Anxiety: How to beat the brain's emotional blackmail

If you’ve ever suffered from racing or intrusive thoughts, or found yourself paralysed by worry, it can seem that your brain, that amazing supercomputer running our day-to-day lives, is, in fact, a mortal enemy. Who, other than an enemy, would sometimes make us feel so bad about ourselves that we can’t function properly, or fill our minds with the very worst-case scenario every time we try to plan or achieve our goals?

The good news is your brain is not your enemy, in fact, it’s your greatest protector, managing to keep you and your ancestors alive for millions of years, long enough for you to be here, now, reading this article. However, there is something about our brains that we aren’t often told, the real key to understanding why our minds can sometimes seem to be working against us, and more importantly, how to pull ourselves out of anxiety, depression, and negative thinking. 

Your brain does not want you to be happy

The hard truth is our brains haven’t evolved to give us what we want, they have evolved to give us what we need. Specifically, what we’ve needed in order to do just two things: stay alive and get our genes into the next generation. That’s it. That’s all our brains care about, and they will do whatever it takes to make sure we follow these two simple goals, even if it makes us incredibly unhappy in the meantime. The brain still uses the same system to get us to stick to this simple agenda as it has done for millions of years.

Emotional blackmail, through the arising of feelings, that seemingly constant flow of energy in the body we call negative and positive emotion. If you're following the brain’s agenda, for example, making yourself seem a powerful, popular and attractive mate at work or amongst friends, or else keeping yourself safe and secure from anything your brain perceives as a threat, then you will be rewarded with warm and positive feelings. However, if you are not in line with the brain’s limited and often flawed perspective, this is when you find your mind flooded with negative, intrusive thinking, propped up by those familiar emotions of anxiety, rage, sadness, or self-loathing. These will continue relentlessly, demanding you solve whatever problem the brain has decided needs your full attention, or else be doomed to think and feel terribly until you do. 

But what if the problem can’t be solved or worse, doesn’t really exist?

Like a strict old-fashioned parent still living in the past, our brains often aren’t up to speed with the modern world and its problems. Evidence suggests that our brains haven’t evolved much in thirty-five thousand years, yet our lives have changed beyond recognition. So, while our brains still act like most of us live in caves or communities of a hundred or less, we are left trying to navigate busy competitive work and private lives formed from hundreds of different social connections or processing dysfunctional modern family dynamics that often leave us stymied. Not to mention more and more demands on our attention and self-esteem from the internet and social media. 

The world went and got an upgrade

Thirty-five thousand years ago our brains were sure of what was a threat and what wasn’t. Also, raising our social standing, or navigating personal and political issues in order to be useful and attractive were simple endeavours, involving members of a tribe we knew from the moment we opened our eyes. Now our tribe is the world, our social interactions and means of validation so nuanced and complex, our poor brains don’t know what is a problem and what isn’t, let alone how to solve it.

A work event with new colleagues can have the brain flooding the nervous system with the same level of anxiety needed to flee a hungry tiger. A negative comment by an acquaintance, or on social media bringing about self-recrimination levels to match being thrown out into the wildness by your closest allies.     

It's for these reasons that while our worlds have become bigger, more exciting and myriad in opportunity, we often find ourselves stuck on what I call the unhappiness treadmill; a cycle of negative thought leading to negative emotion which in turn leads to negative thought and so on, until we find ourselves lost in rumination and anxiety, or else shutting down the system completely in numbing depression, our brains unable to figure out a way out of the ever-expanding maze of modern life. 

Breaking the cycle and taking back control

Let’s not get too down on our brains, they are still the most sophisticated piece of computer hardware on the planet, allowing us to plan, build, and rationalise. They also help us learn incredibly fast, creating new neural pathways around our habits and efforts, running most things on autopilot to free us up to attempt and achieve even more. However, while our brains think they know what’s best for us, it’s clear that if we leave them totally in charge we are destined to run into problems. Therefore, in order to live a happier, more peaceful and freer existence we need to access a part of us that exists beyond all the automatic thinking of our evolutionary mind. 

Investing in the cultivation of awareness, through mindfulness therapy, (a combination of talking therapy, meditation, and body work) we soon become aware, and more importantly feel a different deeper calmer Self beyond all the conditioned thinking and emotional blackmail of the evolutionary brain. A part of us that is more conscious and autonomous and able to exist and react in the moment as the circumstances require without fear, guilt or anger.

I’ve spent many years studying the mind and finding the best therapeutic techniques from around the world to help clients access this part of themselves. Modern science and the latest brain scans show that people who live in this part of the mind, that part that lies beyond the default mode network of the evolutionary brain, are not only happier and calmer, but over time and with effort, their brain shape and function begin to change, rewiring to support and garner these positive emotions and ways of thinking in the long term. 

‘What we think we become’ a very great man once said. Without taking the time to cultivate attention and awareness in our lives and actions we are destined to think, feel and become whatever our brains tell us to. Mindfulness therapy provides a unique space to build a very different way of being, one that has your unique and individual happiness at its heart.