Reframing Anxiety

I never thought of myself as an anxious person, but for a few years fear and anxiety became a pretty big part of my life. An increasing number of things became stressful, and I made an increasing number of decisions, big and small, to avoid those stressors. It wasn’t a great time.

There was a lot of stuff involved in digging out of that hole, but one thing that helped a ton was a bit of fortune-cookie wisdom off of Twitter: “sometimes fear is excitement in disguise”.

Neurologically, in a sense, that’s actually kind of true. At the lowest level, your autonomic nervous system can switch between sympathetic (flight/fright) and parasympathetic (rest/digest). The underlying arousal machinery for positive and negative experiences is, for the most part, the same(Sapolsky 2004). A number of other systems, primarily involving the amygdala, loop in memory, context, and orientation (in the Boyd sense) to place the arousal in an emotional context, and give it valence. Your higher brain functions in turn will position this in some kind of temporal cause-effect narrative (that may or may not have much to do with reality) People with a neuro background are probably cringing, but this is my crude working model. . This structural order doesn’t imply a causal order, of course. Frequently things start in the “middle”, where a sight or sound triggers an emotional response, which in turn triggers both SNS activation and a narrative explanation. Less commonly, something physiological will trigger SNS activation directly, which then cascades into an emotional response (this can be the case with some kinds of panic attacks). And, of course, it’s frustratingly easy to make yourself angry, afraid, and distressed while doing nothing but sitting in a chair telling yourself a story inside your head. A narrative-building brain has its downsides.

The nice thing you get from thinking about it in this way is it’s kind of obvious where different interventions fit. If you’re stressed, feeling unpleasant emotions, and don’t want to be, you can try to modify your SNS/PNS balance directly: this is what a lot of breathing exercises do, or other physiological hacks like cold water on the face The water has to be fairly cold for this to work, but this reliably triggers the diving reflex, dropping your heart rate. This feature came with your land-dwelling animal starter pack, as it appears in every vertebrate we’ve come across. It may also cause interesting heart arrhythmias (concerning, but unclear if it’s a problem) and spleen contraction (Lindholm and Lundgren 2009). or wide-angle vision Alternatively, you can try to manipulate the associations applied by memories, by deliberately creating favorable new ones: this is essentially what happens in exposure therapy, where you “teach your brain” (really, just create new memories) that provide evidence that a given phenomenon is actually safe. Wide angle vision: Deliberately pulling your attention away from your fovea and into your peripheral vision, which can be useful both for relaxation and situational awareness. If I recall correctly, I first came across this from a podcast years ago- it was only much later that I realized that the podcast guest was A. Huberman, before he got famous.

And, of course, you can try to restructure your conscious narratives, giving different explanations for the associations, emotions, and sensations you feel. This is (approximately) the entire field of therapy, so it naturally gets complicated, but an extremely simple reframing goes as follows:

Am I actually feeling fear, or simply arousal? Unless I have a specific,
realistic negative consequence in mind that I want to avoid, it's probably just
arousal. That doesn't mean a bad thing is happening: just an exciting one, in
that something interesting is going to occur. The stress response I'm feeling
is my body getting ready to deal with that, and that will make me better at
dealing with the challenge. I like action, so this could be fun. Let's go!

This is called stress arousal reappraisal in the literature (Bosshard and Gomez 2024), and it seems to work. My pet theory, at least as far as my own experience goes, it’s that it’s helping all three layers of the simple cartoon model above:

  1. It provides a healthier, more helpful narrative to explain what I’m experiencing. This one fits with what I feel, but doesn’t imply lots of cascading future fears to also worry about.
  2. It provides a better, healthier association for those feelings of fear. My folk-explanation for my growing period of anxiety was that after a number of rough experiences, I learned to associate basically all arousal/excitement as bad, and hence fearful. This helps un-learn that association.
  3. Ironically, because my memories and internal narrative aren’t conjuring up future imagined stressors to react to, my physiology calms down and comes back to baseline quicker than it otherwise would have.

This isn’t a panacea, but it’s worked more often than I expected for something so simple, and working through it has helped me understand more about my own thoughts and nervous system. I hope you find some bit of this useful as well.

Bosshard, Michel, and Patrick Gomez. 2024. “Effectiveness of Stress Arousal Reappraisal and Stress-Is-Enhancing Mindset Interventions on Task Performance Outcomes: A Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials.” Scientific Reports 14 (1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-58408-w.

Lindholm, Peter, and Claes EG Lundgren. 2009. “The Physiology and Pathophysiology of Human Breath-Hold Diving.” Journal of Applied Physiology 106 (1): 284–92. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.90991.2008.

Sapolsky, Robert. 2004. Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. New York: Times Books.