Chapter 1
Perception of Threat
Do you ever feel as though you were living your life hooked up to an IV drip of fear? 6:00 a.m.: I couldn’t get to sleep last night. Now I’ll be too groggy to be productive. 6:01 a.m.: Did I check whether the kids did their homework? 6:02 a.m.: God, I hope the market holds! And so on throughout your day.
The fact is, you are living with a virtual IV drip of fear, a steady dose of stress hormones that you experience as anxiety and worry. It’s a prescription written for you and delivered to you by your own brain. And trying to do something about it has only made it worse.
This book will show you why you can’t control your anxiety. Indeed, it will show you that the very things you’ve been doing to try to control your anxiety are actually what maintain your anxiety. Resisting, avoiding, and distracting yourself from your anxiety are behaviors that send the wrong message to your brain. These behaviors fuel a cycle of anxiety that always leads to a bigger dose. I call it feeding the monkey. By the monkey, I mean the monkey mind, a metaphor as old as the behavior itself. Let me explain what I mean.
For thousands of years, sages have likened the human mind to a monkey—leaping into thin air from one branch of thought to another, never content, never at rest. Worries echo in our heads like so much monkey chatter. Powerful emotions have us jumping at anything that promises a little relief. Yet somehow relief always lies just beyond our reach.
Whether due to genetic traits or traumatic life events, millions of us suffer from excess anxiety. But regardless of what variety or intensity our anxiety manifests, there is one thing that is true for all of us. We cannot relax and be at peace unless we feel safe. Humans and all other creatures, regardless of species, are first and foremost survival machines. Maintaining safety is, by necessity, our highest priority. When we feel that our safety is at stake, everything else—appreciating the beauty and wonder of life, pursuing the heart’s desires, or simply being “present in the moment”—becomes expendable.
Whether or not you believe your personal safety is at stake, you’ve been living as if it were. The way we anxious folks are wired, we don’t feel like we have any choice. In order to understand how this has happened to us, let’s take a brief trip to what is sometimes called the “fear center” of the brain.
Deep within the core of your skull, at the top of your spinal column, is a pair of almond-sized nuclei called the amygdalae. All experience—everything you see, smell, hear, touch, feel, or think—passes through the amygdalae like travelers passing through airport security. There in the amygdalae each experience is instantly and automatically screened for threat.
When there is a perception of threat, the amygdalae set off an alarm system that alerts their neighbors, the hypothalamus and the adrenal glands, which in turn send hormonal and neurological signals to the sympathetic nervous system, instructing it to accelerate the heart rate and breathing, bathe you in stress hormones, and shut down digestion and other unnecessary functions—in short, to go into survival mode.
How we experience survival mode—what it feels like to us—is crucial not only to our safety but to our sense of well-being. Depending on the perception of threat, we may experience these alarms as uncomfortable physical sensations, like heart palpitations and sweating, and negative emotions like fear, anger, and shame. These feelings are not conducive to our peace of mind. They can override everything else we want to think about and act upon—in effect, they hijack the rest of the brain.
If you are unable to enjoy the higher functions you are capable of—the ability to relax, to experience joy, to move toward your dreams—that alarm system is being overused. You are living with an IV drip of low-level negative emotion, otherwise known as anxiety. You are surviving, but not thriving. Your purpose on earth is being trumped by the misperceptions of threat and the false alarms of the amygdalae or, to borrow the sages’ metaphor, the monkey mind.
Why a monkey? Isn’t the source of our fear and anxiety more like a monster to be vanquished, a demon to be exorcised? Hardly. This part of your brain is a loyal, hardworking component dedicated to your safety. It just gets a little wild and overreactive sometimes, like a monkey.
A Call to Action
Imagine you are crossing a busy intersection on your way to work in the morning when a truck runs a red light and heads straight in your direction. Instinctively, in a fraction of a second, you leap to the curb, out of the truck’s path. Your heart is pounding and your hand is shaking so hard your coffee is spattering on your sleeve. This is the fight-or-flight response, and while you may not enjoy the feeling, it has kept us alive for thousands of years.
This early warning system is so quick and powerful that it overrides the rest of your brain. Whatever else you were focusing on—watching the walk light, thinking about the meeting you are heading to—falls away so dealing with the threat can take center stage. This is as it should be, for after all, the number one job of the brain is staying alive. The fight-or-flight response is the call to action of the monkey mind. Without it, we’d all be busy cliff diving and petting snakes.
As if keeping us safe were not a big enough responsibility, the monkey mind is also instrumental in performing the number two job of the brain, that of keeping us connected to each other. In addition to threats like charging wild boars, club-wielding rivals, and speeding trucks, the monkey mind can recognize social threats to our survival. It’s hardwired to do so. Even in our earliest stage of life, infancy, we can perceive safety or danger in the facial expressions of our parents. Why is this necessary? We humans are thin-skinned, without sharp teeth or claws, and not very strong—what other predatory animals might call a soft target. We have always hunted and housed ourselves together in packs, so we can watch out for each other. Your ancestors’ social status within their families and tribes was crucial to their survival.
In order to protect your social status, your monkey mind is always watching and listening to those around you, looking for signals telling whether you are respected, whether you are loved, and whether you belong. If you are alienating your neighbors, irritating your friends and family, or a subject of scorn to your community, even if you are not aware of it, the monkey reads the signals and sounds the alarm. A serving of fear, with a side order of shame, will focus your attention and remind you that you need to play well with others.
Primordial Threat
These two ever-present possibilities—death, and losing social status or being kicked out of the tribe—are universal, what I call primordial threats. The ability to recognize primordial threats is so important that it is built into our brains, part of our operating system. You don’t have to teach a toddler not to put her hand in the fire or walk off a cliff. The ability to recognize heights, loud noises, snakes, bared teeth, and other dangerous situations as potential threats is universal. The hard-learned lessons of our ancestors are bequeathed to us in our DNA, informing the monkey mind’s ability to perceive threats and thus enabling humanity to survive.
Unfortunately, the monkey is also the source of all our modern anxieties. Why? Because when the monkey is presented with something it hasn’t been programmed to recognize, it has to guess whether or not it’s a threat. For those of us with a lot of anxiety, our monkey mind’s guesses err on the side of safety. This makes for plenty of misperceptions.
If on the day after your close call with a speeding truck, you find yourself standing anxiously at the curb, clutching your coffee, waiting for the walk sign to turn, you may wonder why you’re feeling so jumpy. You remember the vivid image of that speeding, homicidal truck clearly, but you know very well that incident was an anomaly. There is statistically little risk crossing the street when the walk sign is on. Nevertheless, you are anxious. That’s because the monkey mind cannot do risk assessment. Just like a real monkey, it is no good at math.
When that memory of the oncoming truck flashes across your mind, the monkey notices and makes a guess at your danger level. Without pausing to reflect (because it can’t reflect), it sounds the alarm. When the monkey mind hits the fear button, we are as simple and single-minded as our forebears. Anxiety is a call to action. The monkey is screaming, Woo-woo-woo! Something is wrong. Do something!
How you react depends on how you’ve learned to react in the past. You might stand frozen in fear for a few moments, waiting until others cross safely. You might avoid that corner in the future, or you might white-knuckle your way across the street, shaming yourself for your fear, muttering This is ridiculous!
When the monkey uses its trump card, usually whatever we do is ridiculous. Once your fight-or-flight reflex is activated, the chemicals, hormones, and emotions at work in your body hijack the rest of your brain.
This is quite an accomplishment for such a little critter. The prefrontal cortex, known as the executive brain, is the size of an elephant compared to the monkey mind. It’s the greatest cognitive engine in history: the primary tool used in the writing of Hamlet, invention of the iPhone, and perhaps someday, a cure for cancer. Yet with the help of a little anxiety, the monkey can make the elephant stand on its hind legs and trumpet its snout in terror. No matter how smart you are, no matter how crystal clear your vision, everything is distorted when viewed through the lens of fear.
Hijacked
When we are hijacked by the monkey mind, we make two simple mistakes. First, we overestimate the threat. What are the actual odds of another homicidal truck appearing the moment you step into the street today? The chance is practically nil, but you’re trusting a wild guess of the monkey: Woo-woo-woo! Looks likely to me!
The second mistake is that we underestimate our ability to cope with both the negative emotions in the monkey’s alarm, and with the threat should it actually occur. Whether we’re crossing the street or climbing a ladder, accidents happen. When you attempt any task, you can fail. When you open your mouth to speak you may offend someone. But life doesn’t stop when threats manifest as reality. We cope. We recover. We can learn from our mistakes and move on. Nor should life stop when we’re feeling the negative emotions and sensations of the monkey’s alarms.
But many of us have our lives on hold. The ambient background of anxiety keeps us paralyzed, unable to follow our dreams. We spend our days—and for some of us, nights—reviewing the past for errors and looking into the future to prevent making more. We debate decisions we’ve already made, recycle old concerns, indulge endless regrets, obsess over things we can’t control. It’s all in response to a constant stream of negative feelings and monkey chatter. Woo-woo-woo! Something is wrong. Do something!
We try to manage things. We check our smartphones or turn on the TV. We pour ourselves a drink, we get a snack, we go shopping. We triple-check the report for errors. We say yes to things when we want to say no. We look up symptoms on the Internet to reassure ourselves the mole is not cancerous.
These distractions and strategies offer only short-term relief. The monkey mind is always on the job, hypervigilant, waiting for an opening. If you’ve ever tried meditating, and given up in frustration, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The moment your focus wavers, the monkey elbows in with something compelling to feel anxious about and occupy your mind.
When it comes to the monkey mind, the cliché resistance is futile is actually true. The monkey mind is an ancient brain-within-a-brain—simple, focused, and hardwired to be autonomous, beyond our direct control. The monkey is always there, even when you most want to enjoy the moment without it—when you’re alone just trying to relax, when you’re in your lover’s arms, when you are trying to pursue your dreams.
While this may sound discouraging, it is actually good news. If you can conceptualize your anxiety as a false alarm, and your anxious thoughts as being like the chattering of a monkey, you have already begun your healing. You understand that the monkey mind is a working part of you, but you are not the monkey.
In cognitive behavioral therapy we call this defusion. Becoming aware of this difference de-fuses—creates a distance between—the part of you that is hyperreactive to threat and the rational part of you that can notice your thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations, and learn to override them when necessary. Working with patients, I’ve learned that defusion is a lot easier when we conceptualize the source of anxiety not as a monster within, but only as a frightened little monkey trying to do its job.
This book will teach you how to develop resilience to the monkey’s alarms so that you can think and act clearly in situations where you are usually hijacked. Having more resilience will also allow you to be more resourceful and flexible when real threats arise. With practice you will eventually experience less anxiety, which I imagine is why you are reading this book. And there’s a bonus. While following this practice you’ll also reclaim your personal values and reorient yourself toward what your heart desires.
With your new awareness of the monkey mind, you’ve taken the first step on your path to recovery. You understand now that your anxiety does not define you. It is a distinct part of you that is beyond your direct control. Coming up, step two: recognizing how anxiety affects your thinking. What happens to your point of view when you get hijacked by the monkey?
