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What if one of our most uncomfortable emotions could actually be seen as a gift, bringing us a wealth of insight, productivity, and empathy?

Neuroscientist Dr. Wendy Suzuki argues that by reframing anxiety as a misunderstood superpower, we can take advantage of it as fuel to enter flow state. Suzuki shares her science-backed trick for those saddled with the emotion, transforming it from a daily burden to a powerful tool.

WENDY SUZUKI: Anxiety is a normal human emotion. We all have it, okay? So you’re never gonna get rid of it. And we all have it because it is protective. It evolved to protect us. And so my whole book, “Good Anxiety,” is teaching us to look at anxiety in a different way, to really flip the script on anxiety and use neuroscience and tools from psychology as well to learn how to take advantage of anxiety and learn about the gifts or superpowers that come from it.

– [Narrator] How to turn anxiety into a superpower.

– It’s great to start with a simple definition of anxiety. So anxiety is the feeling of fear or worry, typically associated with situations of uncertainty. So it makes perfect sense why our global levels of anxiety have gone up over the last two-and-a-half, three years with a global pandemic. Nobody knew how to deal with this, a brand new, very, very scary, uncertain situation, but kind of reel it back into everyday life. Obviously, it pops up with lots of uncertain situations that many of us deal with every single day, but it’s important to realize that this human emotion, anxiety, this normal human emotion, anxiety, exists on a really, really, really wide spectrum. It goes from every day anxiety that can be from, you know, mildly annoying to kind of really, really annoying and really a drain on you. But then it goes all the way up to clinical levels of anxiety, that becomes a different beast. That becomes something that you must go see a medical professional to deal with. All of the techniques and the neuroscience that I talk about in my book, “Good Anxiety,” were really written for everyday anxiety. Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody with clinical anxiety can’t use those techniques, it’s just not the only thing that one should use if you have clinical anxiety. You should absolutely go see a medical professional. But I just wanted to make that clarification because there is a difference. And all of the approaches that I’m talking about are really for those of us, just everybody that has everyday anxiety. One thing that trips essentially all of us up is something called the negativity bias, which says that we are more prone to see the negative sides of things than the positive side. Why? It’s a safety mechanism. You wanna be extra careful if you are going to be, you know, in a dangerous situation rather than saying, “Oh, I’m gonna be just fine.” And so it is a protective evolutionary safety mechanism. But what happens is, if you’re tired, if you’re stressed, if lots of problems are coming up, you will tend to see the world in, “Oh my God, they hate me. This person hates me. “I’m never gonna get the job. “I’m never going to lose the weight that I wanna lose.” All these things come up as part of that negativity bias, and that becomes part of the, what I like to call, the big kind of stone of anxiety that you wear around your neck every day, kind of dragging it along with you. Part of that is the negativity bias. There are many, many different brain areas that get activated with anxiety, but simplistically there’s one that we know that is particularly activated in the similar emotions of fear and anxiety. And that is a brain structure called the amygdala. The amygdala is one that is kind of automatically activated when there is a possibility, you hear that, you know, that bump in the night, that launches your anxiety and the brain area that could help that calming that might happen in that situation is the prefrontal cortex, the area that’s involved in executive function. It helps you kind of order your day, but unfortunately, in situations of high stress, high anxiety, what happens is not only is your amygdala activated, but your prefrontal cortex get shut down too. So that makes the situation even worse. And so that’s part of what can happen when you, you know, one can kind of devolve into a really serious situation or a case of anxiety. Brain plasticity is the brain’s extraordinary ability to change and rewire itself in response to the external environment. And probably the most common form of brain plasticity that you’ve done today, I’ve done today already, is new learning. Every time you learn something new, there’s a change in my favorite brain structure, the hippocampus, that, you know, allows for the laying down of that new memory. This is something we’re doing all the time every day, but I’ve, in my work, tried to use and explore the boundaries of brain plasticity to address some very challenging issues that have come into the society, particularly our high anxiety levels. I use brain plasticity as the core of my entire research program. Memory, I started out studying memory as a form of brain plasticity. The effects of exercise on the brain, exercise is one of the best examples of positive brain plasticity. But when I started getting into anxiety, I realized how critical brain plasticity was to address anxiety. When I started writing this book, “Good Anxiety,” it was because I noticed in my students and my friends, my colleagues, myself, higher levels of anxiety. And this was well before the pandemic started. And so I started to write about what I knew about neuroscience and psychology that could really help us understand and address anxiety. But in the middle of writing the book, there was something that happened that completely changed the book for me and changed my attitude towards anxiety. And it wasn’t, it included anxiety, but it was really, a really situation of grief, and something that all of us unfortunately have to go through. In the period of three months, I lost my father and my younger brother, both of heart attacks. And I can tell you it was one of the most difficult times I’ve ever gone through in my whole life. And so it was impossible to write my book about anxiety. I put it on the side, I had to deal with all these feelings of grief, of sadness, of anxiety. Am I gonna feel better? And it was rough. And it took a while to come back. I used all the tools that I knew. I exercised, got myself into exercise. I reached out to my friends, I did my regular meditation. And I remember one day I was doing a video exercise, which is what I do every day. And I hadn’t seen this video before, but the trainer that day said something that helped me so much, and that was in the context of physical activity, she said, “With great pain comes great wisdom.” And I thought, “Oh my God, “that is what’s coming from the great pain of the grief, “including anxiety mixed in, that I’d gone through. “What is the great wisdom?” The great wisdom was that underlying that, that it was so painful and so acute because there was so much love behind that emotion. And I thought, “That is the thought “and the intention that I need to help me get out, “finish my emergence from this grief. “That what’s behind that was so much love.” And that, you know, it’s the flip side of love, which is this great grief if your loved ones pass away. And that was so helpful for me at this moment. And then I realized it was transforming the way that I was thinking about this anxiety book, because if that terrible emotion, negative, horrible emotion of grief had this silver lining of wisdom, what about anxiety? Could anxiety be helpful? And was my book just gonna be about techniques to reduce the big, bad anxiety? Or was I going to approach it as something that could be beneficial? That’s when the book changed for me. It became a quest that I needed, I needed something to put my mind on. And I dove into trying to find gifts or superpowers or beneficial elements from all the different kinds of anxiety that I read about, that I experienced, that I was writing about already. And that’s how I came up with the six gifts or superpowers of anxiety. They would not have come to light if I didn’t go through this experience in the middle of writing this book. But it shifted the way that I thought about anxiety. It shifted the way that I was able to recover from this. And it shifted my thoughts about human emotion in general. In “Good Anxiety,” I talk about six superpowers, but let me mention my top three. The first one is a superpower of productivity. Did you realize that your own form of anxiety could be a superpower of productivity? And it works like this. It focuses on one of the most common forms of anxiety that we all suffer from. I certainly suffer from it myself, which is that what if list, what if you didn’t do that? Or what if you did that and you didn’t do it right? And for me, it hits me right before I’m gonna go to sleep and it disrupts my sleep. So what do you do? That is your anxiety welling up. And so here is the trick, that anxiety is focused on things that are important to you in life. That is the key. You don’t get up in the middle of the night worrying, “Oh my God, I didn’t finish that last episode “of the Netflix series I’m watching,” right? It’s about the project you’re working on, about a really important relationship. So these are things that are important to you. And so the way to transform it is to turn that what if list into a to-do list. Take each one of them and do an action, you know, put an action on each one of them, whether it’s asking a friend for help, doing something, Googling something and go tick through them one by one. How does that help? It helps because evolutionarily, anxiety evolved to have us put an action on it. Typically, 2.5 million years ago, it was either you fight the danger that was causing anxiety or you run away from it. That is the fight or flight response. And so you can help alleviate that form of anxiety by putting an action on it. Even if it is, “I’m gonna ask a friend,” “I’m going to spend 30 minutes of detailed work “on this thing that I’m worried about.” That is how you get productivity from your anxiety. And that is superpower number one. Superpower number two is the superpower of flow. And this one I’m very proud of because all the data out there says that anxiety can eliminate flow. So flow is a psychological state. I like to think about it as it’s those moments that you’re doing something that you’re really good at and it’s really exceptional. Time stands still, you know, it’s like you’re moving in slow motion and everything is just going beautifully. And I always think, I’m a student of the cello. I always think of Yo-Yo Ma, who’s playing the box solo cello suites, you know, not every single time, but that one time at Carnegie Hall, the sound was just so beautiful. He was in flow. And so I knew I wanted to talk about flow, but I couldn’t just say, “Well, sorry, if you have anxiety, “no flow for you.” And so I was experiencing writer’s block. I didn’t know how I was gonna bring this concept in without being very just depressing about it. And so to alleviate my writer’s block, I went to yoga class, a yoga class. So I go to yoga class, I’m doing my up dog, my down dog. I flip the dog. I was doing really well. And then I get to the end of class and I go into my favorite pose, which is of course, Savasana, laying down in Savasana and it hits me that I am flowing in Savasana, that I am laying on the ground still better than anybody has laid down on the ground still. At least I feel like I’m flowing in Savasana, okay? And maybe it’s not classic flow, maybe it’s micro-flow. And so I came up with this concept of micro-flow, and then I realized that my micro-flowing Savasana was even sweeter. Why? Because I had writer’s block. I had that anxiety about what was gonna happen. I didn’t know, that uncertainty was coming in. And so that I realized that your own anxiety can make your own moments of micro-flow, which we all have during the day, even if you don’t realize you do, make them even sweeter. And so it’s kind of a realization that your own anxieties, helping those moments of micro-flow be even, as I like to say, flowier. That’s superpower number two. Superpower number three, that comes from your own anxiety is my favorite of all the superpowers. And it comes from my own evaluation of my own anxiety, my own history of anxiety. And I was a very, very shy young girl growing up. So, you know, hiding behind my mom’s legs, I was always interested in class, but always had this fear of asking questions in class. Why? For the same reason everybody’s afraid. You’re afraid you’re gonna say something stupid and you’re gonna look like an idiot in front of the whole class. So I had that fear all through my very, very long educational process. But I was interested in teaching and in academia. So one day I find myself at the front of the classroom, and here’s what I realized. I didn’t realize it then, but I realized it later that that lifelong anxiety of shyness and being afraid to ask in class gave me a superpower of teaching in that classroom. Because I knew instinctually that there were maybe 10 times as many people that had questions that didn’t have the bravery to lift their hand up, but they were just having silent questions in their brain. So I always came early, stayed late, made sure that I had a moment of private time to answer questions for everybody. And so that became my superpower. But here’s how it works for everybody. Think about that anxiety that is most familiar to you, your most common form of anxiety. You know what it feels like, you know what it looks like. All you have to do is turn that anxiety to the outside and notice when others might be suffering from that same form of anxiety. And here’s your superpower. All you have to do is give a kind word, a simple helping hand in that situation. That becomes your own superpower of anxiety that’s based on your own form of anxiety. And I love the superpower because I can’t think of anything that we need more in the world today than higher levels of empathy.