transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:04] Welcome to Raising Good Humans. I'm Dr. Aliza Pressman, and I know this episode is going to be top of mind for so many of us. We're talking about why anxiety is good for you, even though it feels bad, with author, professor, and clinical psychologist, Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. She's pretty remarkable because her approach to how we think about anxiety is to shift our mindset, to start to consider not just what's wrong with anxiety, but what are the benefits of anxiety? What is anxiety? What is the origin of all of this? And how we can best support our kids. Her book, Future Tense, Why Anxiety Is Good For You, Even Though It Feels Bad, is such a phenomenal reframe that really takes into account the science of anxiety, not the mainstream misunderstanding of anxiety. And all of this to help us be able to best support ourselves and our kids as they move through the inevitable feelings of anxiety and when we should worry and what we can do about it. Tracy has published over 100 scientific articles in top peer-reviewed journals and delivered more than 300 presentations at academic conferences just to give you a sense of how influential she is in this field and how wonderful it is to get to hear from her. This is actually going to be two episodes because anxiety is something that is so top of mind for so many people. Whether you have a baby or you have a teenager, how we can respond in our households and in our family culture, can have an enormous impact on supporting our kids. Of course, if you enjoy this episode, please write a little review and you can always sign up for my Apple Podcast Premium. Go ahead to Apple Podcast, type in Raising Good Humans and there I will be. You can sign up for my Substack newsletter, draliza.substack.com. I would love for you to join my community. It's another way for me to reach you, to answer your questions and to have monthly interactions and engagement via Zoom groups. So I want to start with defining anxiety and why we need anxiety.

Speaker 2:
[02:36] Right. The first thing I feel like we all need to say about anxiety is to remind ourselves it's an emotion. Because when we say the word anxiety, we think anxiety disorder automatically. We think, oh, he has anxiety, better get rid of it or oh, there's anxiety, oh, emergency. So the first thing when I think about and try to talk through anxiety is to say, it's an emotion, which means like all emotions that we evolved to have them. We evolved to have anxiety. It's the feeling we get when we look into the future. When we try to become fortune tellers, we're thinking about something coming around the bend, and we know that something bad could happen. But we also know something good is still possible when we're anxious. So anxiety gives us that information that we're on the edge of our seat waiting for something that's bad or maybe good. That's why it feels a lot like fear. It feels, it kind of revs us up. It's the typical usual suspects of bodily signs like heart racing, maybe feeling a little choking feeling that butterflies in the stomach. But what it's actually doing by giving us information about this uncertain future, is it's preparing us to act so that we can avert a future disaster, something bad that could happen, and actually work and persist in making the positive outcome a reality. So that if I'm anxious about an upcoming job interview, or if I'm a kid and I'm taking a test tomorrow, my anxiety is telling me, so say I'm taking the test, oh, this test, I don't feel really prepared. I'm not sure if I know the answer to each question, but I also know that I can still study for it. It's not happened yet. I haven't given up. So I actually am getting the information that there's something I can still do to work to make that future I want. So that's why we need anxiety, because it exists in this space between where we are now and where we want to be. And it can give us that energy to bridge that gap.

Speaker 1:
[04:45] I really like the nerdy stuff you talk about in terms of the origin of even the word anxiety. And I think that it's useful to talk about, to all get us on the same page with how anxiety and anxiety, this big thing came to be in our human world or came to be thought of. Can you kind of go through that in your nerdiest way possible? But it's so interesting and I think it really helps set the tone.

Speaker 2:
[05:17] You know, we have to remember that, you know, this word that we take for granted in the English language and in other, especially European languages, it's really the way we use it now is completely different than the way we used it, you know, 1500 years ago. So if you look at the, if you really, if you want to dig in on the nerdy parts a little bit and you look at the, you know, etymological origins of anxiety, you have to go back to proto-European, Indo-European, like really old, old words. And you see this word, ungh, A-N-G-H. I mean, these are the roots of words for Sanskrit and for Latin and for everything. And what that word means is choke. So it's this, so really what it's describing. And then you have, you know, subsequent Latin words like anxiety, which is more like anxiety. But, but the flavor all of these words have is that it's this physical experience. It's extremely visceral. It has to do with strong feelings that then almost get caught in your throat. It's like you're choking. It's like you don't know what to do with this energy. And so in the middle ages and, you know, and even a little before, before you saw the rise of the Catholic church, you really had people rarely using the word anxiety. And when they did, it was just, it was really just a physical sensation, like the sort of nervous, like I'm nervous. It's like what we say now when we say nervous, or even excited, one could argue. You know, there's a spectrum, right? Because anxiety is on the spectrum all the way from excited and sort of positive, like I'm nervous about this party I'm going to, I'm excited about this party, all the way to full blown panic. And that's really how it was used, but very physical. There wasn't even a conception of psychology back then. But then you have the Catholic Church. And what the Catholic Church did was to recruit this word, to explain a brand new concept in Western civilization, which was the Christian soul. Because it was a soul that was in anguish and torment, because it was caught in the sinful body, and it was anticipating the punishment of hellfire, and the circles of hell, and eternal damnation. And so anxiety was now the anguish of the soul of our spiritual selves, right? Looking down eternity and fearing that we might go to the bad place.

Speaker 1:
[07:46] And so it's a totally reasonable fear. Like, of course, if that is your future, you're gonna be pretty tightened in the neck.

Speaker 2:
[07:56] And that's when you think of that choke and you can feel it, right? And the thing, too, that even that use of the word anxiety, remember, I mean, it was the threat of damnation, but the promise of eternal life. So even in that anxiety, you had a future that was teetering on the edge of hope and despair. So it's this, you know, so the Catholic Church recruited this word. And so then it became a much more common way to think about our internal, not just our physical sensations, but these kind of this internal life that the Catholic Church was starting to articulate for much of Western civilization. Then you have, in the 1600s, you have this absolutely seminal publication of The Anatomy of Melancholy by Burton. And Burton was sort of, he's been sort of celebrated as the first psychiatrist, as the first person who sort of tried to codify and describe not just mental health ailment, but kind of physical ailments in general. And he put in mental afflictions now as part of this medical encyclopedia. And so what was really interesting about anxiety in The Anatomy was that he still described it in these sort of demonic ways. He called anxiety the foul fiend of fear. So you could just see this evolution because even though, as the Enlightenment was starting to emerge, the Renaissance, where now Sapere Aude was dared to know, I mean, this new approach, we still felt the remnants of this Catholic approach to the universe and where anxiety sat there. And so then you have this first kind of psychiatric model and manual. But then what you had was this whole kind of blown out of the water idea of the mind is separate from the soul. And this was new. I mean, this was Cartesian dualism. This was Descartes. This was Kant, who was the first philosopher to actually talk about the mind. He called it the mind's presence room. It was as if there was a space where thoughts existed. And that's where anxiety and psychological phenomenon started to exist in the Western mind. But then, you're at this key moment. Now, you're in the, say, 1700s, 1800s, and you have nations like Britain, that were the greatest civilizations on the planet. And this was the height of colonial. They thought they were absolutely the top, and they were in terms of science and knowledge. But you have what's starting to emerge then, a serious mental health problem, which was referred to as the English disease, which is suicide, high skyrocketing rates of suicide. And when you look back at that period, you start to, and you see writers of that period, you start to see that what in part was happening is, people no longer had the certainty of faith. They no longer had this idea that there were healers of the soul priests, and they could get their sins absolved, and they would be okay for one more day. Now you had notions of free will. Now you have this idea that what, do we create our futures? And how do we control this irrational mind that's all of a sudden separate from our soul? And so we just had this deep existential angst that was starting to really become predominant and without the comforts of faith. And so then that's when you start to see the rise of the early psychologists, the alienists. And of course, this term alienist is even this, I think born on this idea that there are these things that are important, that are alien to our true selves. It's like we have this internal struggle. And so the psychologists were to be the healers of the mind now because priests couldn't heal the mind. They were healers of the soul. And so, and that's when you start to see the rise of Freudian thinking of the, you know, the psychogenic and somatogenic theories that started battling that, oh, did, you know, is, is mental illness or dis, or distress, is, does it arise because of something in the mind, you know, because of the conflict, you know, among the ego and superego, or now is it somatogenic because we're a medicalized field increasingly and maybe it just emerges from the body like a cancer. And so you start to have those warring viewpoints. And what really wins out in Western culture is the medicalization of mental illness and anxiety disorders in particular, because anxiety are central to all psychotherapeutic thinking, especially Freud, who talked about all these internal anxieties and ways that we converted that anxiety into other physical illness or we're neurotic because we have this tension, these inner anxieties that needed to be resolved. And then what you see though with the medicalization of anxiety and mental illness is we move away from philosophy. So the philosophy departments where psychologists used to do their research into actually having being a medical discipline. And you start to have developments like the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which are very much the case that, well, now we need credibility as a medical science. We need to develop a nosology. We need to codify these diseases like we do heart elements and diabetes and cancers and everything else. And so then what happens is you sort of have this reification, this final apotheosis, really, of this medical approach to our mental and emotional lives, where now they're disease categories, like any other disease.

Speaker 1:
[13:35] Right. And what's so wonky about this system is that, I think we all know that we have a much richer view, a more sophisticated view of mental health, mental wellness and the range of emotions that we all experience as humans. And in my mind, this idea that it's either a disease or you're healthy would mean that there's an absence of something like anxiety, as if you either have cancer or you don't have cancer, is such a mistake because it's put us, the humans in this world right now, into such a knot about the natural range of feelings that we're all going to have as humans. So I'd love to straighten that out a little bit, given that lens, and then we'll go into where we are today and what we can do. And of course, we'll talk about when to worry, medication, what we think is going on. This is like a very big conversation and we'll do this for a number of hours.

Speaker 2:
[14:50] I mean, you so hit the nail on the head, because it's the metaphor that we've chosen. These metaphors that it is that all of these experiences of emotion have now become a disease. And as you say, there's no good cancer. So how do you then wrap your head around the fact that, well, wait a second when it comes to a lot of psychological experiences that are hard, like anxiety, like sadness, and even a depressed mood, like feeling a little more manic, like all these things that are potentially on a spectrum are now immediately demonized. It's really messy being human. It's really, we're very used to this idea that we have to be super optimized, almost like a robot. At all times, we have to be super kind, super aware, somehow have time for navel gazing, and a little yoga, and exercise, and also be kind of start to work towards self-actualization. And it's this yoke that can lead to wonderful things. When we think about, well, there are personal goals we can aspire to there. But when we take it, as you were saying before, that mental health is the absence of struggle, it's the absence of inefficiencies, it's the absence of mistakes. That's when, I mean, for me, this is all about mindset. For me, that's a very powerful operative word, because mindset, what we perceive and believe about a certain experience like anxiety, and then how that belief prepares us to respond to it. So if we have mindsets about anxiety that are, as you say, that it's a disease, like cancer, what do you do with the disease? You eradicate it. Yes. If it's a character flaw, which is another dominant mindset about anxiety in particular, but really a lot of mental health struggles, what do you do? You ignore it and you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps and all of these solutions that are primed by the mindset are avoidance, are rejection, are a lack of engaging and actually building skills to work with these experiences. And instead, we feel we have to immediately eradicate it, suppress it. We don't allow ourselves time or get the tools to actually build skills. And I think this mindset actually even blocks good things like therapy, like wellness practices. It also blocks those from giving us the best, the most benefit.

Speaker 1:
[17:18] Okay. So I'm hoping everybody heard very clearly that we're not trying to eradicate these things. And in fact, let's talk about a little more about the superpower of anxiety. For example, let's go through some examples of how it benefits us beyond the not getting chased by a saber-toothed tiger, like beyond our fight, flight, or freeze system of stress response, which I think is a separate thing and you can totally go into it. But how can it benefit us in our day to day, whether it is... And then we can talk about sort of when it's getting in the way.

Speaker 2:
[17:57] Yeah, that's great. And that's helpful because it is a sharp double-edged sword. And that's the thing that I really want to get across because when I say that... And the title of my book is Why Anxiety Is Good For You, even though it feels bad, which... I mean, that to some people feels very invalidating. And it's really important to me to explain that the reason I lead with that sort of controversial statement is because the emotion of anxiety gives us incredible benefit when we decide that it can be an ally to us. And all allies, they don't just do what you want them to do. You need to work with them, you need to negotiate. And sometimes, they're real pain in our asses. So, we have to, you know, so, but to under, but to actually get to the point where we're ready to work with rather than around anxiety because the only way out is through. I think we have to start wrapping our head around this very question you're bringing up, which is how can it be good for us? What possible benefit could anxiety serve? So, as you started by saying, we know that anxiety can be productive, it's the whole fight flight thing, but it's a lot more than that. We're just starting to get some really compelling emerging evidence about this, because scientists are people and we have not asked some of the right questions. We have not even looked for anxiety to be in these productive places. So, while it's projective, it's also productive. So, we've started to learn that when we're anxious, dopamine spikes in our brain. Now, what's dopamine? It's the feel-good hormone, it's sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We think of it as being linked to addiction, but what it really is, is it's a neurotransmitter in our brain. And like any neurotransmitter, what it's really good at is helping different areas of the brain coordinate their activity so that we can meet goals. And dopamine is coordinating our brain to sort of supercharge us to meet and pursue positive goals, things we want, things that make us feel good, things we hope for. And so, when you think about anxiety as being one of the factors that revs up our ability to persist in, plan, and pursue goals, you see it's absolutely necessary. Now, it's not the only emotion that does that, but it is a powerful influencer of that. A second thing it does is it increases oxytocin in our bloodstream, which is the social bonding hormone, a hormone that's increased when we are socially, like when you give birth and you're bonding with your child, oxytocin increases, but it also increases during times that it's going to prime us to seek out social support. So it's not just the result of being around people we love, it also is a response that can prime us to seek out those people who we know will support us and help us in times of distress. So in that sense, anxiety is priming one of the best solutions we have, which is our social network and our support system. We also know through research on anxiety and creativity, and I actually love this research because anyone who's a performer, artist, someone who's ever on stage or performing in front of others, they know that they have to figure out how to harness anxiety in their life. I've spoken to a lot of Broadway performers and people who are on stage a lot, and they say often, they'll be like, if I'm not throwing up in the bathroom before almost every performance, something's off because it means that I don't care. There's this other way in which anxiety, because it's this feeling we get when our sympathetic nervous system is getting into high gear during a time that we're about to be challenged. We've come to interpret it as, oh, my heart's racing, I'm breathing faster. Oh, that must be that I'm about to fall apart. But really, it's your body preparing to perform. It's your heart pumping oxygen to your brain so you can focus, so you can be more present, so all your muscles are going to work and you're going to nail that dance solo. I mean, it's all of these kinds of responses that when we learn to use anxiety as this wave of energy and channel that, that we can build skills in working and living with it, that's when we can do the most amazing things.

Speaker 1:
[22:12] One thing that happens for parents and caregivers is that sense of chocking when it comes to noticing our kids experiencing anxiety. It really sets adults into a tailspin, whether it is a mom of a younger child who just is having trouble being alone in a bedroom, for example, or whether it is a parent whose child is struggling because they're nervous about tests or friend group or there's so many different things. The worries are endless. How can we help kids understand this language of what their learning matters to them, of how anxiety can help if they look at productive anxiety versus the unproductive stuff, and how to support them without minimizing their feelings and not trying to rescue their feelings? That was like 18 questions.

Speaker 2:
[23:22] Yeah. And I will answer them all. I mean, for me, the thing I really, if parents hear nothing else from our conversation, what I'd love them to hear is that if we all want our kids to be happy, to do beautiful things in the world, to be fine, you know, find their joy, right? But the only way kids can learn to feel good and to do well is if we help them learn to feel bad, learn to feel distressed, learn to work through it. And so our job as parents, as I see that, is to be there, help to scaffold them, support them as they experience the inevitable ups and downs and uncertainties of life. And remember, anxiety is giving us information, if we're talking about anxiety in particular, that there's uncertainty around the bend, there's something bad or good, and it's preparing us to do something about that uncertainty. So we also have to let our kids feel that uncertainty. There's this great quote attributed sometimes to the physicist Richard Feynman that goes, intelligence is not the acquisition of knowledge, it's the ability to handle uncertainty, to navigate it, and it's what you do when you don't know the answer. So if we really want to help our kids and help them be successful on every level, whether that's emotional, social, career, we have to help them figure out uncertainty on their own and be their support in that. So having said that, I think once we kind of can buy in a little bit to that mindset, again, it's about mindset because it prepares us to act differently. When we see our kids distressed, we have to, the first thing we really need to do is pause on fixing. That it's so crucial that we abide with their feelings and allow them to have whatever feeling it is. And when we do that with anxiety, we have this incredible opportunity to not only learn something about our kids, but to help them become more introspective and wise about their own emotions. So I have a middle school, I have actually an eighth grader and a fifth grader, both of whom are middle school in their schools. And my older child, my son, he puts a lot of pressure on himself for academic performance. And of course, this is eighth grade and it's really starting to rev up. And he came to me not too long ago, and it happens intermittently for sure, because he was studying for a big test. And he was feeling really anxious about it. And I started feeling that panic that you mentioned, because he was really feeling it. Like he was, I was like, oh, wait a second, what's going on? This is a little more than I'm used to. What's going on? He really felt like he might be falling apart, and I could see that in his reaction. And so my initial instinct, and of course, we shrinks love to fix everything. That's why we're in this field. We want to make everyone feel better. I had to just force myself to pause. And instead, what I said to him was, you know, bud, I'm feeling, you know, I'm really hearing that there's something intense going on, you're having these intense feelings. I, you know, what, you know, what's going through your mind? Like, what are you, what are you thinking about? I, and I knew it was his test, but I just stopped and I didn't assume. I sort of took this beginner's mind approach to say, let me not put words in his mouth. Let me instead help him put words to what he's experiencing. And when we did, he was able to automatically take it down a notch because we weren't trying to get rid of the feeling. He didn't need to present himself as, you know, everything's okay to me. We were just like, oh, man, let's just sit with this for a minute.

Speaker 1:
[27:19] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[27:21] There's a lot. There's a lot going on. You know, let's just, let's just put some words to it. And so that took him down just, and he didn't really put words to it. He wasn't even like, he didn't like come up with any genius words. But he was able to say, well, it feels like things are pressing down on me, or he was starting to describe it physically. And then we were able to get to, okay, it was this exam, this big math test that was coming up tomorrow. And then we were able to dig further. So I'll just pause a bit. But really, I can say that the really crucial first step was just allowing the information to come, just allowing the emotion to come. And then we were going to start digging in to see what it was telling him. What was it tell? What do you, why are you feeling anxious about this test? Let's dig in further.

Speaker 1:
[28:06] And what I think is really important to highlight about that situation is that what you didn't do was say, this test doesn't even matter, you're not, it's not even for your college record yet. Or what's the percentage it counts for this class? Or you've studied so hard, or we don't even care about grades. Like those kinds of things that we just desperately want to say because we're trying to get rid of the feeling, take away this opportunity to pause and allow him to name what's going on, even if it's clunky, as he's figuring it out, and to make a decision about how to proceed.

Speaker 2:
[28:47] It's such a fantastic point. And all of those things went through my head. I'm pretty sure that's like you just read one. You literally like were in my brain at that moment. And the thing that's really interesting about that when we observe ourselves, and by the way, I mean, I have many, many stories about just these moments when my anxiety about my kids' anxiety was so overwhelming to me that I made some mistakes. And I will say you can repair them. So even if I had gone in with the, just don't even matter and don't worry about it. And but you know, I could have still said, wait a second, that was me trying to make myself feel better honestly, and make this go away. You can still like kind of take a few steps back and repair that. So but I think you're absolutely right. We do it because we feel and we've come to believe this, I think through this sort of parenting advice, industrial complex, you know, this sort of all this parenting advice that tells you your kids have to have self-esteem and they have to feel good and all this terrible pressures on them. And that is true to some degree. But it assumes that kids are really fragile. It assumes that they shouldn't be challenged or that really, and this is of course what's the whole kind of negative nomiker of like the snowplow parent. This is, but we've bought into it that, oh, we just have to make things nice and smooth for kids and then they can be their best. But really it's in these moments that we realize their kids are anti-fragile. And of course, that's a term that's very important, I think, to dig into. I don't even know if you want me to define it or go into it.

Speaker 1:
[30:19] I definitely want you to dig into it. And before you dig into the definition of anti-fragile and the origin, because I think that is going to be the entire second half of this conversation. So we'll save that. But I just want to say, I mean, save it, take a break, and next week we'll go right into anti-fragile.

Speaker 2:
[30:40] Perfect.

Speaker 1:
[30:41] What I wanted to just highlight is the three things that you said that we just want to keep remembering. If you do feel like you're fixing those feelings because they're too hard for you as the caregiver, you said it, and it's so important for all of us to remember, you can make repairs. We all have a best plan, a best response, and then we do what we do, which is just we're humans, and we go into our own panic mode, perhaps, and we just want to fix it. That doesn't mean that you're laying the groundwork for your child to have an anxiety disorder for the rest of their lives. It does mean that you might have been watering a plant that didn't need so much water, and it might be time to make a repair and pay attention the next time. But those repairs are incredibly valuable and in themselves beneficial for our kids, they see that we also make mistakes and missteps.

Speaker 2:
[31:41] That's so the case. Because the other thing that we all are laboring under is this definition of mental health, is the absence of emotional distress or discomfort or imperfection. Sometimes people call it toxic positivity or force and positivity. It really is in the deepest sense, I think, toxic because it really convinces us that if you don't check off all 10 boxes on the checklist, 10 out of 10, you might as well not do anything. It's a fail, it's all or none thinking. I think it's so important what you're saying.

Speaker 1:
[32:17] The other thing that you mentioned before we go into anti-fragile kids because I really just want to highlight how excited I am to get into that part of the discussion. But the other thing that you mentioned is figuring out what it is about these moments that lights us up. And I don't mean lights us up in a good way, no.

Speaker 2:
[32:43] I don't like to use the word trigger. It's overused, but maybe that's kind of what you're getting at a little bit.

Speaker 1:
[32:50] It is. I was totally trying to avoid the word trigger. It's about to go. Because trigger is so overused. Everything's triggering. If we feel our nervous system getting a little boiled over, and we think about what it would have been like, we're so empathetic that we just want that pain to go away. Rightfully so. It is completely appropriate to see someone you love struggling and want to get rid of the struggle. So it's completely appropriate. Our response makes sense. Also, if we can find that space to check in with why and how and what is happening for us, and remind ourselves there's not an emergency. Like no one is going to have, this isn't like you have to rescue your child from a dangerous situation. A car is not coming. The knife is not near them. So how can we tell ourselves, this is not an emergency, and I, the parent, can take time, even if it's just a few seconds before I respond so that I'm not adding fuel to the fire.

Speaker 2:
[34:06] We really have to believe, before we can do that, I think we really have to believe that mental health are a set of skills you build. It's not a state you achieve.

Speaker 1:
[34:17] I love that so much.

Speaker 2:
[34:19] When we believe that, we know that it's not an emergency. I guess it's like the growth mindset of mental health in a way. But like all ways of thinking like this, it also means that failure is part of that path. It means that you fall down and then you pick yourself back up. We end, then we start to trust our gut instinct again more. I feel like so many of us parents feel that I need to master all the expert books out there and all of this, and they'll somehow explain it to me because it's pretty overwhelming to be a parent now. What we forget to do is check in with ourselves, as you're saying, and remember that our instincts are still good. We love our kids more than anyone on the planet, and we have the ability to figure this out a lot of the time, even if we can benefit from advice and benefit from community, and maybe family and friends who also know and have been on this path.