How to Turn Bad Anxiety Into Good Anxiety

A new book explains that anxiety can give us clues about how to make our lives better

The daily deluge of bad news and anxiety inducing events can wear us out. But those anxious feelings can also prompt us to take meaningful action. (Lipik Stock Media/Shutterstock)

Anxiety can feel like a heavy weight that we didn’t ask to carry. Who wouldn’t love to get rid of it?

But neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki wants to challenge the way we view our anxiety. In fact, her new book is called “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion.”

If you’re skeptical, so was I. But Suzuki’s point is that anxiety is a natural human emotion, and it serves a purpose. We feel anxious when there’s some kind of danger: It primes our body to fight or flee from that danger, in hopes that we’ll end up better off (or alive, at least). In the same way, our modern anxieties can be a warning signal for things that are wrong, such as not getting enough rest, too much multitasking, and isolation from others. Our anxious energy alerts us so that we can change our lives for the better, according to Suzuki.

“If we simply approach it as something to avoid, get rid of, or dampen, we not only don’t solve the problem but actually miss an opportunity to leverage the generative power of anxiety,” she wrote.

Good anxiety can draw our attention to a problem. When we’re aware of a problem and feel that anxiety, it’s our fight-or-flight response, which comes with the activation of our sympathetic nervous system. This brings a cascade of biochemical changes that help us deal with an immediate threat.

When the threat passes, we kick into rest-and-digest mode, which comes with the activation of our parasympathetic nervous system and its own cascade of biochemical changes. Unfortunately, in today’s high-stress world, we’re left in a state of constant alert, and that bad anxiety makes it difficult to calm down and get the benefit of what our anxiety is signaling.

To do that, we first need to turn down the volume of our anxiety, so that we can listen to what it has to say. Meant for people with everyday anxiety (not anxiety disorders), “Good Anxiety” explains how to do that in order to make your life more productive, creative, and connected. In our Q&A, Suzuki highlighted some of the ideas from her book.

Wendy Suzuki. © Matt Simpkins Photography

Kira M. Newman: You have a whole section of the book with lots of different tools to help us decrease bad anxiety. How do we figure out where to start?

Wendy Suzuki: Let me give everybody my top two go-to’s for using the tools to decrease anxiety, because they’re fast, they’re easy, they work, and there’s a lot of science behind them, including science that I’ve done in my lab.

So tool No. 1 is breathwork. Just simple, deep breathing. I recommend a box breathing approach: inhaling on a four-count, holding at the top for four counts, exhaling on a four-count, holding at the bottom for four counts. This works because it’s literally activating that parasympathetic nervous system. There’s a reason why monks for hundreds and hundreds of years have turned to breathwork to calm themselves down, to get into a meditative state. They may not have known the term “parasympathetic nervous system,” but that’s exactly what that deep breathwork is doing.

No. 2 go-to is moving your body. I’m not talking about marathon running. I’m talking about going outside, walking around the block, walking around your dining room table if you’re isolating. Moving your body is activating a whole bunch of neurochemicals released in your brain. I like to say that every single time you move your body, it’s like you’re giving your brain a wonderful bubble bath of neurochemicals, including dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins. I’m sure people have noticed that when they go for a walk, they go outside when they can’t take it anymore, they feel better when they come back.

I start with the breath because it’s easiest to do. You can do it in the middle of an anxiety-provoking situation, and nobody even knows you’re doing it. It’s hard to do some jumping jacks in the middle of an anxiety-provoking situation. That’s a little bit awkward.

Ms. Newman: What interesting research about anxiety would be helpful for readers to know about?

Ms. Suzuki: I'll share some of the most recent findings from my lab: These are preliminary data where we started to look at really short interventions. Sometimes you don’t have 45 minutes to go to a full meditation class or listen to a full lecture on mindset, so we looked at five- and 10-minute interventions of either breathwork or chair yoga that are easy to do at work or at your dining room table.

These have turned out to be significantly effective for immediate reduction of anxiety levels, which is great. YouTube gives you free access to hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of short and long yoga, breathwork, even short movement exercises. Not to mention songs if you just want to stand up and dance, which is one of my favorite ways to move your body, especially if you’re all alone dancing in your living room.

Have these things in your back pocket so you’re not searching on YouTube as your anxiety attack is developing. It can be five or 10 minutes of this activity that can significantly decrease your anxiety levels.

Ms. Newman: What do we tend to do in those moments when we’re starting to feel anxiety that’s counterproductive?

Ms. Suzuki: I think it’s very common to start to be anxious about being anxious, so you have a meta-anxiety going on. You’re feeling yourself going into anxiety and that just makes you even more anxious and brings you down into the void of anxiety even faster.

The goal or the promise of “Good Anxiety” is that when you start to feel that, instead of saying, “Oh no, I’m starting to feel anxious. What do I do?” you have 10 possible things that you can do right now (depending on the situation) that you’ve already tested, that you know you can do, that you know you like, and that can immediately work. Pull it out of your back pocket, use it right there, and that will quell your anxiety.

Ms. Newman: What do people do once they’ve turned down the volume of anxiety?

Ms. Suzuki: Step two is learning about what that anxiety is telling you about your values, your life, your lifestyle. You can ask yourself: “Why did I get anxious? What caused that? What can I understand about this that I could address in the future, perhaps in a different way?” Once you turn the volume down on anxiety, it allows you to step back and learn and contemplate what this anxiety is telling you about your values, about how you’re living your life, about the patterns in your life.

That thing that causes me anxiety may never change. I’ve had many of my anxieties from the time that I was very little. I talk a lot about my own anxieties since I covered them in the book, and one of the oldest that I talk about is social anxiety. I was a very, very shy, awkward kid. All through high school and college, I always had that fear of asking questions in class, and to this day I get scared of social situations.

So I find myself thinking, “OK, well that’s always going to be there. How can I make that easier for myself?” So, I go with friends, make sure I have somebody that I can talk to that eases my way in. While I have social anxiety and it always makes me nervous to make new friends, I have this human desire to be part of a social group, and my dear friends are some of the most comforting elements in my whole life.

Ms. Newman: And the third step in this process is to reap the benefits of anxiety? What does that mean?

Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion (Atria Books, 2021, 304 pages)

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Ms. Suzuki: There are six different gifts or superpowers that I talk about, and the easiest one to understand and implement for anybody is the superpower of productivity that comes from your specific anxiety.

Here’s how that works. A very, very common manifestation of anxiety is that “what if” list that comes in your head: “What if I get sick with COVID? What if I don’t get an A? What if I can’t remember what the professor said on this part of the test?”

The superpower that comes with that anxiety-induced what-if list is shifting that into a to-do list. So, you’re worried about failing a particular exam. Obvious to-dos: Find a friend to study with, find a tutor, study these particular three lectures that were confusing to you.

Good anxiety is using the activation energy of that anxiety-induced stress response to get something done, to take that warning signal and do something with it, whether that’s to study for that test or make that appointment for your vaccination if you choose to do so or consult your financial adviser if you’re worried about money. In completing the to-do, you help resolve that feeling of anxiety, and it makes you more productive.

Ms. Newman: What else would you like readers to know?

Ms. Suzuki: I guess I would say that my wish for everybody who reads the book and dives into all the tools is that they come out with a more fulfilling, more creative, and overall less stressful life in bringing these tools and approaches into their lives to flip their bad anxiety to good. That’s what I found as I’ve practiced these tools, so that’s what I hope for all of the readers.

[Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for brevity.]