You Are Not Your Thoughts

April 20, 2021 2:07 PM

That anxiety you're feeling, it's a habit you can unlearn. An interview with researcher/psychiatrist Jud Brewer on anxiety as an addiction. Transcript. "...we like to think that our thinking mind is in control. But if you look at how behavior is driven, thinking really doesn’t hold a candle to the feeling body. The feeling body — those urges are much stronger. And in the same way we can’t stop our thoughts. I often get people coming to me in a seminar or if I’m teaching a class where they say, oh, how do I just turn off my mind? How do I just stop my thoughts?"

"...And the first thing I say to them is, well, good luck. Tell me if you can get that to work. Nobody’s ever come back and said, I figured out the thought switch and I’ve turned it off. The second thing is, well, I actually think thinking is helpful. Thinking and planning is helpful. But the third piece here is our brains are driven based on how rewarding something is. So if we can actually change our relationship to our thoughts, we can actually get in control.

So I think we’ve been looking in this direction, whether it’s willpower or however you want to think of it — we’ve been looking in the wrong direction. It’s actually we should be looking in the neuroscience direction. How does our mind work? And if we can understand how our mind work, then we can actually hack it..."

posted by storybored (7 comments total)

Also: "...the more we start thinking of ourselves as anxious people — for example, this woman who said, I feel like anxiety is deeply etched in my bones. The more we identify with it, the more we start to see the world through anxiety glasses. Oh, I am an anxious person. What that does is it reifies the concept in our minds so that we start to interpret things through that anxious lens. But it also makes us become more rigid, where it’s like, oh, I’m anxious and nothing’s going to change, basically. So I’m an anxious person.

That’s really different than if we really look at it as, oh, I’m a person and here are feelings of anxiety. Oh, those come and go. So we start to have much more fluidity with our experience. And we start to see that we can also let go or we can shed some of these sweaters, let’s say, that we’ve been wearing all the time. We’re like, oh, this is a very comfortable sweater. This is my anxiety sweater. Oh, I can actually take this off. I don’t need this anymore."
posted by storybored at 2:09 PM on April 20 [3 favorites]

I agree that the cortisol and adrenaline that high anxiety produces can create a positive feedback loop leading to more anxiety. It's a rush, right? It's energy you can use to do things with. It's power. Of a kind. Dangerous power.

But let me say right now that if you have an anxiety disorder, then that power is too fucking strong for the magic of positive thinking. It's that third rail -- when you touch it, you can't let go.

Anxiety meds can help moderate the power of that anxiety enough that you can talk yourself down e.g. with CBT; in fact I do it all the time now. "No, I don't need to be anxious about that. No, there's nothing to be anxious about. Settle down."

But without the meds, no way.

Just keep that in mind. If you feel like you ought to be able to talk yourself down, but can't, don't feel bad about it. Maybe find some professional advice! Life can be so much calmer.
posted by seanmpuckett at 2:29 PM on April 20 [26 favorites]

The beloved graybeardmustache Nick Spitzer articulated in his Kuffler Lecture that he believes language is what sets the human brain apart: once we have a word for a thing, we are able to affect the actual structure of our brain. Effectively, rehearsing a word, activates and reactivates a circuit, over and over again, following that Hebbian aphorism "neurons that fire together wire together." We can consciously change the circuitry of our brain. Sammà samkappa.
posted by rubatan at 2:37 PM on April 20 [2 favorites]

You might also look at your drinking habits. Regular alcohol use can cause or contribute to chronic anxiety. Are you anxious all day long, and sometimes wake up at night feeling that the hounds of god are after you? Good time to stop drinking.
posted by Modest House at 3:34 PM on April 20 [6 favorites]

But without the meds, no way.

Definitely.

I have OCD. And I realized pretty early on that the reason it was so hard to shake was because the compulsions actually worked. Not all the time. And they worked less over time, which meant you sometimes had to find new compulsions. But sometimes the sense of relief I got when I did a compulsion was a physical rush. My breathing slowed down, my heart rate slowed down; I calmed down. But of course the intrusive thoughts come back, and the compulsions don't work as well. By the time I reached my twenties, they barely worked at all, and I had to do them every day, for hours a day.

Without medication, I probably still would be.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 4:20 PM on April 20 [4 favorites]

You might also look at your drinking habits. Regular alcohol use can cause or contribute to chronic anxiety.

I never really started drinking because even in college, I experienced very elevated anxiety the day after drinking. This turned out to be generally a blessing, because I found that so unpleasant that I decided very quickly to be very moderate with alcohol.
posted by BungaDunga at 4:31 PM on April 20

Mod note: One comment removed. It's generally fine to talk about theories and etiologies of anxiety etc. in the spirit of contributing to the discussion of the article, but please avoid doing that in a way that is dismissive of other people or their experiences. The site guidelines start with "speak for yourself, not others". That's as important in discussions of mental health as it is anywhere else.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:16 PM on April 20 [2 favorites]