Anxiety can feel like the enemy. However it shows up — a tightness in the chest, a knot in the stomach — it’s easy to want to obliterate those feelings.
“Anxiety evolved to help protect us,” says Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neural science and psychology at the Center for Neural Science at New York University. “We need to recalibrate our level of anxiety to get it back to that level where it is superprotective for us.”
In her new book, Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion, Suzuki outlines strategies to turn that sinking feeling into something productive. Anxiety, she says, is trying to give us information about what we appreciate and what we value in our lives.
Suzuki spoke with NPR’s Life Kit about how we can use emotional regulation when faced with anxiety-inducing situations, positive coping strategies that can help and the upside of anxiety.
Selected Interview Highlights
What are some positive coping strategies to deal with your mindset?
I like to encourage an exploratory kind of mindset, and then we come to the [anxiety-provoking] situation itself. … What do you do if you get anxious during the actual event? Continue to kind of try to use that deep breath to calm yourself. The other thing that you can do is distract. The third thing is preparation. Prepare with somebody else. Have them go over the questions that they might ask you. Have them ask you the hardest questions in the situation that they can think of, and practice, practice, practice getting comfortable.
Let’s go a little bit more into the upsides of anxiety. What are the gifts of anxiety? What can it do for us?
Number one is a gift of productivity that comes from anxiety. So often anxiety kind of shuts us down — we can’t focus. However, here is a gift that can come from your anxiety, and that is that “what if” list that comes with your anxiety. Everybody can turn your “what if” list into a to-do list. It’s satisfying because, again, going back to evolution, our stress response and the anxiety response evolved to be resolved with an action.
You talk about this concept of supercharging resiliency as a key to transforming anxiety into good anxiety. How can someone build up that muscle when they feel like their everyday anxiety is flaring up?
Mindset is so powerful and can be the difference between being beaten down by anxiety or being able to use that to build your resilience. The secret is to approach every single anxious situation with an activist mindset. That allows you to think, “What are some of these different ways that I can approach it?”
If you lean into those emotions, it really does allow you to have a more fulfilling, more creative and ultimately less stressful life.
Excerpted from “Good Anxiety Does Exist. Here’s How You Can Benefit From It” on NPR‘s Life Kit. Read the rest of the interview highlights in the full article online.
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Source: NPR | Good Anxiety Does Exist. Here’s How You Can Benefit From It, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/07/1034777586/good-anxiety-benefits-coping-strategies | © 2021 npr
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