- Brain plasticity is the brain's extraordinary ability
to change and rewire itself
in response to the external environment.
I've tried to use and explore
the boundaries of brain plasticity
to address some very challenging issues,
particularly our high anxiety levels.
You hear the word "anxiety," you think,
"Oh God, this thing I wanna kick out the door.
It's a disease. I have it.
I don't know how to get rid of it."
One of the first things that I wanted to do
was flip the script on our whole mindset around anxiety.
Anxiety is a normal human emotion.
We all have it, okay, so you're never gonna get rid of it.
It evolved to protect us,
and so my whole book, "Good Anxiety,"
is teaching us to look at anxiety in a different way.
We can use neuroscience and tools from psychology
to learn how to take advantage of anxiety
and learn about the gifts or superpowers that come from it.
Anxiety is the feeling of fear or worry
typically associated with situations of uncertainty.
The amygdala is a brain structure
that is automatically activated
when you hear that bump in the night
that launches your anxiety,
and the brain area that could help
that calming in that situation is the prefrontal cortex,
the area that's involved in executive function,
that helps you order your day.
But unfortunately, in situations
of high stress, high anxiety,
what happens is not only is your amygdala activated
but your prefrontal cortex gets shut down too,
so that makes the situation even worse.
One thing that trips essentially all of us up
is something called the 'negativity bias,'
which says that we are more prone
to see the negative sides of things than the positive.
What happens is, if you're tired, if you're stressed,
if lots of problems are coming up,
you will tend to see the world in,
"Oh my God, this person hates me.
I'm never gonna get the job.
I'm never going to lose the weight that I wanna lose."
All these things become part of the big stone of anxiety
dragging along with you.
'Cognitive flexibility' is the idea
that we are able to look at and approach situations
in lots of different ways.
We are habit-forming animals,
and sometimes without even knowing it
you are approaching the same situation
the same way that you approached it
when you were six years old.
Cognitive flexibility says that if there is a realization,
there are other ways to approach it.
You have the ability to do just that.
I dove into trying to find gifts
from all the different kinds of anxiety,
and that's how I came up
with the six gifts or superpowers of anxiety.
Let me mention my top three:
The first one is the superpower of productivity,
that "what if? list."
What if you didn't do that,
or what if you did that and you didn't do it right?
That anxiety is focused on things
that are important to you in life.
That is the key.
Evolutionarily, anxiety evolved
to have us put an action on it.
2.5 million years ago,
it was either you fight the danger that was causing anxiety
or you run away from it.
That is the fight or flight response.
The way to transform it is
to turn that what if list into a to-do list.
Put an action on each one of them,
whether it's asking a friend for help, doing something,
Googling something, and go tick through them one by one.
Superpower number two is the superpower of flow.
Flow is a psychological state.
It's those moments that you're doing something
that you're really good at.
Times stands still.
It's like you're moving in slow motion
and everything is just going beautifully.
All the data out there says
that anxiety can eliminate flow.
I know I wanted to talk about flow,
but I couldn't just say,
"Well, sorry, if you have anxiety, no flow for you."
Okay, maybe it's not classic flow.
Maybe it's "micro flow."
Your own anxiety can make your own moments of micro flow
which we all have during the day,
even if you don't realize you do, be even flowier.
Superpower number three.
Think about that anxiety that is most familiar to you,
your most common form of anxiety.
You know what it feels like. You know what it looks like.
All you have to do is notice when others might be suffering
from that same form of anxiety, and here's your superpower.
All you have to do is give a kind word,
a simple helping hand in that situation,
and I love this superpower
because I can't think of anything
that we need more in the world today
than higher levels of empathy.
An 'activist mindset' is one that is flexible,
that can look at a situation
and see lots of different possibilities,
everything from that negativity bias all the way to,
"Oh, actually, maybe this is gonna teach me something
really interesting, really new."
To have an activist mindset requires cognitive flexibility.
You're gonna try something new.
Sometimes it's hard,
but if you practice it in different ways every single day
it can be something that becomes a very powerful tool.
This is a really important part of my book,
and I think it was emphasized
because of this situation that really shaped the book,
which is a difficult passing of two of my family members,
and really coming out of that
with a beautiful example of an activist mindset.
Everybody's going to experience
loss of a loved one during their lifetime.
My activist mindset was knowing
that all of that pain and that loss and that sadness
was undergirded by love for these people,
and that was my activist mindset.
I brought that beautiful, helpful,
almost life-saving example of activist mindset
to my addressing anxiety.
What is it about my anxiety that is difficult?
Can I bring a superpower or a gift from that
as an opportunity to learn, to grow,
and to learn more about yourself?
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