Friday, August 18, 2017

Courage, the Anti Anxiety

"I have anxiety." It's a common phrase you hear today. People are fairly open about it, even talking openly about their medication and whatnot. Leftists display psychological conditions (typically undiagnosed) on their social media profiles as if they are badges of honor, which always include some form of anxiety, PTSD, or similar.

Saying you have anxiety is something like saying you have feet. Anxiety is a normal functioning of the brain to protect us from situations we aren't prepared to handle. When I was a child I told my mother that I wished I didn't feel pain. She replied that there are people in the world who actually don't feel pain, and their lives are not so easy. For one, they must constantly monitor themselves for injuries that could lead to life-threatening infections. It became clear that pain served a vital function after all. As a parent now, I've watched as pain provided a feedback for my daughter to learn to walk and function in the world safely.

Anxiety seems to work in a similar fashion. It keeps us from situations that could cause us harm. We understand what it means when people say they have anxiety: they have too much anxiety; they feel anxiety when they really shouldn't. It's rightfully an undesirable psychological condition. It exists on a spectrum, but too many treat it like a binary condition. To them, anxiety is a disease, like cancer or hemophilia, and you have it or you don't. And I suspect many use it as a handicap, as an excuse for lack of achievement, success, or whatever. It's yet another form of oppression.

Most people are over-anxious these days, for lots of valid reasons. We all wish were less so, a little more calm, a little more cool and collected. I would advise that the last thing people should internalize is I have anxiety. To do so is to work from a position of defeat. A better mindset is I need to develop more courage. Work towards a positive goal, rather than thinking yourself fundamentally flawed. Courage is the ability to overcome anxious self-doubt and act in accordance with one's values and intellect, rather than to react to one's uncontrollable emotions. Courage enables us to exercise our full capacities as human beings. Giving in to fear despite our better judgment reverts us to a more animal-like mode of existence.

The core thing to know about anxiety is that you can't reason your way out of it. (Anyone who experiences public speaking anxiety, as I do, understands this.) The amygdala is the brain structure that triggers anxiety. It exists in a deeper, older portion of the primal human brain, and it doesn't care much what the cerebral cortex tells it. The amygdala is just a pattern-matching function. It scans the environment and, if it finds great uncertainty or matches it to previous situations where harm occurred, it triggers the anxiety state. You can't tell it what to do. You can only update its historical data records. It's no different than training a dog. You can't tell the dog what to do, only train it through an ample amount of positive and negative reinforcement in a regimen of gradually increasing difficulty. We take the same approach to learning to play basketball or guitar. We know in our head what good music sounds like, or what a basketball player should be doing, but we can't talk ourselves into a great shooting technique. We must train ourselves through repetition.

Anxiety is just psychological pain, and it drives people to avoidance behavior (to the point of safe spaces being implemented in many of our educational and corporate institutions). The same can be said of exercise. Lifting weights is difficult and painful. Squats are tortuous, in my opinion. Successful athletes learn to appreciate the burn, because they know that's where the improvement occurs, and they seek it out consistently. They also learn not to push too hard, otherwise they will overly exhaust or injure themselves.

The amygdala is entirely analogous. Anxiety is the burn. The brain hack is to learn to appreciate the burn because it is making you stronger. If instead of avoiding anxiety you seek it out, you'll find that it will take increasingly stressful situations to feel the same anxiety. Speaking to an audience of two used to make you anxious; now it takes five. And then ten. And so on.

There is no way to cure anxiety but to enter the stressful situation and demonstrate to your amygdala that everything is fine, and to do that routinely. The only way to do so is to muster up some good old fashioned courage. Not once, but routinely. Make courage a lifestyle decision and in six months you'll be amazed at how much more enjoyable life is.

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