Anxiety not always bad

New book makes case that it can offer insights.

Most people with anxiety just want it to go away and leave them alone.

Not Wendy Suzuki, though. Suzuki, a professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, decided to try to make friends with her anxiety. Why? So she could tame it, train it and turn this physiological and psychological response into a “superpower.” What’s more, she says this strategy can work for just about anyone trying to manage “everyday anxiety.”

What’s everyday anxiety? Unlike clinical anxiety, which includes anxiety disorders, everyday anxiety isn’t fun to deal with but, at the end of the day, most of us find ways to cope with it, whether through positive or negative coping mechanisms.

“There’s a wide spectrum of anxiety,” Suzuki says. “And clinical anxiety is truly debilitating. You can’t do anything, you can’t get out of bed and you’re afraid to leave the house.”

“I think of everyday anxiety, however, as more like a constant pressure, an extra load you have to carry every day,” she continues.

“I picture my own anxiety as a kind of an anchor around my neck that doesn’t keep me from doing stuff but, if I didn’t have this stupid thing around my neck, I could be so much more free.”

Sadly, there’s no path to being totally anxiety-free. Anxiety will always be with us, which is actually a good thing. Although our experience of anxiety is often an unpleasant and uncomfortable sensation, it’s also an early warning system that helps us stay out of harm’s way. Without it, we’d be far more vulnerable.

Where it can seem complicated, though, is that anxiety isn’t always a response to an immediate threat, as in, jumping out of the way of an oncoming car. Anxiety can also arise in response to less concrete and less urgent issues — health concerns, financial worries or social situations. This anxiety isn’t just a misfire, though, and we should also pay attention to it, says Suzuki, whose book, “Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion,” is being released this month.

“The single thing that surprised me most when writing this book is that I found myself trying to make friends with my own anxiety,” she says. “And anxiety is prickly. It’s not like your warm and cuddly friend who gives you a big hug every time you see her. It’s that prickly friend who kind of tells it like it is, but gives you really important insights.”

It may be prickly but, underneath it all, anxiety is a benevolent friend, she says, even when it’s making you feel tense, nervous or even full of dread. So, step one is to decrease or quell any “overactive” levels of anxiety. There are several strategies for doing this, but Suzuki recommends breath work, specifically box breathing, which has you count to four on the inhale, hold it for four, count to four on the exhale and then hold it for four again.

“This activates the ‘rest and digest’ part of our nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, which decreases the heart rate and increases blood flow to your digestive and reproductive system,” Suzuki says.

When the parasympathetic nervous system kicks in, it’s like hitting the brakes on the physical symptoms of anxiety after you’re safely off the tracks and the train has passed. It’s easy to imagine it in the case of an immediate threat but, again, much of the anxiety we experience is related to long-term stresses and worries, as opposed to things that can be fixed immediately. And so, for many of us, we turn to negative coping strategies, such as working all the time, stress eating or repression, to make the anxiety go away.

Instead, we need to quell the immediate feelings so we can start to get into the habit of “sitting” with these feelings, which have a lot to tell us about our values and the path forward. That’s where we can start to work on developing our anxiety superpowers and, eventually, get our superhero capes.

“One of my lifelong anxieties has been social anxiety and, after years and years of being the awkward wallflower, the anxiety taught me how much I value social interactions with my friends,” says Suzuki, who recalls that she got better with her interactions, but still failed to make time for them. “My prickly friend reminded me how much I valued it, so why didn’t I spend some time on that instead of trying to get the next paper written?”

Listening to the voice and making change are two different things, of course. But Suzuki says that making big changes are within our grasp, thanks to brain “plasticity” — the human brain’s ability to form new, more positive, neural pathways.

“I’m optimistic that people will be able to do this because I’ve studied brain plasticity for the last 25 years of my neuroscience career,” Suzuki explains. “If you take a moment to reflect on your anxiety and appreciate that it is protective and those quote-unquote negative emotions are telling us something so valuable, so insightful about ourselves, you can reframe your whole experience of anxiety.”

She adds: “I know the idea of ‘good’ anxiety is counterintuitive, but the promise of the book is ultimately a more fulfilling, creative and less stressful life.”

“Anxiety ... is that prickly friend who kind of tells it like it is, but gives you really important insights.”

WENDY SUZUKI NYU PROFESSOR AND AUTHOR