A psychology professor confesses the real reason she studies anxiety: It’s personal (Pt. 4)
I’ve spent almost two decades consumed with research on anxiety. I’m a professor at a university. I run studies and write reviews on the causes and consequences of anxiety and depression, as well as how to best design interventions to help young people cope with these mental health issues. I do this because anxiety and depression are the leading cause of disability worldwide and anxiety is the #1 most prevalent mental health concern, with 1 in 4 kids suffering. An astonishing 1 in 6 Americans are on some form of psychiatric medication. In previous posts in this series, I’ve written about how excited I am about the potential of scientifically-based, beautifully designed video games to help prevent and treat these mental health issues. But those scientific and socially-relevant reasons for studying anxiety are just half the story. It’s also personal.
I’ve struggled with anxiety all my life. As an adult:
· I used to have panic attacks before any important talk I needed to give (noteworthy given that my bread and butter comes from giving talks at conferences and lecturing to classes of 300+).
· I cannot make small talk without my heart-rate doubling. This means I loathe, to the point of complete avoidance, “social” work functions, cocktail parties, pretty much anyone ringing the doorbell at my house.
· I moved from Toronto (where I had close friends for 20+ years) to the Netherlands 7 years ago: I’ve made exactly one friend in that time.
· I make bullet lists of emotional issues to keep those issues looking standardized, in control, and well-managed. Control is a big fucking issue.
At the risk of minimizing other people’s experience with diagnosed anxiety disorders, I need to be clear that I don’t pass any clinical threshold. I could have it a lot worse. But I struggle. Like a very, VERY big percentage of people struggle. An estimated 40% of people are suspected to have serious-enough anxiety that they could be diagnosed if they sought professional help.
My professional hunch is that any kind of strict, binary threshold for “real” anxiety disorders misses the bigger point: Anxiety falls on a spectrum with most of us challenged to figure out how to cope at significant points in our lives. We’re all going to have to wrangle with intense anxiety at some point of high-stress (work transition, asshole boss, new baby, infertility, divorce, illness of a child), or during and after a traumatic experience (9/11, military duty, repeated media exposure to terrorist coverage, childhood abuse), and/or as we age and deal with the inevitability of death (Seriously. I have no idea how we don’t talk about this more. All the time. We’re all going to die and you’re reading this blog post and probably not losing your shit over that basic, indisputable fact).
Psychologists who research anxiety call it a “basic emotion” in that it is biologically wired for good reasons: We’d die without it. Without the signals that anxiety sends our body, to prepare for fight or flight, to pay close attention to the threat in front of us, coming straight on, we would have been tiger food long ago.
The problem with anxiety comes not when the tiger is in front of us. It comes from having a biological system that is wired to look for tigers, even when there are none around us. As we tune in and attend to cues in our environment that may be threatening, we can start generalizing too much and seeing threat in the most banal circumstances. It's this state of super vigilance to potential threats that can make us miserable. So, for example, during a public talk when I'm very anxious, instead of focusing and noticing the nodding heads and smiles, my cognitive-perceptual system will tune into the blank faces or the furrowed brows. Instead of reading these faces as interested or thoughtful, I'll start interpreting them as disgusted, confused, or bored. If this goes on for too long, I'm likely to lose my focus and passion for what I want to communicate. There's loads of very effective strategies to get over this type of anxiety-inducing attention, but my point here is that we are biologically wired to pay attention to threat and this wiring can backfire when the tiger is not actually in front of us.
I’m putting my own struggles with anxiety out here because authenticity has become more important to me, in my offline life for sure, but in my online one as well. I’m not going to be writing a self-help book or going through public therapy (not that there’s anything wrong with those things). But I think the hierarchical, pedantic approach that we psychological scientists, psychiatrists, and mental health practitioners often take is doing us no favours for the end game.
The truth is: Meditation apps, yoga retreats and the vast majority of Medium listicles on Productivity are basically anxiety-regulation hacks. Making that connection could help all of us talk more productively about both the hardships and potential benefits of anxiety (There are some great discussion on Medium already, about this potential, including James at Sanctus and Tom Hollenstein).
What am I reaching for? Connection, collaboration, empathy and kick-ass innovations that come from bridging worldviews and disciplines. If I’m asking for that kind of trust and collaboration — from young people themselves, from artists, designers, and my grad students who’ve gone all in towards this vision — I want to put my whole self in the game.
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Next up in the series:
· Examples of games we’ve developed, and the research to back them
· The AI systems that will break open how we think about mental health
· Profiles of our artist and design partners
· An open call for commercial games that emotionally empower us
Check out previous posts in this series:
Part 1: Video games for emotional and mental health
Part 2: Video games can do better than therapy for anxiety and depression
Part 3: Who would want to play a “serious” game?
Part 5: DEEP-VR: A stunning virtual reality for anxiety and depression
