Want to find your anxiety's off switch? Martha Beck can help

CNN

15-02-2025

Gun violence, the climate crisis, political division and brain-hijacking technology make today's society a breeding ground for anxiety.
Disrupting the cycle of constant worry requires big shifts in how we relate to the world, argues Martha Beck. Searching for ways to curb her own off-the-charts anxiety led the sociologist and best-selling author to discover that curiosity and creativity can act as antidotes. Evidence shows a kind of toggle effect between creativity and anxiety, she explained in her new book, 'Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose.' 'When one is up and running, the other seems to go silent.'
Our brain's natural programming makes it easy to slip from calm into catastrophizing, wrote Beck in her book. So, mounting a defense against the 'infinite, subtle and powerful' cultural forces that amplify our anxiety demands that we nurture new brain pathways to cultivate 'curiosity, wonder, connection, compassion and awe.' She shares strategies designed to soothe anxiety, which she describes as a 'frightened creature in your brain,' while liberating the creative genius inside us all.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
CNN: Why are people so anxious these days?
Martha Beck: People have always been anxious. Our brains have a negativity bias that makes us very attentive to anything that might harm us. But today, we're in the unprecedented situation where innumerable cultural forces are spinning our brains into fear-based thinking that not only leads to anxiety but also teaches us to use the anxiety-prone parts of our brain. Once you're in an anxiety spiral, it's hard to get out; natural brain function leads to an unregulated feedback loop that tends to make anxiety increase indefinitely rather than subside.
CNN: What do you mean by 'negativity bias'?
Beck: I call it the '15 puppies and a cobra' story. If you walk into a room with 15 puppies and a cobra, your attention will focus on the cobra because it's the potential threat. This bias helped keep our ancestors safe, but in modern life, it can lead to unrelenting anxiety.
Even if the cobra exists only on our news feed, our brains respond as if the threat is real and present. Then, our brain compounds the problem when it interprets our nervousness as evidence that we should be nervous, reinforcing the pattern. So far as we know, humans are the only animal that can take an imagined fear and turn it to a consistent, sustained experience of anxiety. We can get stuck in a fear-filled 'hall of mirrors' that keeps escalating.
CNN: How is anxiety different from fear?
Beck: Healthy fear is a response to something dangerous that we experience as an intense burst of energy that subsides almost immediately when the danger passes. Anxiety is a response to our thoughts. We feel fear responses to things that are not present, may not have happened, may never happen. The feelings can linger even when we're completely safe. Anxiety is like being haunted.
CNN: What is the 'secret door' out of anxiety, and how can we access it?
Beck: First, let's talk about what never works. Often, our first attempt is to try to attack our anxiety. We want it gone, so we charge at it, trying to banish it. But anxiety is a frightened animal. Running after it saying, 'I want to end you' does not calm it down.
Instead, curiosity can be the first step toward calm. Tap into your self-compassion, even if you don't feel it. Say, 'I'm listening. I hear you. I see you're afraid. Tell me everything.' It doesn't even matter if you mean it, at first. Just forming the thought moves you into a different way of thinking. Neurologically, curiosity pulls our attention away from the mechanisms that cause anxiety, generating the beginning of the end of the spiral.
We are programmed to attend to what makes us anxious. Turning our attention toward curiosity and away from anxiety helps us to expand instead of contract our lives. If you can get curious enough about your own anxious thoughts to ask yourself whether they are true — whether they're setting you free or keeping you captive — you're already on your way out.
CNN: How does creativity help us to manage anxiety?
Beck: Creativity engages the right hemisphere of the brain, which helps to shift our attention away from left-hemisphere-located anxiety. Instead of crunching us into a tiny prison of fear, creativity motivates learning, opening us to the whole universe. It grants access to a pathway to transcendence, which comes when a creativity spiral formulates an experience of flow that is the opposite of fear. I believe that's the way we should be living most of the time.
CNN: But wouldn't it be dangerous if we stayed in a flow state, creating? Wouldn't we lose track of the cobra?
Beck: It would be absolutely unlivable. We'd just run out into the street and be dead in seconds. But here's the thing: The right hemisphere, where creativity resides, never rules out the data from the left. It sees the cobra and it says, 'What creative thing could we do to deal with this cobra? Could we wall it off? Could we make a little snake-catching unit?'
Today, we're facing a whole lot of never-happened-befores. We live in a world with unprecedented knowledge transfer and technology, and right now, we're cooking the earth. If we just run around in a panic about these things, we can't do anything helpful. We must let our right hemispheres take the wheel — to allow our creativity to engage in the process of invention.
CNN: How can creativity ease anxiety in everyday life?
Beck: Anytime I get anxious, I ask myself, 'What could I make?' Not 'What shall I do?' but 'What can I make?' That immediately puts me into a different state of being.
Left hemisphere-dominated behaviors are so fundamental to our culture. We live in a society that assumes anxiety helps solve problems. Actually, good solutions never come from anxiety or panic. They come from curiosity, calm and creativity.
Our anxiety has led to an obsession with control — a focus on trying to count, analyze, measure and label everything that has taken us away from nature's rhythms. So many of us are stuck in a left-hemisphere trap that leaves us creatively starved. Making art, especially hands-on work, can reconnect us with our biology, balancing our whole selves.
CNN: What about for people who aren't artistic?
Beck: I believe all people are born creative geniuses before socialization convinces us that we're not. By art, I mean anything that we make, create or originate. The moment you pick up a lump of clay, for example, and start to make something, your brain's right hemisphere lights up. It helps to start with self-compassion and curiosity about your own experiences as you engage in art and creative activities that use your hands.
Focus on the process instead of the product. We don't go to the gym thinking, 'My whole job is to lift this weight and keep it in the air.' No, you're lifting it for the effect it has on you. Paint not for the painting itself but because it reinforces the neurons going into the creative part of your brain.
Coloring a mandala, for example, has a levitating effect on your mood, immune system and all the positive parts of your psyche. So, color a mandala for 20 minutes, then throw the damn thing away (if you want to). It's not about the coloring but the good mood you take away from it. It also helps to find community with others who are also engaging in creative pursuits and connect with them.
CNN: What ripple effects could creativity bring to the world?
Beck: I think we could save the world. Anxiety is contagious, but so is calm. Humans co-regulate with the calmest person they can find. Our brains are electrical, and if two people meet each other in a state of deep regulation, the field of their calm expands way beyond them, extending it to other people.
Making art is one way to reach deeper states of calm that can serve as an anchor, for yourself and for others. A line attributed to the 14th century Persian poet Hafez has had such an effect on me: 'Troubled? Then stay with me, for I am not.' That's what we can be for each other. The world needs untroubled people more than it ever has.
Jessica DuLong is a Brooklyn, New York-based journalist, book collaborator, writing coach and the author of 'Saved at the Seawall: Stories From the September 11 Boat Lift' and 'My River Chronicles: Rediscovering the Work That Built America.'