Latest / Float: The Anxiety Podcast with Dr John Eaton PhD / Why Do We Feel Anxious For No Reason?

Transcript

Why Do We Feel Anxious For No Reason? · Float: The Anxiety Podcast with Dr John Eaton PhD

• 0:01
  If you have chronic anxiety you might know that jittery feeling in the morning,
• 0:06
  the one where you surfaced from sleep and the anxiety is already there waiting
• 0:12
  for you like it woke up before you did,
• 0:16
  Nothing happened overnight and yet your nerves are chittery,
• 0:21
  your chest is tight and your mind has already started out a stream of wires,
• 0:26
  before you lift your head off the pillow.
• 0:29
  If that's familiar, this episode is for you. I want to talk about why anxiety
• 0:34
  shows out like this with no obvious reason for it and what's actually going
• 0:40
  on in your brain when it does.
• 0:54
  Welcome back to Float, I'm Dr. John Eaton,
• 0:58
  And I want to start with something personal Because I don't think you should
• 1:02
  have to take my word for any of this Without knowing I've lived through it myself,
• 1:08
  I'm thirty odd years into clinical practice now so This doesn't happen too much
• 1:13
  to me these days But it certainly did in my twenties,
• 1:18
  I remember one summer in London just before university when a friend who'd lent
• 1:23
  me his flat announced he was moving back in.
• 1:27
  I had about a week to find somewhere else on a student ground in London. Not easy.
• 1:33
  For a few days it really looked like I might end up with nowhere to go.
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  In the end I found a room through the university notice board just in time and
• 1:42
  moved in with a lot of relief.
• 1:45
  Here's the thing though. The jitters didn't stop when the problem was solved.
• 1:50
  Every morning for days afterwards they came back followed by a long list of
• 1:55
  trivial words would I fit him would the wind go up was some new disaster about to happen,
• 2:03
  and none of that did happen and yet that morning anxiety faded only very slowly.
• 2:11
  Now if that sounds at all familiar, you'll probably also recognize something I call alarm jumping.
• 2:19
  This is where an anxious charge about one thing, an abrupt email with your heart
• 2:23
  skipping a beat, a bill you forgot to pay, jumps to something else entirely within seconds.
• 2:30
  The worry about the email jump will worry about your heart, jump into another
• 2:35
  worry about whether the electricity getting cut off.
• 2:38
  So, you end up anxious about three different things And still your mind keeps jumping to more wires,
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  Let me tell you about a client of mine I'll call her Tanya,
• 2:50
  She came to me describing exactly this problem Why anxiety is there for no apparent reason,
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  Every morning a low constant hum of dread With no obvious loss Her job was fine,
• 3:04
  her marriage was low care her finances were in her words boring in a good way,
• 3:10
  yet she was still waking up at half past nine every morning with her heart going
• 3:16
  like she'd just run five miles,
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  what she wanted from me understandably was an explanation because if you feel
• 3:24
  like that the obvious conclusion is that something must be seriously wrong with you.
• 3:30
  And that particular move is usually where people go wrong.
• 3:34
  So let's slow down and have a look at why. Here's the first thing I want you
• 3:40
  to take from this episode.
• 3:42
  Anxiety is a brain-generated state.
• 3:45
  It's produced automatically whenever your brain compares something happening
• 3:51
  right now or the night before to some troublesome experience,
• 3:56
  often an outdated memory, and decides to release the alarm.
• 4:01
  And that alarm is nearly always exaggerated.
• 4:04
  What that means is, the anxiety has nothing to do with you as a person.
• 4:10
  It's not evidence that you're flawed.
• 4:12
  It's not evidence that you're broken, or that you've somehow lost the ability to cope.
• 4:19
  It's a sign that your brain is overreacting to uncertainty.
• 4:23
  But here's where it gets deeper, the moment you start believing the anxiety
• 4:29
  says something about you, rather than about an overactive alarm system,
• 4:35
  that's when the hole opens up.
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  Two things follow, first you react, with horror, with resistance,
• 4:43
  with a nurse to fix it or make it go away, and your brain reads that reaction
• 4:48
  as confirmation of threat,
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  so if If you're reacting like there's a real threat, well, there must be a real threat.
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  So it turns up the alarm further.
• 5:00
  The second thing that happens is shame. Associated with fear of what the alarm
• 5:05
  means about you as a person, tangled up with the idea that it's all your thought,
• 5:10
  and you really ought to be doing better.
• 5:13
  That combination, the resistance, plus the shame, is what actually feeds the loop.
• 5:20
  Not the original spike of anxiety which might have passed on its own within
• 5:24
  a few minutes It's the story about the anxiety that keeps it going.
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  Let me explain what's happening mechanically. And I'll keep this simple because
• 5:36
  technical language might obscure the point rather than illuminating it. And the point is this.
• 5:43
  The anxiety is being created by your misfiring brain, not by you.
• 5:49
  Your brain runs on something called predictive processing. Instead of passively
• 5:53
  observing events, it's actively generating predictions about what's going to happen next.
• 6:00
  Then checking what actually happens against the prediction. Most of the time
• 6:04
  events match the prediction and the alarm doesn't go off, which is why you don't
• 6:09
  notice this process 98% all the time.
• 6:13
  But when something doesn't match, you get a shock of attention.
• 6:18
  That shock comes from what I call in my book, Float, the threat detector.
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  The primitive part of the brain whose entire job is to shout first and let everyone
• 6:29
  else work out what the fuss was all about later.
• 6:33
  Two more systems getting involved from there on. The analyst makes sense of
• 6:37
  the alarm after the fact, gathering evidence, running through scenarios, looking for causes.
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  The storyteller takes whatever the analyst comes up with and turns the audience
• 6:48
  to a story, usually a catastrophic one, where it's going.
• 6:55
  Between the three of them, they can turn a routine setback into a full-blown
• 7:00
  crisis before you finish your first morning cup of tea.
• 7:05
  And here's why this tends to get worse rather than better. Neuroplasticity.
• 7:10
  Your brain strengthens whichever pathway it uses most.
• 7:14
  So every time a threat detects a fire, that circuit gets a little faster,
• 7:20
  a little more automatic, and over time it builds something close to a superhighway,
• 7:26
  needing almost no provocation to send you hurtling down it.
• 7:31
  And that's a big part of what's behind alarm jumping. Once the pathway is well
• 7:36
  established, almost anything gets rooted onto it,
• 7:40
  which is why the email of the ache in your side and the passing thought about
• 7:44
  the boiler can all end up feeling like exactly the same emergency.
• 7:50
  Now, I want to be clear about one thing. Understanding this mechanism only tells
• 7:56
  you what's producing the anxiety.
• 7:58
  It doesn't on its own change anything.
• 8:01
  Knowing you have a threat detector doesn't switch it off any more than knowing
• 8:06
  how a smoke alarm works stops it going off when you make toast.
• 8:11
  Later in this podcast, I will talk about some changes you can make.
• 8:16
  So, here's the question that actually brings most people with anxiety into therapy.
• 8:22
  Not necessarily why does this happen, but why does it keep happening,
• 8:28
  day after day, when nothing's actually wrong now?
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  The answer lies in one word, hypervigilance. When your threat detector's been
• 8:38
  running hot for a while, Stressful patch at work, health scare, a bad week.
• 8:45
  It doesn't just reset once those difficulties are over. It stays sensitized.
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  It's threshold for firing drops.
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  So even very small cues that are not normally enough to trigger it end up firing the alarm.
• 9:02
  That could be a delayed phone call, someone's expression on the train in the
• 9:07
  morning, or the quality of silence in your house at six in the morning.
• 9:12
  And that's also why the anxiety doesn't politely switch off once the facts improve.
• 9:18
  Last week's crisis might be resolved, the bills pay, work settled,
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  and the alarm keeps sounding anyway because the system was never listening to the facts.
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  It was listening for pattern matches to thread and the sensitivity setting turned up far too high.
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  You can't argue a hyper-vigilant amygdala back down with evidence,
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  which is exactly why trying to is so frustrating.
• 9:45
  Now here's the part I think is most important, and it's the part almost nobody
• 9:50
  expects to hear from a therapist.
• 9:53
  The final reason your anxiety won't switch off might be you.
• 9:57
  Not because you're doing anything wrong exactly, but because of what happens,
• 10:02
  once you make the anxiety personal.
• 10:05
  The natural next move is to fight it, to resist it, to fix it.
• 10:12
  And that resistance confirms something to your brain.
• 10:16
  There are now two threats instead of one, the original trigger and the anxiety about the anxiety.
• 10:24
  This is true even of coping tools you might have learned in therapy.
• 10:29
  A breathing exercise done hoping it will suppress the anxious feeling tends to amplify it.
• 10:35
  Same with arguing the thoughts away or distracting yourself with your phone.
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  Every time you check back in to see if the anxiety has gone there you bring
• 10:46
  your attention right back to it and the brain notices,
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  and it further concludes there really are two threats the original one and your
• 10:55
  attempt to defeat the alarm,
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  so what can you do instead.
• 11:01
  The float approach starts from a genuinely different premise.
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  The anxious state doesn't need fixing, it doesn't need resisting,
• 11:10
  it doesn't need defeating, because it was never a verdict on you to begin with.
• 11:15
  It's a brain-generated state produced by systems that are oversensitive to threat.
• 11:22
  What actually changes things isn't a better fight with anxiety,
• 11:27
  it's a shift in your relationship to it.
• 11:30
  Understanding what's producing it, noticing it as it arises in awareness rather
• 11:36
  than getting swept up inside it,
• 11:39
  accepting it as a passing state rather than a personal flaw, and witnessing it.
• 11:46
  Actually watching inside awareness, as the threat detector generates the alarm
• 11:52
  and the feeling that comes with it,
• 11:54
  the analyst generates the worry and the storyteller creates a prediction about
• 11:59
  the catastrophic thing that's going to happen next.
• 12:02
  And you're watching the whole thing, as if you were observing a movie.
• 12:07
  There's a name for this in therapy, second order change.
• 12:12
  Instead of trying to fix the problem by pushing back against it at first order
• 12:17
  change you do the opposite and you stay with it in awareness,
• 12:22
  you let it be whatever your brain wants it to be and you watch those thoughts,
• 12:27
  feelings and urges to correct pass through,
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  and when you do that you're sending a covert signal to your brain,
• 12:36
  whatever you think you're doing right now is of no interest to me being sure you float past him.
• 12:45
  I know how that might sound, it sounds too simple, does it really work?
• 12:52
  In my experience, personal and 30 odd years of clinical, it's the only thing
• 12:58
  that does in the long run.
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  Not for the specific anxiety that has an obvious cause and clears up on its
• 13:05
  own, but for the anxiety that keeps coming back, for no reason you can find.
• 13:12
  And when you just allow it to be there and float by it, You're giving it a chance to dissolve.
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  And that is the way out.
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  If any of that landed for you, there's a companion article on the blog at reversethinking.co.uk,
• 13:41
  that goes into more detail.
• 13:43
  And the full approach is laid out properly in my book, Float,
• 13:48
  Exiting the Anxiety Stress Loop.
• 13:52
  Thanks for listening, and see you next week.