Swap Anxiety for Joy

Swap Anxiety for Joy

By Myra Goodman

Posted on January 11, 2025

World-renowned life coach Martha Beck teaches how to find liberation from anxiety by embracing curiosity and creativity.

There’s some good news for those of us who struggle with anxiety and are eager to live with more joy and less fear: Martha Beck has figured out how to break free from the torturous grip of anxiety, and she’s helping others do the same.

Beck—a Harvard-trained sociologist, world-renowned life coach, and best-selling author—has devoted her life to cracking the code on anxiety, one of her biggest struggles since childhood. “Luckily,” Beck writes about her younger years, “inactivity made me just as anxious as everything else. So I charged forward into life, not so much bravely as frenetically, like someone running from a swarm of bees.”

In her wisdom-packed new book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose, Beck teaches how to replace the excruciating “anxiety spiral” with the exhilarating “creativity spiral.”

Brain Basics

Beck’s anxiety-busting strategies rely on understanding two things about the human brain. First, just like every mammal, we have an ancient part of our brain—our amygdala—that manages many of the emotions essential to our survival, especially fear. Second, our brains have two hemispheres, a left and a right, and each has a very different way of processing information and experiencing the world.

Beck explains that anxious thoughts are generated by our brain’s left hemisphere—the verbal, logical, and analytical part of our brain that thinks linearly and logically, accumulates facts, and passes judgment. In contrast, our right hemisphere—the creative, non-linear, intuitive part of our brain—experiences life in the present moment. Instead of bringing the past forward or fretting about what might happen, it stays attuned to immediate emotions and sensory input. This means that the right brain does not experience anxiety, because anxiety is always future-focused.

For most animals, the experience of fear ends when they are no longer in danger. But the human brain’s ability to hold information as a verbal story and elaborate on it with imagination enables us to generate scary scenarios that can keep our fear response elevated indefinitely. “And here’s a key point,” Beck writes. “The thoughts remembered and imagined by the neocortex feed back to the left amygdala as if they are actually happening.”

Commiserating with people who are well-acquainted with anxiety spirals, Beck writes, “You know how it feels to lie awake, safe and sound, getting more and more terrified—not by actual events but by possible ones … jolts of intense alarm followed by terrifying thoughts about potential disaster followed immediately by even more intense jolts of alarm.”

The Anxiety Spiral Versus the Creativity Spiral

Beck believes that much of our anxiety stems from how much our culture prioritizes left brain functions over those of the right brain. She writes: “From early childhood, you have been constantly rewarded for thinking in a certain way: verbally, analytically, in organized lines of logic … In school, you were carefully taught to repress your creative genius by working through every subject in a logical, linear way … You had to follow consistent procedures, and they had to be the same procedures as everyone else.”

According to Beck, living in a left brain-dominated culture not only breeds anxiety, it reduces the right brain’s ability to perceive context, connection, and beauty. “Where the left side analyzes (the word analyze means ‘to cut things apart’), the right side synthesizes, or puts things together. Working with the raw material of whatever we perceive in the present moment, the right brain harmonizes, blends, relates, and assembles things, often in highly original ways.”

When we learn to calm our anxiety and access both sides of our brain, we can activate what Beck calls the creativity spiral, which is the mirror image of the anxiety spiral. “Where the brain’s left-side spiral sparks fear and makes us want to control things, its right-side spiral sparks curiosity and makes us want to create things.”

Beck’s roadmap to swapping anxiety for joy is based on the fact that these two opposite spirals can never be activated simultaneously. When one turns on, the other shuts off.

“Anxiety shuts down creativity so completely that even the slight stress of being told we’ll get paid for solving a puzzle makes us less able to think creatively,” Beck writes. “But by the same token, deliberately entering and moving further into the creativity spiral pulls us out of the anxiety spiral … It can take us on a wild, delicious joyride that leaves anxiety so far in the rearview mirror we can barely remember it.”

Fostering Calm

Because anxiety shuts down creativity, the ability to calm ourselves is a prerequisite to fully activating our creativity spiral. Beck explains that the most effective approach to soothing anxiety is acceptance and kindness. She bemoans how often people try to “attack” anxiety, “fighting it like warriors on a search-and-destroy mission”—an orientation that only reinforces the left brain’s tendency to compete, battle, and conquer.

Beck shares six “amygdala-whispering” techniques (summarized below), which are akin to “horse whispering”—methods based on building trust and connection, as opposed to “horse breaking,” which relies on force and control.

Martha Beck’s “Amygdala-Whispering” Techniques

1. Sigh. Exhale deep breaths with long sighs. “Every time you breathe out, your heartbeat slows a little. Exhaling taps the brakes on your fight-or-flight response.”

2. Soften the focus of your eyes. Because maintaining a sharp focus is part of the fight-or- flight-response, “Softening the focus of our attention, especially the focus of our eyes, sends a powerful message to our anxiety creatures that it’s okay to relax.”

3. Move. Staying still when you’re feeling anxious can feel akin to captivity. “Movement, especially shaking, is a highly effective way to handle current or post-traumatic stress … a powerful way for the nervous system to regulate into a state of peace.”

4. Accept. Trying to stop yourself from feeling your emotions fuels anxiety, while acceptance breeds calm. Try telling your anxious parts, You can go ahead and stay scared. I’m not going to try to change you. I accept you exactly as you are.

5. Murmur, hum, sing, or chant. Our amygdala is reassured by sound and vibration. “When we’re anxious, our throats tighten. Our voices go up in pitch as well as volume. Relaxing our breathing muscles by speaking in a low, slow voice is soothing both because it requires us to loosen this tension, and because the physical vibration of a calm human voice helps regulate our nervous systems.”

6. Deploy kind internal self-talk (KIST). Use a gentle voice while focusing on extending loving-kindness to yourself as if you are addressing another being. Experiment with comforting phrases such as, “You’re okay,” “I’m here with you,” “May you feel peaceful,” and “May you feel free.”

Turn Right Toward Curiosity

Beck views curiosity as the secret doorway between the fearful and inventive sides of our brain and explains that there are two very different types: deprivation curiosity and interest curiosity. The first stems from a worried need to accumulate enough information to feel safe, while the second stems from an enthusiastic desire to explore.

“Where anxiety makes us avoid more and more of the world, curiosity draws us forward, helping us get used to unexplored environments and unfamiliar experiences,” Beck writes. “Anxiety retracts; curiosity expands.”

Confident that our innate curiosity is always eagerly waiting to be reactivated, Beck writes, “Once you begin turning on your interest curiosity, opening the secret doorway between worry and wonder over and over, you’ll find that the door starts to work more smoothly.”

As we reawaken our childlike curiosity, Beck says we will begin to feel more playful and filled with wonderment.

Activating the Creativity Spiral

Throughout Beyond Anxiety, Beck offers many practical strategies to activate curiosity and creativity. She urges people to drop their externally conditioned ideas about what should interest them and begin to pay close attention to what actually sparks their delight.

Beck has coached people whose creativity spirals were activated by all sorts of activities, including raising chickens, making variations on spaghetti sauce, photographing insects, and carving soap. “Your interests may seem quite normal or completely bizarre to the people around you,” writes Beck. “What matters is that they stimulate your curiosity and make you want to keep playing with them.”

Diving headlong into what interests us often allows us to experience the delightful state of “flow.” Beck says this is what happens when time disappears and we join with the “energy of pure creation.” Not only do flow states flood us with delicious-feeling hormones, they enable us to bless the world with our best, most creative ideas.

Beck emphasizes, however, that even our most passionate creative pursuits won’t always feel easy—and they shouldn’t. Embracing “getting stuck” is an essential part of the creative process. Beck writes that getting stuck is our clue to take a break, appreciate the open and receptive state of not knowing, and then re-engage when our minds are clear and rested.

Free Yourself, Heal the World

The benefits of swapping anxiety for creativity are far-reaching. “Anxiety is contagious,” Beck explains. “As society makes us anxious, we make it anxious. Our uneasy feelings, thoughts, and actions bleed into the world around us, making others more anxious still.” Anxiety also reinforces suspicion and prejudice, which can lead us to “embody the very attitudes we don’t want to see in the world.”

Creativity spirals, on the other hand, are what Beck calls “love in action.” They open our minds and hearts, impelling us to learn about different people and perspectives. “Anxiety spirals show us only half the world. Creativity spirals show us all of it.”

Beck wants those on an anxiety-healing journey to understand that the logic of anxiety is always self-defeating, because it makes us believe that the only way to be safe is to never feel safe.

“Anxiety always lies. Always,” writes Beck. “Remember, healthy fear is the truth: a clear impulse to act when, for example, there’s a leopard in your bedroom. Anxiety is only a thought: the fear of leopards when no leopards are present. You’ll always have your healthy fear. It can save your life; anxiety can only ruin it.”

For Beck, turning toward curiosity and creativity is what finally enabled her to extricate herself from the relentless grip of anxiety. She is certain that the more you activate your own creativity spiral, the more “you’ll start to experience that incredible, beneficent magic: a sense of the world reaching back toward you from all around, as if the vast intelligence of nature is exploring you.”

Myra Goodman

• https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/swap-anxiety-for-joy

A Shortcut to Our Best Selves

A Shortcut to Our Best Selves

By Myra Goodman

Posted on October 23, 2023

To foster love and unravel unhealthy patterns, clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy recommends searching for the most generous interpretation.

Each of us is born into an intricate web of familial patterns unconsciously handed down through generations. Since infancy, I was labeled the “good girl” by my mother, while my older sister was branded the “bad girl.” This began when my mother arrived home from the hospital with me in her arms to find my 13-month-old sister upset, withdrawn, and difficult to comfort. From my mother’s perspective, her older daughter was making her life difficult, while I was an easy baby—not colicky, as my sister had been.

Because the world we see is largely shaped by our own projections, as the days and years passed, my mother continually found evidence confirming her biases, and she treated her daughters accordingly. Certain that my lovability hinged on always behaving perfectly, I grew up in constant fear of falling off my precariously high pedestal into the abyss of rejection, while my sister felt perennially frustrated and deeply hurt by her inability to prove her goodness.

Now, at 60 and 59 respectively, my sister and I are both tackling our entrenched early conditioning. On the challenging journey of repairing childhood wounds that many of us face, the wisdom shared by clinical psychologist and parenting expert Dr. Becky Kennedy is a powerfully transformative and enlightening resource.

The Belief in Essential Goodness

Dr. Becky, as she is known to her millions of followers, believes everyone is good inside—that at our core, all humans are compassionate, loving, and generous. In her best-selling book, Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, she writes, “The principle of internal goodness drives all my work—I hold the belief that kids and parents are good inside, which allows me to be curious about the ‘why’ of their bad behavior.”

Dr. Becky highlights the importance of disentangling who someone is from what they do. Rather than viewing difficult behavior as a confirmation of “internal badness,” she sees acting out as a sign that big emotions have overwhelmed a person’s ability to cope. When we view a child as a “good kid having a hard time” (instead of being mean, out of control, or spoiled, for example), it helps us intervene differently—with kindness, compassion, and curiosity instead of outrage and anger.

According to Dr. Becky, helping children develop emotional regulation skills is an essential job of every parent. Punishing kids when their behavior exhibits a lack of these skills is not only unfair and hurtful, it also leads to shame and shutting down instead of growth and connection. Because the primary way children learn to manage their feelings is through the direct experiences they have with their caregivers, adults often need to grow their own emotional regulation capabilities alongside the children they care for.

The Power of the Most Generous Interpretation

If we want to evolve into our best selves and help our children do the same, Dr. Becky offers a simple but exceptionally powerful tool that immediately broadens our perspective: Seek out the most generous interpretation (the “MGI”) behind every behavior.

“Finding the good inside can often come from asking ourselves one simple question: ‘What is my most generous interpretation of what just happened?’” Dr. Becky not only asks herself this question when it comes to her own children, she also looks for the MGI in her interactions with friends, her husband, and with herself. “Whenever I utter these words, even internally, I notice my body soften and I find myself interacting with people in a way that feels much better.”

Dr. Becky explains that finding the MGI teaches parents to focus on what’s going on inside their child (big feelings, big urges, big sensations) rather than what is going on outside of their child (big words or big actions)—to view behavior as a clue to what a child might need, not as a measure of who they are.

When we shift our orientation inward, we teach our children to do the same. “Self-regulation skills rely on the ability to recognize internal experience,” writes Dr. Becky, “so by focusing on what’s inside rather than what’s outside, we are building in our children the foundation of healthy coping skills.”

Children respond to the version of themselves that parents reflect back to them, and then they act accordingly, which is why Dr. Becky writes, “If we want our kids to have true self-confidence and to feel good about themselves, we need to reflect back to our kids that they are good inside, even as they struggle on the outside.”

Breaking Intergenerational Patterns

There are numerous reasons why finding the MGI can be challenging, especially when we’re triggered. “First,” Dr. Becky writes, “we are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias, meaning we pay closer attention to what’s difficult with our kids (or with ourselves, our partners, even the world at large) than to what is working well. Second, our experiences of our own childhoods influence how we perceive and respond to our kids’ behavior.”

It is common to respond to children in a similar way to how our own parents responded to us, and many people were raised by parents who led with judgment and criticism instead of curiosity and understanding. Additionally, we can be easily triggered by the specific behaviors that we learned to shut down in ourselves when we were young—such as crying, whining, shyness, or expressing anger or disrespect. This is why Dr. Becky emphasizes that it requires an intentional effort to course correct and not let history keep repeating itself.

In my case, it turns out that when my mother began sorting her daughters into polar opposite roles, she was repeating the same pattern that had shaped her growing up. As the elder of two daughters, my mother had been permanently cast into the role of the “bad” child by her own mother, while her younger sister was held up as the angel of the family.

In Good Inside, Dr. Becky specifically addresses the importance of looking for the MGI of an older child’s behavior when a new baby joins the family. She asks us to contemplate everyone cooing over the baby while telling the older child how happy they must be feeling. What happens, she asks, if the older child begins to have frequent tantrums and yells, “Send my sister back to the hospital. I hate her!”

If a parent is committed to seeking the MGI, it will be easier for them to see that underneath the upsetting outburst is a child in a lot of pain, likely jealous and fearful as they observe so much love and attention being diverted to the new baby. How would that older child feel if they’d been gathered into their parents’ arms and offered an abundance of love, comfort, and reassurance versus being sent to their room after being told that their outburst was mean and totally unacceptable? What lessons would they have learned about feeling and expressing all of their emotions honestly?

Healing the Present by Envisioning a Better Past

Admittedly, we cannot change the past. However, it is healing to imagine how different it would have been for my sister if she’d been fully embraced as the good child she always was from the moment my mother walked through that front door 59 years ago with me in her arms. Doing so both illuminates and invalidates our mother’s negative assumptions that firmly took root so long ago.

Looking back at my mother’s behavior through the lens of the most generous interpretation, I can see that having a “good” and “bad” daughter was the dynamic her nervous system was most familiar with—the one that came so naturally, she never thought to question it. I can feel compassion towards my mother, who has lived her entire life with the great pain of believing she was “bad,” and the unfortunate ramifications of assigning that same label to many of the people in her life.

Whether it’s in relation to a child’s tantrum, a spouse’s emotional outburst, or a grocery clerk’s impatient mannerisms, looking for the most generous interpretation can open our eyes to what we were unable to perceive before. Most importantly, it can help us penetrate the filter of our personal biases and emotional triggers so that we are capable of recognizing another person’s essential goodness. This is an act of profound kindness towards others, as well as ourselves.

“There’s nothing more valuable than learning to find our goodness under our struggles, because this leads to an increased capacity to reflect and change,” writes Dr. Becky. “All good decisions start with feeling secure in ourselves and in our environment, and nothing feels more secure than being recognized for the good people we truly are.”

https://www.spiritualityhealth.com/shortcut-to-our-best-selves