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

Shift Mindset is a cross series of CNN, but a better team. We are talking to experts about how to do things differently to live a better life.

Weaponthe Climate crisisand Political division And Brain-Hijacking technology Make today community A land reproduction for anxiety.

The disruption of the ongoing anxiety cycle requires major transformations in how we are linked to the world, Martha Beck. The search for ways to reduce its anxiety outside the plans has led to the most -selling sociologist to discover that curiosity and creativity can be an antidote. Evidence showed a kind of impact of switching between creativity and anxiety, as she explained in her new book, “Beyond anxiety: curiosity, creativity and finding the purpose of your life“When someone is running, the other appears to be silent.”

Beck wrote in her book in her book. Therefore, the installation of defense against the cultural forces “infinite, hidden and strong” that inflame our demands for our anxiety, we take care of the new brain paths to grow “curiosity, wonder, communication, sympathy and dread.” It shares the strategies designed to calm anxiety, which it describes as a “fearful creature in your mind”, with the liberation of the creative genius within us all.

This conversation was edited and intensified for clarity.

CNN: Why are people very worried these days?

Martha Beck, sociologist and author of “Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity and finding the purpose of your life” – Rowan Mangan

Martha Beck: People were always worried. Our brains have a negative bias that make us very interested in anything that might harm us. But today, we are in the unprecedented situation where endless cultural forces rotate our brains to fear -based thinking that not only leads to anxiety, but also learned to use the anxiety parts of our brain. Once you are in the spiral of anxiety, it is difficult to go out; Natural brain function leads to an unorganized reactions that tend to increase anxiety indefinitely instead of weakness.

CNN: What do you mean by “bias of negativity”?

Beck: I call it the story of “15 Pubies and A Cobra”. If you walk in a room with 15 caused and cobra, your attention will focus on the cobra because it is a potential threat. This bias helped maintain the integrity of our ancestors, but in modern life, it can lead to an anxious anxiety.

Even if the cobra is only on our news summary, our brains respond as if the threat is real and present. After that, our brain focuses on the problem when it explains our nervousness as evidence that we must be nervous and enhance the pattern. To our knowledge, humans are the only animal that can take an imagined fear and turn it into a fixed and sustainable experience of anxiety. We can stumble in the “Mirror Hall” full of fear that continues to escalate.

CNN: How is anxiety different from fear?

Beck: Healthy fear is in response to a dangerous thing that we experience as a severe explosion that is almost immediately receded when the danger passes. Anxiety is in response to our ideas. We feel that fear of things that are not present, may not have occurred, may never happen. Feelings can remain even when we are completely safe. Anxiety is like haunted.

CNN: What is the “secret door” out of anxiety, and how can we reach it?

Beck: First, let’s talk about what never works. Often our first attempt is to try to attack our anxiety. We want to disappear, so we get it, and try to remove it. But anxiety is a fearful animal. Running then, saying, “I want to end you” does not calm it.

Instead, curiosity can be the first step towards calm. Take advantage of your self -conflicts, even if you don’t feel it. Say, “I listen. I hear you. I see that you are afraid. Tell me everything.” It doesn’t matter even if you mean, at first. Just formation of thought leads to a different way of thinking. Nervously, curiosity pulls our attention away from the mechanisms that cause anxiety, which generates the beginning of the end of the spiral.

We are programmers to attend what makes us concern. Transforming our attention towards curiosity and away from anxiety helps us to expand rather than contract our lives. If you can feel curious enough about your anxious thoughts to ask yourself whether it is correct – whether it is free or keeping you captive – you are already on your way out.

The open field

The open field

CNN: How does creativity help us manage anxiety?

Beck: Creativity is involved in the right hemisphere of the brain, which helps to turn our attention away from the anxiety arrested from the left hemisphere. Instead of destroying us in a small fear prison, creativity stimulates learning and opened the entire universe. Access to a path to transcending, which comes when the vortex of creativity gives an experience of flowing inverse. I think this is the way we should live most of the time.

CNN: But is it not dangerous if we stay in a state of flow, and create us? Will we not lose the cobra path?

Beck: It will be not applicable at all. We were just raging on the street and separating in seconds. But this is the thing: the right hemisphere, where there is creativity, does not exclude data from the left. You see the cobra and says: “What is the creative thing that we can do to deal with this cobra? Can we stop it? Can we make a little snake capture unit?”

Today, we face a large group of uninterrupted columns. We live in a world with unprecedented transfer and technology, and now we cook the Earth. If we just run in a state of panic around these things, we cannot do anything useful. We must let us describe our right -wing population to take the wheel – to allow our creativity to engage in the invention process.

CNN: How can creativity reduce anxiety in daily life?

Beck: What time I am concerned, I ask myself, “What can I do?” Not “What do I do?” But “What can I do?” This puts me immediately in a different state of existence.

The behavior dominated by the left hemisphere is essential to our culture. We live in a society that assumes anxiety helps solve problems. In fact, no good solutions come from anxiety or panic. It comes from curiosity, calm and creativity.

Our anxiety has obsessed with control – focusing on trying, analyzing, measuring and naming everything that we took away from the rhythms of nature. Many of us are stuck in the trap of the left hemisphere that creatively left us. Making art, especially practical work, can re -connect us to our biology, and a balance between ourselves.

When you try to contact your anxiety and become creative, it helps to focus on the process rather than the product. GoodBoy/Istockphoto/Getty Images

When you try to contact your anxiety and become creative, it helps to focus on the process rather than the product. GoodBoy/Istockphoto/Getty Images

CNN: What about people who are not technicians?

Beck: I think all people generate creative geniuses before we are convinced of socialization that we are not. By art, I mean anything we make, create or create. The moment you pick a mass of clay, for example, and start making something, the right hemisphere in your mind shines. It helps to start with self -sympathy and curiosity towards your own experiences while engaging in art and creation activities that use your hands.

Focus on the process instead of the product. We do not go to the gym, “My whole job is to raise this weight and keep it in the air.” No, you raise it to influence you. No drawing of the painting itself, but it promotes the neurons that fall into the creative part of your mind.

Mandala coloring, for example, has an effect on lifting on moodand The immune system And all the positive parts of your psyche. So, color Mandala for 20 minutes, then throw the dreaded thing away (if you want it). It is not related to coloring, but the good mood you take away from it. It also helps to find a society with others who also participate in creative efforts and communicate with them.

CNN: What are the effects of ripple that creativity can bring to the world?

Beck: I think we can save the world. Anxiety is infectious, but calm as well. Humans participate in the organization with the calm person they can find. Electrical brains, and if two people meet each other in a state of deep regulations, their calm field extends beyond them, and extends to other people.

Making art is one of the ways to reach quiet, deeper situations that can serve as an anchor, for yourself and others. A line attributed to the Persian poet in the fourteenth century Havis He had such an effect on me: “Disrepted? Then stay with me, because I am not.” This is what we can be for each other. The world needs more different people than ever.

Jessica Dolong He is a journalist in Brooklyn, based in New York, a book collaborator, a writing coach and author of “Save at the Seawall: Stories from The 11 Septmber Life” and “My River Chronicles: Re -discovering the work that built America”.

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