Regulate & Rewire: An Anxiety & Depression Podcast

Why We Overestimate Threats (Part 2 - Anxiety Equation Series)

• Amanda Armstrong • Season 1 • Episode 129

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Welcome to part two of our series! Today, Amanda’s diving into the first half of the anxiety equation: the “Overestimation of Threat.” Learn why your brain is wired to assume the worst-case scenario and discover three practical tools to help your nervous system calibrate to the actual level of danger, not just the perceived one.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

  • Why your brain’s “negativity bias” is a survival skill that’s poorly adapted for modern life
  • How childhood experiences can turn your internal alarm system up to the highest setting
  • The connection between your nervous system state and the stories you tell yourself about what’s happening

Tools to "Right-Size" the Threat:

  1. The Reality Check Question: "What do I actually know to be true right now?"
  2. The Percentage Game: "If I had to bet money, what's the real percentage chance of the worst-case scenario happening?"
  3. The Friend Filter: "What would I tell my best friend if they came to me with this exact situation?"

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Amanda Armstrong  0:00  
Amanda, welcome to regulate and rewire an anxiety and depression podcast where we discuss the things I wish someone would have taught me earlier in my healing journey. I'm your host, Amanda Armstrong, and I'll be sharing my steps, my missteps, client experiences and tangible research based tools to help you regulate your nervous system, rewire your mind and reclaim your life. Thanks for being here. Now let's dive in.

Amanda Armstrong  0:27  
Welcome back. This is part two of our anxiety equation, mini series. And not only is this a three part mini series, but it is a three part mini series made up of mini micro episodes. My goal in this series is to introduce just a small piece of this equation, and then to invite you to experiment with it, to build some awareness, personal application, some curiosity around how this might look and play out in your everyday life. So last time I introduced the anxiety equation, which is that anxiety equals an overestimation of the threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to handle that threat. And today we are going to dive into the first part of this equation, why our brains are literally wired to overestimate threats. But not only why they overestimate threats. I'm going to give you some tangible things that answer the question, What can I do? 

Amanda Armstrong  1:27  
So let's start with a truth that might make you feel a little bit better. Your brain overestimating threats isn't actually any kind of character flaw, sign of weakness, and oftentimes it's not even necessarily a problem. It becomes problematic when we are overestimating the threat and underestimating our resilience, our ability, our capacity. This overestimation of threats in our everyday life is actually your nervous system doing its number one job, which is to keep you alive. I want you to think about it like this. Our ancestors, the ones who survived, were not the ones who said, Ooh, that rustling in the bushes is probably just the wind. Our ancestors that survived were the ones who assumed that it was a predator and ran or prepared to face it, the anxious ones lived to pass on their genes. We are all literal descendants of the worriers, and this created what we call a negativity bias. And so this means that our brain gives more weight to potential dangers than to potential rewards positivity or neutral information, and studies actually show that we need about five positive experiences to outweigh a single negative one. That is how strongly our brains prioritize threat detection. 

Amanda Armstrong  2:55  
But here's the thing, this is where it can get tricky in modern life. The same system that saved us from sabertooth tigers now gets fired up from an email, a notification, a weird body sensation, somebody's tone of voice, the news, our nervous system cannot tell the difference between a real tiger and the countless metaphorical ones that Modern, connected technological life offers us countless times a day. And then if you add your childhood programming to this mix, things get even more complex. If you grew up in an environment where you had to be hyper vigilant, maybe there was inconsistency, emotional unpredictability, criticism, chaos, your threat detection system got turned up even higher. Your nervous system became even more sensitive to threats. You learned, hey, remember that one time you let your guard down and that terrible thing happened, or you were criticized in that way? Or remember when you thought you were going to get accepted, and then the friends at school rejected you, or you were bullied, don't let your guard down. And so you became even more hyper vigilant, even more hyper aware. You learn to scan for danger constantly, because at the time, that is what kept you the most safe. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:10  
And unless you have done some very, very intentional healing work to reprogram that hypersensitive nervous system, it is still the programming your default operating system today. So now, as an adult, you get a text or an email that says, hey, we need to talk. This sends your nervous system into the same stress response as if you were being chased by a predator. Your brain fills in the blanks with worst case scenarios. You're going to get fired. Your relationship is over. Something terrible has happened, or maybe it's something that you notice on a more sensational body based level, you notice that your heart is racing, and you immediately think it's a heart attack. You have a headache and it's a brain tumor. That person didn't text you back. They hate you. 

Amanda Armstrong  4:50  
And I'm not exempt from this. Just last week, I found myself doing this. I got a text from a friend that just said, Hey, call me when you can. Period, no context. That was the whole text, call me when you can. But. My brain immediately went to someone's in the hospital. Something terrible has happened. There's bad news. I could feel my chest getting tight. My breath was shallow. That threat felt massive. I was like, Oh my gosh. What happened? What happened? I have to call them right now, but I was in a place where I couldn't call them right now. So that sensation just sat, it sat, and it built up. Then I took a breath, and I paused, and I used my own reality check filters, and I was like, What do I actually know? I was like, the only thing I actually know is that my friend wants to talk. That's it. Turns out, all she wanted to know is what to bring for dinner on Sunday, my nervous system had me preparing for catastrophe over what actually was just potato salad. And when we are living in this chronic, activated state, that yellow zone, state, that state determines our story, we come back to this all the time here on the podcast. When you are living in the yellow zone, we turn mole hills into mountain. We turned spilt milk into the end of a good day. I turned a simple text into a possible catastrophe when the reality is it was about a side to bring for Sunday. 

Amanda Armstrong  6:17  
Your Brain, my brain, when this happens, is doing what it learned to do. It is assuming the worst, to help keep you safe, to help keep you prepared. But most of the time, the actual threat is nowhere near what we build it up to be, what we imagine it to be. So what do we do about that? Here are three practical tools for when you catch your brain overestimating the threat, and I will even add here when you catch your brain even possibly overestimating the threat, because when you've been doing this for years or even decades, it's not hard for you to create a lot of evidence for why you're not overestimating the possible threat, why that might actually be what happens to you.

Amanda Armstrong  7:03  
and the first of these tools or filters is something I call the reality check question, and it sounds like quote, what do I actually know to be true, not what might happen, not what happened last time, but what Facts do I have in this moment about this thing, and oftentimes we realize that we are responding to a story we've created, not the actual data or facts that we have. So what do I actually know to be true right now? 

Amanda Armstrong  7:34  
The second practical tool is what I call the percentage game, and it sounds a little bit like this. So if I find myself in one of those moments, I might turn to myself and ask, quote, If I had to bet money, what percentage chance is there that the worst case scenario will happen? And this is how I kind of gamify when this happens for me, because it helps us to put an actual number on it. And when we put an actual number on it, we often realize that there is like a 5% chance, and we are treating that 5% possibility like it's the 95% certainty. So if I had to bet money, what percentage chance is there that this worst case scenario version of the situation will happen? 

Amanda Armstrong  8:14  
And then the third is what I call the friend filter. So asking yourself, if my best friend came to me with this exact situation, what would I tell them? Because we are often much better at accurate threat assessment for other people than ourselves. 

Amanda Armstrong  8:31  
So anxiety equals an overestimation of threat paired with an underestimation of your ability to manage that threat. And the part of this that we took on today is that first part of the equation, this overestimation of threat. And I want you to remember that overestimating threats, it's not it's not a personal failure. It's not anything that you're doing wrong. It's not anything that's wrong with you. It is your nervous system trying to protect you with outdated software. And the goal isn't to never feel anxious. The goal isn't to never overestimate the threat. That is what humans do. It is simply to help your system calibrate to the actual threat, rather than your perceived or filtered or magnified story of that threat. And you can do that with the reality check question, what do I actually know to be true right now, with the percentage game, if I had to bet money, what percentage chance is there that this, this worst case scenario, actually happens? We want to stop treating that 5% possibility like the 90% certainty, and then using that friend filter. If my best friend came to me with this situation, what would I tell them? 

Amanda Armstrong  9:41  
And so for now, before we get to the next episode, where we'll tackle the other side of that equation, kind of talking about why we forget how capable we are, especially when we need to remember the most. For now, practice catching yourself in the threat. Overestimate, notice it with curiosity, not judgment, because. Your brain trying to keep you safe. And as you bring some awareness to this, as you start to use those three filters that I offered here, this is to help you update your operating system for modern life, instead of 10,000 b 

Amanda Armstrong  10:16  
All right, that is it for today. Take this little sound bite episode and put it to use in your everyday life this week and until next time, I am sending so much hope and healing your way.

Amanda Armstrong  10:31  
Thanks for listening to another episode of The regulate and rewire podcast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe and leave a five star review to help us get these powerful tools out to even more people who need them. And if you yourself are looking for more personalized support and applying what you've learned today, consider joining me inside rise my monthly mental health membership and nervous system healing space, or apply for our one on one anxiety and depression coaching program, restore, I've shared a link for more information to both in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, and I'll see you next time you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai