Using neuroscience to keep your anxiety under control

With the world seeming to fall apart over the past week I wanted to use my PhD in neuroscience to help a little bit. There’s COVID-19 and collapsing stock markets, not to mention all the other stuff that was stressing you out before all that happened, so it’s easy to let your anxieties get the better of you. Now I can’t protect you from getting sick, or protect your 401K, but I can use my understanding of the brain to improve your wellbeing through all this. So with that in mind I just wanted to give you one simple trick to help keep your anxiety in check: focus on what you can control.

Lack of control enhances the brain and body’s stress response, increasing cortisol and other stress hormones. There’s nothing inherently wrong with stress; in fact it’s essential to survival. But if that stress overwhelms your capacity to cope, or it’s a constant ever-present thing, then it can create potential health problems. Finding better ways to cope with chronic stress not only reduces anxiety and improves wellbeing, it can also enhance functioning of the immune system (so maybe I can help protect you from getting sick).

There are always things out of your control, but it’s the things you focus on that most strongly influence your wellbeing. The more you focus on things you can’t control, the greater the reactivity of your brain’s emotional circuitry – the limbic system – and the more out of control you feel. But the more you focus on things that are under your control, the more your limbic system calms down, and the more in control you feel

Interestingly, you can’t fully control what you focus on. Some of your attention is controlled by the automatic activity in your limbic system, which will draw your attention to the worst parts of reality. But don’t get too upset with your brain; it’s just trying to keep you safe.

Fortunately we (humans) have a highly evolved prefrontal cortex whose job is to help regulate the limbic system and plan for the future. While you don’t have total control over your attention, you do have some control. You can’t control what random, unhelpful thoughts pop into your head, but you can control what you do next and what you choose to shift your attention to.

As I write in The Upward Spiral Workbook, “You can’t control other people. You can’t control the past. Essentially the only things you can control are your actions in the present moment. You can’t even control the overall outcome of a situation, except insofar as you have any control in the present moment. If you’re having difficulty accepting this, you are not alone. This is one of the most difficult truths to accept.”

So stop focusing on all the toilet paper you didn’t buy last week. You can’t change the past. Stop focusing on whether or not the economy will tank. You can’t control the buying habits of millions of people. Stop. Stop. Stop. Or rather, that’s probably what you’re trying to do: stop thinking about all those things. And you find that you can’t stop focusing on them, which just further draws your attention to the things you can’t control – a classic downward spiral.

If you can’t do something, that’s fine. It’s not the fact that you can’t do it that’s most limiting, but your focus on the fact that you can’t do it. Instead of trying to stop focusing on something you can’t control, START focusing on what you CAN control. And then don’t just focus on it, do it! Start focusing on washing your hands. Start focusing on being kind to yourself and others. Start focusing on making dinner. Start taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.

And if you can’t take action right now, or it’s not helpful to do it right away, then create an intention to take action once you can. That’s called planning, and it helps activate the prefrontal cortex in a way that keeps the limbic system from running amok.

So what can you do right now? Maybe it’s washing your hands. Maybe it’s making a plan. Or maybe it’s just taking a deep breath and accepting that that’s all you can do at this moment. Now go do it.