Worrying is getting you to pay attention to the problem.
The difficulty is when worrying becomes rumination,
With rumination, you just play the same loop over and over and over again
and never come up with a solution.
Anger is really seductive, I mean, you feel so self-righteous,
but what's happening is your amygdala is driving your prefrontal cortex,
so you're going to do something
or say something you're going to regret later. most likely.
You know there's road rage, which you know, can be fatal.
And the way to manage that, it's really a case study
in impulse control, these are emotional impulses. What's happening is the amygdala is hijacking
your prefrontal cortex when you get angry,
and if you can be self-aware, you can feel it coming on
and you can tell yourself, “I'm getting angry again”.
When you do that and you name it to yourself, you actually shift the energy
from your subcortical networks, the amygdala and so on
to your prefrontal area, the thinking brain. And it gives you the ability to
be more likely to short-circuit the anger. And so there's one thing that diminishes
the rage rush, and that is
cognitive control. Which is the ability to
manage your emotional impulses. One thing that
increases cognitive control, there are many, but one that does it is meditation, mindfulness.
Developing the capacity to watch what's going on in your mind,
so you can tell yourself, “I'm getting angry now”. The very fact you can say that yourself
sends the momentum in another direction,
literally into different brain circuits. And that's going to diminish the intensity
and also going to help you be more resilient. Resilience is measured as the peak
of arousal in the brain, and anger is very arousing.
To getting back to baseline, to calm. Well, the function of worrying, positive worrying
is to mull over a dilemma or problem or frustration
which often, by the way, have to do with relationships, it turns out,
and to come up with something you can do that might improve the situation,
that's the function of worrying.
Worrying is getting you to pay attention to the problem.
The difficulty is when worrying becomes rumination.
With rumination, you just play the same loop over and over and over again
and never come up with a solution. Well, if it's functional there is no reason,
but it becomes dysfunctional very easily. And the one sign of the dysfunction is
you're thinking the same thing over and over again,
that's what you want to break, that's when worry turns into anxiety,
and anxiety just doesn't help. I once saw Dalai Lama say
something really great, he said, “if you can change things, why worry?”
“And if you can't change things, why worry?” So worrying actually serves no function,
problem solving serves a function, but rumination doesn't serve a function.
One thing you can do is name what's going on, “oh, I'm caught in worry”.
When you say that you're shifting the energy from the circuitry in the subcortical
part of the brain which carries the worry
and its a salience network, “this is important and this is
important, think about it, think about it”. You're shifting it to the prefrontal cortex,
which can see that this is not that useful. The quicker that is, the quicker your recovery,
the more resilient you are. Resilience is the opposite
of getting stuck in rage or anxiety, it means that you can break out of that
particular emotional state and get back to a state where you're calm and clear.