podcast

Hello again, everyone. Good to have you with me again today. We're going to talk today about an anxiety management strategy, which focuses on your situation. We're still focusing on situation modifying strategies. And this one is one that I call breaking the high alert habit. I borrowed this term from a book by Alan Gordon, which is called the way out, which focuses on helping people to cure Chronic pain, but it has some things which overlap quite a bit with anxiety management. And this concept in particular, breaking the high alert habit is one which is really pertinent for us learning to manage our anxiety.
Gordon talks about how for many of us living in a constant state of high alert has become the new normal, and he cites the Gallup 2019 Global Emotions Report, which is a survey based on 151, 000 interviews on positive and negative emotions conducted in 143 countries. countries. When asked, did you experience stress during a lot of the day yesterday, worldwide, 35 percent of people said yes. So we can see that stress levels worldwide were pretty high in 2019. This is before the pandemic. But in America, they were even higher. 55 percent of Americans said yes. And what's interesting is that the U. S. this was fourth highest, had the fourth highest score in the world out of 143 countries, of stress level and it tied with, listen, these, these are the countries that it tied with Albania, Iran, and Sri Lanka, and it was only four points behind the most stressed country in the world, which is Greece, which has been having a terrible economic crisis for 10 years now. Now, this was, as I said, before the pandemic, this is 2019. The economy was doing well in the country. Why? Why are Americans so stressed? Well Gordon goes into this question and he gives kind of a silly example, which I'm going to use here because it illustrates really well why we might be so stressed.
So he says, imagine a zebra, the zebra's life. Most of the time he is on low alert. Most of the time he is grazing and mingling with his herd and enjoying the sun and just having a normal zebra life. But every once in a while, when he spots a lion, he's on high alert. And his brain triggers a release of hormones that help him to run fast, give him a boost of energy, make his heart pump faster, give him this fight or flight response. And he's not a fighter, so of course he's going to flee from the lion. And this extra boost of energy allows him to be able to run fast enough to get away from the lion. But so his life is mostly calm, mostly grazing with his herd and enjoying the sun with an occasional run for your life situation.
Now let's imagine this same zebra. Let's give him a TV with 24 hour news coverage, mostly about lions and recent lion attacks, future lion attacks, and even a terrifying special called, Are Lions Getting Faster? So now, even without lions nearby, even when the lions aren't near where he can see them, he's now on high alert.
Okay, now let's give him a cell phone so that he can keep in touch with his zebra friends who are far away. The problem is that his friends always seem to be doing better than he is. They've got better groomed stripes. They have more beautiful mates. They even have greener grass than his grass. And every time he gets this notification ping, he gets a little jolt of hormones that comes from this social comparison, that he's having every time he gets a notification, it keeps him on high alert. He feels, in some sense, like he's in danger socially, like somebody's always getting above him in the social hierarchy. And on top of that, let's give this zebra a job to pay for his bills, and he has to commute 45 minutes, and by the time he gets to his job, the phone's ringing off the hook, his calendar's overflowing with meetings, and the program that he's using on his computer to do his work keeps crashing. So now we have a zebra who is panicky, insecure, and overworked. Just a bundle of stress.
So that little illustration kind of helps us to see ourselves a little bit. This modern world is Full of stimulation that we did not have in our environment of evolutionary adaptation. We brought up the concept last time of the environment of evolutionary adaptation, which is the environment that our brains were genetically designed for. It's the environment that we spent over 90 percent of our human history in, which is basically this hunter gatherer, nature based lifestyle, which really didn't have a lot of stimulation. And that's why our brains were wired, are wired to seek stimulation because in that environment, that hunter gather environment in which we evolved, stimulation was rare, but it was important to go after these stimulating things because they gave us things that were important for our survival, like nutritious food and like finding mates.
But in the modern world, stimulation is not rare. We are absolutely bombarded with emails, with texts, with calls, with meetings, with articles and ads and videos. And these things are not important for our survival.
It's really easy in our modern day world, in our modern environment, for our brains to get overstimulated. And this is a problem, Gordon says in his book, because it makes our brains more sensitive to physical pain. And of course, he's focusing on helping people get rid of chronic pain. But I would argue, That it makes our brains not just more sensitive to physical pain, but to any kind of pain, including emotional pain. And it makes us more vulnerable to anxiety. And it's because our brains are not allowed to relax and rest. And we don't allow our bodies to go into that rest and digest state because we're demanding that they always be ready for the next possible danger. And Remember a couple of episodes ago, we talked about the definition of stress from Richard Lazarus, where he says that it's a relationship between a person and their situation where the person appraises the situation as either going to tax or exceed their resources. And we talked about how there's kind of two main directions that stress appraisals can go. We can either, our brain can either decide, that our resources are up to the demands of the situation, in which case our brains will produce a challenge response, which motivate us to approach the stressor, which give us a feeling of pride and excitement and help us to rise to the occasion with our bodily resources to be able to meet the stressor and facilitate our cognitive performance. And also this type of challenge response, when the stress has passed, the stress response doesn't linger. We recover quickly back to baseline. However, the other direction that our stress appraisals can go is threat. And that's when our brain decides that our resources are not up to the demands, that the demands are too much for our resources. And then it produces a threat response, which motivates us to avoid or defend ourselves from the stressor. Which debilitates our cognitive performance, makes it harder for us to think our way through the problems. And another problem is that the stress response, this type of stress response, tends to linger even after the stressor is over. And so we end up having elevated levels of stress hormones for a long time, which is where it becomes a problem for health. So, if we're always on high alert, we're basically making our brain feel like the demands in our environment and in our life are ever present and relentless. And so, they're going to seem larger to our brains, it's going to be harder for us appraise them as surmountable. And the other aspect of it is that since we're not allowing ourselves Times to rest and unplug and rejuvenate, then our resources get depleted. We get overspent, and then it will be harder to for our brains to feel like our resources are up to the demands when stressors come by. So it can really augment our sense of the demands and make it a lot harder for us to formulate challenge appraisals. We're much more likely to formulate threat appraisals, which is where we end up with anxiety. So that's the importance of breaking this high alert habit. That's how it will affect your anxiety from the, from the perspective of these appraisal theory based models that help us to understand challenge response and threat response and how each one is formulated. When we're constantly in that high alert state, we are, it is much harder for us to formulate challenge appraisals and we're more likely to go into those anxiety threat related appraisals. So it's important to recognize different activities and behaviors that we're engaging in that are unnecessarily putting our brains on high alert and to do them less.
Now, I'm going to say it. You know it's coming. We've all been hearing it. Your cell phone, your cell phone is one source of this high alert stimulus. Dr. David Greenfield, who's a professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, talks about studies that show that our cortisol levels are elevated when our phones are in sight or nearby, or when we hear them, or even when we think we hear them. And now cortisol is a hormone that, a stress hormone that can be especially harmful to our health if it is too elevated for too long. So it's a hormone that we want to reduce when possible. So Dr. Greenfield talks about how these elevated cortisol levels that we feel when our phones are nearby is a stress response from our bodies and it feels unpleasant and our natural response, bodily response, is that we want to go check the phone to make that stress go away. Now it may make the stress go away, but it also may make it worse, because once you check your phone, you might find something else stressful waiting for you there. Some email from work or some social media post that makes you feel insecure, and this leads to another spike in your cortisol and another craving to check your phone again to make the anxiety go away. And it creates a cycle. And when you continuously reinforce that cycle, then you can end up with these elevated cortisol levels, which is a problem for our health.
So what can we do about our phones? Well, one suggestion is that you can get rid of some of your apps, that you can turn off the notifications from some of them.
Now what I did, I'm offering this just as a suggestion because it helped me a lot. It's not the only way to deal with this. It's just one idea of how you can do it. And what I did as an experiment was I turned off all of the notifications from all of my apps, except for things like Uber, where I really did need to know when the driver was a minute away or something. But for my email and things like that, I decided instead to just set up a certain time during the day that I was going to go check those apps, check my phone for it to see if there were new messages. And so I don't receive the notifications in real time, but I have established times that I go check the notifications. I also turned off my texting notifications, except for, um, those from my family. So I decided I wanted to be able to get my family's messages in real time for whatever reason that they were messaging me, I wanted to know right away. But for everybody else, they could wait until those pre- decided times that I was going to go check my phone to see if someone had texted me. And in addition, I took all of the social media apps off my phone so that I have to go on a browser, on a web browser, in order to check to check them. And this just makes it one more step harder to check the social media and so I end up doing it less. And the final thing that I did Was that I decided to put my phone in black and white. This one was a suggestion from one of my sons who tried it. I didn't initially think that it would make a big difference on my relationship with my phone, but when I did it, I realized that all of a sudden my phone was a lot less attractive and exciting, and I didn't feel this constant urge to go check it. Let me tell you, social media is much less interesting in black and white than it is in color. And so it's just one more way to turn down the stimulation. I don't feel that constant urge, that constant attraction to my phone when it's in black and white. The final thing that I decided to do, I decided to stop watching the news. Now, for some people, this feels like a bad choice because they feel that it's really important to keep up with things in the world. I can respect that decision, but I felt that for me, I needed to experiment with this. And what I found is that when there's something important that happens, I end up hearing about it from other people around me. So the most important news items I end up getting those through the people around me, but I don't have to go out seeking for it myself and watching news. And this is really helpful to me because I don't fill my brain with all of the most violent, the most distressing news happening in the world. And so my attention is not as caught up with threatening information and I can focus more on things that give me a sense of safety and security. So that's just a personal choice. Take it or leave it, but be aware of the influence that watching the news has on your sense of the demands in the world, the threats that are out there, and how much that occupies your attention.
Another thing that you can do is to set aside hours where you decide that you're going to unplug, where you're going to do a sort of digital fast. Maybe it can be a 24 hour sabbath from digital devices. This can help rebalance your body's chemistry and hormones and just kind of gain that, regain that sense of control. But even just leaving your phone behind you when you go to lunch, for example, is a step in the right direction, to have some moments when you don't have this cortisol triggering cell phone near you.
I just want to end now by playing you a song that I got special permission to use. It's from a book by Sandra Boynton called Philadelphia Chickens. It's an imaginary Broadway musical that she composed. And she made a book and a CD. And this particular song is called Busy, Busy, Busy. And I just Just bear with me, listen to it, I think that it will help you to see our own American habit of addiction to busyness in a different light.
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Alright, I know the lyrics in that song were very quick, and maybe you couldn't understand everything, but I want to just repeat a couple of them. The beginning, it says, we're very, very busy, and we've got a lot to do, and we haven't got a minute to explain it all to you. For on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, there are people we must see. And on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, we're as busy as can be. With our most important meetings and our most important calls and we have to do so many things and post them on the walls. And then it continues and then at the end it says, and we think there is a reason to be running neck and neck. Yes, we think there is a reason, but we don't have time to check. We think there is a reason to be running neck and neck. Yes, we think there is a reason, but if not, well, what the heck? My kids, when they were little, used to love it when I would put this song on. They would run around as fast as they could around the room, running and laughing, because of the ridiculousness of running for no reason. And we don't always recognize how silly it is that in our culture we have this addiction to running and hurrying and a hectic lifestyle. And I just want you to think about about your reason for maintaining your hectic lifestyle and also think about the reasons, the compelling reasons for reducing the hurriedness and reducing that high alert state that you live in and how that might affect your anxiety.
Again, this is situation modifying strategy. So it is indirect. It's not a direct hit on your appraisal, but it can make it a lot easier for you to generate challenge appraisals rather than threat appraisals because of the way that it can support your own body's ability to rest, to rejuvenate, to heal. And it can help us to feel that our resources are more robust, and it can help our brains to feel like the demands in our situation are not as crushing. They're not as relentless. So I just want to give you that thought this week for you to think about and think about different ways that you might be able to reduce sources of stimulation in your environment to be able to help your brain come down off that high alert state and have some time to rest.
So that's what I want to leave you with today. Thanks for listening and see you next time.