420. Why anxiety can be good for us: Helping your child handle fear, uncertainty, and discomfort with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (00:00):

We have kids who are struggling with anxiety, depression, self-harm, these problems at a higher rate than many. It comes and goes, but this is a very high rate of these crises. And it is not that our kids are broken or we’re broken, that they’re just hypersensitive. It’s that we’re trying to contend with this world.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:27):

Most of us have been taught to think of anxiety as a problem, but what if anxiety is not the enemy we think it is? And learning how to work with it is actually one of the most important skills we can help our children develop. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist, mom of two, and the host of Securely Attached. In this podcast, I’m joined each week by leaders in the field of medicine, psychology, psychiatry, and child development. And together we translate the science and research into easy to understand and actionable parenting insights. Today I’m joined by Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary. Tracy is a clinical psychologist, researcher, professor of psychology and neuroscience, director of the Emotion Regulation Lab at the City University of New York and author of the bestselling book, Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good for You, Even Though It Feels Bad. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Washington Post, and the BBC, and she’s widely recognized for her research on anxiety, emotion regulation, and mental health.

(01:33):

In this conversation, Tracy challenges one of the most common assumptions parents hold about anxiety, that it is something we should try to eliminate as quickly as possible. Instead, she explains why anxiety is a normal and even valuable part of being human and how our efforts to protect children from discomfort can sometimes get in the way of the very skills we hope to help them develop. Together, we explore what it looks like to support children through fear and uncertainty without reinforcing avoidance. We talk about how parents can become a source of calm and difficult moments and why learning to work with anxiety may be far more powerful than trying to make it disappear. Tracy also shares a practical framework that can help parents respond to anxiety both in themselves and their children with greater confidence and clarity. So whether you have a child who struggles with anxiety or you simply want to better understand how to support your child through fear, uncertainty, and life’s inevitable challenges, this conversation offers a perspective I think every parent needs to hear.

(02:43):

Hello, Tracy. Welcome to the show. Thank you for being here.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (02:46):

Hello. It’s so wonderful to be here.

Dr. Sarah Bren (02:50):

So today we’re going to be talking a fair amount about anxiety and I think maybe the best place to start is to sort of maybe talk a little bit about the difference between anxiety the emotion versus anxiety as a diagnosis or an anxiety disorder. And maybe you could talk a little bit about what anxiety itself actually is and what that emotion is doing for us versus it being conceptualized exclusively as a disorder.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (03:24):

Right. Thanks.That’s a great big one to start with, but I think it’s exactly the right place to start with. As we’ll talk about today, I wrote a whole book really about addressing that question because anxiety the emotion, which it is like sadness, anger, joy, anxiety, the emotion, we’ve mixed it up. We’ve conflated it with anxiety, the disorder. And so we know that anxiety feels really bad. It’s actually, I think it’s the unpleasant emotion we hate the most possibly. And for good reason, it does feel terrible and it sucks. And the thing about feeling bad is that doesn’t mean that we’re on the path or have a disorder, even when we feel really, really anxious. So let me talk a little bit about the difference and how we know the difference. First of all, with anxiety, anxiety is on a spectrum. So when we think about anxiety, we might think panic attack, but really we’re probably feeling little signals of anxiety every day in our lives in very common ways and very useful ways.

(04:34):

So on that spectrum, you have intensity, right? So you have little butterflies in your stomach when you’re getting ready to do something that makes you a little nervous and all the way to full blown panic, that’s the spectrum. But what anxiety prepares us to do and why I called my book Future Tense is to anticipate an uncertain future where something bad could happen, but something good is still possible and to be energized and focused to do something about that future that’s uncertain so that you can avoid the negatives and avoid disaster, but work and bring all of your gifts, your skills to bear on making that positive possibility into reality. So for example, if I’m nervous about being on a wonderful podcast and I’m feeling little butterflies in the stomach, that’s a great thing because that means that my body, maybe my heart is pumping a little faster because it’s sending oxygenated blood to my brain so that I can think and focus even better, right?

(05:39):

It’s maybe there’s a little bit of adrenaline. We also know that when we’re anxious, we actually have spikes in oxytocin, which is the social bonding hormone. So actually that nervousness as I’m about to speak to you on a podcast, for example, might be priming me to find points of connection. So all of these things are happening because yes, this podcast could go terribly and I could forget everything and we could really be like, “Ooh, this is not a great conversation.” That’s the bad that’s possible in the uncertain future, but it could also be a wonderful conversation where it’s really exciting and interesting and fascinating. And so my body and my mind preparing like that for the future allows me to do my best in that situation. That’s why we evolve to be anxious. I think it’s a crown jewel in the evolutionary kind of gifts that we have as humans because it allows us to do things like, instead of like think of prehistoric people and maybe they’re sitting around the, they’ve just discovered fire and maybe they got some food somewhere and they’re sitting around the fire and they’re so comfy and if you don’t have that little bit of anxiety to say, “Hmm, I saw some mountain lions in the caves the other day that I was hanging out with.

(07:00):

Maybe I should sit around here and build a shelter for myself instead of going back to that cave.” Like that anxiety, that discomfort, it prepares us to do something really important and I’ll end with this and take a breath and let you react and the flip side of anxiety is hope because when you’re anxious, you’re not in despair, you have not given up. When you’re anxious, you actually are prepared, you’re in that space between where you are now and where you want to be and you’re driven to make that positive mountain lion free reality into make it into reality. It’s mobilizing. Yeah. So I think of anxiety, the emotion, even when it’s painful and uncomfortable and we have to really work through it and with it, it is still our ally, even when we have to negotiate with it. So that’s the emotion.

Dr. Sarah Bren (07:55):

Yes.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (07:57):

Now we can talk about anxiety disorders, which are real, which are not advantageous like the emotion of anxiety. It’s when our anxiety ceases to work for us or where there’s a mismatch between the amount of anxiety that we have either, it’s always a combination of external sources, our own sensitivities to the world, when there’s a mismatch between our ability to work through that anxiety and to manage it and to tolerate it, right? So when we see signs of that mismatch, I think of it as kind of four big red flags. One is that anxiety is experienced as too strong as it’s too intense. It lasts too long, right? And we can of course, when we think about our kids and anxiety, we’re trying to look for this too, right? Like what’s normal anxiety, what’s that? So you see your child maybe struggling with school like, okay, is this too intense of an emotion?

(08:55):

And it’s not just a week or two, it’s week after week, month after month, it’s just lasting too long. It doesn’t fit, that’s the third criterion in a way that it doesn’t fit the situation. So it makes sense to be really anxious about a test and maybe you have to work through that, but are you also being anxious when you’re with friends that you already know? Are you also anxious in situations that are safe and helpful? So is it out of context some of this anxiety? And then, and this is the most important one and you know this obviously as a clinician, I’m sure you think about this all the time, does the experience of anxiety and how we’re coping with it get in the way. That’s the functional impairment. So are we chronically avoiding situations that are causing anxiety so much so that we’re not going to school, we’re missing exams for adults, are we disconnecting from our community? Are we missing work deadlines? So that’s the way we’re contorting ourselves to deal with that intense long lasting out of context anxiety blocking us from the good things in life. And it’s not always easy to know the difference. Parents go for help. Yeah. Go for help if you have any question, but they’re all connected.

Dr. Sarah Bren (10:10):

Right. The first thing you described is just the emotional experience. And I’m curious too, as you were describing it, I’m like, is there in the body of research that you’ve done, do you differentiate anxiety and arousal or are we just talking about the same thing or is it qualitatively different?

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (10:30):

Arousal is a very general purpose term. So you can be aroused and angry. You can be aroused and joyful, right? So that’s a dimension of emotionality. So you have arousal and valence, right? You have the kind of orthogonal, you have the quadrants where you can say, “Oh, I can be high in arousal, but also high in positivity for the dimension.” So arousal’s distinct from anxiety and anxiety as an emotion, if you take a functional view, each emotion, this is also very evolutionary and functional emotion theory, which is a very popular theory in psychology really takes an evolutionary perspective, which is that every emotion gives us the opportunity to understand the world, to appraise it and what it means for our wellbeing and then it creates an action readiness tendency to react, to make our lives better. So anger is the appraisal that there’s a obstacle to something we want and the activation is that it helps us to work to overcome that obstacle, right? So that’s why the biology and the thinking that goes along with anger is very overcoming and persistent. Anxiety is the appraisal that we have a future that’s uncertain or that we’re ruminating on that uncertainty that happened. But mostly anxiety is a very forward … You can ruminate and drive anxiety, but it tends to be rooted in this future uncertainty.

Dr. Sarah Bren (11:52):

Something bad is going to happen or something isn’t going to feel good. I won’t be able to handle whatever is going to come. I don’t know what’s going to come.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (12:03):

Precisely. That’s at the heart of the emotion of anxiety and this is where we forget the action readiness tendency and this is where really you have the information that’s so helpful, right? Because when you have the action readiness tendency, it is that something bad is going to happen, but the good is still there and that’s the thing we forget. You are not anxious about a test if you think there’s no chance that you’ll do well.You would despair. You would be sad about that test. So what anxiety tells us is that we’re still in it.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:32):

Yes. It’s still mobilizing until I suppose it hits that threshold of becoming so overwhelming that it blocks and we freeze. We basically shut down or avoid and that’s maybe the despair you’re talking about, but it could also be almost like I just dissociate a turn off.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (12:52):

Exactly. I mean, precisely and that’s that mismatch I talked about where the degree to which the anticipation of the future and our feeling that we don’t have what it takes to still create a future that feels good or that’s safe, right? And when that mismatch, what you have left over often is avoidance because now in the moment you’re just trying to make yourself feel better, it’s this overwhelming feeling you want to escape from. And as you know, I mean the key problematic kind of factor in anxiety disorders across the board is that chronic and rigid avoidance and you lose flexibility and that’s when it starts going down this road towards an anxiety disorder.

Dr. Sarah Bren (13:34):

Right. I always say like anxiety at the level of a disorder makes our world small. That’s one of the things I’ll kind of use to describe when I’m trying to evaluate a kid or a family member, like a question I’ll often ask is like, does their world feel like it’s shrinking? That’s so great.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (14:00):

I love that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (14:01):

Yeah. Yeah. Because that often will capture that threshold, right? Once you move it out of, okay, anxiety being functional versus it being non-functional, it makes us, to your point, like when it’s functional, it’s mobilizing. It can make us continue to persevere when things feel really overwhelming or challenging or we’re not sure how it’s going to happen, how it’s going to play out, but it’s actually mobilizing. And I remember there’s like this inverted U of anxiety to…

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (14:34):

And stress. It’s the same kind of inverted U. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (14:36):

Right, too little anxiety and we’re like, whatever, I’ll study tomorrow.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (14:40):

We need it. We need it. Yeah. Unfortunately we need it. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (14:46):

It’s funny because my sister and I were very close and we have very polar opposite ends of like our anxiety thresholds. Mine is a little too high. I can procrastinate right up until the … I need a lot of anxiety to mobilize me and it usually has to be like, I got to get right up to the edge before I feel it light up that mobilization. Whereas my sister was like, it takes so little. Her threshold for anxiety is so low. And so when we were kids, because I have ADHD and she’s a little OCD and like when we were kids, I’m older so I would drive us to school and I was always late. I did not care about being on time and she’s just sitting there white knuckling like, we’re going to be like … She would like throw up before every time. We were just like so incompatible to like be like…

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (15:38):

You guys are on oposite ends of the spectrum. That’s fascinating actually. I mean, we’re not easy. I’m sure not easy ever, but I love that you have this beautiful relationship. I mean, it seems like I have a feeling you probably have a great relationship with your sister today. And you say that getting smaller and that’s the threshold when you as a parent have that instinct because it’s so hard in this sort of parenting industrial complex of too much parenting advice, you stop trusting your instinct. And I love that guideline of, if you can see, even if your child’s struggling, they’re still getting out there and they’re trying and you’re supporting, you’re working through it, it’s like, okay, yes, see a therapist, get support, but you’re still kind of on that path and that’s a path all of us have to develop through. But if your child’s life, your life has shut down and choked and actually the … I’m a super nerd, so I’ll just throw this out here. If you look at the etymological roots of the word anxiety, of course there’s the Latin Angiotas, right? But you go back even further to the, I swear to God, the proto into European and it comes from the root ang, A- N-G-H, which if you even say that sound. It means to choke. It means to choke. And so that shutting downness and the kind of shrinking that can happen with anxiety, especially when it gets in the way, I think is at the core.

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:11):

Yeah. And so that’s a great segue because you just brought up something that I wanted to ask you about because I’ve heard you talk about this before and I found it so interesting that kind of the history of not anxiety conceptually as a construct, but the history of the human meaning making of anxiety, like how language has evolved to describe anxiety, how different cultures over time have made meaning out of these sensations and how that’s changed because it’s somewhat of a … It is a physiological hardwired biological construct, right? And our relationship to it is a bit culturally informed, it’s evolved and it might have become highly distorted at this point in our current iteration of it. And I would love to just get, let’s nerd out. Can we just talk a little bit about it?

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (18:04):

You never have to ask me twice.

Dr. Sarah Bren (18:05):

We’re in good company.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (18:09):

Well, great. No, thank you for wanting to nerd out with me too. I mean, it is fascinating because as a clinical psychologist and a researcher, until I wrote this book, I didn’t really go back and think about that because we take it for granted, right? It’s just like anxiety. It’s one of the … Freud talked about anxiety and his introduction, really his work’s introduction to the United States, it was in a book that was the English translation was anxiety and the role that it has to do in our inner lives, but the history goes back so much further. So if you look at … I have a little less knowledge and I’m not even sure if there is scholarship about non-Western language around anxiety. I’ll just put that aside. But if you look at sort of medieval era, how we started using the word anxiety in European languages, it used to be a very rarely used word. It really just described, as you were saying, physiological, these kind of physical sensations. So if someone used the word anxious, it really just meant, oh, my heart’s racing, or I have butterflies in my stomach, or maybe the kind of panic feelings that can happen.

(19:22):

And it wasn’t until the Catholic church really started being a dominant force in European life in the medieval era, that anxiety went from being this very external experience to an experience that occurred in the soul. So you start seeing this language, and of course until writing became widely available and reading was a common thing, this was all from the pulpit, right? This was sermons and these were churches and there was this notion that we had a sickness of the soul and anxiety of the soul that feared hellfire. And so it became this very internal and sort of morally colored emotion that was frightening, right? And it was really…

Dr. Sarah Bren (20:11):

And ever present.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (20:13):

And ever present and sort of this threat from beyond.

Dr. Sarah Bren (20:16):

Yeah, because it’s not just, “Oh, I noticed this sensation and here it is and like all sensations, it comes and it goes like and we’re in fluid motion all the time. So when it stays in that land of sensation, there is this innate, I would imagine, if you’re paying attention, this trust that it comes and it goes. But when it’s now connected to like your existential soul and your morality and who you are and what you do, and the bar was pretty high in that moment in time as to what was good and what was bad and it was also quite black and white. And so I would imagine there’s just a tremendous amount of ever present incongruence with what I’m supposed to be doing and how I am and therefore I’m in conflict.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (21:09):

Yeah. I think you’re 100% right. I think that was a slow burn because still it’s … I don’t think … I’m picturing this, I don’t know this for sure. I’m not a scholar of medieval peasantry, but I’m thinking of people, they would go to church or they would have the … And you don’t have time or you’re just kind of surviving. So you’re not thinking about it all the time, but it set the stage I think for exactly what you’re talking about because if you look at certain kind of scientific and philosophical iterations, okay all of a sudden you have this ever present thing that’s internal and you can’t escape it. It’s not as passing anymore, right? And it somehow links you to the eternal. Okay, that’s intense, right? And then you have philosophers like Kierkegaard, for example, about 180 or so years ago wrote an entire book about anxiety and he was a Catholic, which is interesting.

(22:01):

He took this different perspective. He said,” Whosoever learns to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. “There are all these beautiful quotes from Kirkard about kind of what I’m saying. I’m just ripping off Kyrkagard really, but he’s sort of saying, it’s sort of this … It’s not that the ultimate is that it goes away because maybe it never goes away, as you were just saying, but it’s like, how can we be anxious in the right way? And he called it the dizziness of freedom, of this existential freedom. So now after you move out of the medieval dominance of the church and you’re in kind of the enlightenment era and a little beyond, now all of a sudden you don’t have all the … The church lost some power all of a sudden humans are at the center, people are questioning the infallibility of the church and now you don’t really have a true north anymore.

(22:52):

You just have this soul that maybe it’s … I think it’s there. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s physical. You’re starting to question all these things, but you have this anxiety that seems very powerful and you can’t just hand it over to the church or to God anymore, right? So now you have this all uncertainty. Freud comes along. By the way, and Darwin was in here talking about anxiety. He wrote a whole book about a third of his theory on evolution is about emotion. So people are trying to scientifically wrap their head around, but then Freud comes on the scene and he’s like, ” Actually, neurosis, which is just like another way of saying anxiety, that’s central to everything that’s wrong and we become crazy and now it’s like there’s physical forces, but there are these now super powerful emotional forces that are causing us to go blind because it’s.

(23:45):

And all societies are going crazy because of this powerful emotion. So this is the stage for the 20th century, right? So now we have the new … We’re the new … I hate to say it quite this way, Sarah, but I think it’s true. We’re the new sort of priests and the kind of spiritual advisors of the soul now because for those who maybe don’t have a spiritual life, they turn to psychologists to tend for their soul and now we’re talking about anxiety all the time. Our mindset, the story, our relationship is what you said, I think so athlete to anxiety is that it’s this incredibly powerful force. It causes a lot of dangerous things to happen and if we don’t know what to … If it feels out of our control, which I feel like a lot of the social media dialogue, like modern dialogue is sort of like anxiety is, I’m spiraling, I’m taking over, it’s controlling me, it’s my anxiety that my identity is anxiety.

(24:43):

I think we have a mindset now where the house is on fire, you feel a little anxiety, you’re in danger and you better run, which means avoid and what? What were we already talking about is the actual recipe for problematic anxiety avoidance. So I think we’re in this relationship with anxiety. I think we should break up with that relationship with anxiety. I mean, I think we need to not break up with anxiety and treat it like an enemy. I think we actually need to find a way to negotiate and make anxiety our ally again.

Dr. Sarah Bren (25:19):

Hey, jumping in real quick because I wanted to share a resource that you may find helpful. One of the most difficult parts of parenting an anxious child is figuring out how to support them without accidentally making the anxiety bigger. When your child is distressed, it’s completely natural to want to offer reassurance, make accommodations, or help them avoid situations that feels overwhelming to them. The challenge is that sometimes those well-intentioned responses can unintentionally reinforce our child’s anxiety and that’s exactly what the SPACE program was designed to address. SPACE, which is an acronym and stands for Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions, is a research-backed treatment developed at the Yale University and it helps parents learn how to respond to anxiety in ways that build confidence, resilience, and independence. And one of the things I love most about SPACE is that parents do the work. Your child does not have to attend sessions and in many cases, parents can create really meaningful change simply by learning how to shift their own responses to their child’s anxiety symptoms.

(26:23):

At Upshur Bren Psychology Group, we offer a couple different options for getting started with SPACE. Our four week virtual space group helps parents nationwide develop a deeper understanding of childhood anxiety and OCD through the lens of the space treatment model. Over four weeks, you’ll learn the key components and strategies that make space so effective, gain clarity on the role parents play in supporting change and leave with a framework you can begin applying within your own family. For parents who want a more personalized level of support, we also offer one-on-one space sessions for families in New York State and Connecticut. This option allows parents to work closely with a therapist to tailor the approach to your child, your family system, and your specific challenges with ongoing guidance as you learn, adjust, and implement these principles in real time. As Dr. Eli Liebowitz, the creator of the SPACE treatment modality shared with me on Securely Attached, childhood anxiety is one of the most treatable conditions in the field of mental health.

(27:24):

The work you do now can create lasting change that benefits your child across their entire lifetime. If you’re interested in joining the wait list for our next space group or getting one-on-one support, you can visit upshurebren.com/space. That’s U-P-S-H-U-R-B-R-E-N.com/SPACE. Or if you want help determining what support options are best for your unique family’s needs, you can also schedule a free 30 minute consultation call with a member of our concierge care team who will listen carefully to your concerns and walk you through personalized recommendations so you don’t have to figure this out on your own. All right, now back to my conversation with Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary.

(28:15):

Something you said feels so important to me and I know you do a lot of work in the tech space too, but you’re saying, okay, anxiety is this internal and external inputs, right? Some sort of cues for threat, uncertainty, lack of control. And if the amount of that coming at us then causes an outsized response that is also mismatched with our belief in our ability to cope with what we can handle. So it’s like a recipe. It’s like if you’re trying to make lemonade and you’ve got water, sugar, and lemons or whatever, it’s like, okay, yeah, you need to have balance, then it’s good. Otherwise it’s too sour, it’s too sweet, it’s too watery. The balance is optimal, but we also are like, the problem is not necessarily the balance. Yes, we want to find the balance, but we’re also in a world where people are just throwing lemons and sugar and water on us.

(29:25):

It’s just dumping on us all. The input is also outsized. We can’t keep up because the world we live in in this moment in time is just so inundating with cues constantly, a never ending barrage of it. And so it’s like we might have fairly adequate capacity to believe in our ability to cope with anxiety. We might have a generally decent ability to modulate the intensity of it But the fact that the inputs are just beating down on us everywhere we go, it’s like, well, we’re still going to be high anxiety then.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (30:08):

I am so, so happy you brought this up because we went down the nerdy path of talking about what is anxiety and why you can make it your ally and it’s a mindset, blah, blah, blah. And the total reality is 100% what you’re saying because this era between technology is going to amplify anything and we are already in this age of anxiety of uncertainty of change because anxiety is about uncertainty of things being too fast, too much. All the pressures to … I heard your talk about mattering and Jennifer Wallace and that was a fascinating talk and just it’s never enough the constant pressure. So this is this world and I really want to … I’m just so glad you said that because I make the mistake of not leading with that issue to say this is a world that almost none of us could actually match with it in terms of just naturally being able to, “Oh yeah, this is super easy and I’m just going to not be … ” And so I really want to say that it is an incredibly … We have kids who are struggling with anxiety, depression, self-harm, these problems at a higher rate than many … It comes and goes, but this is a very high rate of these crises.

(31:29):

And it is not that our kids are broken or we’re broken, that they’re just hypersensitive. It’s that we’re trying to contend with this world. And the reason I come back to what we can do about our mindset, what choices we can make as parents, how we can kind of be in the basement with our kids with that suffering and not making it, trying to make it go away or snowplowing over it, because that’s not going to work in this world of throwing lemons and mostly lemons, some sugar too, and definitely drowning in water. So I guess as we work to change our environments and we can use our anxiety to do that work, right? I think we have ourselves, our families, our communities, like things we can do and choices we can make to help make that match better. And I think a mindset about anxiety as painful as it is, I believe it can help us do that and really help our kids do that too. I’m so glad you put that all in context though.

Dr. Sarah Bren (32:34):

Well, I think that the mindset allows us to stay. Having a mindset, if you can say to yourself, “This is safe. This is uncomfortable, but it is safe. There’s utility here. There’s information here. There’s positive elements to anxiety. It’s safe.” That allows you to slow down and stay present instead of running away or turning off or avoiding. So that’s critical because we can’t fix any of the amount of inputs coming at us or our coping strategies or our regulatory response, like we can’t down regulate. Those are like the three, like the inputs, the arousal and the like, “Okay, I can handle this and so I’m going to like…

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (33:23):

Those are the levers we have. Yeah. Those are the levers we have in a moment.

Dr. Sarah Bren (33:27):

Right, but we can’t work with any of those levers if the experience of anxiety or watching our kid experience anxiety is so overwhelming that it shuts us off.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (33:43):

I agree with all my heart and I think that was the motivation behind my writing this book because there are tips and I think if we want to end with some tips for parents and like just kind of a simple … I kind of give a simple framework because there’s so many tips out there, but you need a roadmap and so I try to keep it really simple. But the whole reason I wrote this book was as like on giant recalibration of our mindset about anxiety for that reason. Because if we can start to see, listen, don’t love your anxiety, don’t even like it, but honor it as an essential part of our humanity and a potential ally. Because as you said, it’s only by making it an ally that you can do all the other things you need to do and to help your kids do to navigate this world. And when you do, it can be a superpower. And it doesn’t mean that there aren’t anxiety disorders and people need to be supported and helped and it does not mean that. This is really an end, not a but.

Dr. Sarah Bren (34:40):

Exactly. I think like you were saying before, anxiety is on a spectrum and like that spectrum includes just non-disordered and disordered levels of anxiety, right? So it’s still the same system we’re working with.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (34:56):

And it includes excitement. Yeah, it includes hope. So yes, it’s the same system, but it can go off the rest.

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:03):

Yes. Okay, let’s think about it. Well, I want to hear your framework because what I’m thinking about is now I’m thinking about these three levers. Okay, we can intervene on the level of input, try to reduce the intense … Slow that deluge and I think for kids parents really need to scaffold that because they don’t know how to hit the brakes in exposure to a lot of that stuff and sometimes it’s not possible, but like where it’s possible sloping … I’m always like, I got off like social … I stopped going, getting my news from a certain place. It’s like sometimes you have to curb the volume and the breadth of access you have to all this noise because…

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (35:51):

It’s not even social media anymore. It’s just a giant strip mall and digital space/

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:55):

No. It doesn’t matter. It’s like you can’t walk down the sidewalk without it coming at you, but input … So there’s some place in the level of input that we could intervene. There’s some place in the level of managing our arousal, just physiologically regulating the system, and then there’s some place on that end of like believing I can handle trusting my capacity to cope, increasing my tolerance for the uncomfortable sensations and feelings and thoughts. Is that match your framework or do you have … I’m curious how you think of it and what we could give parents in terms of like for themselves or for helping their kid to just feel like, “Okay, I’ve got some tools in my toolbox.”

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (36:43):

Yes. All of what you said, I’m 100% behind. I created a slightly different framework because really it’s a framework for creating this more hopeful anxiety mindset, right? And it includes, well, the framework is, and I think you’ll see, so it’s sort of that first step, but it also includes actions you can take. I call it the 3L framework and it’s what you do when anxiety shows up for your kid, for you, because you don’t know what to do and there are a million tips, right? But it’s like putting gas in your car and you have no idea where to drive. The three Ls are just like, “Here’s a little roadmap and anxiety shows up and here’s where you can steer your car.” So that’s what it is. And the three Ls are listen, leverage and let go in that order. So the listening part, and it’s the most important part so that if you don’t do anything else, you listen.

(37:36):

This is the point at which you just fully, fully see, validate and accept that child’s experience of the emotion. Now that doesn’t mean you have to agree with it or amplify it, but it’s just that taking that moment that I’m sure you talk with every parent you work with and anyone who’s really trying to be there for their kids where you say, “Okay, you’re having this feeling, I’m with you. Can we give words to it? Maybe not. Can I just sit with you while you’re having this feeling? We don’t want to fix it. We’re pausing on fixing and soothing. We’re just really abiding with our children.” And what that does, it’s like a miracle when you really … And it doesn’t happen overnight, but when you can really practice providing … And this is for your kid, this is for your loved ones, this is for yourself, really taking that emotion for a minute, that anxiety is information that has something useful to tell you.

(38:32):

You’re only anxious when you care so it tells you about something you care about. We do know when we name it, we tame it so it is helpful to give words to those feelings, but we can’t give them to our children. We have to really listen. Sometimes it’s not even a word. Maybe it’s, what color is this feeling? How does it feel in your body? What happened right before you had that feeling? So helping our kids listen to, tune into that feeling. I’ve just sat with … I have a son and a daughter who are teenagers now, but there have been times when my husband and I have just, we’ve had a kid come home really overwhelmed. It’s been a terrible week. You want to talk about it? No, that’s like pro forma. And we just say, “Hey, do you mind if we just sit with you?

(39:16):

Tell us when you want us to go away. Can we just sit?” Whatever. But you sit there and then five minutes have gone by, they haven’t asked you to leave yet. 10 minutes have gone by 15 and then maybe there’s just a little, you’ve created the space where they know it’s okay to fee this way. They don’t have to perform for you and you open the door and over time that can really, that’s the only thing you do, right? Not fixing their child, they’re not broken. So I can go on and on about this, I’ll stop there, but it’s just that experience of deep acceptance and abiding with the feeling. So once you’ve done that and you’ve listened to it and you maybe you can see a little bit about what anxiety has to tell you about what you care about, what’s possible, then you try to leverage it. That’s the second L. So listen and then leverage. And leverage means you actually, for example, if you’re worried about a test and that’s what’s the kid is like, “I’m going to fail math.” Instead of avoiding that, you lean into a little bit and you say, “Okay, what about math?

(40:19):

Are you anxious about … ” There’s this great, I’m sure you’ve probably done this with clients before, you schedule worry time, and there’s actually great evidence that if you schedule worry time right before a test and you let a kid dump all their worries about the test for 10 minutes before the test, they actually do better on the test and that’s work that was published in the journal nature, which is one of the great journals, but it’s just this idea that when you don’t fight and try to suppress the worries, you actually gain control of them, right? So you actually lean and say, “Okay, you’re worried about the test. What is it? I’m going to fail.” Well, what is it that you don’t understand? Well, there’s that one type of algebra problem that just gets me every time. Oh, okay. Well, could you ask your teacher to actually just like, could we just do practice on this one type of question or oh, my friends are going to, they’re not going to talk to me.

(41:08):

I mean, friend anxiety is so deep and wide and it’s hard to solve, right? But just by having listened to anxiety about the friendship, you’ll figure out, oh, okay, well you’re worried that one friend who’s been really mean to you is going to turn everyone against you. What can we do about … Is there some move you can make now that allows you to make a choice that’s going to help you in this moment? So it’s like that listening and then knowing it’s giving you information that you can leverage to do something with, that actually allows anxiety to be useful in the way of what … And sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it takes time to leverage it, but it gives you that concept that you can actually do something. Like a wheelbarrow, like a wheelbarrow, like that’s a lever because a wheelbarrow allows you to lift things that you could never lift on your own. It just gives you that opportunity because you’ve owned that anxiety.

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:00):

Right. But if you don’t listen first, which I think is, I hear your very valid and very useful criteria that you must go in the correct order because if you don’t listen first and you just want to leverage the anxiety before hearing what the real message is, because initially anxiety can show up as this kind of like spray paint, it’s everywhere, it’s nowhere, it’s everything, it’s not … It’s just this big cloud of something. Exactly. And so being with letting it settle, really listening for the true nugget of this is the actual seed of this, this is the fear, this is, it’s not…

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (42:39):

And it’s honoring that. Yeah. It’s honoring that feeling.

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:42):

Yeah.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (42:43):

And the other thing too is I think this is the biggest thing we do and I have two teens, as I mentioned, and they’ve had struggles with anxiety and you can imagine how what my feeling about that might have been too, that I’m supposed to be the expert on anxiety, right? And they’ve been my teacher in this. I mean, it’s been so profound for me to see my own kids struggle and to really see the biggest problem I caused and where I have grown as a human, as a mom, as a psychologist, I think, is to realize that inadvertently I was trying to fix my kids. They had struggles. I went into fix it mode. Here’s the worksheet, here’s the thing, here’s the psychology tip. And the whole world, which is full of psychology tips, is telling us you got to fix

Dr. Sarah Bren (43:29):

Your kid. Let’s do that.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (43:30):

And it’s wrong. Our kids are not broken machines. Listen, our job as parents is to help our children suffer, not to take it away because the nature of life and the nature of mental illness and health is if you can find a way to experience all the feelings and to sometimes suffer and to fall down and pick yourself back up again, that’s mental health, not happiness. But we’re all falling prey to this mindset of fixing something that’s broken. Anxiety’s not broken, but sometimes we have to navigate it and tune it and leverage it, right? And then before we let go of it, which is the third step, which we can talk about in a second, after you react to that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (44:12):

I think it’s anxiety, our child who’s anxious, us who’s anxious, that’s not broken. We don’t have to fix it, but it’s also not … I could see a lot of people be like, “Yeah, I think I realize I’ve been thinking it’s been broken and I have to fix it. ” But also it’s not dangerous. I don’t have to make it go away. That is, I think for me what most people go, “Oh, okay, wait, that one I did think it was dangerous and it needed to go away.” And so if it’s not dangerous and I can sit with this discomfort or it’s not dangerous and I can sit with my child’s discomfort, I’m not failing them as a parent because I’m letting them be in this not dangerous, uncomfortable space.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (45:01):

It is so hard.

Dr. Sarah Bren (45:03):

Because it’s so dangerous, right?

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (45:05):

And we can tell ourselves, by the way, we mental health professionals, we might be like, “Yeah, that’s the way it is. And I’m going to teach all you people how to do it. ” And then you face your own child’s anxiety and you realize how incredibly hard that is. But I am going to promise every person who’s listening to this that if you can tolerate your own distress about your child’s distress, you will become an anchor to them that will be the great … You will build trust in ways that you could never do before if you allow yourself to be more flexible and work on your own ability to feel that pain. And of course we want to protect our kids, but you are not protecting them by trying to make them not feel these feelings. They are not fragile. They are anti-fragile. The only way our muscles grow stronger when we strain them and our emotional strength, our wellbeing, that grows stronger only when we allow ourselves to feel these feelings because you’re going to deny your kid the ability to grow stronger if you try to take those feelings away. It’s true. It’s a terrible truth. It’s the terrible truth, but it’s true.

Dr. Sarah Bren (46:16):

I know and I can’t help but sneak in a little attachment thing because the way you’re talking makes me think of like a secure base. We know that secure attachment, a healthy attachment relationship between parent and child is tied to so many positive outcomes and it’s also very, it’s in part predicted by how much of a secure base we’re able to be for our kid because when our kid is in distress, when they are anxious, which again, they will be, one of the things that they are going to do to self-regulate in that moment is look at you. We were evolved to do that. Our kid falls down. They’ll look at you before they know if they’re going to cry or not. 100%. They’re saying, “I trust your cues more than I even trust my own. I go to you. ” And if you are meeting their gaze, they fall down, they scrape their knee and they look at you and they’re like, “Wait, am I okay?” I’m not asking myself, I’m asking you and I’m not doing it with words, I’m doing it with like unconscious scanning of your facial cues and your threat response.

(47:26):

If you are looking at them from a place of compassion but calm sort of reflecting back the safety of the situation, “Oh, you went down, huh? Ouch. Yeah. I’m here.” Just wait, not saying much, just letting them now go into their own system and actually check for the cues of pain or fear or whatever. And I’ll often say to when kids were little, I always would say whenever they fell down, I was like, “Did that hurt or did that scare you? ” Or maybe both like, “You weren’t expecting that. ” A lot of it is the shock, right? Not just the pain, but again, just our ability to sort of be that secure base and just to reflect back to them the safety in their emotional experience.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (48:19):

I think if we think about every time our kid comes to us with anxieties, fears, distress, overwhelm, if we just picture exactly what you said, just be that safe base, just you’re accepting it, you’re not denying those feelings, you’re not trying to fix them, you’re not trying to say, “Oh no, don’t worry.” I mean, and it comes out of every parent’s mouth, including that. And we can always make amends. We can always repair. Repair is the most important part of parenting. We can always say, “Wait a second, tell me more about that and be that secure base and just visualize that. ” I think that’s half the battle, that is half the battle and it’s the overused, the only way out is through, but it’s another one of those cliches that’s true.

(49:12):

So I’ll end in 30 seconds with the let go part, the third L. So it’s listen, right, really being that secure base, leveraging, doing what we can with that information because emotions are information and then letting go, not the first thing, which is what we want to do. And by letting go, I don’t mean avoiding, although sometimes listen, we’re going to binge watch our Netflix. If you’re me, you’re going to have a bag of salt and vinegar chips, once in a while we’re going to avoid our feelings. But if we can habitually let go in the sense of like we ride waves, like sometimes emotions are a wave and there are ways that we can sort of enter the flow of our lives in very positive ways that lets us release those emotions and it’s hard work, right? Leveraging, listening, leveraging. And we already know how to do this.

(49:57):

It’s not rocket science, being in community, sports, arts, watching a family movie together, meditating. Yes, that’s a really hard version of it, but we already do all of these things. I think community is one of the most underrated ways of letting go because we evolve to, as you were talking about with the gaze, like when we’re the checking in from infancy to parents to give that information, we evolve to be in the tribe, to seek support from the tribe and to work through anxieties and fears.

(50:31):

So drawing on that community, whether it’s spiritual or just giving something back or just being with friends and family. So all of those ways we have to remember to fit them into our lives after we do the hard work of listening, leveraging and then we can look.

Dr. Sarah Bren (50:46):

Yeah. I love it. This was so interesting. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. I imagine people listening got so much out of this. I know I did. So I really appreciate it.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (50:59):

I did too. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr. Sarah Bren (51:02):

Oh, well, I will hopefully talk to you again very soon.

Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary (51:06):

I hope so. Thanks again.

Dr. Sarah Bren (51:13):

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