Imagine ... Harnessing the Positive Power of Anxiety by Being Curious

Curiosity: adapting quicker to changes in our environment!

Across the world, people are struggling with a heightened sense of anxiety. News reports only exacerbate this deeply-felt unsettling emotion. As part of my daily mindfulness practice, I severely limit my news exposure. I focus on living here and now and my anxiety levels are pretty low. Yet not noticing everything that comes across my phone's screen also takes energy, so the thought of spending 5 days in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains for a women's carpentry workshop presented an opportunity to really be away from it all. The anticipation brought me a sense of relief and joy. Imagine then my surprise when, while on the airplane, I noticed my stomach doing little flips as I visualized being there. As I explored compassionately what was going on, I realized that I felt uncertain and a little anxious about learning new skills and having to practice them in a group of people. Then I remembered what I learned from the short video “Anxiety gives you an advantage. Unlock it with neuroplasticity” and decided to share it with our Imagine community.

Dr. Suzuki, a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at the Center for Neural Science at New York University, calls out the positive part of anxiety. For her, “everyday” anxiety is the most misunderstood emotion, because there is also an “opportunity for growth” element to feeling anxious. She uses neuroscience to show us the gifts - even the superpowers - that can come from feeling anxious. Dr. Suzuki defines anxiety as “a feeling of fear or worry typically associated with a situation of uncertainty”. Developing a larger tolerance for that uncertainly by adding curiosity to our living mindfully toolbox will help us overcome our negativity bias. Negativity bias is a “cognitive bias that results in adverse events having a more significant impact on our psychological state than positive events. Negativity bias occurs even when adverse events and positive events are of the same magnitude, meaning we feel negative events more intensely”. (1) Mindfully acknowledging this phenomenon and savoring pleasant events creates more space, ease, and peace in our lives.

If you’re one of our alumni, you will recognize that when Dr. Suzuki talks about the pre-frontal cortex shutting down when we feel anxious, she refers to what we teach in our courses as “flipping your lid”. (2) Yet, we can use our brain’s plasticity to address this. Anxiety can be used to develop a mindset of “This is interesting, this might be something new to explore”. If we make being curious a daily practice, we develop flexibility. Curiosity helps us to move into a space where we can learn to become more comfortable beyond what we are usually comfortable with. This engaging video illustrates 2 of those superpowers, productivity and flow, and encourages us to find our very own superpower based on the anxiety we ourselves are most familiar with - and applying it to show empathy for our fellow beings, something the world needs now more than ever. (3)

So I encourage you to set aside 20 minutes of your time - and enjoy the wisdom Dr. Suzuki is sharing!  

• Summer

  
  

  (Executive Director and Instructor)

(And by the way, the carpentry workshop was just awesome! I learned a lot and couldn’t have been more grateful for the support and kindness shown by everyone at Wild Abundance.)

(1) From this article from the The Decision Lab

(2) Dan Siegel explaining his Hand Model "Flipping Your Lid".

(3) Wendy Suzuki’s book Good Anxiety - Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion.