Martha Beck on overcoming anxiety and finding your purpose

We need creative solutions to society’s problems. What we don’t need is the anxiety that accompanies not having those solutions. Uncertainty about the future makes humans edgy enough. So, what can we do to better understand, accept, and manage such anxiety? 

Martha Beck, a Harvard-trained sociologist and New York Times-bestselling author, has thought long and hard to answer that question, which she presents in her latest book, Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. Big Think caught up with Beck to discuss the book, why the modern world has made us so anxious, and what we can do to calm our nerves in the face of our fears.

Big Think: What was the journey from your last book, The Way of Integrity (2021), to writing this one? What was the thought process leading from the topic of integrity to anxiety? 

Beck: I write self-help because I desperately need it. I have had pretty much every ordinary psychological problem one can have, barring true mental illness, [so] I spent a long time meditating and figuring out how to make my life better. The combination of observing life as it unfolded and my inner life took me to The Way of Integrity. I noticed that I would suffer whenever my actions were out of line with my deepest sense of truth. When everything was in line, I would not suffer. I’d be happy, and things would work better. So that was that book.

Then people started coming to me and saying, “I really believe in what you’re saying, and I’m living as close to integrity as I possibly can, but I’m always scared. I am so anxious.” It puzzled me because that had not been my experience. Then I realized that it took — I don’t know — maybe 10,000 hours of sitting meditation before I noticed nothing I worried about was ever in the room with me.

I remember one time, terrible things were happening in the world, as they always are, and I was sitting in meditation. I thought, “How could I be expected to feel calm under these circumstances”? Another part of me said, “You mean the circumstances of your bedroom? Because my circumstances were all in my bedroom.” I started to see that most of my anxiety was based on things that were not true. 

That’s the link between the two books: The deepest lie we tell ourselves is that we should be afraid.

Big Think: Can you tell me more about that?

Beck: We live in perpetual fear despite being the safest people in history, by and large. This causes what I call the “anxiety spiral.” Due to the negativity bias, our attention preferentially goes to things that make us anxious. We pay more and more attention to things like the media or online algorithms. [These, in turn], feed back to us what gets the most attention, and it’s usually anxiety. 

You’ve got the brain doing it on one level, and you’ve got society doing it on a much bigger level. The result is the entire population spiraling into anxiety and not being able to get out.

Big Think: Are we suffering more these days than, say, 100 years ago, or is it that we’re able to have these conversations now because it’s relatively destigmatized to talk about anxiety? 

Beck: I think we’re experiencing more, and there are a few reasons for that. The first one is the sheer size of the population communicating frightening things across a huge expanse of space and different social situations. There are more of us on Earth now, and we’re communicating much more rapidly than ever. Again, we’re most interested in frightening things anywhere in the world. 

[Another reason is that] we live in this increasingly abnormal environment that we call normal. Before the Industrial Revolution, we would wake up to the sound of wind or rain, maybe the ocean or a river, each other’s voices, the sounds of animals, the songs of birds. I just read a study showing that just hearing bird songs improves mood and health indicators. (I got a recording of bird songs to listen to during the winter.)

Separated from nature, separated from the small physical tasks that are easier to wrap your head around, we live in an increasingly unnatural world for our evolutionary being and our physiology. We’re robbed of the things that would calm us and hyper-exposed to things that we would never have heard about without telecommunications.

So, yeah, we are more anxious.

Big Think: How would you define anxiety as opposed to, say, fear? 

For instance, Joesph LeDoux, the neuroscientist credited with discovering the “fear circuit,” wrote an article in 2015 lamenting that he used the wrong terminology. What he called the fear circuit is threat detection because the emotion of fear comes after and involves other circuits. He said, “Nothing gets in the way of truth — or science — more than language.”

Beck: Always. It gets in the way of the truth of our lived experience, as well.

Big Think: A lot of mental interpretation happens after the initial feeling, right? It’s how you appraise those bodily signals that become your reality.

Beck: Absolutely. I would sharply distinguish between fear — a healthy instinct that galvanizes us into action when there is actual danger — and anxiety —  the interpretation and language with which we dress our emotional impulses. 

It’s one thing to feel an emotional impulse and say, “Oh, I had an irrational thought that the economy would collapse. I’ve got no proof of it, so I will put that away.” But we don’t tend to recognize irrational fears as irrational. We read them as the real environment: “In the room with me right now, there is a predator called ‘the economy will collapse.’”

We are such brilliant verbal creatures who are highly sensitive to fear. We are storytellers. Anything that makes us afraid that does not from an event in the room, but from a mental depiction of that thought, I would call anxiety.

Big Think: What’s your take on the body’s role in anxiety?

Beck: I’ve noticed that when somebody’s in a life that is not working for them, one of their first reactions is to get emotionally tense. They also get physically tense. It’s like their body fights back against a circumstance it doesn’t feel is right — [for example] they are in the wrong job or the wrong relationship, 

Their body shuts down. They don’t want to be touched, and then they get sick. I think it’s because we’re the only species who will force ourselves to do something for years that we don’t enjoy by telling ourselves, “We have to do this.” The body keeps saying, “No.” 

Our body is always trying to get us back to the truth. When we don’t go back to the truth, the tension between the body and whatever we’re living, that comes up as anxiety as well.

Big Think: What would you say about the idea of “eradicating” or “getting rid of” anxiety? 

Beck: Anxiety is not bad. It’s just stupid. If you want to listen to it, fine. Just remember you’re talking to an animal [yourself], and it’s an animal connected to language. 

If I say, “I’m trying to eradicate you,” this would not be a calming thing for you to hear. I should say, “Can you calm and relax your anxiety?” The way I do that is with kindness. Because I can’t tell you to do a calm thing and have it calm you. But I can ask you to say a kind sentence to your fear. Even if you don’t feel it, you can do that.

Basically, the part of us that’s anxious is like a small, frightened animal. That kind, internal self-talk is something that you can force yourself to do, even if you don’t feel it. You can’t force yourself to feel calm or compassionate, but you can get yourself to do kind behaviors. 

Big Think: In your book, you also touch on life purpose, creativity, and curiosity as important for managing anxiety.

Beck: Your life’s purpose is to experience something that is its own excuse for being. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson wrote, “Then beauty is its own excuse for Being.” Joy, compassion, love, enlightenment, illumination, wisdom — [these are] the things that ultimately make life enjoyable in the moment.

If you follow what calms your anxiety, you will go toward sensations like compassion and connection. At that point, you will find enormous joy in healing things that hurt and magnifying things that help. You will find joy in something that affects others positively. I’ve never worked with a client — and this is after thousands of clients — who found that their purpose in life did not help other people. That just seems to be built into our biology.

Joy is our ultimate purpose for being. When we’re without anxiety, curiosity leads us toward our specific purpose. All of our curiosities are specific. I may be more curious about watercolors than you are. You may be more curious about journalism. But our curiosities serve our hearts and psyches. They serve others as well. Curiosity is the link that takes you to your unique way of serving.

Big Think: I see how that enables one to enter a flow state rather than an anxious state as well.

Beck: Nobody in a state of panic creates things out of that panic that can help others. A lot of people think they need panic to motivate them. They believe that, without anxiety, they wouldn’t be motivated. But the fact is that we’re far more motivated by things like love, fascination, and delight than we are by fear.

Big Think: I’m trying to think of an example where creativity comes out of anxiety, but they’re antithetical to each other.

Beck: Anxiety is a barren field. It doesn’t bring forth crops.

Big Think: Unless you end up writing a book about it. 

Beck: Exactly. When I got curious about it, I felt motivated to write.