GOOD ANXIETY: Can You Turn Worrying Into a Superpower?

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Social Sciences, Society & Culture, Education, Science

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2022

⏱️ 44 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

To fret is human. That’s according to recent estimates that suggest 90 percent of the population experiences anxiety. And because anxiety, even in mild forms, can zap our confidence, squelch our sex drives, isolate us from friends and loved ones, most of us have concluded that anxiety is pretty much always a bad thing. But not neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki. In her new book, “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion,” she argues that we should treat anxiety like a form of energy. “Think of it as a chemical reaction to an event or situation,” she writes. “Without trustworthy resources, training, and timing, that chemical reaction can get out of hand—but it can also be controlled and used for valuable good.” Today, Wendy sits down with Lauren Miller Rogen (she's a filmmaker and the co-founder, along with her husband, actor Seth Rogen, of the non-profit Hilarity for Charity, which provides a range of free services to support families impacted by Alzheimer’s) to discuss the science-backed tools you can use to worry well.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Rufus Griskem and this is the next big idea.
0:10.0	Today, is there such a thing as good anxiety?
0:30.0	Tell me if this sounds familiar.
0:48.0	I think just about everyone, at least once, has experienced that kind of palm-sweating, heart-thumping, mind-racing anxiety,
0:56.0	just like I'm sure that everyone has experienced anxiety in its milder forms.
1:00.0	A nod in your stomach, a tremor in your voice, a vague sense of impending doom.
1:04.0	It's no wonder then that most of us have concluded that anxiety is bad news, but not Wendy Suzuki.
1:12.0	A few years ago, Wendy, who's a professor of psychology at neuroscience at NYU,
1:16.0	noticed that there seemed to be an anxiety crisis among her students.
1:20.0	She decided to figure out why, and as she dug into the research, she came to a startling conclusion.
1:26.0	Everyone was always talking about avoiding anxiety or getting rid of it altogether.
1:32.0	I'm sure that makes sense when you consider that anxiety in its most extreme form can be absolutely debilitating.
1:38.0	But our brains didn't develop their anxious tendencies for the sole purpose of making us miserable.
1:44.0	Anxiety, Wendy, says, is actually essential to our survival.
1:48.0	It's the mechanism our brains developed for detecting threats.
1:51.0	It causes us to pay attention, analyze the danger we perceive, and decide if we're going to fight, flee, or freeze.
1:58.0	From the perspective of a hunter-gatherer, anxiety was a good thing.
2:02.0	It forced them to perk up and figure out if that twig snap they just heard was caused by a harmless squirrel or a menacing tiger.
2:09.0	There are just two problems.
2:11.0	First, these days most of us don't encounter menacing tigers at our daily environments.
2:15.0	Second, our bodies can't differentiate between real and imagined stress.
2:20.0	That means non-threatening scenarios can trip our anxiety triggers and send us into a downward spiral of unwarranted angst.
	...

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