Martha Beck is a Harvard-trained sociologist, New York Times bestselling author, world-renowned life coach, and speaker. She is the author of one novel and nine nonfiction books, including Oprah’s Book Club pick The Way of Integrity.
What’s the big idea?
For anyone whose life is in the clutches of anxiety, profound and positive change is possible. There are practical methods for halting the upward spiral of anxious panic, as well as long-term mindset shifts that replace damaging thought patterns with joy and bliss. Learning to live in a perpetual creative response to the present moment is a natural, lasting remedy for anxiety.
Below, Martha shares five key insights from her new book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Listen to the audio version—read by Martha herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Anxiety is persistent worry in the absence of danger.
Anxiety is not the same as fear. Fear is our body’s natural reaction to immediate danger. It is quick, clear, and designed to relax the moment we are out of immediate physical danger. Anxiety, on the other hand, is the chronic, unrelenting misery that emerges when our brains replay stories about potential threats when there is no actual danger present. Fear is a response to real conditions, while anxiety is a response to thoughts about possible conditions.
I felt the difference vividly when I was writing Beyond Anxiety. As I typed away in a small cottage at a game reserve in South Africa, I heard the harsh guttural rasp of a leopard about six feet away from me. The animal was on the other side of a screen door, but for a moment, I thought it was in the room with me. I felt a jolt of intense fear. My senses sharpened. Everything seemed to slow down. Then I saw the leopard gliding away into the darkness. In seconds, my fear became a bubbling sense of exhilaration. That was fear doing its job, protecting me in the moment and then stepping aside.
Where fear is like being shot from a cannon, anxiety is like being haunted. It doesn’t focus on the present situation, and it never shuts down. It keeps us in a state of high alert, pulling our attention away from what is really happening and turning it into a cycle of worry about things that might never occur. Recognizing this distinction is the first step toward freeing ourselves from anxiety’s grip.
2. The left brain plays a big role in the anxiety spiral.
Much of our anxiety is generated by the left hemisphere of our brains. It is the part that’s analytical, verbal, and focused on logical analysis. While all those skills are incredibly useful for solving problems, they also allow anxiety spirals to take root. When we feel a pulse of concern, our storytelling brains may instantly generate worst-case scenarios, dragging us into steadily intensifying spirals of anxiety.
Here’s an example from one of my clients. I’ll call her Kayla. One evening, she walked into a room to find her husband quickly swiping something off his phone. Her brain immediately filled in the blanks: He’s hiding something. Is it gambling, porn, an affair? With each thought, her anxiety spiraled higher. Finally, almost in tears, she confronted him. It turned out he was planning a surprise birthday party for her.
“Anxiety stories aren’t always true, and the more we feed them, the more they spiral upward.”
This is what the left hemisphere of our brain often does. It creates stories to justify our fear, then builds strategies for control to manage that fear. The problem is that anxiety stories aren’t always true, and the more we feed them, the more they spiral upward. To escape the spiral, we have to step out of our anxious stories and anchor ourselves in the present moment. One way to do this is through grounding exercises like focusing on your breath or engaging your senses.
3. We can replace anxiety with creativity.
Anxiety can’t be eliminated; it must be replaced. The human brain is naturally incredibly generative. It is always making something. When we focus that incredible energy on worry, we can produce epic anxiety, but when we redirect our attention into curiosity and creativity, we can exchange that misery for delight. I don’t mean creativity in the sense of the fine arts. I’m just referring to our ability to imagine and make anything new: a sandwich, a joke, a paper airplane—anything. Anxiety and creativity seem to toggle so that when one is on, the other shuts down.
Think of something that makes you mildly anxious. Notice how your body, mind, and emotions react when you think about this subject. Now, get a pencil and make a list of things you love to experience with each of your five senses. Write down a few things you’d love to encounter with each of these senses, then vividly imagine an experience that combines most or all of these sensory experiences. For example, you might imagine eating Belgian chocolate on a warm, sandy beach where you can smell the ocean, hear children laughing, and feel warm sand between your toes. Go deeply into your projected image. This forces your brain to connect different sensory memories and experiences. Notice how, at the moment you bring together the elements of your ideal scenario, you can’t sustain the anxiety you were just feeling. Instead, you may feel the beginning of relaxation and even joy.
4. The best way to solve any problem is with creativity, not anxiety.
When I tell clients they can replace anxiety with creativity, they sometimes balk. They say things like, “Bad things are really, truly happening. I have real problems to face in my life.” There is real chaos and danger in the world, and we all face many difficulties. But if you had been in a terrible accident, breaking many bones and bruising key organs, would you want the surgeons working on you to feel anxiety and panic or calm, confident creativity?
“Moving into a creative mindset is our best chance at solving complex problems and building joyful, meaningful lives.”
One of the lies anxiety tells us is that only by staying anxious can we be safe. That is the opposite of the truth. Moving into a creative mindset is our best chance at solving complex problems and building joyful, meaningful lives. Plus, it makes the process delicious. It’s when we push our creative minds as far as they can go, playing at the outer edges of our ability. Whether that means playing the piano, chess, or a game of tag, our brains go into a state called flow, where we experience maximum levels of enjoyment or even bliss. To face our problems with maximum creativity is to live in flow while inventing solutions to all the problems we face.
5. Connected creativity makes life sane.
Quilters sometimes use a method called crazy quilting. Instead of laying out fabric in a careful pattern, they just find scraps of cloth they love and begin sewing them together, spiraling outward until the quilt is big enough to trim and finish. Abandoning anxiety and living by our creativity, especially at this alarming moment in history, is like using the quilter’s freeform method, but instead of a crazy quilt, I call this kind of life a sanity quilt. To make a sanity quilt life, start by putting curiosity, creativity, and true fascination at the center of living. Then, add other things you love, slowly filling time with beautiful experiences.
This runs contrary to our culture’s pattern of building lives from anxiety. One of the richest men in the world tells his million-plus employees to “Wake up every morning terrified and to stay terrified all day because that’s how to maximize productivity.” These employees aren’t rich. Many of them are barely scraping by, and yet our culture accepts that they should be expected to live their entire lives in a state of fear just to increase the fortune of a man who is already staggeringly wealthy. That’s not sane, that’s crazy.
To regain our right minds in this anxious culture, we must learn to calm our anxiety, then use all our experiences as springboards into curiosity, creativity, and joy. This is how we can solve our individual problems. It’s also the only way we, as a species, can collectively solve the problems we face. The Age of Anxiety can become the Age of Creativity, and it starts inside each of us, right now.
To listen to the audio version read by author Martha Beck, download the Next Big Idea App today:
