Judson Brewer, Elizabeth Bernstein and Mitchell Kaplan on Finding Inner Calm

Elizabeth Bernstein has a column on positive mental health in the Wall Street Journal named “Bonds.” The two columns shown above given hints about how to get more inner calm.

“New Strategies for Calming Your Pandemic Anxiety” is an interview with Judson Brewer, author of Unwinding Anxiety. Elizabeth asked Judson “So how can we learn to stop fueling our anxiety?” Judson said this:

There’s a three-step process. The first step is to recognize anxiety habit loops. Recognize that you’re worrying. Ask yourself: “Is this helping me solve the problem?”

Step two is to … see how unrewarding worrying is. Ask yourself: “What am I getting from this? When I worry, does it keep my family safe? Or is this making me feel worse and not better?”

Step three is … to give your brain something more rewarding to do than worrying. … You can be curious about your experience. And you can be kind. Anxiety and worry feel closed and contracted. Curiosity and kindness open you up.

Judson also made these useful and non-obvious points (bullets added to separate passages):

  • Curiosity feels better than anxiety. It helps us focus on the moment rather than worrying about the future. And it helps us gather accurate information, which is what our brain needs to be able to think and plan.

  • One of my patients has a mantra she uses when she starts to feel anxious, to remind her that she is not in danger: “Oh, this is just my brain.”

  • When we are stressed or anxious, our shoulders tense, our jaws clench and our eyes narrow. You can bring awareness to this: “Oh, my eyes are narrowed.” Then open your eyes really wide. This helps trigger curiosity, because of the association in our mind between eyes wide open and curiosity. Wide-eyed wonder is the epitome of curiosity. It’s not called narrow-eyed wonder.

  • Anxiety triggers procrastination, especially for perfectionists, because we worry our solution to the problem won’t be good enough. Procrastination feels better than being anxious or trying to come up with a solution.

  • Habit loops have three elements: a trigger, a behavior and a reward. Anxiety … becomes a habit when the feeling of anxiety triggers us to worry and that worry results in us feeling like we are in control …

In “The Therapeutic Value of Reading,” Elizabeth says this:

Books are good for the brain. And their benefits are particularly vital now. Books expand our world, providing an escape and offering novelty, surprise and excitement, which boost dopamine. They broaden our perspective and help us empathize with others. And they can improve our social life, giving us something to connect over.

Books can also distract us and help reduce our mental chatter.

She also quotes bookstore owner Mitchell Kaplan saying this:

There’s so much noise in the world right now and the very act of reading is a kind of meditation. You disconnect from the chaos around you. You reconnect with yourself when you are reading. And there’s no more noise.

These are all excellent insights. Beyond these insights, what has been working for me to find inner calm is mindfulness meditations apps such as 10% Happier and the Positive Intelligence tools I talk about in these posts:

Both mindfulness and the other tools of Positive Intelligence is that your inner critic and other chatter fueled by the survival part of your brain are constantly saying things that aren’t very helpful. It is possible to recognize this chatter for what it is and get it to quiet down by exercises such as getting into your body more by focusing on bodily sensations. Methods for awakening power such as empathy, curiosity, and a can-do attitude can also help.

Here is what I think is going on from an evolutionary perspective. The abilities to talk garrulously to both ourselves and other humans and to think at length about the past and the future are very recent in our evolutionary history. We know that because our abilities in those regards go far beyond all the extant species we know of on earth. Even aside from the issue that what is good for our genes may not alway be what makes us happy, genetic evolution hasn’t had time to work out all the kinks in what talking to ourselves and thinking about the past and future does to our psychology.

Fortunately, the ability to talk to one another—and the later invention of writing—kicked off the much speedier process of memetic evolution as useful or otherwise catchy ideas spread and evolve in a soup of minds. (On memetics, see my posts “How Did Evolution Give Us Religion?” and “Jonah Berger: Going Viral.”) A few thousand years is the blink of an eye relative to genetic evolution, but it is a long time in the arena of memetic evolution once we had writing and a large human population size. We are finally homing in on best practice for being happy. But within your lifetime, you will still have to be an early adopter in order to get the benefits for your own happiness.