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Hi everybody, and welcome to today's episode. We're going to talk about the importance of having an anxiety master key. . What do I mean by a master key? Well, a master key is something that opens all of the locked doors. It gives access to every room in the building. It opens the doors, what we do with those open doors is another question. That's the next step in anxiety mastery. But first we need a master key to open all the doors that are locked, or in other words, we need a foundational tool which will help orient all of our decisions in anxiety regulation, help us understand what to do and how to do it.

Now more specifically a master key in the area of anxiety management would help us with these four important questions or open these four key doors. First of all, how do we know when anxiety is helping and when it is hurting or what is the difference between adaptive and maladaptive emotions? How do we define the difference? Now, this may seem like a strange new concept to some of you, but anxiety actually sometimes can be helpful. And here's an example that has been shown in research. College students who feel anxiety before an important test will tend to study more. They will tend to prepare more extensively, with the result that they usually will do better on the test, they will perform better on the test. However, college students who experience anxiety during the test tend not to perform as well as those who do not have anxiety during the test. So there we have an example of maladaptive anxiety. Assuming that the goal of these students was to do well on the test, it was adaptive for those who had anxiety before the test, because it motivated them to prepare more extensively. It was maladaptive for the students who had anxiety during the test because it harmed their performance. So you can see how that first question is very important to answer. We need to know when anxiety is helping and when it is hurting, we need to understand the difference between adaptive and maladaptive emotions. We need to define the difference.

Number two, once we know the difference between helpful and harmful emotions. How do we cultivate the helpful kind and down-regulate the not helpful kind, or what are the basic principles for emotion regulation? What are the basic principles that help us to direct our emotion regulation in the ways that we want it.
And number three, once we know the difference between helpful and harmful anxiety, once we know how to cultivate what we want, how do we choose the right strategies for the right circumstances? We know the basic principles of how it works, but we need to know which strategies to choose. There are so many strategies out there. How do we choose the right strategy for the right situation?
And number four, how do we actually implement those strategies that we have chosen? How do we actually apply them? What does it look like in real world situations?

Now, as far as choosing the right strategy to use, there has been a gap identified by research showing that the number of strategies that people actually use does not reflect the breadth of strategies available in the research literature. In other words, many people have a small handful of strategies that they rely on for anxiety management. But it's much smaller than the number of strategies available in the research literature. And so we can see from this research finding that it is extremely important to be educated about the number of tools available to us, the number of strategies that are out there. We need to have a large toolbox of strategies. But it needs to go beyond this. McKnight and Kashdan talked about this in an article they published in Review of General Psychology in 2009. And they said, that "people with access to a large set of self-regulatory tools, with an ability to flexibly apply them, are in an optimal position to navigate life's challenges and sustain high levels of healthy functioning." So they point out that there is something besides simply having access to the large toolkit that is important. Yes, we need to have that large toolkit, but we also need to have an ability to flexibly apply the tools. We need to be able to use all of the tools in the kit, in the right circumstances and not just rely on the small number. We need to understand how to apply them, and we need to be flexible in the way that we apply them. We need a master key that can translate the research findings into practice in a useful and memorable manner, that can streamline the application and implementation of anxiety research.

Those last two doors, those last two questions about choosing which strategies to implement, and then actually implementing those strategies, those two questions, those two doors, are the, probably the most sticky, the most difficult to open. Because the challenge of navigating anxiety regulation on a personal basis and assessing which strategies to use and when requires an extensive understanding of the available tools, like we said, we need to know about that large toolbox, but we have to know how those tools relate to each other. We have to know when best to apply them. That's demanding. So we need a master key that can synthesize all of that in a useful and memorable manner and make it practical, make it easy, make it simplified.

So returning again to the master key, the four questions, the four problems that it would solve for us. First of all, how do we know when anxiety is helping them when it's hurting? Or how do we know the difference between adaptive and maladaptive emotions? Second of all, we know the difference. We know we want adaptive emotions. What are the basic principles behind cultivating the adaptive emotions and down-regulating the maladaptive emotions? And number three, how do we choose the right strategies for the right circumstances? And number four, how do we implement those strategies? So that's the master key that we're looking for. That can answer all of those questions.

Diana Kenney gives us a clue about where to look for master keys when we're talking about anxiety regulation. She talks about how working theories or models can aid in reducing the difficulty of anxiety regulation. And that's what we need. We talked about how difficult it is. We need something that will reduce the difficulty. Theories help with this because they identify unifying principles that orient and guide the implementation of individual strategies in coherent ways. Theories help explain observations rather than simply describing them. Here's a quote by Diana Kenney. She says, "without theory, observations remain descriptive rather than explanatory. And make it difficult, if not impossible, to develop appropriate ways to conceptualize and treat the condition" of anxiety. So she emphasizes that the treatment of a problem such as anxiety is facilitated when we can move beyond simply describing what is happening to understanding why. Theory helps us to do that according to her, because it helps us identify underlying principles and patterns that can explain the problem's generation and behavior. We're not just looking at describing this problem, but we're looking for the patterns and principles that help us explain why it's happening, and this in turn can facilitate the conceptualization and implementation of treatment because it can help organize available strategies within a framework. That framework can facilitate conceptualization, an understanding of the problem. It can offer clear and systematic direction in the implementation of treatment strategies and give guidance for putting theory into practice on an individual basis. So Diana Kenny helps us to understand that a theory is what we're looking for. A theory. Is a master key, that can help guide and orient the process of anxiety regulation.

I did extensive research on various theories in emotion science . And I introduced to you in the first episode the appraisal theory of emotion, which is one of the most empirically tested and most widely used theories in emotion science, or an affective science with an a. For those of you not familiar with it affective science or emotion science is an established, scientific domain that seeks to describe how emotions are embodied in the brain. So the appraisal theory, as we mentioned, was developed in the 1960s by Magda Arnold and Richard Lazarus, though it does have its roots in ancient thinkers, such as Aristotle and Hume and Spinoza and Sartre. Since the 1980s, researchers have been engaged in creating and empirically testing hypothesis based on the appraisal theory. And they have been offering variants to Arnold and Lazarus has original ideas, and come up with a group of theories or a family of theories called the appraisal theories. But for ease of talking about it, I'm simply going to refer to it in the singular, the appraisal theory. But when I say the appraisal theory, I am referring to this family of theories that have grown out of the original 1960s roots. In the last 50 years, the appraisal theory has become not only one of the major theories of emotion, but also one of the most influential.

I chose the appraisal theory to orient my research because it did elucidate those four questions that we originally proposed at the beginning of this podcast. It clarifies the difference between adaptive and maladaptive emotion. It helps us understand the difference between helpful anxiety and harmful anxiety. It helps to illuminate the basic principles behind these processes, behind the process of cultivating the helpful kind, and minimizing the harmful kind. It gives us a coherent framework to guide and facilitate the process of anxiety self-regulation. It makes the cultivation of helpful emotions more practical and memorable and energy efficient. We'll talk about appraisal theory based models as tools for meeting the challenge of matching strategies to circumstances, that third question that we talked about of choosing the right strategies, orienting the creation of sequences of strategies that are custom fit to individual circumstances. It gives us an organizing framework for the generation and individual adaptation of new strategies, and it gives us a basis that can guide not only strategy selection, choosing our strategies, but actual strategy implementation or practical application on an individual basis, to facilitate real world treatment.
We mentioned briefly last time, the quote that all models are wrong, but some are useful. They're wrong, because they're incomplete, they're simplified versions of reality, but they're useful because they can help us get an understanding, a concept of how things operate so that we can experiment, so that we can form hypotheses, so that we can test them, so that we can make predictions. Models are tools. They can help us to get more leverage to work within reality. Less useful models may not work in very many cases. More useful models will work in many or even most cases. The appraisal theory's long history of experimentation and tested hypotheses based on the appraisal theory can help us to have confidence that this model remains useful even after all the situations that it's been tested in. In these years, since it was originated, it has been fleshed out. Secondary models have been developed to help us to understand how it applies to specific types of situations, what it means and what it doesn't mean. And so we can take confidence in the large body of peer reviewed research, peer reviewed publications, that have examined appraisal theory for its accuracy and effectiveness.

And as I talked about in the last episode, the appraisal theory personally for me has been a very useful tool for my own anxiety management, because it has helped me to evaluate when my emotions are adaptive and when they are maladaptive. It has helped me to understand the principles that guide being able to cultivate the emotions that I want and minimize the emotions that I don't want. It's helped me to understand how to match strategies to changing circumstances, how to create sequences of strategies, even how to create new strategies and how to actually implement those strategies. It's been useful for applying the theoretical to the practical sphere.

I will teach you in the next episodes what I consider to be the most important or most consequential concepts from the appraisal theory, or the notches on this master key that unlocks all the doors. And then we'll get into why these concepts are so important. What the implications of these concepts are for your own practical anxiety management. After that we'll get into strategies. We'll be building your toolbox. I'll be giving you a big survey of strategies, but besides just giving you a list of tools you can use for anxiety management we will always be referring back to the appraisal theory to see what it teaches us about how, and when to use those strategies. We know that, for example, a hammer is useful when you have a nail, but it's not so useful when you have a screw. And the same is true of anxiety management. We need something that helps us to understand when certain strategies are appropriate for certain situations. So we'll always be referring back to the appraisal theory because it educates us about how and when to use those tools that we acquire. And beyond just when, it helps us understand how it can actually be done in the practical sphere, what it actually looks like.

So our next episodes will go like this. I'll give you foundational appraisal theory concepts that can guide your understanding of anxiety and its regulation. And then we'll get into the toolbox of strategies, what the tools are and how they fit into the appraisal theory framework so that you can know how to use them, when to use them, and what it looks like .We'll do this with not only solo episodes from me, but also with interviews from experts from a variety of fields who can offer their unique expertise to our understanding of anxiety mastery.
Tune in next week where we'll begin to zoom in on this master key, examine the notches on it and explain the concepts in the appraisal theory. Until then have a good week. And thanks for listening.