Is Your Anxiety a Habit You Need to Break?

Why We Form Habits In Response To Anxiety

Jason Kander, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, became a rising star in the Democratic Party. A Missouri state senator by his mid-twenties, Jason was elected Secretary of State at the age of 31, ran for the U.S. Senate, launched a campaign to become mayor of Kansas City, and was forthright about his ambitions to one day become President. Because of his charisma, connections, and media appeal, politicians constantly asked him to host fundraisers and make introductions. He said yes to every request, and flew all over the country delivering keynotes and raising money, even though behind the scenes, he was suffering excruciating nightmares, terrible guilt and shame, and panic anxiety.

It was only when he began to entertain thoughts of self-harm that Jason sought out help, and began weekly therapy through the local VA. “That's really where I learned that I had been using my professional life as an avoidance strategy for what was going on with me personally,” he says.

Jason also learned that he’d been suffering from undiagnosed, untreated PTSD, and reacted to it by trying to be a hero to others, always rushing in to help and pushing himself relentlessly. He now realizes that his ambition was fueled in part by the attempt to self-soothe through some of our most socially acceptable and rewarding unhealthy coping mechanisms: overwork and people-pleasing.

Many anxious leaders rely on bad habits and unhealthy reactions that may be soothing in the short term, but ultimately, make them more stressed, deplete their energy, and undermine their leadership. Many anxious people engage in bad habits because they offer quick relief from anxiety. The problem is, the relief is temporary, and once it wears off, whatever was making us anxious is still there—and often, it’s grown worse while we were avoiding it.

Sometimes, however, people advance because of their bad habits. Overwork, for example, is frequently lauded, and its results rewarded. Jason’s drive led to a life filled with accolades many of us only dream of, a fast-track career in public office. You can listen to our interview here.

At some point our bad habits will exact a toll that is too high a price to pay. Work can become a way to avoid issues we don’t want to deal with, people we don’t want to confront, or demons inside. If you want to truly manage your anxiety for the long haul, you need to understand the origins of your drive to work too hard, and examine if the plaudits are really worth the price.

Understanding your anxiety is great—but how do you avoid being stuck with resorting to dysfunctional habits and reactions when you feel anxious? How can you make those reactions more adaptive and less destructive? Today we will hear from two experts on creating new, healthier habits: Dr. Jud Brewer and Charles Duhigg.

Why Do We Form Habits?

It’s worth taking a brief look at how, and why, habits are formed in the first place. Habits begin in the brain. Our brains are constantly searching for the most efficient means to complete a task, and will convert almost any routine process or task into a habit, because habits save time and metabolic energy. In a sense, habits give the brain a break. They allow it to operate on autopilot, relieving us of the burden of thinking through routine tasks step by step. “Our brains are always trying to make light work for us,” says clinical psychologist Dr. Christine Runyan, “so we’ll always recognize patterns and we’ll always default” to those patterns.

Over time, this loop—cue, routine, reward—becomes more and more automatic, and the cue and the reward become intermingled. The process is a powerful feedback loop that creates a habit. It all happens in a split second, and the more you use a habit, the stronger it becomes.

Let’s say you hit a wall on a work project. Frustrated and stressed, you head to the kitchen and find a snack. While you’re enjoying leftovers, your mind is no longer occupied with the problem and your stress decreases. Eating thus becomes associated with stress reduction. The brain learns this is a reaction that works—that eating delivers a reward in the form of stress reduction, in other words—and will turn to it again and again. Boom, a habit is born.

The process is the same for negative as well as positive habits. You can just as easily establish a habit for exercising, meditating, or creating a task list at the start of each day, for example.

But here’s the thing about a habit: healthy or unhealthy, once it’s in place, the brain is wired to keep it in place. On the one hand this is a good thing, as habits save us from having to relearn the same basic task over and over again and allow us to focus on other, higher-order tasks.

The brain, as extraordinary an organ as it is, does not know the difference between a habit that’s going to help us thrive, and one that’s going to hinder our health, happiness, or leadership. Its job is to engage in the habit and snag that short-term reward, not discern the habit’s long-term effect on us.

Once the habit is established, the brain will automatically turn to it to get that reward any time it encounters a cue. Have you ever checked back into awareness only after the bag of chips or the bottle of wine was half gone? That’s because the habit-loop process is so automatic that it happens unconsciously. Once we’re triggered, we engage in the habit without thinking.

Research has shown us that like all animals, we are more likely to revert to heavily ingrained patterns or coping behaviors when we’re under stress.

Most of us have a handful of favorite habits on heavy rotation—the behavioral patterns we tend to lean on when anxiety escalates. We even have habits to cope with the anxiety we feel about feeling anxiety! If there's a weekly one-on-one with your boss that you’re always feeling anxious about, for example, you may develop habits to deal with the anticipatory anxiety you feel about that meeting.

Here’s your homework: what’s a workday habit you frequently employ when under stress? Notice it! Is it a pattern of thoughts, or a behavior? What causes you to act it out?

Morra