Future Tense

Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad)

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

• Publisher: Harper Wave
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063062115
• eBook ISBN: 9780063062122
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education Counseling
• Index: Psychology

A psychologist confronts our pervasive misunderstanding of anxiety and presents a powerful new framework for reimagining and reclaiming the confounding emotion as the advantage it evolved to be.

We taught people that anxiety is dangerous and damaging, and that the solution to its pain is to eradicate it like we do any disease—prevent it, avoid it, and stamp it out at all costs. Yet cutting-edge therapies, hundreds of self-help books, and a panoply of medications have failed to keep debilitating anxiety at bay. A third of us will struggle with anxiety disorders in our lifetime and rates in children and adults continue to skyrocket.

That’s because the anxiety-as-disease story is false—and it’s harming us.

In this radical reinterpretation, Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary argues that anxiety is an evolved advantage that protects us and strengthens our creative and productive powers. Although it’s related to stress and fear, it’s uniquely valuable—allowing us to imagine the uncertain future and compelling us to make that future better. That’s why anxiety is inextricably linked to hope.

By distilling the latest research in psychology and neuroscience, including her own, combining it with real-world stories and personal narrative, Dennis-Tiwary shows how we can acknowledge the discomfort of anxiety and see it as a tool, rather than something to be feared and reviled. Detailing the terrible cost of our misunderstanding of anxiety, while celebrating the lives of people who harness it to their advantage, she argues that we can—and must—learn to be anxious in the right way.

Future Tense blazes the way for a paradigm shift in how we relate to and understand anxiety in our day-to-day lives—a fresh set of beliefs and insights that allow us to explore and leverage even very distressing anxiety rather than to be overwhelmed by it. Through this new prism of thinking, even anxiety disorders can be alleviated. Achieving a new mindset will not fix anxiety itself—because the emotion of anxiety is not broken; the way we cope with it is. By challenging our long-held assumptions about anxiety, this book provides a concrete framework for how to reclaim it for what it has always been—a gift rather than a curse, and a source of inner strength, joy, and ingenuity. 

Part I
Why We Need Anxiety

1
What Anxiety Is (and Isn’t)

Dr. Scott Parazynski and his space shuttle crewmates were speeding seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour on their way out of Earth’s atmosphere. Their destination was the International Space Station, a scientific hub, a stepping-stone for exploration of the solar system, and the largest structure humans have ever put into space. To many people, the ISS represents the pinnacle of human achievement.

By the time that mission took place in 2007, Scott was a veteran of four space shuttle flights and several extravehicular activities—space walks—in orbit. After retiring from NASA, he became the first person to have both flown in space and climbed to the summit of Mount Everest. This is a person who is comfortable with risk. But this mission carried an additional burden of significance. It had been delayed for three years after the space shuttle Columbia disaster, in which the spacecraft had disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members.

Yet for Scott and his team, the mission was worth the potential danger. They were to deliver and install a key component of the ISS that would connect and unify the US, European, and Japanese space labs within the station, providing additional power and life support and significantly expanding its size and capabilities.

After a week of new installations and routine repairs, things took an unexpected turn. Scott and a fellow crew member had just installed two huge power-generating solar cell panels. When the panels were opened and extended for the first time, a guide wire snagged, causing two large tears in them. That was a serious problem because the damage prevented the panels from expanding fully and generating enough energy to do their job.

For Scott to repair the torn solar cells, the team had to jury-rig an exceptionally long tether that would attach Scott to the end of a boom and then connect him—by his feet—to the end of the ISS’s robotic arm. Dangling from the boom, it took him forty-five minutes to move ninety feet along the wing and reach the damaged panels. His skills as a surgeon were crucial as he painstakingly cut the snagged wire and installed stabilizers to reinforce the structure.

After seven nail-biting hours, the mission was a success. The crew on the ISS and the team back on Earth erupted into cheers as the repaired panels successfully expanded to their full length. A photograph of Scott seeming to fly above the glowing orange solar wing is an iconic image of intrepid exploration in space. His achievement is said to have inspired the death-defying spacecraft repair depicted in the movie Gravity.

Almost eight years after his celebrated feat, I had the immense pleasure of speaking with Scott on the stage of the Rubin Museum of Art’s Brainwave program in New York City. Tall, blond, and rugged, he looks like a circa-1950s American hero. He has the manners of one, too, with his easy smile and sincere humility.

I asked Scott how he had kept his cool that day with nothing but a space suit between him and the void. With the fate of the mission resting on his shoulders, what had been the secret of his success?

The answer? Anxiety.

Anxiety and Fear

I probably don’t need to tell you what anxiety is.

It is a fundamentally human emotion, our companion since Homo sapiens walked upright. Anxiety activates our nervous systems, making us jittery and on edge, with butterflies in our stomach, a pounding heart, and racing thoughts. The word, derived from the Latin and ancient Greek words for “to choke,” “painfully constricted,” and “uneasy,” suggests that it is both unpleasant and a combination of the physical and emotional—a lump in our throat, our body paralyzed with fear, our mind frozen with indecision. It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that the word was commonly used in English to describe the range of thoughts and feelings we recognize today as anxiety: worry, dread, angst, and nervousness about situations with an uncertain outcome.

Often, you know why you are anxious: Your doctor calls, telling you she wants to schedule a biopsy. You are about to step out on stage to give a career-making speech before a crowd of five hundred strangers. You open a letter from the IRS informing you that it is auditing your tax return. Other times, our anxiety is more elusive, without any clear cause or focus. Like a maddeningly persistent alarm, this free-floating anxiety tells us that something is going wrong, but we can’t find the source of the beeping.

Whether general or specific, anxiety is what we feel when something bad could happen but hasn’t happened yet. It has two key ingredients: bodily sensations (unease, tension, agitation) and thoughts (apprehension, dread, worry that danger might be around the corner). Put the two together, and we see why choking gave anxiety its name. Where should I go, what should I do? Will it be worse if I turn left or right? Maybe it’s best if I just shut down or disappear altogether.

Anxiety is experienced not only as a feeling in our bodies but also as a quality of our thoughts. When we’re anxious, our attention narrows, we become more focused and detail oriented, and we tend to see the trees instead of the forest. Positive emotions do the opposite: they broaden our focus so that we get the gist of a situation rather than the details. Anxiety also tends to get our minds moving, worrying about and preparing for negative possibilities.

Though dread typically dominates our experience of anxiety, we are also anxious when we want something. I am anxious to board the plane that will take me to my much-overdue beach vacation, and no flight delays or rain better get in my way! This kind of anxiety is an excited frisson for a desired future. I am not, however, anxious to head to an annual holiday party, which is sure to feature the usual cast of characters drinking way too much. I already know I’ll have a bad time there. But whether our anxiety is due to dread or excitement, we become anxious only when we anticipate and care about what the future holds.

So why isn’t anxiety the same as fear? We often use the two words interchangeably, since both inspire unease and trigger “fight/flight” responses—the adrenaline rush, racing heart, and rapid breathing. Both anxiety and fear catapult our mind into similar states: laser focus, detail orientation, and readiness to react. Our brain is prepared, and our body is ready to snap into action. But there’s a difference.

One day recently, I was rifling through an old box stored in the attic. My hand touched something warm and furry that moved. I jumped back faster than I would have thought possible and pushed the box away. Research on the human startle response shows that it took me only a couple hundred milliseconds to react. My heart was racing, I broke out in a sweat, and I was definitely more awake and alert than I had been moments before. It turned out that the creature in the box was a little field mouse.

My response to that mouse was fear.

Now, I’m not afraid of rodents. I think field mice are cute and an important part of the ecosystem. Yet my fear response didn’t care that I don’t expect mice to bite me. Fear wasn’t interested in discussing the merits or cuteness of field mice and whether I really needed to jump back so quickly. And that’s a good thing, because my automatic response would have come in handy had the critter in the box been a scorpion instead—just as reflexively pulling my hand away after touching a pot of boiling water protects me from getting burned further.

My fear was reflexive, much as it was for the little mouse as she darted around the box and then froze in the corner to avoid detection. At no point did I—or the mouse—feel anxiety about an uncertain future. Danger was in the certain present, and we both acted automatically and quickly to deal with it (although later I heeded my anxiety about letting a rodent run rampant in my house and relocated her to a neighboring field).

Of course, human emotional life is much more complicated than reflexive fear, anger, sadness, joy, and disgust. Emotion science identifies these as the basic, or primary, emotions. They’re typically considered to be biological in origin and universal in expression. Animals share these emotions with us; that’s how fundamental certain feelings are.

Then there are the complex emotions, including grief, regret, shame, hate—and anxiety. The basic emotions are the building blocks of the complex ones, which transcend instinct; they are less automatic and more amenable to our thinking our way out of them. I might feel anxious the next time I reach into a box in the attic, wondering whether I’ll find another furry friend, but I can reassure myself that it is unlikely. Animals probably don’t experience complex emotions such as anxiety in the way humans do; my little mouse doesn’t have the capacity to vividly imagine a future in which giant hands might appear without warning to pluck her from the safety of her nest. If she did, that would make her the Jean-Paul Sartre of mice, complaining that Hell is other mice as she retreated to her solitary box and grappling with existential angst as she waits for the next hand to descend. Whatever the case, what we can know for sure is that she will have learned through her encounter with me to fear hands if she ever sees them again, and her fear will end once she escapes to a warm, safe corner.

Fear is the immediate, certain response to a real danger in the present moment that ends when the threat is over. Anxiety is apprehension about the uncertain, imagined future and the vigilance that keeps us on high alert. It occurs in the spaces in between—between learning that something bad could happen and its arrival; between making plans and being helpless to take any real action—like fighting or fleeing, as animals do—to ...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part I: Why We Need Anxiety
• 1: What Anxiety Is (and Isn’t)
• 2: Why Anxiety Exists
• 3: Future Tense
• Part II: How We Were Misled About Anxiety
• 4: The Anxiety-as-Disease Story
• 5: Comfortably Numb
• 6: Blame the Machines?
• Part III: How to Rescue Anxiety
• 7: Uncertainty
• 8: Creativity
• 9: Kids Are Not Fragile
• 10: Being Anxious in the Right Way
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher