7 Science-Backed Strategies to Help Anyone with Mild to Severe Anxiety
Written by Jack Vaughan
Mark Twain once said, “Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.” Why then do so many of us invest in one bogus debt after another? According to the ADAA, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in America, affecting 31.9% of adolescents and 40 million adults each year.[1] In the eyes of Twain, that is a colossal amount of misplaced spending. Thankfully, there are numerous, science-backed techniques that can help us learn how to mitigate anxiety and get back to investing our time, energy, and effort into things that pay off.
1. Flow
Take the wind out of your anxiety’s sails by engaging in an activity that is conducive to flow. Take it from Charles Limb, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins who conducted an experiment on flow states in 2008. Using fMRIs to examine the brains of jazz musicians while improvising, Limb discovered that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (the area of the brain known for self-monitoring) was deactivated.[2] This is the region of the brain where our inner critic (the mighty voice of doubt / the arbiter of our planned actions) resides. Thus, when the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex goes quiet, so does our inner critic.[3] The good news is that you don’t need to be a jazz master to experience such bliss. Flow comes in all shapes and sizes. You can achieve it while engaging in almost any pursuit, so long as you pursue a worthy, yet reasonable challenge, and fully commit your attention.[4] This could be as simple as rolling up your sleeves and cooking a new dish, tackling some gardening, writing a poem, cleaning the house, etc. The more you tune into flow, the more you turn off your dorsolateral prefrontal peanut gallery.
2. Opposite Action
Let’s say (hypothetically) that you are feeling anxious about socializing this weekend. The anxiety compounds and you find yourself justifying another night on the couch rather than seeing your friends (even though a part of you would truly rather spend time with them). Try punching back with opposite-action. This DBT skill encourages a person to do the opposite of what they might normally do under the given circumstances.[5] For instance, if you feel yourself slipping into a pattern of isolation, flip the script and hang out with a friend. Pull the rug out from under your anxiety and watch it flail. This is easier said than done. Trust me, I know. But the point of this exercise isn’t supposed to be easy. In fact, you might loathe every single second of doing it, but the truth is that you will be cutting off the oxygen supply to your anxiety. You will strengthen a positive impulse, which may someday become a reflex, and better yet, a habit. Personally, I like to go for a run when I’m feeling anxious. It clears my mind, but best of all, I get the satisfaction of having punched back. In some ways, throwing that punch is more satisfying than the run itself.
3. Thought Flagging
Intrusive and recurring thoughts are the unfortunate by-product of anxious thinking.[6] And try as we might to push these pushy thoughts away, the more they seem to appear (i.e., “No matter what I do, nothing ever works out!” 10x/day). Left unchecked, these thoughts can wreak havoc on our focus, motivation, self-esteem, outlook, and disposition. But we don’t have to sit idly by and let these thoughts get away with it. Instead, mark them, label them, learn their patterns and shapes, let these thoughts know that you’ve “got their number.” This is known as thought flagging. This is when we intentionally mark the intrusive and recurring thoughts that feed our anxiety. Eventually, the goal is to become so familiar with these thoughts that we can identify them and call them out before they take hold of us.
4. Thought Acceptance
Flagging is the first step, but what comes after we have learned how to spot our anxious thoughts? The next step is acceptance. This doesn’t mean greeting these thoughts with a warm smile and a hardy handshake; it means acknowledging their presence and accepting them the way you might accept a tacky holiday gift from a quirky Aunt (Thanks, but no thanks). No strings attached. Try to recognize these thoughts for what they are (cortisol disguising itself as cognition), and practice letting go of them. Please note that this is not a pseudo-mindfulness platitude. According to Daniel Wegner (the social psychologist who discovered the ironic processes theory of thought suppression), our brains actively “check in” on the thoughts that we push away.[7] So, it’s not enough to merely flag a troubling thought because we still run the risk of pushing it away. And the extra attention we give a thought by trying to suppress it basically tells our brains: ‘Hey! This thought is super important. Please haunt me with it all day.” Thus, the sooner we can flag our anxious thoughts, the sooner we can accept them, and the sooner we can accept them, the sooner they will leave us alone. The opposite of anxiety is not calmness, it is acceptance.
5. Paradoxical Intention
Empower yourself by undermining your fears. This is the lesson of paradoxical intention, a tool used in Logotherapy to help people overcome fear and anxiety.[8] Let’s say (hypothetically) that you have insomnia and are experiencing a lot of anxiety about being able to fall asleep at night. Using paradoxical intention, you would stop trying to fall asleep and instead try to stay awake for as long as possible. It might sound strange at first, but this technique works by undermining your performance anxiety to “fall asleep,” which, in turn, gives you a chance to actually fall asleep. You might be surprised at how much power this strips away from your anxiety. If you are familiar with the film, Jaws, Chief Brody provides a good example of paradoxical intention when he deliberately goes out on a boat despite his severe phobia of the ocean.[9] Only by launching headfirst into the paradox of his condition is Brody able to undermine his fears and overcome them. Similarly, Harry Potter and his classmates learn to conquer their fears by literally turning that which they fear most into something laughable, such as a massive spider on roller skates.[10] Like Chief Brody and the students of Hogwarts, we can really take our anxiety down a notch when we strategically undermine the things we fear most.
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6. Reframing
Oscar Wilde hit the nail on the head when he said, “The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.” Perspective is everything, and the frame through which we perceive reality can always be adjusted. But there’s just one problem: anxiety breeds stubborn and fickle cognitive distortions that warp the very frame through which our perceptions flow. Some of these distortions are catastrophizing (assuming the worst), magnifying (exaggerating your negative qualities while minimizing your positive qualities), labeling (reducing oneself or someone else to a single label), etc.[11] The list goes on. However, when we take the time to actively reframe our thoughts, we can tune into cognitive clarity and give ourselves an opportunity to refill all those half-empty cups we have lying around. But first, we must learn how to interrupt our distortions, challenge them, and then make a positive adjustment. For example, perhaps an upcoming dentist appointment has you in the throes of catastrophizing. The more you think about it, the more you convince yourself that you are going to be subjected to the worst outcome imaginable (i.e., anesthesia wearing off while you are in the middle of a root canal). As hard as it may be, try reframing your perspective and thinking of all the ways in which the appointment will benefit your ongoing dental health (i.e., this root canal means that your tooth will finally stop aching and you can get back to eating your favorite foods.)
7. Positive Self-Talk
Muhammed Ali wasn’t just the greatest boxer of all time; he was also the undisputed champion of positive self-talk. Out of the hundreds of great examples of this, my all time favorite has to be his claim that he “…wrestled with an alligator…tussled with a whale…handcuffed lightning. And threw thunder in jail.” Now I’m not saying that we all need to speak to ourselves in this exact manner, but it might not hurt to take a page out of Ali’s book. Truth be told, positive self-talk is about far more than hyping ourselves up; it is scientifically proven to enhance levels of self-esteem and boost our problem-solving capabilities.[12] But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Positive thinking also results in enhanced mental functions such as creative thinking, cognitive flexibility, faster processing, and a widened attention span.[13] Also, people who regularly think positively are at least .001% more likely to levitate (the jury is still out on this one). All in all, self-directed language that expresses self-compassion, self-acceptance, and self-love is a powerful tool that we all have at our disposal. Here’s what it looks like in practice: write some positive affirmations on post-it notes and place them near your desk, remind yourself of your accomplishments over a cup of coffee in the morning, think of some positive things that other people have said about you the next time you are stuck in traffic, etc. How could you make more of a daily effort to speak to yourself the way you would speak to a best friend? Because the simple truth is that you can’t start being your own best friend until you start talking to yourself like one.
[1] Facts & Statistics: Anxiety and Depression Association of America, ADAA.” https://adaa.org/understanding anxiety/facts-statistics.
[2] This Is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity - 02/26/2008.”
This Is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity - 02/26/2008, 26 Feb. 2008, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/this_is_your_brain_on_jazz_researchers_use_mri_to_study_spontaneity_creativity.
[3]This Is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity - 02/26/2008.”
This Is Your Brain on Jazz: Researchers Use MRI to Study Spontaneity, Creativity - 02/26/2008, 26 Feb. 2008, www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/this_is_your_brain_on_jazz_researchers_use_mri_to_study_spontaneity_creativity.
[4] Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
[5] Shireen L. Rizvi, Marsha M. Linehan, The treatment of maladaptive shame in borderline personality disorder: A pilot study of “opposite action”, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, Volume 12, Issue 4, 2005.
[6] Seif, Martin, and Sally Winston. “Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts | Anxiety and Depression Association of America, ADAA.”
Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts | Anxiety and Depression Association of America, ADAA, 26 Apr. 2018, adaa.org/learn-from-us/from-the-experts/blog-posts/consumer/unwanted-intrusive-thoughts.
[7] Wegner DM, Schneider DJ, Carter SR 3rd, White TL. Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. J Pers Soc Psychol. 1987 Jul;53(1):5-13. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.53.1.5. PMID: 3612492.
[8] Victor Frankl, Mans Search For Meaning, Logotherapy in a Nutshell
[9] Steven Spielberg, John Williams, and John Williams. JAWS. USA, 1975.
[10] Rowling, J. K., Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books, 1999.
[11] Burns, D. D. (1989). The feeling good handbook. New York, NY: Morrow.
[12] Positive Self talk (Curry & Russ, 1985; Scheier & Carver, 1993).
[13] Goleman, D. Focus: The hidden driver of excellence. PP. 170. HarperCollins Publishers, 2013.