The prefrontal cortex has the ability to override the reactive behaviors I discussed earlier. For example, thanks to your nucleus accumbens you could find yourself sitting in traffic uselessly honking at the person in front of you. You could think to yourself, Why am I doing this? It is clearly not having the desired effect, I think I’ll stop, and stop honking. You can even ask yourself, Is this actually a threat to me, and can I do anything about it?, as I recommended in the last section, which will help you to calm down. You don’t even need the inner dialogue, but I’m making a point. Your prefrontal cortex can alter or completely reverse decisions made by other areas of the brain and all you need are your own thoughts. In fact, if you have the right kind of activity in your prefrontal cortex as you enter the traffic, it will prevent your amygdala from identifying it as a threat in the first place.
Again, for those readers who are just flipping through pages:
We begin responding to stress before we have a chance to think about it.
However, we have the ability to overcome our initial response.
Unfortunately, a lot of people do not use their conscious mind in the way I just described, and some seem to not use it . . . at all. Instead of using our thoughts to modify our behavior, we get caught up in the moment and our stress influences our thoughts. We start to think about how much we hate being in traffic and how that person in front of us has plenty of room to move forward, and what is the hold up anyway? Don’t these people know that Judy is late for work? Judy has better places to be than in traffic.
Learning how to increase the right kind of prefrontal activity, or thoughts, and being able to consciously redirect choices made by other areas of the brain, is the key to living a less stressful existence.
As I often say: if you don’t like the way you feel, change your mind . . . er, thoughts.
Worry Is the Worst
Now that you understand stress as simply a reaction to a perception of threat, I want to share a bit about an interesting phenomenon we all engage in where the brain creates its own stress. I would even argue that the vast majority of the stress we experience is self-induced. That is, we feel stress when there is no real external threat to us, only some challenged belief, value, or expectation of ours. In other words, a thought. Yep, most of our stress is imaginary. Those no-good stinking unicorns.
Worry is a thought process that falls into this category and it is just the worst. Worrying is nothing more than internally generated stress—stress we impose on ourselves thanks to some particularly troublesome thoughts. Worrying is a behavior, although a mental one, and we often worry about life stressors, but worry itself can sometimes be the cause of additional stress.
Let me give you an example, again with the traffic. Imagine you get up a little late one morning and hop in the car for your morning commute. On your way to the highway you start thinking about the fact that you woke up later than usual and because of this you might hit additional traffic. You could think to yourself, Oh man, I bet there is going to be traffic. I am so going to get fired. Consider what just happened—you are driving normally and you have just caused yourself to elevate your stress level in anticipation of something that hasn’t even happened and may not happen. You have generated stress unnecessarily thanks to your own thoughts. And another thing, Judy, you really should get your life together.
I often speak out against worry, and I do so for the reason that it is a really bad habit and one that we may not recognize as such. As a form of mental behavior, worrying too much, over a lifetime, can be a major contributor to developing an emotional disorder like anxiety or even depression. It is a behavior that we can change, and doing so is probably in our best interest.
And yet, we all worry. Maybe not all the time, but we all have moments where our negative anticipations consume us and cause us stress. As I mentioned in my introduction, I am a really happy guy and yet I occasionally worry. I mostly worry about my daughter, like how am I going to provide for her future, am I helping her to grow into a happy and healthy woman, and will she be attacked by bears? Definitely the bear thing. Worrying is a normal activity, which is why it probably doesn’t register on anyone’s radar when it is problematic. But there are people who worry way too much, about anything and everything. They have practically turned it into a hobby.
One of my college roommates was like that. He was an extreme worrier. Although I eventually earned my doctorate, I was never a traditional college student. For reasons I no longer remember, I dropped out of high school in my senior year, and that sort of thing generally makes it hard to go straight into college (and most drop-outs . . . well, don’t). Nobody in my family had been to college, and I didn’t exactly hang out with a college-bound group of kids, so I really had no idea what I was doing in the beginning.
I first met my friend James in high school and we actually got our GEDs at the same time. We decided college would be easier if we attempted it together and signed up for a lot of the same classes our first year. We had this one class that met Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I forget the subject but I remember we had an exam every Friday.
James and I were not the best students (go figure, the bad habits that led us to drop out of high school followed us into college), but we were motivated. One of the major differences between us that I noticed was our approach to those weekly exams. Whereas I would turn in my exam as soon as I finished and duck out of class to get an early start to my weekend, James was the kind of student that wrestled over every question, often second-guessing himself and waiting until the very end of the hour to turn the test in. Later on, we would sometimes meet at the bar on the corner near our apartment. I remember one time in particular when he looked a bit anxious. “Are you okay?” I asked.
“Man, I’m just really worried that I failed that exam,” he replied.
“Well, then you probably did,” I said. “But worrying about it isn’t going to change anything now, you might as well relax and enjoy your Friday night.”
I thought it was strange, but he couldn’t do that. In fact, all night he kept referencing the class and questions on the exam that he thought he had gotten wrong. He ended up going home early. I woke up the next morning to find that he was already awake and was in the living room with all of his books and notes out, frantically going over them. “Man, you remember that one question? I think I got it wrong.” I swear, if he put in this much effort before the exam, he wouldn’t have needed to spend his weekend worrying.
But he would worry about it, and all weekend long. On Monday we would get our grades and he would either be pleasantly surprised or have his fears confirmed. Either way it went, his worrying all weekend did absolutely nothing to influence the outcome of the exam. He wasted his weekends, when he could have been wasted. Eventually he decided that college wasn’t for him, not because his grades were that bad, but because he couldn’t handle the stress.
And that’s the thing about worrying, it does nothing to prevent bad things from happening. Worrying does not affect the outcome of a situation, it doesn’t make adverse events less likely to occur, it just makes our life less great.
Let me add another step to the advice I gave in the last section. When we start to worry to the point that we start to experience stress, we need to take a moment and ask ourselves, “Can I do anything about this?” If the answer is yes, then do it or make a plan to do it. In fact, if we can do something about a situation and we choose not to for