Exactly 4 years ago I did an about face in how I understand the science of my own fear, anxiety, anger, love, joy, happiness and all my human emotional and biological cues. An unintended consequence was I started to understand and relate to my dog, Duffy, a whole lot. Really Duffy is my parents’ dog, but he lives two doors down.
As a teacher, child care provider, and mother for 30 years, I realized through brain research and observations of hundreds of children that our brain is biologically an organ of paranoia, vigilance, defensiveness, and protectiveness.
According to acclaimed brain researcher Jeff Hawkins, author of On Intelligence, our brain’s main job is to match the predictions it has made in each moment to the reality of what actually happens. The split second an event occurs differently than the brain was predicting, the brain cues the amygdala to cue for fear and anxiety in order to force us to pay attention to the anomaly NOW. Our brain is constantly on the look-out for anomalies. Our brain is totally paranoid by design.
The biological fact is, our brain cannot see, hear, or sense anything being locked up in our skull the way it is. Jeff Hawkins has shown through his research that our sense organs and all other organs for that matter continuously and constantly feed information into the brain in the form of sequences of patterns. So when the brain receives a pattern sequence different from the one it was expecting, it has no way of knowing if the difference is slight or huge. The brain registers and treats all anomalies the same.
For this reason, our human brains move in and out of fear and anxiety all day, every day. We cannot choose to have only positive responses and thus stop paranoia, fear and anxiety. If we did, the consequences would be tragic, because paranoia is to our brain what pain is to our body. Without pain sensors, we would suffer gruesome injuries throughout our lives. Without our paranoia and fear to cue us to potential dangers, we would suffer gruesome outcomes as well.
We are perfectly accepting of our pain sensors. We hate to feel pain but we know how necessary pain is for our ability to orient safely in space. So what if we developed just as much acceptance about paranoia, fear, and anxiety?
Removing all negative connotations around my own paranoia, fear and anxiety has changed everything about everything for me. I take my fear and anxiety seriously now and address my anxiety immediately when it surfaces. After 4 years of relying upon instead of dissociating all my emotional and biological cues for the information they give me, I notice myself to be more like a dog, particularly when it comes to my anxieties.
Instead of trying to push my anxiety away due to life long messages that anxiety is negative, I now do the simplest thing in the whole world. I pay attention to my anxiety immediately. I deal with it immediately. And then I let it go, just like a dog.
Imagine the dogs who leap from a deep sleep when a stranger walks by, yelp frenetically until the stranger passes, and then melt back into a deep sleep immediately. Dogs don’t get all anxiety stricken and judgemental about their paranoia and fear. They pay attention to it immediately, deal with it immediately, and get over it immediately. Amazingly, I have become as quick to manage my anxiety and fears as a dog.
My brain will never stop calling up my fear intermittently all day every day, so using my fear as a guide instead of something to avoid has given me much more clarity and actual guidance.
I also treat people differently now, especially children. I take children at face value. When a child is upset, even for what some might consider a silly reason, I take them seriously instead of telling them they should not get so upset. I don’t make a big deal out of children making a big deal out of things any more. When I take children seriously and at face value, they become very calm in my classroom or home. They know they won’t be second guessed or challenged for saying or doing what makes sense for them to spontaneously say or do. When they are calm, they make better choices in general, and there are fewer conflicts in general.
When children are able to deal thoroughly with whatever upsets them, they get over their problem much more quickly than If I shut them down right away by telling them they shouldn’t be so upset. If I invalidate a child’s concerns, they withdraw and stew about it or they act out and have a prolonged period of irritation and aggression about it. To validate a child’s concerns is so easy, costs nothing, takes way less time than invalidation, and I believe it is a practice that has the power reduce anxiety related disorders in children.
When children know I will always validate them by taking them seriously, hearing them out, and respecting their reasoning for their thoughts and behaviors, they are equally willing to hear me out and listen to my reasoning when my reasoning differs from theirs. Conflicts become unbelievably easier to navigate and resolve.
When I started to take student responses and behaviors seriously and stopped treating their responses and behaviors as bits of information for me to judge and manage from my perspective, my students STOPPED having behavior problems. True, I stopped understanding behaviors as something problems could exist within. But when students knew their responses and behaviors belonged to them and them alone, their brains stopped perceiving me as a threatening element. If students predict I will jump all over their responses and behaviors, their brains become extremely paranoid and anxious about how I might do it and when. When students know they are free to respond and behave in ways that make sense to them, the whole class becomes chill, and the need for behavior management goes away.
My observation is that our brains are as ferociously protective of our behaviors as they are about our predictions. A brain must be able to know it can rely on the full array of behaviors accessible to it because a brain never knows what behaviors it might need to call up to help it make predictions for what to do next.
Why have paranoia, fear, and anxiety gotten such a bad rap over the years? Psychological theorists like Freud and Jung developed their theories well before modern brain research. Their ideas about emotions were arbitrary and have been proven wrong. But their ideas have never been fully replaced and many inaccurate assumptions live on in psychology for reasons I cannot figure out, hard as I have tried. Inaccurate psychological assumptions are gobbled up on the daily by the self-help industry, repackaged, and resold to us as one miracle solution after another for happiness and positivity. Forcing ourselves to have only positive thoughts and emotions is one of the inaccurate ideologies possibly linked to our epidemic of anxiety related disorders.
Instead of ranking our human emotional cues and biological capacities, with some being considered positive and some negative, I accept all my biological cues as having important and valid reasons for engaging when they do because they are designed to engage for situationally appropriate reasons to guide me. I bump into fear all day long that cues and clues me for how to orient myself in space and time. I also bump intermittently into love, trust, respect, anger, irritation, joy, sadness, hunger, fatigue, desire, etc. I cannot manufacture these biological cues to build myself into an ideal version of myself according to the latest self-help or psychological strategy. I am meant to rely upon these cues as they intertwine themselves with my cognitive predictions in order to optimize my predictive decision making every moment of every day. When I can do this unimpeded, I have a happy brain, and I am a happy person.
Making peace with my brain that makes a big deal out of anomalies and respecting this dynamic in myself and others has made my life unbelievably more serene and pleasant than it used to be.
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