions, thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors—and all of them will be colored by the current mental state in which the maps were drawn. Your brain starts weaving large and small life shocks into a pattern of limiting beliefs and rules for living that create anxious, fearful, and moody thinking, and interfere with clarity, follow-through, confidence, and a sense of satisfaction. You develop a habit of defending yourself, which results in poor relationships, compromised health, business failure, and emotional paralysis.

You are now executive producer of a horror movie you can watch any time in the privacy of your own mental theater. Just add popcorn. The movie gravitates from one issue after another, escalating in intensity as it shows you how your problems will continue to plague you and keep you from success in all areas of life, how you can’t have what you want, how people are against you and always will be, how you may be sued because of it, how all of your material things will be taken from you, you will end up on the street as a homeless person, and have interminable insomnia for the rest of your life, and no more birthday parties.

Breathe.

Empowered Perspectives

New behaviors automatically emerge when you deliberately shift into a new mental state, such as calm, so our first goal will be to help you retrain your nervous system so that it exists in a less-fear-driven state. Then you can retrain the contents of your mind. As you learn to regulate your body’s response to surprises and interrupt your mind’s natural tendency to worry or ruminate, you’ll develop the ability to stay in happier mental states for longer periods of time.

Many of our clients have been dubious at first. “It can’t be that easy. Don’t I need to talk about how badly my parents treated me?”

It’s certainly helpful to understand your relationship with your parents and figure out how you adopted certain thinking patterns. Certainly, all of your early experiences have had an impact on your daily perception of the world. But endlessly reviewing the past and regurgitating every injustice or dissatisfaction won’t move you forward. It doesn’t help you find solutions and experience more joy in life. Shake up your thinking patterns, however, and you can break free of your past and forge a vibrant future.

Author Anne Lamott said, “My mind is a bad neighborhood I try not to go into alone.”³ This strategy may work for a while, but if you really want to make a change, you need to get in there and get to work.

The Science Behind Happily Ever After

Marie, the worried insomniac you met at the beginning of this chapter, did eventually get some sleep, regained her equilibrium, and went on to lead her life with confidence and optimism. How? By learning to calm her mind through powerful interventions we’ve developed based on three neuroscience discoveries:

1. With practice, you can rewire your brain. It’s a process called self-directed neuroplasticity. Your emotions, patterns of behavior, attitudes, and perspectives are all connected to your mental states. How and where you focus your attention determine the mental state where you spend the most time. Change the focus of your attention and you can change the mental state you live in.

2. By self-regulating and managing your beliefs, feelings, and behaviors, you can make changes and live in happier mental states for longer periods of time. Living in a state of worry, always running the worst possible future movies in your head, keeps your mental state in constant crisis mode. But when you learn to master yourself through awareness and self-regulation, you begin to see the world more clearly and react to your experiences appropriately. For example, if you find yourself irrationally lashing out at people, through self-regulation you may recognize that what you really need is to let off some steam, so you start taking the stairs instead of the elevator every day. In this way, you’re consciously choosing a strategy to achieve the mental state you desire instead of spinning blindly in a mental state that does neither you nor anyone else any good.

3. Your body reflects your mind. You know all too well that worry can give you an upset stomach or headache. Your mental state impacts your physical state on a moment-to-moment basis, sending out unconscious thoughts and feelings that direct your behavior. When you consciously direct calming thoughts to your mind, however, you can effect astounding changes in your nervous system. You can actually rewire your brain to change your mind, and reprogram your mind to change your body.

In our research and clinical experience, we’ve learned that your brain functions optimally when you train and condition the mind and nervous system to be calm. When you also set up your environment to support and sustain that state of calm, such as taking a break from watching the evening news or going on a social media hiatus for a while, you can diminish the anxiety and rumination in your day-to-day life.

But what happens when unforeseen events—drama or even tragedy that inevitably comes in some form to almost all of us— rocks our world?

Life Shocks

You’re going along when suddenly, something unexpected throws you off course, something shocking, stunning, and, for a while, immobilizing. We call this sudden stress event a life shock. It comes out of nowhere. It hurts. It stops you in your tracks. A storm, financial setback, emotional abuse, loss of a job, illness, some heartbreaking disappointment at work or with your partner—an experience like this often affects your sense of safety, connection to others, or feelings of worth. Life shocks can happen at any age, but when we’re young they’re more difficult to manage. They can shut down our courage to take risks and block our initiative to discover the purpose and gifts we could have—and should have— offered to the world.

When we’ve been hurt, when we’re under stress, fighting to regain our equilibrium, our behaviors change. Our primal survival instincts emerge, determined to protect us, sometimes in destructive ways. For example, if you feel fragile, easily hurt, or even outraged, you might automatically protectively pull inward. In your isolation, you might start worrying that your friends and family are against you, which can soon lead you to start living on high alert, which then leads you to react poorly to ordinary situations without understanding why. For many, even as the shock fades, a legacy of worry lingers just below the surface.

The more you worry that this same life shock will occur again, even unconsciously, the more fearful and anxious you feel. You wake up in the morning feeling uneasy, almost a trembling in your stomach. What’s causing this bad feeling? you ask yourself. Your mind’s attention goes from one worry to another nonstop—a difficult conversation you need to have with your spouse, an employee you have to lay off, financial worries, your aging parents—and cycles around to start all over, always focused on the worst possible outcomes. You feel alone, trying to solve problems without knowing what the problem actually is.

Everyone experiences life shocks. Not everyone lets them take control of their lives. To break the cycle of worry, you’re going to have to make some changes.

Attention and Self-Regulation

Part of your problem is that you’re paying attention to all the wrong things. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, noticed, “What we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, determines the content and quality of life.”⁴ So if your attention is entirely focused on what could go wrong, life is going to feel very unstable indeed. But if you can change the focus of your attention, you can change your brain and your internal experience of life.

In the 1970s, biofeedback researchers discovered that people could become aware of very subtle internal sensations, such as heart rate, hand temperature, and muscle tension. Each sensation is connected to a particular state of consciousness. Once you become aware of those sensations—usually possible only with the help of a biofeedback system—you can learn to control them, and thus your state of consciousness.

But we don’t need a biofeedback system to make those changes. Later research found that humans can, with practice, raise or lower amplitudes of their own brain waves. Our brain waves are what generate our emotions, so if you can control them, you can more easily recover from painful events and spend more of your life feeling happy (we’ll explain how in Chapter 2). You’re less likely to step in your own personal ant bed of negative thoughts, emotions and behaviors that make you feel terrible. With practice, you master self-regulation, proving the old adage: “Energy flows where attention goes.”

Arousal Levels (Not as Much Fun as They Sound)

Our brain acts a bit like our own personal branch of Homeland Security, assessing threats and setting our minds to the corresponding arousal levels it thinks will be best suited to keep us safe. When life goes well, your brain is in an optimal arousal state: not too tense and not too relaxed. You’re chilling in that Goldilocks middle ground, where your mental and physical state is just right. Obviously, dangerous events—like three bears walking in the door—require a high level of arousal for you to react quickly, but normally as you learn to successfully respond to surprising but non-life threatening situations with low to medium arousal, you can negotiate the bumpy road and quickly return to a calm mind.

Worry, however, keeps you stuck in a state of high arousal, and when you become over-aroused in a situation that isn’t dangerous, your responses will be out of whack, reacting to threats that don’t exist. Meanwhile, if you are depressed, you’ll be under-aroused in situations that need a heightened response, which can be equally debilitating. Being over-aroused and frazzled, or being under-aroused or disengaged, ruins our efforts to be at our best in all situations.

Our goal is to help you learn to self-regulate so that your arousal levels leave you relaxed but alert, so you don’t respond with worry to stressful events and can perform optimally the rest of the time. We want you to become more aware of how you generally respond to situations: This is your default state, your resting mental space.

Emotional Adventures of a Go-Go Girl

Rachel, a high-powered telecom industry executive, was responsible for making financial decisions at her company. All day she ruminated over whether she was making the right choices. She got so scared of making the wrong call that eventually she started to freeze up every time she had to make a decision. The fear of making a mistake was overwhelming and making it hard for her to do her job well. Her boss had started hinting that he wasn’t happy with her performance, and the stress was keeping her awake at night, and making her tired and grumpy around her friends.

We asked her, “How do you want to feel?”

“I want to stop worrying all the time,” she said. “I want to make decisions quickly and feel confident about them.”

We suggested that Rachel try to remember a time when she felt calm and confident.

“Easy,” she said. “I spent some time learning psychological strategies in corporate training, and they taught me how to calmly diffuse potential conflict at work. It was totally fascinating. Right up my alley.”

Her demeanor shifted before our eyes, from worried and weary to calm and curious.

“Great,” we told her. “Remember that feeling. We’re going to work on getting you to feel that way more often. Every time you feel worried or scared, you’re going to be able to snap yourself out of it, and eventually this calm state is going to be where you spend most of your time.”

Because the mind’s tendency is to wander from one worry to another and then to disconnected subjects, maintaining one mental state for a period of time is a skill that requires practice. It’s more difficult than it seems.

The next time you’re feeling worried, try focusing on your breath for one minute. Notice what happens? You’ll find it is impossible to worry and focus on the breath at the same time.

Now think about a problem. Problems are all about how you define them, and sustained in patterns of thinking or how you pay attention. If your definition leaves no possibility that the problem isn’t as hard to solve as it seems, you’ve painted yourself into a corner, and there’s nothing to do but sit there and worry. But there are always many solutions to a problem, even though some require thinking outside the mental box you construct.

Milton Erickson, the famous psychiatrist who was chosen as one of the top 25 clinicians in the United States by Life magazine, used to say, “Whatever you can imagine, you can accomplish.”

Erickson, who lived in Phoenix, used to ask his students to think about this problem: How many ways can you travel from Phoenix to Tucson? His students came up with the usual answers: car, plane, bus, train. Erickson challenged them to relax and allow their unconscious minds to suggest other ideas. In just a few moments, the creative ideas were zinging around the room: take a hot air balloon, fly a plane around the world backward, tunnel under the ground.

“Very good,” said Erickson in his mischievous way, “but your unconscious mind has many other solutions. Try again.”

Now the class moved further outside the box: teleportation, astral projection, ostrich racing. It was an exercise in learning that the frame you place on a problem limits its solutions, and if you let your mind soar, astounding ideas emerge and you open up futures that were never before accessible to you. We used this technique to help Rachel open up to the possibilities in front of her and achieve greater confidence in her ability to problem-solve and make decisions.⁵

How Your Personal Stories Contribute to Worry and Anxiety

The stories you tell yourself change how you behave.

The unique narratives we construct about ourselves lock in our story about what we believe is possible. But we can unlock those possibilities by changing our story. We can’t undo the pain we’ve experienced—and we all experience it—but we can learn to manage it by reshaping the stories we tell ourselves about those painful events. Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,”⁶ but the story itself can help or hinder how you live. Change the story and you can change your perspective, and then all things are possible.

Stories Are Mental Fuel

Amber, a CPA at a large tax law firm, became involved in a conflict with a coworker and began to worry about her spreading negative rumors. Her coworker, Reba, was climbing the ladder to management and was on the fast track to be promoted. Reba had a reputation for talking negatively about everyone except those in power, to whom she kowtowed. Amber tried to have conversations with her to work out a difference of opinion in how to accomplish the office goals, but Reba would avoid the encounters and could be seen having covert talks with others. Amber felt disempowered as time went on and didn’t know what to do.

We asked Amber what story she was telling herself. She described a scenario in which everyone turned away from her and her boss was unhappy with her work. Her next horror scene was of her company laying her off, forcing her to work for much less money somewhere else.

We suggested she change her story so that it was about Reba. As she settled her mind, a new idea popped in. She suggested that perhaps the reason Reba dedicated herself to her work and aimed to receive the most kudos by blocking others’ success and spreading negative ideas about them was because she was insecure and lonely. This different story thawed Amber’s frozen narrative that told her she could do nothing but suffer and feel constant fear. Her new story allowed Amber to feel empathy for Reba, even as she realized that she could strategically protect herself by staying warm yet aloof.

The more you are wedded to your personal story, the less flexibility you have in choosing a different perspective.

Go Deeper: Assess Your Emotional Reactivity and Self-Regulation

Let’s crack out another clean sheet of paper and divide it right down the middle again.

You’ll answer the following 20 questions under each heading, rating your response on a scale of one to 10:

1 = very little/seldom

5 = somewhat/sometimes

10 = extremely/always

Once again, the left side will be that default state where you are now, and the right side will be where you want to be.

Emotional Reactivity

1. How reactive do you get when people disappoint you?

2. Do you tend to become anxious around people?

3. Do you tend to avoid people?

4. How cheery are you?

5. When you are under stress, do you tend to become anxious, depressed, or a mixture?

6. How often are you upset with others?

7. How fulfilled are you now?

8. How judgmental are you toward others?

9. How long can you hold a positive state of mind?

10. How much do you find yourself blaming others for your feelings?

Self-Regulation

1. How able are you to bring your mind back to a pleasant place after an upset?

2. How easily can you make changes in your behavior?

3. How would you rate your willpower?

4. How alive do you feel?

5. How often do you numb yourself?

6. How often do you use sweets or carbohydrates, such as chocolate chip cookies, for personal therapy?

7. How rigid is your thinking?

8. Do you engage in habitual worry?

9. Do you feel victimized by others?

10. How often do you feel angry?

What you’ll see when you compare the two columns is a graphic road map showing specific areas where a gap exists between where you are and where you want to be. These are the areas where you’ll want to focus your attentions and your intentions as we go forward together.

You’ve learned about the natural tendency of the brain to focus on negative events and scan the environment for threat. Worry and rumination, those personal Stephen King horror mind-movies about the terrible outcomes that possibly await, keep your anxiety high rather than allowing you to calm down enough to find a solution to your problems or put them in perspective. These movies will become part of your life story unless you commit to training yourself to reside in a calmer mental state. You’ve learned that worry and rumination are the result of states of over-arousal, and that every mental state is caused by patterns of emotion, beliefs, and behaviors. When you shift your mental state, you shift those emotions, beliefs, and behaviors, and ultimately you change your reality.

Power Thought: With brain training, you can shift your mental state to access more positive patterns of behaviors, perspectives, emotions, and attitudes.

Now that you have a good idea of how the mind works, you are ready to discover how the brain actually puts us in certain frames of mind. Then you’ll be ready to experience your first powerful brain-change tool to completely shut off anxiety and worry.