The 3 best ways to tackle anxiety, according to a leading expert

One might expect that a cognitive psychoanalyst, former head of NHS mental health and author of How to be your own therapist And Addicted to anxietyto offer some fairly familiar advice to anyone suffering from anxiety. Yet Owen O’Kane’s view is refreshingly different. Rather than viewing anxiety as something to be eliminated, he argues that it is something we must embrace. In fact, contrary to the popular brain-based advice that dominates social media, he believes the most effective starting point is not the mind but the body. Here he tells New scientist the three things we should do to reframe our relationship with anxiety – and live well alongside an anxious mind.

1. Rethink your relationship with anxiety – it’s trying to help you!

Scientific studies on anxiety often point to treatments that help you “turn off this part of your brain” or “reduce this or that hormone.” I fundamentally believe this is not the right way to deal with anxiety. Before we even start thinking about the brain, we need to establish a better relationship with our anxiety. We must learn to know him. Work with it. Negotiate with him. Understand why it is there.

There is a part of you that is sometimes afraid, and when that feeling arises, it manifests itself as anxiety to get your attention. It does this to get you to react – it’s a useful mechanism that protects you from danger. If you look at anxiety as a person, it feels like you’re doing the right thing. If you’re worried about ruining a presentation, that means “okay, I can make sure you don’t feel bad about this, that it doesn’t go badly. I can get you out of here in 30 seconds.”

But if you treat your anxiety like an enemy, that’s exactly what it will become. This heightened feeling also means you could lose a job or opportunity. But if you always think about it as a person, your anxiety doesn’t care about your losses, it does its best to keep you safe.

If you don’t start by establishing a relationship with anxiety and understanding that yes, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s because it makes you pay attention, then everything else is just a band-aid. This will reduce your anxiety, but it will eventually creep back up. Anyone who promises you tools to get rid of anxiety is lying to you. The anxiety has to be there, and you have to accept it to improve anything.

2. Consider changing your body, not your brain

Many psychiatrists immediately focus on the brain, trying to help you change your thoughts. But my key starting point is the body. Most people can feel anxiety somewhere in their body: in their heart, their shoulders, their neck. When anxiety manifests in the body, it is in a state of alert. This sends a message to the brain that something is wrong. The brain will then accept this information and subsequently, the prefrontal cortex – the part of the brain that helps us to be a little more rational and measured – is suppressed.

When you notice your body reacting, do everything possible to release this state of threat. This could include breathing, exercise, or an ice bath. Everything that regulates your body. And do it knowing that you’re not doing it to get rid of the anxiety, but to be able to send a new message to the brain to turn off that threat response so that your prefrontal cortex can come back online and allow you to work with the anxiety in a much more measured and calm way.

3. Write about what really happened to increase your tolerance for uncertainty

We have several thousand thoughts every day, according to neuroscientists. And studies suggest that a significant percentage of them are negative, critical or fearful in nature. That’s a lot of dark and scary thoughts. Most of it is not factual, but when you are in a state of anxiety, you will deal with these thoughts as if they were scientific evidence, creating an anxiety loop.

After accepting that anxiety is trying to help you and determining what helps your body regulate itself, I encourage you to start taking note of what happened when these anxious thoughts arose. List the spiral of worries and think about how many of them came true. Start looking at the evidence. This may allow you to be a little more rational about them the next time they appear.

An anxious person might say: but what about x percent of the time a bad thing happens? I tell them that they cannot have certainty all the time, the world we live in is uncertain. The definition of anxiety that I agree with is that it is an intolerance of uncertainty. You need to get comfortable with not knowing and accept the idea that not everything has to be perfect. It’s a bit of a dance, but for someone who suffers a lot from anxiety, the reality is that there is no other choice, you can either stay as you are or try this alternative view of uncertainty. Ask yourself what it would be like to let go of that control, to surrender to unpredictability. This is all very difficult, but every time you change the way you respond to anxiety, you create new neural pathways in the brain that will help you live more comfortably with anxiety.

As told to Helen Thomson