Harnessing the Hidden Power of Anxiety
Turning Fear into Fuel with 5 Insights, 3 Thought Experiments, and 4 Strategies
In an era where the spotlight often shines brightest on the Ivy Leagues - Harvard, Princeton, Penn, and MIT - let's shift our gaze to the hidden gems of academia. There's a wealth of brilliant minds out there, doing groundbreaking work without the fanfare deserved.
One unsung hero is Dr. Tsachi Ein-Dor from the School of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel. His research on anxiety is nothing short of revolutionary. So, let's circumvent the usual metrics of prestige - the university name, country residence, demographic checkboxes - and focus on what truly matters: the quality and impact of the work.
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Anxiety. It's a term frequently tossed around in discussions about mental health. A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center revealed that a staggering 70% of teenagers identified anxiety as a significant issue among their peers. This concern outpaced other issues such as bullying, drugs, alcohol, poverty, and teen pregnancy. Fast forward to 2022, and four out of ten U.S. parents expressed very or extreme worry about their children grappling with anxiety.
Indeed, we should be concerned when anxiety escalates to the point where it significantly disrupts daily life, when distress becomes unmanageable.
However, it's crucial to recognize that anxiety, at lower and moderate levels, carries value. Anxious moments trigger a surge of energy and power. Anxiety plays a pivotal role in our lives, both on an individual level and within group settings. This is the province not of merely tolerating or accepting anxiety, rather the ability to harness this emotion for better living.
The Missing Piece
Here's the truth:
You need an anxious person on your team.
You want to be a highly anxious person at the right time.
Without anxiety, a small problem can quickly snowball into a disaster.
The Overlooked Solution
Mistakes are a necessary part of creativity and innovation. They're how we learn. But we want to catch mistakes early, before they escalate into something unhelpful. This is where anxiety comes in. It's a low-maintenance, concrete prevention strategy that's often ignored because it's counterintuitive to our pursuit of pleasure and happiness.
In the quest for emotional well-being, what emotional goals should we set? It might seem obvious to chase pleasant emotions and avoid unpleasant ones. However, an excessive desire for intense pleasant emotions or a general preference for unpleasant ones is linked to unhappiness. Striving for happiness as the end game can ironically lead to greater unhappiness.
The benefits of pursuing certain emotional goals varies greatly depending on the individual and the situation. Anger might be useful in a confrontational negotiation - leading to higher levels of well-being, but not in collaborative social situations. Anxiety might be useful when managing threats (such as driving on an icy road), but not when seeking rewards (such as renting sports cars to speed on a country road). This work highlights the importance of flexible emotion goals - the ability to pursue the right emotion, in the right situation, at the right time.
The Role of Anxious People
Anxious people are the sentinels of our teams. They're the ones who react quickly and vocally to early signs of danger, helping others in their social surroundings.
When faced with potential danger, people typically fall into one of three categories:
The self-reliant ones who tackle the issue head-on (lone guns).
Those who ignore the threat, hoping it will resolve itself or that someone else will take the lead (energy conservers).
And then there are the anxious folks.
What sets anxious people apart is not just their heightened state of alertness. It's something more sophisticated. Here's what they do:
Scare: They're chronically hypervigilant, on the lookout for potential problems, especially in unfamiliar or ambiguous situations.
Startle: They react quickly and strongly to early, unclear cues of danger.
Share: They warn others about looming danger. Their innate desire to care for others soothes them, helping them step outside their own heads.
Scout: If their warnings aren't immediately heeded, they go into investigative mode, gathering more data and adjusting their persuasion strategies to build an alliance against the threat.
Squat: They stick with others and stay focused on the problem until it's resolved, rather than going rogue.
“Scared Saviors”
In a fascinating study by Dr. Tsachi Ein-Dor, group members were led to believe that they accidentally activated a computer virus that rapidly infected files on a computer. On their way to tell the person whose computer they were on, four obstacles prevented them from warning others or seeking help. To pass the obstacles, they needed to be abrupt and assertive, two qualities that are tough for a person who fears being judged negatively by other people. Yet, the most anxious people slalomed through these detours with laser-focused dedication (Scared and Startled). Requests were refused, kindness was discarded, and they were better than their less anxious and happy peers at alerting others (Sharing) about the danger and getting immediate assistance (Scouting and Squatting).
The Limitations of Positivity
Researchers found that being extraverted, sociable, and dominant were unrelated to the single-minded, gritty determination of anxious people. In danger zones, positivity doesn’t work, anxiety prevails. Just as important, in situations when danger is a possibility but the cues might be obscure, complicated, and uncertain, anxiety prevails over positivity.
Yes, anxious people are primarily concerned about saving themselves but the side effect is that they quickly discover solutions and when there is a team around them (in-group, friends), they share the problems and the solutions.
So, next time you feel that familiar flutter of anxiety, remember its value. Harness its power. Maintaining a mindset that anxiety is useful in the right situation (the 5 S's above) enables this power.
Provocations I
Climate Change - Thought Experiment: Imagine a team where everyone is always positive, always optimistic. Now, introduce a sentinel, an anxious person who is always on the lookout for potential problems. How does the dynamic change? How does the team's performance change?
Hidden Incentives - Thought Experiment: Imagine a scenario where a quiet sentinel detects a potential problem and defuses it before it escalates. How would you reward this person? How would you share this story within your organization?
Fire Prevention - Thought Experiment: Reflect on a time when a small problem escalated into a big one. How could early threat detection have changed the outcome? How can you encourage early threat detection in your current environment?
These thought experiments are starting points for deeper exploration and understanding.
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