Introduction
In this article we’re going to take a crack at anxiety in a creative, yet counterintuitive way.
Take a moment to read and practice the meditation below; this just takes five minutes.
Bring your attention inward to wake up your parasympathetic nervous system. You might like to close your eyes or leave them open, whatever you’re comfortable with. Focus attention on the internal sensation of breathing, the feeling of the air inside your lungs, the muscles in the interior of your chest expanding and contracting. Let go of anxiety.
Isn’t it remarkable how just five minutes can make such a change? It’s an illustration of the fundamental principle and focus of this article, which is that using your mind skillfully can activate brain and bodily states that support your overall wellbeing and that of everyone whose life you touch. It’s the basic cycle of using the mind to influence the brain to benefit the whole being.
Experiencing Anxiety
Next, imagine that you are at a crowded event. The speakers at this event ask you to take part in an exercise. Imagine how this makes you feel. This exercise will help show you where, in your own brain, the emotions of anxiety and security live. Most of the time, when anxiety and panic arise we are not aware. We find ourselves in the middle.
The Exercise:
So what we’re going to do is have you greet as many people in the room as you can in the next five minutes. Walk around, and take ten to twenty seconds to introduce yourself to each person. Introduce yourself to people you’ve never met before, not people you already know, sharing however much you’re comfortable with. Watch yourself and watch others as they introduce themselves to you.
Close your eyes, gently come back into a quiet space and review how you felt while imagining this exercise. What happened? What does your body feel like in general? How is your heart rate? Sweat glands? Are you aware of any tension? What’s in your back? Your belly? What’s in your heart? How is your breathing? What desires were stirred up and are gone? Notice what changed. Notice what stayed.
Evolutionary Neuropsychology of the Threat Response
In evolutionary terms, why did we become anxious? A short reason is that it helps us to have grandchildren. Our animal ancestors who could experience a sense of alarm at a threat (or at the risk of losing rewards) were more likely to survive. These creatures lived more often than creatures who were not as worried. The blissed-out squirrel, lizard, or bird that doesn’t pick up the slither in the bushes, gets eaten.
It’s remarkable to think about the passing of time.
If we’re lucky, we might live to be a hundred years old. Writing’s been in place fifty times that long, or about five-thousand years. A hundred centuries takes us back to the beginnings of agriculture. One hundred to 150-thousand years takes us to genetic copies of our species, and 2.5 million plus years to tool-using ancestors whose brains were half as big as ours, but plenty big enough to make a stone tool. There have been 80 million plus years of mammals, 650 million years of multi-celled creatures and 3.5 billion years or so of single-cell animals. You notice they had a three-billion-year head start on us, which is one reason it’s a good idea to watch your stress and take your vitamin C as we head into the cold season.
In an evolutionary framework, anxiety is adaptive. It helps us do one of the fundamental things any organism needs to do if it wants to see the sunrise: approach, avoid, or move on. That’s what anxiety is all about. Approach means, essentially, to eat or mate with. Avoidance is one pole of the classic fight or flight reaction. Moving on simply means looking for something more rewarding to approach. Whether it’s an amoeba that engulfs a smaller microbe or a sponge that’s filtering seawater all day long—taking in what’s good and ejecting what’s not—or an infant tasting food she doesn’t like and spitting it out, at the most basic level, anxiety serves to trigger one of these three basic responses.
How does the brain accomplish this task to know when to approach, when to avoid and when to move on?
The first thing it does is label the phenomenon.
This initial framing tells us that rustling in the grass is a snake and we respond accordingly. Alternatively, haven’t we all had the experience of believing there was a snake in the grass when it was just a rope? Those frightening sounds turn out to be wind benignly pushing branches against the side of the house.
For therapists, most of the action in helping people with anxiety is based on this initial framing. We label things which may not be threats as threatening based on our history. Or we amplify them as threats. Identification is shaped by personal experience.
Next comes feeling tone.
The feeling tone is not an emotion but the basic sensation in the experience of pleasant, unpleasant or neutral. If you’re familiar with Buddhism, the feeling tone is one of the four “Foundations of Mindfulness”; one of the four fundamental aspects of experience we need to bring mindfulness to, as well as one of the five fundamental aspects of conscious experience or existence. Two parts of the brain, in particular, the amygdala and the hippocampus in the limbic system, are constantly and quickly labeling things as pleasant, unpleasant or neutral.
They are small, about the size of a knuckle, communicating down the brain stem and up into the frontal lobes and receiving information from many sources, including tons of perceptual information. The initial framing alone triggers arousal of the sympathetic nervous system and sets off a cascade of hormones which is described in the article “Your Parasympathetic Nervous System,” based on the first Train Your Brain article. It’s a foundational article which also includes six practices which help to activate the parasympathetic wing of the nervous system, which dampens the sympathetic wing. The two operate together like a see-saw. When PNS goes up, the SNS goes down. When the SNS goes up, it knocks the PNS down.
At the front of the response to a threat, and very often trying to catch up, comes the influence of the frontal lobes.
“Wait. It’s not a snake but a rope.” Or, “Hold on. Not all men are evil and bad.” Or maybe the frontal lobe action comes in at the front end and elaborates this identification process. Also coming in, sometimes late or sometimes at the very beginning, is our old friend, the self. When you first hear a rustling in the grass, a rapping at the window, or when you realize you are going to be standing up momentarily and saying hello to strangers, there may not be much sense of “I” yet. Fairly quickly, however, you can watch the self constellate in response to a threat or an opportunity. That you can watch this happening is itself a great teaching.
Self is not a fixed quantity, but there can be more or less self-activation. This constellating sense of self tends to shape our reactions to phenomena, as well as how we think about our own being. Is “self” seen as potent and efficacious or frail and outgunned and already mistreated? That sense of self, the experience of self, shapes how we respond at the front end.
Next comes the sympathetic nervous system activation and a cascade of hormones of the hypothalamic – pituitary – adrenal axis.
There’s a good description of how these work together in the article on the parasympathetic nervous system just mentioned. You can feel this cascade in your body within seconds, the adrenaline and other stress hormones. What’s interesting is that the parasympathetic nervous system can be turned off in an instant, whereas the SNS, especially it’s biochemical cascade — which you can think of as tidal waves of molecules — stay in your body for minutes, sometimes hours. Just being emotional is stressful.
You’ve probably had the experience of having an argument or thinking something bad was going to happen, then working through the argument or realizing that the bad event wasn’t going to occur, but your body was still affected, sometimes hours later.
Not everything that characterizes us had reproductive advantages for our ancestors. We have capacities and inclinations with no evolutionary advantage at all. So while it’s an error to infer that everything we are is a result of evolutionary pressures, nevertheless, this perspective is an extremely powerful tool, especially when considering core functions related to survival or mating success.
In hunter-gatherer cultures, infant mortality was 90%, most people died before the age of 35, and the number one cause of adult male death was murder. This kind of harsh environment drives reproductive advantage. Something that gives you a one-percent better chance of survival doesn’t count for much in a relatively tranquil environment, but in an extremely intense environment, like that of our ancestors, small things add up.
The Frontal Lobes and Their Relationship to the Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis
There’s a wonderful book by Robert Sepolsky at Stanford called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. The zebra’s H-P-A axis is activated when the lion jumps out of the bush, but thirty seconds later, the zebra has successfully run away and is very comfortably, very parasympathetically, eating and digesting grass down by the waterhole a quarter mile off. Unlike us, zebras don’t give themselves ulcers by worrying. Why is that?
The frontal lobes are our major evolutionary advantage. They enabled us to project into the future and see the consequences of our behavior in an extremely harsh environment, where evolutionary pressures are powerfully driving for evolutionary advantage. In that kind of environment, the frontal lobes, using memory as a guide, can create scenarios that get us into recursive loops. That’s what Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is, the brain saying “Here it comes again. Here it comes again.”
This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two: The Big Six
