How to Live When Your Mind Is Governed by Fear
Psychiatrist and habit change specialist Dr. Jud Brewer explains how anxiety masquerades as helpful
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I was recently on the phone with my friend Kate, who had just returned from a summer road trip with her kids. She’s one of those ultra-responsible types who is up on evolving coronavirus precautions and social distancing guidelines (full disclosure: She’s also an editor at Elemental). As a way to salvage joy amid the wreckage of 2020, she opted to drive her sons to a few remote spots in Montana and Wyoming. They were gone for two weeks, and upon return, Kate sounded elated, relaxed, and thrilled with the decision to pull up stakes from the normal routines of daily life and go deep into nature. “I cannot believe,” she told me, “that I almost didn’t do it.”
Were this any other year, such a trip would have been seen as a no-brainer, a guaranteed source of mom points and memories. Yet because it’s 2020, and because Covid-19 dominates all aspects of life, Kate almost canceled — not because of safety (she ensured everyone’s safety) but because of fear and anxiety.
“Even as I knew in my logical brain that the trip made sense and would be hugely beneficial, I kept doubting myself in a way that I couldn’t shake,” she told me. No matter that Kate knew she’d be exiting more populated California for less populated areas, wearing masks in public settings, spending most of her time in the wilderness, and traveling by car — a sneaking suspicion kept telling her she wasn’t “supposed” to do this. In fact, fear had sent its close cousin, anxiety, to tail Kate like an unmarked police car as she plotted her journey — staying just out of sight but coming into view every now and then to let its presence be known.
Damn you, anxiety — threatening to ruin even the most wholesome of family trips!
Fear is an innate survival mechanism, set up to help us learn what is dangerous and how to avoid it. It is the oldest survival mechanism known in…
