Self-Awareness

Temperament II: Players

Ron Johnson Personality, Personality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the second installment regarding “temperament.” Temperament is a way I have come to see and understand people. It is not the only way and it may not be the best way, but it has been helpful for my understanding people for many years. Beginning with the Greek philosopher Galen two millennia ago there have been people who have used temperament as a valuable way of understanding people. Understanding people by their temperaments is part of what I have called a “friendly diagnosis.” In other words, instead of diagnosing people with some kind of disorder, like depression, anxiety, or personality disorder, making a friendly diagnosis is finding ways of understanding the basic natures that people have. Other positive ways of understanding people include personality type (originating with Carl Jung), multiple intelligences (Howard Gardner), the Enneagram, personal development (many authors), and cultural elements of personality and behavior.

In this and forthcoming blogs I will discuss each of four temperaments: player, analyst, lover, and caretaker. People tend to fall primarily into one of these temperaments, and sometimes two, but everyone has characteristics of all four temperaments to some degree. Let’s start by examining what I call the player temperament.

Background

My introduction into psychological testing was exclusively directed at what was psychologically wrong with people, called psychopathology. The tests I was introduced to in graduate school in in 1969 were primarily the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Profile (MMPI) and the Rorschach Ink Blot test, although since that time many more problem-based tests have been developed. These tests provide categories like depression, anxiety, personality disorder, or schizophrenia. The MMPI, the Rorschach, and other tests of psychopathology gave me a way of understanding people, but primarily what was wrong with people. Next I learned about tests that identified personality “traits” that weren’t necessarily about psychological problems, like the Edwards Personal Preference Scale (EPPS), the California Psychological Inventory (CPI), and the Adjective Check List (ACL), all of which provided about 20 personality characteristics or traits. These tests of personality were more valuable in understanding the differences among people, but with 20 or 30 different terms, like “sucorance” and “achievement,” they were cumbersome in offering me a way to help understand how they saw the world and how they engaged the world.

My understanding and use of psychological testing was dramatically affected by three events: (1) Both the problem-based tests like the MMPI, and the personality trait-based tests like the EPPS didn’t really help people understand themselves and profit from that understanding. (2) Master therapist, Dick Olney, had “reframed” a very valuable way of understanding people developed by Alexander Lowen. Lowen identified people by “body type” and “diagnosed” them in the categories of schizoid, oral, masochistic, psychopathic, and rigid. Olney reframed these categories into words that were more positive, namely creative, loving, containing, challenging, and achieving. (3) By far the most dramatic development in my understanding of personality came when I was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) developed by Elizabeth Briggs-Myers and her daughter, a test based on Carl Jung’s psychological types. An adjunct to the MBTI was a system of “temperament” developed by David Keirsey. After some years using the MBTI and Keirsey’s understanding of temperament, I began to see patterns of personality and behavior that led me to develop my own temperament analysis using a test that I called the Johnson Temperament Indicator (JTI).

My understanding of temperament, while not unlike Keirsey’s and others who had preceded me did not develop all at once. The JTI and my analysis of temperament developed first by my understanding how two important people in my life operated: my daughter, Krissie, and my friend, Kevin. Kevin and Krissie seemed to share a certain similarity in the way they saw the world and engaged the world. They seemed to play all the time. I wrote a monologue on what I came to call “the player personality” originating in my observations of Kevin and Krissie but also on many people that came to my office. Since I had started my practice as a child psychologist, I continued to see a lot of children, many of which were struggling mightily in school and home for some reason. Often these children had been given diagnoses and medications to treat ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, or conduct disorder. But the parents who brought these kids to me weren’t satisfied with these diagnoses and medications and asked if I could help them deal with their children who seemed unruly and unpredictable. I found it valuable to “diagnose” some of these children as “players” and treat them accordingly. From this initial “friendly diagnosis” of the player personality, I began to see people with other temperaments, those that we will study in forthcoming blogs. But what could I say about the psychological makeup of players that distinguished them from people of other temperaments? This has been a work in progress and remains so.

Characteristics of players

Movement.

One of the dominant features of players is physical movement. I saw this movement in Krissie and Kevin albeit in different ways, and I saw movement in all the player patients I saw in my office and friends in my social life. I recall a moment when I saw Krissie skipping between one room and another, skipping, not running, and certainly not walking. I saw Kevin nearly always moving his hands in ways that could have been American Sign Language except for the fact that it was unique to Kevin. I saw Kevin and Krissie always fiddling with something. Krissie would pick things up, explore them, and then perhaps drop them, often nowhere form where she found them. When she was two, she loved to pull tissues out of the tissue box, much to the distress of my wife. I suggested that she just be allowed to pull the tissues out and see where it went. I don’t recall what actually happened, but it is likely that the living room looked like a tornado hit it. I watched Kevin do similar movements, often with his hands and fingers, but most distinctively he would chew on something, often a piece of paper with a kind of vigor that suggested he was somehow connected to this inanimate piece of paper.

My observation of people I came to call players was not limited to my daughter and my friend Kevin. I saw other people, both children and adults, engaging the world in a physical way. I saw people on the dance floor who seemed to have natural physical movement, albeit rarely in any kind of formal dance pattern. I saw kids playing various sports, but the player kids weren’t necessarily playing by the rules; they were just playing. I saw movement in Sam, whose mother said that she “just couldn’t keep up with him” and in Jamie whose father was beside himself in trying to manage her movement in the house that seemed excessive to him. But movement was not the only thing players did. In fact, I came to understand the “excessive” movement that I saw in players as a way they wanted to engage life: they wanted to experience the world, not just observe it.

Experiencing:

At first I thought that players “played all the time.” While that is true is some ways, I came to see that players more accurately want to experience life, not watch it. Their way of learning is to live life by experiencing it in any way possible. This experiencing usually involves some kind of physical engagement, but it can also be the experience of connection to another person, group, or event. This experiencing life, whether personal or impersonal seems to be a way of making life real. Making physical property real means engaging things: picking them up, dropping them, throwing them, or just fondling them. Making people real means the same thing: picking them up, perhaps dropping them, yes, maybe fondling them. Engaging machines most certainly means to see what these machines can do, perhaps by turning the machine on full blast, which could be the radio or the crosscut saw. Things and people are real when they are engaged physically. Players don’t just watch; they have to be involved.

I had to learn early with daughter Krissie that she engaged all property as if all things were toys. This could be the tissue box or the mashed potatoes when she was young, and my charm bracelet (yes I have one) when she was a teenager. I still don’t know where some of the charms ever ended up, and she certainly doesn’t know. I recall Kevin being one who would often literally “be in your face,” often with a grimace as if he were seeing into your soul. A player child I once saw in my office jumped into my lap as soon as he came into my office, somewhat to the chagrin of his mother. I’m quite sure the actor Robin Williams was a player having him engage anything or anyone in his environment as a way of experiencing people and things, always with a vigor of curiosity. Williams’ form of experiencing blended with entertaining.

Entertaining:

I think that all players like to entertain, but I think I originally conflated the player nature of extraversion, which only some players have. Players’ entertaining nature takes many forms. Entertaining people is a way players experience the world, engage to the world, and serve the world. Shakespeare said, “All the world is a stage.” Players take this to heart.

My wife who certainly has a player nature (while primarily “analyst”, the next temperament that we shall study) finds a stage wherever she happens to be, preferably alone in her greenhouse with her precious flowers or in canyons with her precious rocks. It seems that God is in all rocks, flowers, and more for Deb. I am never quite sure if God, the rocks, the flowers, or the canyons are part of the audience or returning the favor of entertaining her. Other players are like Jack, an 8-year old player kid I saw many years ago. When he was in my office, he spied my guitar in the corner and told me he could play it. I was surprised to learn this about Jack because his mother had said that he never stuck with anything longer than 30 seconds. I invited him to pick up the guitar and play something. He did so without hesitation and began strumming the guitar, seemingly randomly, and singing equally randomly without meter, rhyme, or cord. He was entertaining me. Then he asked me if I could perhaps advertise my clientele for a performance he could do for people. I declined his request to his great disappointment. Jack, an extraverted player, just wanted to engage people by entertaining them. A more introverted young man and I talked about the magical wardrobe portrayed in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. When we walked around my office building one afternoon (as a part of “therapy”), he spied what he thought was a wardrobe and asked if he could get in it. I agreed, and he entered this old closet, sat on the floor and closed the door. He was there silently for ten minutes or more, and might have been there longer had I not opened the door. He was disappointed that the back of the “wardrobe” hadn’t opened up to Narnia.  By the way, Jack had been brought to me by his father who was convinced that he was ADD because he couldn’t sit still. I’m convinced that he could have sat in the wardrobe still for hours waiting for Narnia to expose itself. He was ready to entertain all Narnians. When he was in the wardrobe, he was in the moment, and that was all that mattered.

In the moment:

One of the characteristics of personality type (which we might study at a later time) is what I call a “low boundary” orientation, something the Jung/Briggs people call “P people.” Low boundary people challenge boundaries because they know that all boundaries are human-made, and hence artificial in a sense. While most players certainly have this low boundary orientation, it seems that they live in the moment like there is no tomorrow. They know that the moment is all that we have so they want to fill that minute with 60 seconds worth of experience as Kipling once said. Players just don’t want to waste time; they want to use time. For players, especially young players, the moment is all that exists. They’re right.

I think my granddaughter, Alexis, has a good deal of this “in the moment” that players have. Given the opportunity, she will simply run, jump, and otherwise engage whatever part of the world she finds herself in. She seems most content to run around our lake cabin, sometimes disappearing into the woods, sometimes into the water, something that gives her mother (player daughter Krissie, by the way) great alarm. I think she is just seeing what is out there in the world and what is in there inside of herself. Some players find success in certain professional avenues, like improvisational work because they are so naturally good at entertaining by seeing what or who is in the moment. Whether experiencing, entertaining, or in the moment, all players are playing.

Playing

Players play. In fact, not only is all the world a stage, and every minute should be filled with experience, all things are playthings. That certainly means all property. It often means all money. And it means all people. They think that all things are toys, all money is play money, all people are playmates, and the world is a playground. But what is play? Play is activity that engages body, mind, soul, and preferably other people in activity that has no ultimate meaning but just meaning in the moment. Players want to enjoy property, places, and people not unlike the first rule of the Westminster Confession written some 400 years ago: “the chief end of humankind is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.”

We will be looking at the Opportunities and Challenges that players have in the world. You might have already considered that players might have both. We dill defer this discussion, however, until a bit later because we want to tell you about the other temperaments. Next up: analysts.

Further Reading

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2018). Watch your temperament. Prepublication manuscript available at our office.

Bruner, J., Jolly, A., and Sylva, K. (1976). Play: its role in development and evolution. New York: Brunner.

Dabbs, J.M. (2000). Heroes, rogues, and lovers: testosterone and behavior. New York: McGraw Hill.

Temperament I

Ron Johnson Personality, Positive psychology, Self-Awareness

This is the first of what I suspect will be several blogs on “temperament,” something I have been interested in for about 45 years. Let me indulge myself with a bit of history here, namely how I came into this idea of “temperament.” I started this rather odd profession of being a psychologist in 1966 right after I graduated from college and entered seminary. That would be 52 years ago. My first work was with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) as a campus minister doing what I suppose was a bit of “counseling” of undergraduates, who were then maybe two or three years younger than I was. Then through a chain of events I had the opportunity to be in a group of people who gathered weekly for an “encounter group,” which was, in a way, a part of an important movement adjacent to “The 60’s revolution” where everything was up for grabs, everything questioned, and many things challenged. It was an exciting time for me because it was a time where I could explore the many things that have continued to fascinate me for these past 52 years, and continue to fascinate me. While there were many excesses in the 60’s, it was an important time in America that had just finished the 50’s where everything was stable, the 40’s where we had war, and the 30’s where we had desperation. It was a time that many people challenged anything and everything. It was also a time where there was a great resistance to these challenges.

I challenged a lot. For instance, I challenged my quite Republican/conservative theology while simultaneously holding tightly to what I thought was a deeply Christian theology and value system. I challenged my seminary professors to such an extent that I was asked to “reapply” for my senior year because of my perceived recalcitrance. I thought I was just interested in finding the truth, but I was perceived as simply resistant and arrogant. Certainly there was some truth in their perception, but give me a break, I was a “Young Turk” of 23 and asking questions that I thought everyone should ask. I read an article in Look Magazine of all things, about Gene McCarthy and immediately became a follower of his politics. While in Portland, OR at the time I had the opportunity to hear Robert Kennedy speak the day he lost the OR primary but then won the CA Democratic primary the next day, minutes before he was assassinated. Challenge was good for me, but during these early 20’s I had no idea of the journey I was taking, a journey I am still on. I thought it was a good time to challenge everything, albeit with a respect for people of different opinions.

In this time of personal challenging I continued in this encounter group, which was my first real experience in real life psychology. The mode of the group was to experience and let it all hang out. In other words to trust your feelings, speak your feelings, and trust the truth that came out of speaking your feelings. This orientation to saying anything that came to your mind fit my extraverted nature quite well, but it took me years, if not decades, to learn to temper my expression of my thoughts and feelings. I mistakenly thought that everyone should be as extraverted as I was, which was an example of the excesses of the 60’s and the excesses of my experience in the 60’s. It seemed right to me to be able to challenge openly not realizing that I often offended people in my expressions of feelings, sometimes for a lifetime. It saddens me to see the many mistakes I made during these formative years. Yet in allowing myself to experience the joys of expression, I slowly learned that there is equal value in keeping one’s feelings and thoughts private, no small task for the flaming extravert that I am by nature.

Fast forward a bit: leave seminary 1, go to seminary #2 for my senior year, continue to challenge and have a deuce of a time finishing seminary. My continued challenges included coming to believe that no one will ever go to “hell” and maybe the Holy Scriptures weren’t not entirely accurate in everything they said, not positions that are commensurate with graduating from a conservative seminary. But graduate I did, albeit with mixed emotions, both on my part and at the part of my seminary. Thank God for Dr. Vernon Grounds, the president of Denver Seminary at the time, who for some unknown reason took me under his wing and steered me through these challenging years. Dr. Grounds, who had a PhD in psychology in addition to his theological studies, was now my second experience in psychology after the psychologist who led the encounter group in Portland. Yet I was still in the mode of seeing psychology too simply, namely “just let it all hang it out” and “say it the way it is.” Still the young Turk.

From seminary to graduate school at the University of Iowa, first in a pastoral counseling program, which turned out to be a bad fit and then into psychology proper, where I learned of psychological testing and diagnosing. I was in love again, this time with the categories of people by what was wrong with them. This guy was schizophrenic, this other guy was depressed, this gal was addicted, and the other one was anxious. Something seemed right about this finding ways of understanding people by seeing their problems, but something also seemed wrong about it as well. I didn’t have any other way to understand people given that the entirety of my training in psychology was, indeed, on what is wrong with people. Fast forward 4 years of graduate school in Iowa City into my first real job as a psychologist working for a psychiatrist in Council Bluffs, IA. Again, I learned from Dr. Rassekh, the psychiatrist for whom I worked, that the only way of understanding and categorizing people was by what was wrong with them. He was, indeed, brilliant in his diagnostic capacities, like spotting a guy in the lobby who he was convinced had a paranoid personality disorder without ever actually listening to him.

Fast forward again into my own practice that developed just a year after working for Dr. Rassekh, and then a couple years in. I had a thriving practice at that time, so much so that I hired several part-time therapists and now called my practice Midlands Psychological Associates, the name we have retained for nearly 50 years. One of these therapists went to a conference where he was introduced to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and he talked about this test as possibly valuable. The MBTI changed my perspective drastically. I immediately learned not only that I was “extraverted,” having thought that everyone should be, but I learned that it was equally valuable to be introverted, however hard that was at the time for me to understand. And the MBTI also had other categories of understanding people. Importantly, the MBTI looked at personality, not pathology; what is right about people, not what was wrong with them. The journey of understanding myself and people continued with a new perspective: what is right with people.

About the time that I became familiar with the MBTI, I started studying other ways of understanding people. This brought me to several personality theorists, some 2500 years old, like the Greek philosopher/psychologist Galen, and the others who followed him. I also was simultaneously looking at the work of people who found ways to integrate personality and pathology, like the outstanding psychotherapist, Dick Olney, who “reframed” Alexander Lowen’s fine work of “body diagnosis” into friendlier terms. As I looked at the patients I was seeing as well as looking at myself and my friends and family, I saw what became the cornerstone of what came to be the temperament system I created and have used for 40 years. I saw my daughter and then a patient by the name of Kevin who seemed to share some characteristics of living. I also noticed that I also had many of these characteristics, which seemed to center around playing. My daughter, Krissie, loved to play; Kevin loved to play, and I certainly loved to play. So I came up with the first of what became four temperaments, the player personality, and wrote a bit about people who were players. Many people, including my daughter whom I had previously thought of as “suffering” from ADHD, now seemed more accurately understood as players. I began to think of how I could help players be true to themselves but also engage society successfully, something that appeared to be a real challenge.

From seeing players as a rather distinct group, I put together a system of understanding people of different temperaments, namely four temperaments. I constructed a test called the Johnson Temperament Indicator (JTI) and began to use it regularly in my testing package, along with the MBTI and a bunch of other tests. We still use these tests, which patients first complain about having to spend 4 hours finishing only to see the great value of understanding themselves, namely “what is right about them.” While players, and people of all personality types and temperaments, are inclined to some kind of problems, I didn’t see people with problems first, but problems that often resulted from not finding ways to be who they are in meaningful, helpful, and valuable ways. Enough history, abbreviated as it may be, boring as it may be.

In following blogs l will discuss my four temperaments that I now see in people. While no one falls perfectly into any one of these boxes, most people find themselves relatively secure in one of them or perhaps two of them. The temperaments are:

  • Player
  • Lover
  • Caretaker
  • Analyst

The typical characteristics of these people are:

  • Players: seek experience, often excitement. They bring fun to live.
  • Lovers: seek human connections. They bring sacrifice to live.
  • Caretakers: protect property. They bring safety to life.
  • Analysts: seek meaning. They bring understanding to life.

Consider how you might fit into one or more of these temperaments. Then follow us as we unpack these four looking at strengths, possibilities, trials, and challenges of each.

 

Further Reading

Bates, E. and Wachs, T. (eds.) (2002). Temperament: individual differences at the interface of biology and behavior. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Keisey, D. and Bates, M. (1978). Please understand me: character and temperament types. Del Mar, CA: Prometheus Nemesis Books.

Johnson, R. (1985). The Johnson Temperament Indicator (test). Available in our office.

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2018). Watch your temperament. Prepublication manuscript available in our office.

Ward, R.M. (1988). Blending temperaments: improving relationships—yours and others. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker.

The Cure for Anxiety

Ron Johnson emotional maturity, Feelings, grief, mindfulness, Self-Awareness

Sadness. That is the cure for anxiety. But let me explain. Or you can read our book that devotes a whole chapter to the “cure for anxiety.” In this brief blog I will attempt to do several things:

  • Explain what anxiety is along with its cousins: worry, fretting, fear, and outright terror
  • Explain why anxiety is without a doubt one of the most resistant of all psychological difficulties people have, like depression, relationship problems, vocational problems, and general living problems.
  • Explain some of the underlying neurological functions that cause, create, and maintain anxiety once it gets into one’s psychological system

The neuropsychology

I distinguish the mind and the brain as I have explained in Mind over Matter blogs before. I use the term “mind” to describe our thinking, feeling, and acting. The brain is the machine the mind uses to do such things. There is great debate about this matter, however, with some very good neuropsychologists suggesting that the mind is the brain, while others, like myself, believe that there is an as yet undefined element in the human condition that we consider to be the operator of the brain. I’m afraid you’ll have to be content with the fact that we are all theorizing about how things work in the brain. But let me defer this discussion to previous blogs and other psychologists’ writings.

Aside from whether there is a real mind/brain difference, some things are quite well known. The brain (in my understanding) engages in only two operations that keep things going in the body: safety and pleasure. We discussed the pleasure side of the brain when we discussed “liking and wanting” as different operations of the brain, both related to pleasure. So this function of the brain seeks pleasure, mostly through chemicals, such as dopamine, and sometimes through electrical operations. The more important of the two things that the brain does, however, is safety. In other words, your brain works most diligently and constantly on keeping you alive. Central to this keeping you alive is the brain’s fantastic operation of keeping blood flowing in the body, originating in the heart and then to the rest of the body. Blood oxygenizes the body’s cells with blood and simultaneously cleanses these cells from material that needs to be dispenses. While the brain looks to pleasure when possible, something like 99% of the brain looks for safety. Our wonderful brain is doing this protection all the time, every second of our lives.

The brain is wonderful in protecting you and finding pleasure for you, these 100 neurons (brain cells) operating sometimes with trillions of connections to one another. But the brain is sort of stupid in anything else than pleasure and safety. For instance, the brain (again, not the mind) does not know what the mind knows, like love, trust, honesty, work, play, and the many other elements of character, relationships, and daily living. Importantly, the brain does not have an understanding of time. The brain does not know any difference between past, present, and future. In the brain, these three elements of time are all conceived as present. So when the brain senses that something might happen in the future, that future is right now or at best, a second or two in the future. This fact, namely that the brain doesn’t distinguish future from present is very important in the cause, maintenance, and ultimate cure for anxiety.

The brain’s resistance to threat

If you keep in mind that the brain is spending most of its time taking care of the body and protecting the body from harm, you get the picture as to why the brain needs to do this and how it does this. The brain (not the mind) has a startle reflex, for instance, that overrides anything else on your mind when you are started in some way, usually with a loud noise, but also sometimes by something visually that startles you, or perhaps even something that startles you in one of the other three senses (smell, taste, and touch). You don’t have to think, much less feel, when you touch a hot pan by accident while you’re cooking. You don’t have to think or feel when you see fire in that same kitchen. Your startle reaction operates in your olfactory lobe (smell) if you smell something odd in the kitchen. Startle reaction is just one of the ways the brain takes care of you by taking immediate action when the brain perceives something that is dangerous or could be dangerous because it is not within the norm of daily living.

The brain’s protective mechanism operates wonderfully all the time and keeps us alive. Unfortunately, this same protective mechanism also operates when there may not be any immediate or actual threat because the brain doesn’t distinguish a current threat from a future threat. When your brain senses some kind of threat, it goes into hyper drive in order to protect you from danger. This hyper drive comes in the forms of increased heart rate, higher blood pressure, increased breathing, and increased sensual awareness. Increased sensual awareness is in all five senses: sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch. In other words, when the brain senses some threat, it garners all the defenses: chemical, electrical, and sensual to protect you from this perceived threat. These increases are much like what it may have been like for primitive humankind to be faced with the sight of a lion coming over the hill: the brain sees the lion and immediately does the chemical and electrical changes in your body so that you can run. Hopefully, the brain churned up these defenses in time for you to protect yourself. If a lion were chasing you in the Serengeti, for instance, you would be experiencing a pretty high level of anxiety, like life-and-death anxiety. Thank you brain for keeping you aware of possible escape routes from the charging lion.

The cause of anxiety

Anxiety is devastating. It is a well-known fact that that many, if not most, visits to the ER have at least some anxiety driving these visits. Millions of people have thought they were having heart attacks, raced to the ER, and had all kinds of expensive tests, only to find out that there “was nothing wrong with them,” often to their great disappointment. Anxiety has many forms, including the rather popular current diagnoses of PTSD and OCD, but more often anxiety is what is called “free-floating.” In other words, people “just feel anxious for no apparent reason.” Well, there is a reason but it is not that they are having heart attacks or making this stuff up to get attention. Nor is it true that “nothing is wrong with them.” Something is “wrong,” but it has nothing to do with their bodies or minds. What is wrong is that their brains have somehow concluded that the lion is coming over the hill, or something equally dangerous. Why would the brain think such a thing? Most of us don’t roam the Serengeti and few of us have to contend with lions around. The brain should know that, so it seems. The brain does not know that. The brain thinks something very much like “the lion is coming over the hill, so you have to be hypervigilant.

How does this happen. How does the brain think something crazy like the lion is coming after you when there is no lion? It does so because the brain has heard a message from the mind that there is some immediate danger. So, the brain goes into its normal operation of increasing heartrate, blood flow, breathing, and hypervigilance to keep you hyperaware of your surroundings. Anxiety is essentially hyperawareness. Why?

The brain creates what we call anxiety for you to be hyperaware of your surroundings and “protect you from the lion coming over the hill.” The brain does not distinguish different kinds of dangers. The brain does not distinguish dangers: danger is danger, whether it is the spider or the lion. So anything that the brain determines is some kind of threat will start the chain reaction in the brain of upping the various elements of the body to protect you, primarily by making you hypervigilant.

Not only does not brain fail to distinguish kinds of threats, the brain does not distinguish the present from the future. And this the crux of the problem with anxiety. When you think of something aversive that might happen in the future, it is your mind that is doing this thinking, not your brain. Let’s say your boss has called a meeting with you on Monday morning but she didn’t tell you what she wanted to talk to you about. This kind of situation can cause “anxiety,” namely worrying about what your boss might say to you, or God forbid, that you might get demoted or fired. So it seems natural that you would worry about this future meeting. Unfortunately, your brain does not know any of this: it does not know that you work, it does not know you have a boss, it does not know about the meeting, and it does not know about the future. So, when you brain hears from your mind that you have a potential meeting that could be deleterious for you, your brain assumes “the lion is coming over hill,” and wants to send you into hyper drive.

Then, to make matters worse, your brain sort of “talks” back to your mind about this potential danger because the brain can’t think. It is the mind that thinks. The message from the mind to the brain started this cycle moving by telling the brain that there is some danger. You brain assumed this danger was immediate and started the hypervigilance, but it didn’t stop there. The brain then sent the mind the message that the mind needed to figure out what to do. Now we have this ongoing cycle with the mind telling the brain that there is danger and the brain talking back to the mind asking the mind to figure it out. So the mind tries to figure it out. How does the mind do that? By worrying about worst case scenarios like, “If he fires me, where will I get another job?” or “if he criticizes me for my performance, how can I defend myself” and the like. Of course this fretting does no good but, all the while the brain is sort of insisting that the mind come up with a solution to the problem it perceives as “the lion coming over the hill.”

Unless there is some way to stop this cycle of considering danger (the mind), reacting to danger (the brain), and then fretting (the mind again), anxiety will stay present and very possibly increase. If the brain determines that there is no immediate solution to what it perceives as the lion coming, it will do what it does: create more hypervigilance. How do we break this cycle?

The cure of anxiety

Read the first word again in this blog: sadness. The cure for anxiety is sadness, however odd that sounds. This is what I mean: you have to face the potential loss, feel this potential loss by feeling sad, and resolve this sadness. Easily said, not easily done. Anxiety in all its forms (fear, worry, fretting) keeps therapists busy trying to calm people down and physicians busy prescribing anxiolytics to treat the symptoms of anxiety. But neither really works to cure anxiety. There is no “settling down” someone who is in a state of anxiety because the brain perceives “the lion is coming over the hill.” You can’t talk to the brain about jobs, meetings, and the like, and you certainly can’t talk to the brain about the future because the brain, this wonderful machine, has no capacity to understand such things. You have to get the mind involved. You have to get the mind and the brain to work together the way these two elements work together 99% of the time. How do you do that?

You cure anxiety by considering the loss you might have, feeling sad about this potential loss, and allow this sadness to end. This is what you need to do: truly consider the worst case scenario. In our theoretical case, you need to consider that you would be fired. Then you have to feel sad about possibly being fired. This is what we call anticipatory sadness because you are anticipating some important loss in the future and allowing yourself to feel the sadness about this possible loss. It sounds crazy, I know, but this is the only way to cure anxiety, namely feeling sad in the present about something that might happen in the future. Note the tenses here: feeling sad in the present for something that might happen in the future. You can learn to do this with a little practice, but let me warn you, you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to feel sad about losing a job that is important to you; you don’t want to consider that your daughter with cancer might die; you don’t want to consider that your house will be robbed. And you don’t want to feel sad about these things because they haven’t happened. You know that they haven’t happened. But this “you” is your mind, not your brain. Your brain thinks that something really dangerous is happening and needs to be fixed. The only way out of the cycle of anxiety is to feel this anticipatory sadness. The sadness will end.

The interesting thing about sadness is that it always ends. Anxiety does not end. It can go on for years or a lifetime and get worse in the process. But if you lose something you love, you will feel sad for a period and eventually finish feeling sad. An even more devastating phenomenon that occurs with people is depression. Depression is the collections of many losses that have not been felt and finished, and have collected to such a degree that your brain shuts down interest in life in order to cope with the fact of these many losses.

So try it out. When you feel anxious about something, ask yourself the question, “What might I lose?” Then you will discover that you might lose something that is important to you, something that you love. Then allow yourself to feel the sadness you would feel if you would actually lose this something. Dare to feel this sadness now about what you might lose in the future. You will feel sad for a moment or two, maybe longer, but eventually, your anticipatory sadness will end.

Further Reading

Previous blogs on feelings

Johnson, R. and Brock, D. (2017). The Positive Power of Sadness. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger

LeDoux, J. (2015). Anxious: using the brain to understand and treat fear and anxiety. New York: Viking Press.