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Chapter Three

Getting on My Nerves — The Psychology of Anxiety

The more you understand the different factors that work together to create our experience of anxiety, the more avenues you have to address and overcome it. In the last chapter, we explored how anxiety begins as an experience inside your body, and we identified some basic strategies that can help you get your body back under control. Now we are going to briefly explore how your thought-life can also be a significant contributor to your level of anxiety and begin to look at different psychological strategies that can help anyone experience greater peace regardless of the level of anxiety they might be experiencing in their lives.

Psychological and Emotional Factors

Although we often don’t realize it, when something happens to us, it impacts us on several different psychological and emotional levels at once. Let’s pick a simple illustration. Suppose you text a friend and you don’t get a response. As a result, you begin to experience some degree of anxiety.

The First Layer — The Event

From a psychological perspective, the first layer of experience is the event itself. You texted a friend and didn’t get a response. As a result, you are aware of a feeling of nervousness and dread. But why? Most people answer this question by simply describing what happened, as if that explains everything. “I just told you! I texted my friend and didn’t get a response! How could I NOT feel anxious and upset?”

The problem is that this statement assumes that everyone would feel the exact same way about this event as you do. Although many people feel anxious when a friend doesn’t text them back, some people feel angry, some people are curious, and others don’t give it a second thought. Even among those who get anxious, they might be more or less anxious than you. The real question is, what is causing your unique emotional reaction?

The Second Layer — Self-Talk

To answer this question, you have to go a little deeper. The second layer of any emotional experience is self-talk. Self-talk is the internal narration of your life. We aren’t always paying attention to it, but our mind is always engaging in some kind of self-talk as a way of telling us what our current experience means to us, what we should make of it, and how we should respond to it based on past experience. One good example of self-talk are those internet memes that show a person thinking two different thoughts: the thing they say to be polite and the thing that they really think.

Karen texted Julia an adorable cat video. Julia didn’t respond.

Karen smiled and said, “It’s fine …”

It was NOT fine.

To get at the particular self-talk that attends a specific emotional event, rather than asking, “Why do I feel this way?” which tends to simply lead to circular reasoning (i.e., “I feel this way about the event because the event happened!”), it’s better to ask yourself, “What does it mean to me that this event happened?” Or even, “What does it say about me that this happened to me?” Both of these questions do a better job of helping us tune in to the self-talk that underlies our anxiety.

“What does it mean to me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

“It means that I’ve annoyed her and she’s trying to distance herself from me!”

“What does it say about me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

“Obviously, it means that I’m a pest who makes people uncomfortable and drives away everyone I care about.”

Granted, this is an extreme response, but it’s a surprisingly common one. Maybe you have even felt this way from time to time. Of course, you might have a different response entirely. Another person might answer these questions in the following way.

“What does it mean to me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

“It means that she’s busy and didn’t have time to look at a cat video even though it was really adorable.”

“What does it say about me that Julia didn’t respond to my text?”

“It just says that I picked the wrong time to share this. No big deal, I’ll just show her when we get together next time.”

Obviously, a person whose mind was engaging in this kind of self-talk would not experience much, if any, anxiety about Julia’s lack of response. This is usually when my client says, “But how does Karen know she didn’t drive Julia away? What if Julia does think she’s annoying?”

Of course, the answer to this is that Karen has no idea at all what Julia is thinking. She could be thinking one of a million possible things, and “Boy, that Karen and her stupid cat videos really burn my toast” could be one of them. If that were the case, assuming that Karen took the time to ask Julia what was going on, she and Julia could work through it together and become better friends because of it. But how often do we actually stop to ask the other person what they are really thinking before we respond to them — or even react to them? Most of the time, in the absence of any other actual evidence, we assume our automatic interpretations of the event are correct. We allow our actions to be informed by these erroneous thoughts, often causing ourselves to feel powerless, isolated, self-pitying, and anxiety-ridden in the process. The situation is real, but our interpretation and reaction are entirely self-created. So, where do these interpretations come from? They come from the third layer of our psychological experience.

The Third Layer — Memories

When something happens to us, our right brain does a quick, gut-level search through our bank of life experiences to find the past experience that most resembles this present event. Our right brain has less than a second to sort through all our memories and choose one that best compares with the present experience so we have some idea of how to respond, even in the absence of additional information. Considering how much information it has to sort through in so little time, our right brain does a phenomenal job of correctly associating present experiences with past events to help us formulate appropriate, proportionate, and productive responses to what is going on in the here and now. But sometimes the process goes a little haywire. For instance, what if something your wife says makes your right brain recall some hurtful thing your mother said when you were five? In that case, it will make perfect sense to you that the only logical response is to pout — or even throw a tantrum. Of course, this response will seem completely insane to your wife, who would have no idea why you’re acting that way.

Worse, what if your memory bank is filled with unhealthy experiences of people treating you poorly through neglect or abuse? These experiences are not uncommon, but fortunately, they don’t define the way most human beings normally treat each other. Even so, if those are the only experiences your right brain has to choose from when it looks for a guide to current events, you’ll automatically assume — on an unconscious, gut level — that many people have more malicious intent than they actually do. For instance, a study by the University of Vermont published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships showed that children raised in households where moms and dads engaged in non-abusive but chronic arguing were more likely to assume a negative intention behind even the neutral actions of others. Their brains were primed to assume the worst about others, because when they encountered a new social situation, their right brains took them back to memories of people assuming the worst about each other.

To understand where your particular brand of self-talk originates, it is helpful to ask the question, “What experiences taught me to feel that way?”

To answer this question, you’re not looking for that time on Wednesday, September 4, when your mom sat you down and said, “Now, honey, when someone doesn’t return a text right away, that means they hate you and you’ve driven them out of your life. Got that, dear?”

Resist the temptation to overthink this. Instead, sit with the feeling you are having and reflect on the thought going through your head. In our example, Karen’s thought is, “I’m an annoying pest who drives away people I care about.” As she reflects on this thought, she should allow whatever memories that may be associated with that thought to float up to the surface of her mind. These memories don’t have to make sense. Often, our first reaction to these memories will be, “That couldn’t have anything to do with this. Don’t be silly.” She should just sit with it, trust the process, and write down whatever memories come up, regardless of what they are.

As our fictional client, Karen, does this exercise, perhaps she will be reminded of a time when she was bullied in grade school, or a time when her sister refused to play with her and called her a “pest,” or her father was having a bad day and carelessly told he was too busy for her stupid games. Of course, it could also be something more recent, but a good rule of thumb is that the deeper and stronger a particular reaction is felt, the earlier the memory that’s associated with it. Regardless, one memory might come up, or several. Whatever emerges from your reflection will tell you, for better or worse, what your right brain is making of this present event.

Processing This Information

I’ll give you a step-by-step process for dealing with this information later in the book, but for now it’s enough to ask yourself, “Do these specific memories really describe my present experience?” For instance, if Karen’s right brain is taking her back to a time when she was bullied in grade school, she might ask if it’s really fair to paint Julia with that same brush. If Julia has been mean or disrespectful in the past, it may very well be appropriate to lump her into the same category as the bullies in her past. But if not, it would be very unfair to assume that Julia is thinking about Karen the same way. Karen might not know what Julia is thinking, and Karen can now admit that. Rather than feel and act as if she is being aggressively shunned by Julia, she is free to look for another explanation that takes into account the way Julia has actually treated her in the past.

As I mentioned, we’ll talk through what to do with all this information later on, but for now, it’s important to become aware of these different layers of experience. The more anxious people are, the harder it is for them to get past even the first layer and hear their own self-talk, much less the memories that underlie their automatic interpretations. Those who experience serious anxiety tend to become so fixated on getting their external environment under control that they don’t think to ask these questions. Because of this, much of their emotional experience remains unavailable, and they can’t avoid the patterns that set them up for failure again and again.

Think about it. What would happen if Karen didn’t ask herself these questions and eventually realize that it wasn’t fair for her to automatically compare Julia to bullies in the past? Karen might avoid Julia in an attempt to protect herself from the imagined slight. Then Julia would probably be hurt because she wouldn’t know why Karen didn’t want to see her anymore, and she would stop trying to reach out. In fact, Julia might even complain to mutual friends about Karen’s poor treatment of her, which could further jeopardize Karen’s social position.

In response, Karen would experience all of this as proof that she truly is annoying and really does drive away everyone she cares about; and she would become even more anxious in future social situations. Imagine how crippling it would be if this same dynamic happened a thousand or even a hundred thousand times over the course of Karen’s life. Our self-talk and memories have tremendous power to shape our experiences. It’s important to become aware of these messages and memories — and exercise good stewardship over them — so that we can control them rather than allowing them to control us.

Exercise: Self-Talk Practice

To practice identifying the self-talk and memories that inform your unique experiences, take five minutes a day with your notebook to reflect on the following questions.

What emotions am I feeling right now? Sad? Anxious? Happy? Hurt? Peaceful? Something else? Write down the feeling that best describes your experience.

As you sit with that feeling, ask, “What thoughts are going through my mind as I feel these emotions?” Write down your answers.

Finally, “As I sit with these feelings and thoughts, what memories come to the surface?” Write these down in your notebook.