PARENTING ANXIETY
PARENTING ANXIETY
Breaking the Cycle of Worry and Raising Resilient Kids
DR MEREDITH ELKINS
VERMILION
UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia India | New Zealand | South Africa
Vermilion is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Penguin Random House UK One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London SW 11 7BW
penguin.co.uk global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in the USA by Crown in 2026
This edition published in the UK by Vermilion in 2026 1
Copyright © Meredith Elkins 2026
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture. Thank you for purchasing an authorised edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception.
Typeset by Six Red Marbles UK , Thetford, Norfolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
The authorised representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D02 YH 68
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781785045349
Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.
For my beloved daughter
CONTENTS
Author’s Note ix
Introduction 1
PART I
Chapter 1 In My Feelings 15
Chapter 2 We’re All Freaking Out (and That’s Okay!) 31
Chapter 3 Is This Normal? 46
Chapter 4 How Avoidance Fuels Anxiety 60
PART II
Chapter 5 The Intensive Parenting Paradox 79
Chapter 6 Overparenting 95
Chapter 7 The Flexibility Factor 111
PART III
Chapter 8 The Gold Standard 133
Chapter 9 Unpacking Exposure Therapy 153
Chapter 10 The Comfort Trap 175
Chapter 11 Ripping Off the Band- Aid 195
Chapter 12 Charging the Batteries 208
Chapter 13 When the Sh*t Hits the Fan 227
Chapter 14 Finding Your Way 247
Conclusion How the Struggle Becomes Strength 267
Acknowledgments 273
Appendix: Decoding Diagnoses 277
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Every person has a unique story, and protecting their privacy is a sacred trust. This is why the narratives in this book are not direct retellings of real cases. Instead, they are carefully crafted composites, woven together from years of clinical practice and personal interactions. While no single character represents a single person, each story is an authentic representation of the themes, challenges, and triumphs of addressing anxiety in kids and in parents, allowing exploration of these important issues while ensuring the privacy of my patients, colleagues, and friends.
PARENTING ANXIETY
INTRODUCTION
“I totally blew it,” Heather says, sitting across from me at a local coffee shop. Heather and I have been friends since our kids met in preschool several years ago. A warm, intelligent woman in her late thirties, Heather is a married lawyer with two young children, and we instantly clicked. Heather reached out to me about a week earlier, asking for advice. Her son, Liam, has been struggling with frequent meltdowns, dissolving into angry tears in the face of any minor disappointment.
“We have been working on him doing more things independently, and he was doing a math worksheet while I was making dinner,” she says. “All of a sudden, he chucked his pencil and started crying that he couldn’t do it. I know I am supposed to stay calm and validate his feelings—and I did, for a while—but then he whacked his elbow on the table when I tried to help him with the worksheet, and it was game over from there. He wouldn’t accept any help and nothing I suggested was good enough. Eventually the mom rage just got to me, and I completely snapped. I shouted at him, basically telling him to figure it out himself, and stormed off. But then a second later I felt like the absolute worst parent in the world.”
I tell her that sounds like quite an indictment. She rolls her eyes, but good-naturedly, and sips her coffee. “Okay, well maybe not the worst, but definitely not my finest parenting moment.”
We’ve all been there, I remind her.
“I get it, but I need to do way better. I don’t know what your social media feeds look like, but everything I see on mine says that I need to be calm and confident when my kids are having a tough time so that they can learn to be calm and confident. I’m not supposed to lose it on this eight-year-old who is just frustrated with his homework. But there have been way more big feelings recently. Like he is refusing to go to soccer, which he loved last year, because he says he is nervous, but he can’t say why. His teachers even reached out to say that he has been sort of crumpling when something is hard. They say he seems afraid to try anything new.”
I acknowledge how hard that must have been to hear, and she nods.
“Yeah, it’s been rough. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I was a bit like this at his age, a lot of anxiety and self-doubt. Well, I mean, nothing was ever diagnosed or treated, but I was definitely the kid who always was glued to my mom’s side. And then we have a bunch of mood and anxiety stuff percolating in my family, and some substance abuse on my husband’s side, so I feel like my kids are genetically loaded. So when either of my kids are having big feelings and can’t seem to get it together, I guess I just worry about what it means down the road, and I kind of freak out.”
This makes a lot of sense to me, and I tell her so. She’s clearly worried, and mom rage is so often a reaction to our own anxiety.
“Totally. The meltdowns have become such a trigger for me. Like, is he doomed to have crippling emotional issues for the rest of his life? If this is how he is reacting now, what’s it going to be like when we add adolescent hormones and social media into the mix? When I see the kids getting upset, I feel this intense pressure to help them out of it perfectly—like this is the moment where I need to be an A+ parent. I worry all the time about what will happen to them if I screw that up.”
I agree that it’s a ton of pressure for parents when we feel like it’s all on us to prevent our kids from developing an anxiety disorder.
Heather nods. “My husband is constantly reminding me that the best way to help the kids to avoid being anxious is for me not to be
anxious. But seriously—when Liam was born, I remember looking at my husband and saying, ‘I don’t think I will ever not be anxious again.’ ”
Heather’s experience is deeply relatable. I find myself having these kinds of conversations more and more, both in my professional life as a clinical psychologist specializing in anxiety disorders and in my personal life as a mother and friend. As the co-director of a clinic treating child anxiety disorders at McLean Hospital, as faculty at Harvard Medical School, and in my private practice where I treat mothers with postpartum anxiety disorders and parenting stress, I consistently connect with parents who are worried about their children’s anxiety. I see these concerns mirrored in my friends, colleagues, and acquaintances—individuals and families without formally diagnosed anxiety disorders, or who are not currently seeking treatment, but who still feel paralyzed by the responsibility of helping their child grow up to be emotionally healthy in today’s tumultuous world. It makes sense to be concerned. Let’s start with some facts. We know that rates of pediatric anxiety disorders have been steadily rising for the past several decades, and that the COVID-19 pandemic was an absolute gut punch to kids and families that only accelerated this trend. Anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental health concern impacting children, adolescents, and adults. Each disorder is characterized by persistent, excessive fears or worries that significantly interfere in daily life. The source of the fear is what differentiates one disorder from another. We’re talking here about separation anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, selective mutism, generalized anxiety disorder, specific phobia, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and unspecified anxiety disorders. These conditions are closely related to—but distinct from—obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
While the identification of anxiety disorders has certainly improved, it is highly unlikely that the trends we are seeing are simply
due to better diagnosis. A number of arguments have been proposed for why anxiety in young people is accelerating—including the dominance of smartphones, the decrease in childhood independence, pressures to achieve, and mental health experts themselves. It’s tempting to pin it all on a single culprit. But the global increases in anxiety disorders are most likely due to a number of factors combining to create chaos. To this effect, in 2021, the U.S. Surgeon General declared youth mental health concerns a national public health emergency.
What makes this crisis even worse is the lack of providers available to treat the growing number of kids in need. It’s even harder to find clinicians who are trained in evidence-based approaches—treatments that are backed by science. And even though we are getting better at identifying mental health concerns when we see them, the number of kids with unmet healthcare needs is increasing. Less than two-thirds of kids with anxiety disorders receive treatment, and it’s even harder for kids from racial or ethnic minority populations, or for kids from low-income families, to access care. Kids are so often languishing on waitlists as symptoms worsen, if they can find a provider at all.
The cost of anxiety can be high. Kids with anxiety disorders can lose pace academically, and they often become isolated from their peers. Lots of these kids avoid important activities, like parties, family gatherings, extracurricular activities, and—most problematically— school. Child anxiety disorders create ripple effects throughout the family. Parents of kids with anxiety report higher levels of stress, depression, and—understandably—anxiety as well. Siblings can be affected, too, as parents shift the focus of their attention and resources to the struggling child. And speaking of costs, families with an anxious child can spend up to twenty-one times as much on illness-related expenses compared to families without these concerns.
We know that untreated anxiety disorders put kids at risk for developing depression, substance abuse, self-injury, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors. Alarmingly, longitudinal data from adolescents and young adults highlights that having an anxiety disorder increases the odds of suicidal thinking by nearly eight times, and suicide attempts
by close to six times. In short, these conditions are increasingly common, but they are by no means easy to manage.
The Primal Scream
So, many kids are really struggling. And many of today’s parents aren’t doing that great either. Between 2016 and 2020, there was a significant decrease in the number of parents reporting that they were coping “very well” with the demands of childrearing. In fact, over two-thirds of parents believe that modern parenting is much harder than it was twenty years ago. Things have gotten so bleak that, in 2024, the U.S. Surgeon General released an unprecedented advisory on the decline in the well-being of parents. And new research reinforces this advisory, revealing a decline in maternal mental health that cuts across sociodemographic lines—an alarming indicator of a widespread and deepening crisis.
This is a huge deal. Today’s parents are coping with the additive stressors of economic instability, unmanageable time demands, heightened health and safety concerns, the complexity of managing technology, growing loneliness and isolation, and cultural pressures to do everything the “right” way. This all takes a toll on a parent’s physical and emotional health, and declining parent mental health is actually another risk factor for youth anxiety. Parents and kids are trapped on an anxiety-fueled roundabout, and it often seems like there’s no exit.
If you’re a parent who struggles with your own anxiety, or have kids who struggle with anxiety, you want to support your children in any way that you can. As in Heather’s situation, you may be worried that the proverbial apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and you don’t want your children to suffer as you have. You actively seek knowledge, skills, and support. Enter social media, which is inundated with “experts” with a range of credibility creating content in response to this demand. Delivered in short video or text snippets, these platforms serve up suggestions for managing specific child behaviors or promote a certain parenting style. But these hot takes cloaked in therapist-speak
are often inflammatory rather than reassuring. They reduce complex ideas into a one-size-fits-all approach.
Ironically, the hyperavailability of this bite-sized content—which is often conflicting or inaccurate—can lead to even more confusion and anxiety. As one parent shared with me recently, “The advice out there makes me feel like not only do I not have the right answer, but I don’t even have the right problem. My kid seems way more complicated. It makes me feel like my child must be a total disaster and that my instincts are completely wrong.” Today’s parents are truly stuck between a rock and a hard place: The problem of anxiety is overwhelming, and many of the available “solutions” are confusing at best and harmful at worst.
Within today’s culture of Intensive Parenting, parents are under relentless pressure to always do more to promote their child’s future well-being and success. Parents feel driven to deliver a wealth of positive emotional experiences and offset any negative ones to ensure their kids’ “optimal” development. Parents are inundated with the message that “good” parenting means protecting kids from every possible danger, internal and external, meaning that it’s no longer enough to keep your kids physically safe; you are warned of the perils that may arise when your kids experience painful emotions like anxiety, sadness, or shame—emotions that you are told must be processed and problemsolved by the attentive and well-informed parent. You are bombarded with the message that experiencing anxiety will cause kids toxic stress, cortisol spikes, attachment injuries, and any number of other alarming outcomes served up to you as parenting clickbait.
When each negative emotion is seen as a threat, it’s easy for you to conclude that whatever feels uncomfortable must also be unsafe—that feeling bad means something is really wrong. This means that even the normal emotional experiences that you might expect your kid to encounter during childhood can now be seen as hazardous: the pain of social rejection, the disappointment of being cut from a team, anxiety about giving a presentation. These days, you may be convinced that if you don’t do something in the moment to “fix” your child’s anxiety, you
are insensitive at best, neglectful at worst. This manifests in parents who email teachers to get their child out of a difficult assignment, who are in constant contact with their teen when apart from one another, or who walk on eggshells at home to avoid stressing out their kid. For many modern parents, knowing that your child is experiencing anxiety and not doing anything about it simply feels like bad parenting.
But something isn’t adding up. If being uncomfortable is indeed unsafe, shouldn’t child mental health be improving as parents, educators, clinicians, and policy makers work to decrease discomfort in kids? Instead, we are seeing the opposite effect as rates of pediatric anxiety and co-occurring conditions continue to soar.
Where did things go wrong?
In this book, I argue that many people misunderstand what anxiety really is, and modern parenting culture often adds to this confusion. Because of this, well-meaning parents may use parenting approaches that, sadly, often end up making child anxiety worse. Ironically, as you try so hard to protect your kids and to minimize their distress, you’re creating the perfect environment for anxiety to thrive.
This happens for a very simple reason: When you avoid something that makes you uncomfortable, it becomes harder to face again in the future. Avoidance means that you lose out on the chance to learn that, even though it’s uncomfortable, you can cope with feeling anxious. And, importantly, more often than not, your worst-case scenario doesn’t come true. The basic truth here is that avoidance fuels anxiety. And it’s just as true for kids as it is for adults.
I specialize in treating anxiety disorders using exposure therapy, the evidence-based psychological practice that encourages you to approach—rather than avoid—anxiety and discomfort. Clinicians who do this work know that being uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe. We know that resilience comes from learning that you can cope with discomfort, and that the most effective way to overcome a fear is to face it. After gradual, intentional exposure therapy, kids who were afraid to sleep without their parents go away to camp. Teens who were afraid to drive go on road trips with friends. New
parents who were afraid to leave their baby with a sitter can go on dates again. Discomfort is where the learning happens.
But we are in an era where each negative emotion is treated as a crisis, and where fears of screwing up the parent-child relationship mean that you may be working overtime to minimize any discomfort in your kid—and in yourself. And this is backfiring spectacularly.
The avoidance of discomfort itself is what can ultimately be unsafe. When kids haven’t had the chance to practice coping with discomfort in normally stressful situations, they lose out on learning how to deal with their negative emotions and to practice tolerating distress. So they can end up flailing in truly unsafe ways when larger challenges come up. On the extreme end of this, we are seeing an increase in young people turning up in emergency departments for suicidality and self-injury, a trend that represents their most troubling attempts to cope with emotions that feel utterly unmanageable. The bottom line is that attempts to shield kids from discomfort can actually worsen anxiety, deepen dependence, and stifle resilience.
What You Can Do Differently
Getting to know anxiety better can help you dispel the myths about this normal, natural, and ultimately helpful emotion. It also can help you to shift your responses to anxiety-provoking situations so that you and your kids can become less avoidant and more resilient. And you are actually doing a ton to protect your kids—and yourself—through this process, as you cultivate the flexibility and fortitude that paves the way to flourishing.
And when you step back, you can begin to see the ways in which contemporary parenting expectations have likely shaped your view of anxiety. Once you recognize the waters in which you are swimming, you can choose to go against the tide. You can make decisions that are right for you, and for your family, rather than giving in to modern parenting orthodoxy when your gut tells you otherwise.
And finally, where anxiety is a clinical disorder, knowledge about how and why the best psychological treatments for anxiety disorders work is empowering. Going into treatment with this understanding gives you a leg up, allowing you to more rapidly and effectively fight against anxiety.
Even in the absence of clinical anxiety disorders—if you or your child has not been formally diagnosed—awareness of these approaches gives you an anti-anxiety framework to apply to your life, helping you to break cycles of anxiety and promote resilience. Simply put, knowledge is power, and theory can be your friend. I learned this lesson early on in my clinical training.
My first patient was Nora, a six-year-old girl with separation anxiety disorder, whom I co-treated during my first year of my clinical psychology PhD program alongside a senior doctoral student named Christina. In this model of psychotherapy training, the senior student takes the lead on the case, with the junior student observing and taking an increasingly active role over time. I had worked with kids before, but this was my first rodeo as a budding psychologist specializing in child anxiety. Nora and her family were suffering, and I really wanted to help.
I prepared meticulously for each session, wanting to ensure a foolproof, step-by-step approach to Nora’s treatment, accounting for every “what if” scenario.
“You know that pit in your stomach that you get before a session?” I asked Christina. “Does that ever go away?”
“It gets better,” she reassured me.
Then one session, the wheels came off the bus. The plan had been to help Nora practice separating from her mother, staying in one room with Christina and me for five minutes while her mother went into another. But anxiety is unpredictable, and it got loud that day; Nora was not having it, and her mother was paralyzed. So was I.
Christina swooped in. She got down on Nora’s level, intervening confidently and flexibly, and made a new plan. She validated Nora’s
anxiety with warmth and also expressed confidence in her strength. She didn’t tie herself in knots trying to make Nora feel better. She didn’t say too much, honestly. She waited.
After a few agonizing minutes, Nora’s sobs lessened a bit. Christina encouraged her and then gave her the choice of trying the original plan, or separating for four minutes instead. Four sounded better to Nora than five, and she practiced separating. The session ended on a high note.
Back in our shared office after the session, I asked Christina in awe, “How did you know what to do?”
She thought for a moment. “I go back to the theory,” she said simply, and turned back to her laptop.
“What the hell does that mean?” I thought.
In parenting, as in psychotherapy, there is no way to prepare for all possible scenarios. The scripts we memorize, the strategies we research, the skills we practice—they can work beautifully under perfect conditions. But life is full of curveballs. How can we ever know how best to respond to the infinite possibilities? How do we know how to act in any given moment so that we make the issue at hand better, instead of worse?
I didn’t understand it at the time, but Christina was spot-on. You need to know the theory from which you are operating, meaning that you need to understand why and how suggested approaches and strategies work. Understanding that avoidance fuels anxiety and that emotions are painful but not harmful gave Christina the clarity to support Nora with calm and confidence.
Basic knowledge of how your immune system works helps you make choices to minimize your risk of getting sick. In the same way, foundational knowledge about the emotion of anxiety—how and why it occurs, what is normal and what is cause for concern, factors that make it better or worse, and parent-child dynamics that either promote resilience or prolong disability—provides a framework through which you can respond to curveballs with confidence. This book will help you do just that.
A Road Map and a Tool Kit
In these pages, I offer a practical guide for parents who are seeking to understand and address anxiety in themselves and in their kids. My aim here is twofold: (1) to address how you can most effectively manage your own anxiety, particularly in the context of the parent-child relationship, and (2) to address how you can best support your anxious kids, whatever their age. This is a resource for you if your family is experiencing normal, minimally impairing anxiety. It is also a guide for you if you, or your child, are struggling with a diagnosed anxiety disorder.
The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, I demystify anxiety. We discuss what drives normal fear and anxiety in the body, consider what it looks like on the outside, and highlight the relationship between parent and child anxiety. We debunk the myth that experiencing anxiety is harmful. Instead, we learn how anxiety is either emboldened or defused, based on what you do in response to it. We learn the difference between normal anxiety and clinical anxiety disorders, explore how less acute anxiety can become an anxiety disorder over time, and create a framework for intervening before it does.
In Part II, I highlight the powerful impact of cultural beliefs and expectations around parenting in our responses to anxiety. Specifically, we consider the impact of Intensive Parenting—the dominant cultural framework that drives beliefs and expectations around “ideal” parenting practices in much of the world today. Some aspects of Intensive Parenting may be useful for coping with child anxiety. At the same time, parents need to be aware of how Intensive Parenting culture pushes them to respond in ways that actually worsen child anxiety by encouraging overinvolvement, overcontrol, and overpermissiveness. These behaviors and the beliefs that inform them have been culturally consecrated as “good parenting.” Anxiety is hijacking this vulnerability, and kids and parents are suffering for it.
A central theme of this book is that the best approach to parenting anxiety within our childrearing culture is to find a middle-path
approach, where warmth and empathy coexist with firm limits. How can you achieve this? By developing psychological flexibility, which is the ability to take mindful, values-guided action. It means becoming aware of your outer situation and internal experience, and then choosing to act in a way that is consistent with your values. Psychological flexibility is at work when you resist saying the thing that will really hurt your partner in the heat of an argument, pausing to take some deep breaths instead. It’s operating when you allow your daughter to stay up and watch TV with you tonight, even though it’s past her bedtime and she’s got a test tomorrow, when your gut tells you that you both need this moment of connection. It’s present whenever you choose to do the hard, scary thing that you have been avoiding, because you know that doing so will ultimately bring you closer to your goals. Psychologically flexible responses to normal and clinical anxiety are associated with a ton of benefits for kids and parents. Because of this, developing psychological flexibility is a key aim of many of today’s leading psychological treatments. We introduce this concept as it relates to parenting in Part II of this book, and it is woven throughout the chapters that follow.
Part III of this book is a deep dive into the evidence-based treatments for clinical anxiety disorders, providing an accessible road map for addressing these disorders in kids and parents alike. We outline the most effective strategies delivered during cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety disorders and discuss how psychological flexibility helps you apply these approaches to address what you and your family need most.
It’s extraordinarily difficult to be a parent. I’m trying my best, and I know you are, too. My hope is that this book gives you practical insights and strategies to manage anxiety in a balanced, confident manner. I know that you are coming to this book with all the tools you need to succeed. Seriously, if you have ever successfully put sunscreen on a screaming toddler, you have what it takes to be successful here. So stay open, get curious, and keep going—you’ve got this.
PART I
In My Feelings
“I don’t want to feel this way anymore.”
“I don’t understand why I can’t just control my irritability around the kids.”
“I have no right to be depressed; on paper my life is great.”
“My anxiety is completely out of control.”
When I ask my adult patients what their goals are for therapy, the majority give me some variation of these answers. In other words, “I want more control over my painful feelings and thoughts.” It’s not far off from what my child patients want, and they lead with something similar, like “I just want my anxiety to go away.”
Totally fair. Emotions can be super painful, and we kick ourselves when we can’t seamlessly “snap out of it.” We think that our inability to instantly pivot to positivity means that we are weak, broken, or deficient. We assume that something is wrong with us if we don’t feel happy—or at least content—most of the time.
We come up with all sorts of strategies to “get better” at negative emotions. Our go-to strategies primarily involve trying to avoid, suppress, or replace painful feelings. We might start a gratitude journal. Or pour a glass of wine to take the edge off. We distract ourselves with social media. We shop online. We recommit to exercise. We focus on self-care. These are all normal and socially acceptable coping strategies, and even if we feel less proud of ourselves for using some than others, they are all recognizable parts of the modern coping tool kit.
The emotional well-being of your kids is arguably even more of a priority for you than your own contentment. It can be gut-wrenching to see your kids struggle with negative emotions like anxiety, sadness, frustration, or shame. And you’d probably attest to the truth of the phrase “A parent is only ever as happy as their unhappiest child.”
But it no longer seems good enough for modern parents to merely empathize with kids who are going through a hard time. In a culture that sees parents as the architects of children’s happiness and success, child distress seems like an indictment of your parenting. If my kid has a public meltdown, I’m less worried about her being judged for being a chaos goblin—she’s just a kid, after all—and way more worried that I am being judged as a bad mom. I am my own worst critic when I fall into the trap of berating myself for my inability to control my kid’s emotional experience. I wonder if you ever feel the same.
This burden of being your kid’s emotional security guard creates tremendous pressure, breeding loneliness, anxiety, and self-doubt. So you may find yourself working equally hard—if not harder—to avoid, control, or “fix” your kids’ negative emotions. Isn’t that what good parents are supposed to do?
Wanting control over your emotions, and wanting to teach your children to control their own, makes so much sense; who wouldn’t want to feel good all the time, or at the very least never feel bad? Human beings are innately motivated by the deceptively simple drive to avoid the bad, maximize the good. This impulse not only drives your emotional experiences but ensured the very survival of the human species.
And yet deep misunderstandings about emotions—and your ability to control them—can amplify your suffering. The beliefs that you have about which emotional experiences are okay and which are not are translated to your children. They deserve a true story.
You can start to change your relationship to your emotions when you understand where they come from, what they are trying to tell you, and the ways in which you actually have tremendous agency. Un-
derstanding the human emotional experience and what drives it is so empowering. It demystifies what we all, by design, experience, and provides a foundation for better, more resilient coping with anxiety.
Get the Good, Avoid the Bad
Modern humans are the product of millions of years of evolution. In a nutshell, any biologically based feature that helped our early ancestors survive long enough to make babies was selected for in the next generation—meaning that the qualities that allowed parents to survive would likely be passed along to their children, who in turn would be more likely to survive until childbearing age and pass along their genes.
Our early ancestors who had particularly nimble hands and fingers would have been better able to feed, shelter, defend, and clothe themselves because they were better at making and using tools. Modern humans now have the dexterity to write novels, build intricate watches, play the piano, and embroider tapestries. Emotions evolved in the same way: Any trait that helped our ancestors avoid threats or accumulate benefits was more likely to be passed along to the next generation.
Most scientists agree that there is a set of universal human emotions, experienced and recognized by all humans, regardless of culture, language, and ecology. These “basic” human emotions are communicated through universally recognizable facial cues, vocalizations, posture, and gestures. They remain with us because they helped us survive, or because they enabled social connections that were key to survival. Which indicates that being in psychological distress does not necessarily mean that you have a mental health disorder . . . it means you are human.
At their core, emotions are signals: They tell us something about our experience and about the world around us. Perceiving these signals sets off complex changes in our body that affect how we feel, think, and act.
Ultimately, the signal of any emotion triggers an urge—we feel strongly driven to do something in response to the emotion. Positive emotions like joy, love, or excitement signal to us that there is an opportunity to get something that we want, like, or need. We then have the urge to hold on to, or get more of, that thing.
In contrast, negative emotions like fear, anger, or sadness signal that there is a threat that will bring us something that we don’t want, we don’t like, or could hurt us—like fear, pain, or loss. We then have the urge to avoid or oppose that threat. In simplest terms, humans are governed by the basic urges to accumulate the good and avoid the bad.
This signal → urge pattern is so deeply ingrained that it can happen without your awareness. If you start to cross a street and a car comes barreling around the corner, you don’t stop and think, “This seems dangerous, how can I avoid becoming a road pancake?” Your brain perceives a threat and signals the emotion of fear, which automatically kicks your body into high gear—immediately sending blood to the parts of your body that need the energy to respond, dilating your pupils to help you see better, and tensing your muscles so you can flee. You leap back onto the curb without even thinking about it. This is a profoundly beneficial system.
All of our emotions—even the ones that we think of as the negative or “bad” ones—have a purpose. When you consider three of your basic human emotions—sadness, anger, and fear—you can see why these unpleasant emotions were so crucial for our ancestors’ survival. And you can better understand how they continue to impact you today.
Sadness
Normal sadness is not a crisis—it does not mean that you are weak or broken. Sadness signals that you have lost something that was good for your well-being. When you feel sad, you have the urge to isolate, to withdraw from family or friends. Alternatively, you may feel the urge to seek comfort from others. Sometimes it’s a bit of both.
The urge to withdraw allows time and space for reflection and problem solving, both of which are often enhanced by being in a sad mood. Humans are not great at interpreting our environment. We are much more likely to take in information that confirms our opinions, versus information that challenges our beliefs, and we are susceptible to a range of biases, stereotypes, and other cognitive shortcuts. These errors are more common when we are in a good mood. But when we are in a mild negative mood, our memory is improved, our judgment is better, and we are less susceptible to biases. Sadness also helps shift our attention, leading to a more faithful interpretation of the world around us.
Another urge triggered by sadness is to seek comfort from others. Feelings that led humans to connect with each other helped foster the relationships and build the societies so necessary for survival. Sadness motivates the connections that humans need to thrive and helps information processing and problem solving so you are less likely to experience loss in the future. Sadness isn’t a flaw or a failure—it’s just a feeling that has really bad PR.
Anger
Anger signals a threat, urging you to get aggressive and defend yourself. In response to a threat, neurotransmitters called catecholamines prepare your body for a fight by increasing blood flow, heart rate, and muscle tension. Attention, alertness, and focus become sharpened. In times of danger, scarcity, and competition for scant resources, the highly reactive, quick-to-anger early humans were more likely to survive and reproduce. In contrast, early humans who didn’t pick up on threats and who didn’t have a strong urge to defend what was theirs were less likely to fight and win their resources back, meaning they had fewer resources to ensure survival and reproduction. Chill vibes died out a long time ago.
Fear
Like anger, fear is a response to a perceived threat. We will go into the emotion of fear, and its sister, anxiety, in greater depth in the next chapter. But in short, fear signals danger and prompts you to avoid its source. If you can’t do that, you prepare to defend yourself. This is the fight-or-flight response that you learned about in biology class. It makes sense that if you were to perceive something dangerous, you would be motivated to avoid it now, and in the future.
Like sadness, anger, and the range of other negative human emotions, fear is natural and normal . . . and it feels awful. However, when you understand how this ancient system operates in your modern emotional life, you can start to create a road map for coping most effectively.
Ancient Circuitry, New Environment
Emotions, with their characteristic signals and urges, persisted across the ages because they enabled human survival in a threatening world. But things have changed. The closest thing to a dangerous animal in my neighborhood is the birdseed-stealing squirrel who drives the dog nuts. Even in the absence of ever-present danger, ancient human emotions are at work in modern humans. When you perceive a threat, your primal emotional circuitry automatically kicks in. You feel physically anxious, experience anxious thoughts, and have the urge to flee, regardless of whether the situation is actually dangerous. Your teen’s classmates aren’t actually going to abandon him to die alone in the wilderness, but it can feel to him like they might when they start teasing him. The modern inputs are different, but the emotional experience is still universally recognizable—and, contrary to many conflicting messages, inescapable.
Controlling the Uncontrollable
The human brain is an incredible evolutionary advantage that propelled the development of civilization. Thanks to the neurological genius machines at the top of our necks, humans harnessed fire, pioneered agriculture, invented the wheel, mastered seafaring, and developed penicillin. Given how adept our species has been at mastering our environment, it’s tempting to think we should be able to master our internal worlds as well.
But this is just wrong. You can’t control whether you feel your feelings.
Don’t believe me? Consider how useless it is to be told “Just relax,” “Stop being so angry,” or “Don’t be sad.” Has anyone ever responded to this type of chiding with “Thank goodness you said that. I’m all set now!” Or consider how impossible it would be for you to fall in love with someone random—to immediately feel genuine love for them— just because someone tells you that you should. You can’t snap your fingers and just feel something, or not feel something, just because you believe you should, even if you want to.
Kind of strange, right? We send humans into outer space, but we can’t prevent the wrath that arises when we step on Legos in bare feet. We developed lifesaving vaccines, but we can’t halt the lurch of disgust that accompanies a glimpse of a cockroach. My kid can command, “Hey, Google, play Beyoncé,” and Google obeys her, but I can’t stop myself when I feel despondent about my aging body even when I know I shouldn’t care.
In the absence of ever-present threats to our daily survival, many of us find that we work hardest to avoid the bad in our internal, emotional world: avoiding disappointment, anger, guilt, worries, envy, regret, hopelessness, anxiety. You barely consider freezing to death, but you work overtime to avoid feeling shame. Your kid is less concerned about being eaten, more concerned about whether she will feel crippled by anxiety during basketball tryouts. Parents aren’t generally up
at night worrying that their kids will survive past age five, but they are worried that their kids aren’t happy.
This is not to belittle these concerns; painful emotions are painful. The point is that the conditions that drive modern emotional experiences are often radically different from those under which they evolved. It’s great that your fight-or-flight response still kicks in if you think you might be mugged in a creepy parking garage, but it sure feels less adaptive when it goes off the night before final exams.
Modern humans work so hard to avoid or control negative emotions, in ourselves and in our kids, having gotten the message that we should have the psychological fortitude to do so. You may believe that if you can’t control your emotions, it means you are fragile, inadequate, or broken. You may also believe that uncontrollable emotions are unsafe—and no wonder, when your social media feed is inundated with terms like “toxic stress,” and you are now terrified of your own cortisol. This leads to a painful-feelings pile-on, where you feel anger, and then feel guilt over your anger; where you feel sad, and then feel shame because of your sadness; where you feel fear, and then become afraid of the fear itself. This pattern of feeling painful feelings, and then condemning yourself because you feel painful feelings, amplifies suffering enormously.
Long story short, you can’t control whether you experience painful thoughts or feelings, any more than you can determine whether you experience pleasant ones. And as much as you’d like to, you can’t change whether your kids experience painful thoughts or feelings. However, you are not powerless. Let’s explore a tool that can help you find your footing.
Emotional Mapping
Meet Sophia, a fifteen-year-old girl who is about to start in a new school. Changing schools is hard, and it makes sense that Sophia would experience anxiety. But what does “experiencing anxiety” actually entail? Let’s break it down a bit.