Lewis Howes argues anxiety is a normal warning signal, not a brain disease. Forty years of research chasing a single biological cause has failed, and labeling anxiety a disorder makes people feel broken, which worsens it. Learning to manage anxiety as useful information, rather than suppress it, keeps it from spiraling.
I'm curious, from a neuroscience standpoint, what is the root cause of anxiety and why do you feel like it is amplified so much in the recent years? Yeah, this is just reading those stats makes you feel anxious. Yes. And so there's two ways to look at this. One is what are they actually saying? Because actually 100% of people battle with anxiety. So it's actually bigger than what we see. The stat 100% people, everyone battles with anxiety because anxiety is a very, very normal emotion. It's a warning signal telling us that something needs to, you've got to pay attention to something in our life and where it becomes a problem is when we don't deal with it, when we don't manage it. And what's often happening in our current, the past 40 years, the focus on dealing with mental health issues has been very much one of let's identify the, the biological cause, let's find the neurobiological cause. Where is it in the brain? Something's causing it in the brain. There's something in you that's wrong that's causing the anxiety. And that's been a huge focus of research and that's been, it's called neuro reductionism where everything's focused around the brain. Now that in itself doesn't quite ring true and scientifically it's been pretty much disproved, but it's the going philosophy and it results in these kinds of stats that we see because. Because what we need to do as humans is anxiety is part of being human. It's a normal response to adverse circumstances, obviously of varying degrees and different stages of our life and all that kind of thing and dealing with change and, or being a human. And so when we manage it and see it as something that's giving us information and recognize when it's becoming disruptive and how to, in dealing with that, then it actually isn't such a problem. But when we are told that it's a brain disease and you need a medication and you've got a disorder, you wire in a perception into people that becomes how they see themselves and you feel kind of hopeless. So when you think, oh, well, I've got a brain disease, there's something wrong with me, there's something broken in me that makes things worse. Initially giving it a label or a name or saying you have a disorder makes people feel comfortable because, ah, that's why I feel like this. There's a reason and that's really nice. But then it's a gift that doesn't have anything inside of it. You open it up and think, now what actually? And it backfires. And that's what we're seeing. That's what we see there, is that when you suppress and don't deal, it will then turn into something big and anxiety then shifts from being normal into something that becomes distorted.
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