Michelle: Here’s a wild statistic for you. Around 40 million adults in the U.S. have an anxiety disorder. But what if the most common advice we get—'just calm down' or 'don't worry about it'—is not only useless, but is actually the very thing fueling the fire? Mark: That's a huge number. And yeah, 'don't worry' is the most unhelpful advice ever. It's like telling someone who's cold not to shiver. It just makes you feel like you're failing at not worrying, on top of whatever you were already worried about. Michelle: Exactly. And that's the paradox we're diving into today with the book 'Be Calm: Proven Techniques to Stop Anxiety Now' by Dr. Jill P. Weber. What's fascinating about Dr. Weber is that she's a clinical psychologist who built her career on evidence-based therapies, and she wrote this book to make those powerful, often expensive, techniques accessible to everyone. It's highly-rated precisely because it's not just theory; it's a practical toolkit. Mark: I like that. Not just philosophical naval-gazing, but a 'what do I do right now at 3 AM when my brain is screaming at me' kind of guide. Michelle: That’s the perfect way to put it. And her whole framework starts with a simple but profound model she calls the 'Feelings-Behavior-Thoughts' triangle. She argues that these three things are deeply interconnected, and you can intervene at any point to find relief. Mark: Okay, a triangle. Feelings, Behaviors, Thoughts. Which one do you think people find the hardest to control? My money is on feelings. You can’t just decide not to be sad or angry. Michelle: You’ve hit on the exact starting point of the book, and the first major paradox. We all think we need to control our feelings, but Dr. Weber argues that our very attempt to suppress them is what creates the anxiety vortex.

Michelle: Dr. Weber shares this incredibly vulnerable story from her own life. A few years ago, she took a genetic test, mostly for preventative reasons, and got some shocking news. She had an 80 percent lifetime risk of developing breast cancer. Mark: Whoa. That’s a heavy, heavy piece of information to receive. I can't even imagine. Michelle: Right. And her immediate reaction was what most of ours would be: denial and suppression. She told herself it had to be a mistake. She tried to just push the fear and the profound sadness away. But the emotions didn't just vanish. Instead, something strange happened. She started obsessing over completely unrelated things—minor work issues, small worries about her family, things that normally wouldn't bother her. She was having sleepless nights, just consumed by this free-floating anxiety. Mark: Huh. So the fear was like a river that got dammed up, and the pressure just started seeping out through cracks all over the place. Michelle: That's a perfect analogy. She wasn't consciously dealing with the grief and terror of her health diagnosis, so her brain just latched onto other, smaller targets. The anxiety was a symptom of the suppressed emotion. It wasn't until she allowed herself to actually feel the vulnerability, the sadness, and the grief that the obsessive worrying started to subside. Mark: But hold on, isn't that self-preservation? If you get terrible news, your instinct is to wall it off so you can function, so you can get through the day. It sounds like you're saying the solution is to... feel worse? Michelle: It sounds counterintuitive, I know. Dr. Weber uses a brilliant metaphor for this: the Chinese finger trap. You know, that little woven tube? The harder you pull your fingers apart to escape, the tighter it grips you. The only way to get free is to do the opposite of your instinct—to push your fingers in, toward the center. To lean into the discomfort. Mark: Right, it's like quicksand. The more you struggle, the faster you sink. The only way out is to relax into it, which is the last thing your panicked brain wants to do. Michelle: Exactly. And this isn't just for big, life-altering events. She sees this pattern constantly in her clinical practice. She tells the story of a patient named Tanisha who suffered from crushing panic attacks. As they explored her history, it turned out that as a child, whenever Tanisha was sad or angry, her parents would dismiss her. They’d say things like, "Get over it," or "You're being too sensitive." Mark: Wow, that's heartbreaking. To hear your own parents' critical voice in your head for years... that's a heavy weight to carry. Michelle: It is. And what happened was, Tanisha internalized that voice. As an adult, whenever she felt hurt or lonely or full of self-doubt, she would tell herself, "What's wrong with you? Get over it!" She was judging and suppressing her own emotions, layering shame on top of the original pain. The panic attacks were her body's way of finally screaming for a release that her mind wouldn't allow. Mark: So the panic was the built-up pressure from years of not being allowed to just... feel things. It all had to go somewhere. Michelle: Precisely. The book’s first major takeaway is that you have to give your emotions a voice. Acknowledging them, labeling them—"I am feeling sad," "I am feeling angry"—moves that emotional information from the reactive, primitive part of the brain to the frontal lobe, the part that can reason and problem-solve. You're not giving in to the emotion; you're just giving it a seat at the table so you can understand what it's trying to tell you.

Mark: Okay, so fighting your feelings backfires. I can see that. But what about just... avoiding the things that trigger those feelings in the first place? That seems like a smart, efficient strategy. If public speaking makes you anxious, don't do it. If highways freak you out, take the back roads. Michelle: Ah, you've just walked right into the second major trap Dr. Weber identifies: the avoidance loop. And you're right, it feels smart. It provides immediate, wonderful relief. But in the long run, it's disastrous. Mark: How so? If it works, it works. Michelle: She uses another great analogy: imagine you're at a swimming pool on a hot day. Everyone is splashing around, having fun. You're in your swimsuit, ready to go, but you're standing at the edge, hesitating. You're dreading that initial shock of the cold water. Mark: Oh, I know that feeling. The mental debate can last longer than the swim. Michelle: Exactly! And that's where the anxiety wins. In your head, you're going back and forth. "It's too cold. I'll just sit here. But I want to swim. But the shock will be awful." The more you nurture that impulse to avoid the cold, the bigger the fear gets. You feel self-conscious, like everyone is watching you hesitate. So you decide not to jump in. You get instant relief from the decision, but then you're left sitting on the side, feeling isolated and watching everyone else have fun. Your fear made the decision for you. Mark: And your world got a little bit smaller. It's now a world where you don't go in the pool. I see this all the time. People turn down invitations, avoid difficult conversations... It's a thousand tiny 'no's' that add up. Michelle: They add up to a very small life. Dr. Weber presents the case of a man named Jase, who had a fear of public speaking. He was great at his job, but he avoided any and all group meetings where he might have to speak. He would make excuses, call in sick, anything to get out of it. Mark: The swimming pool, but at the office. Michelle: Precisely. And in the short term, he felt immense relief every time he dodged a meeting. But in the long term, he was invisible. He couldn't showcase his talents, he was passed over for promotions, and his career stagnated. His avoidance was reinforcing the idea in his brain that meetings were a genuine threat to be escaped, just like a predator. Mark: So each time he avoided it, he was feeding the fear. He was training his brain to be more scared next time. Michelle: You got it. He was strengthening that primitive, "reptilian brain" fight-or-flight response. The book explains that avoidance prevents you from ever learning the truth: that your anxious expectation is probably wrong. Jase's brain was screaming, "If you speak, you will be humiliated and fail!" But because he never spoke, he never got the chance to see that he would probably be fine, or even do well. He never disproved the fear. Mark: So what's the fix? You can't just throw someone with a phobia into the deep end. Michelle: No, it's a gradual process. The book calls it "exposure." For Jase, the first step was just to attend the meetings. No pressure to speak, just be in the room. Then, the next goal was to ask one simple question. Then, to make one short statement. It's about slowly, deliberately challenging the avoidance behavior and proving to your brain, through experience, that the threat isn't real. It's about choosing to jump in the pool, knowing the first few seconds will be uncomfortable, for the reward of the swim.

Michelle: And that avoidance, that fear of jumping in the pool, is all driven by what's happening up here... the stories we tell ourselves. The book's final, and maybe most powerful, point is that you can't believe everything you think. Mark: That's a big statement. Our thoughts feel like the most real thing there is. They feel like us. Michelle: They do, but our brains are not objective reporters of reality. They have what's called a "negativity bias." For evolutionary reasons, we're wired to pay more attention to threats than to positive things. A thousand years ago, it was better to mistake a stick for a snake ten times than to mistake a snake for a stick once. Mark: Survival instinct. Better safe than sorry. Michelle: Right. But in our modern world, that instinct goes haywire. It catastrophizes. It overgeneralizes. It turns a minor mistake at work into "I'm going to get fired," or a bad date into "I'm going to be alone forever." Our thoughts are often the least reliable narrators in the room. Mark: Okay, so our brains are drama queens. What do we do about it? You can't just tell your brain to stop. In fact, there's that famous experiment, right? The white bear? Michelle: Yes, Daniel Wegner's white bear experiment! He told participants to think about anything but a white bear, and of course, all they could think about was a white bear. It proves that thought suppression is completely counterproductive. The book's approach isn't to suppress the thoughts, but to investigate them like a detective. Mark: I like that. Being a detective of your own mind. So how does that work in practice? Michelle: Dr. Weber introduces a fantastic tool from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy called the "Downward Arrow Technique." It's a way to trace a surface-level worry down to the deep, core belief that's actually fueling it. Mark: Okay, that sounds a bit abstract. Can you walk me through how someone... like that woman Ava in the book... would actually do this? What does she literally ask herself? Michelle: Absolutely. So, Ava is obsessing over a report for work. Her anxious thought is, "I'm not going to finish this report on time." That's the surface thought. Using the downward arrow, she asks herself: "Okay, and if that's true, what does that mean about me?" Mark: Okay... Michelle: Her answer might be, "It means I'll let my team down." Then she asks again: "And if that's true, what does that mean about me?" Her next answer: "It means my colleagues won't respect me." She keeps going. "And if that's true, what does it mean?" "It means I've failed." One more time: "And if you've failed, what does that mean about you?" And she finally hits the bottom. The core belief: "It means I am inadequate as a person." Mark: Wow. So it was never really about the report. The report was just the stage on which this deeper fear of being inadequate was playing out. You're not just swatting at the symptom—the worry about the report—you're following the trail back to the source. Michelle: That's the breakthrough. Once you identify that core belief—"I'm inadequate," or for another character, Ahmed, it was "I am unlovable"—you can start to challenge that. You can look for evidence in your life that contradicts it. Has there ever been a time you were adequate? A time you were loved? The core belief is almost always a gross overgeneralization, a distorted thought that feels true but collapses under gentle scrutiny. You stop fighting the thousand anxious thoughts and start questioning the one big lie they're all based on.

Mark: So it's a three-front war we're waging on ourselves. We fight our feelings, which just makes them stronger. We avoid our triggers, which just makes our world smaller. And we believe our own scary stories, which just makes the fear feel real. And in each case, the thing we think is the solution is actually the problem. Michelle: Exactly. The path to being calm isn't about building higher walls or becoming a better fighter. It's about learning to sit with the discomfort. Dr. Weber's whole approach is about gently turning towards the anxiety, not running from it. It's about accepting your feelings, approaching your fears, and observing your thoughts with a curious, non-judgmental distance. Mark: It’s a radical shift in perspective. It’s not about eliminating anxiety, but changing your relationship with it. Michelle: That’s the heart of it. The book ends with this powerful idea of acceptance. Not resignation, but acceptance. Saying, "Okay, anxiety is here. I don't like it, but it's here. Now, what do I want to do with my day?" It stops being the tyrannical boss and becomes more like an annoying coworker in the cubicle next to you. You can acknowledge it's there and still get on with your life. Mark: I love that. So if there's one thing listeners could try today, what would it be? Michelle: I think it would be this: Just for today, notice one small thing you're avoiding out of anxiety. It could be making a phone call, sending an email, or even just going to a different grocery store. You don't have to do it. Just notice it. Acknowledge the "cold swimming pool." That awareness is the first step. Mark: That's a great, simple action. It makes me think... what's one 'cold swimming pool' you've been standing at the edge of for too long? It's a powerful question to ask yourself. Michelle: It really is. This is Aibrary, signing off.