How to Harness Your Anxiety

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, I talk with Morra Aarons-Mele about why anxiety and achievement often go hand in hand. Listen on Apple or Spotify, and tell us about your relationship with anxiety in the comments below.

If you, like me, are a Homo sapien, then you experience occasional cycles of anxiety. They may be more than occasional, depending on your genetics and childhood. The question is not whether anxiety is part of your life; the question is what is your relationship with it? How do you process it?

Does your anxiety feel like a fruitless cycle of self-doubt, rudderless rumination? Or does it feel like a heightened state of attention — uncomfortable, yes, but useful for addressing the problem that is triggering your anxiety?

According my guest today, Morra Aarons-Mele, "In any given day, up to a third of the American population is walking around with an anxiety disorder. And, in truth, it's probably higher." Morra is a writer, podcaster, and mental health coach. And she’s one of those 85 million Americans who struggles with anxiety on a regular basis.

Here's the good news for those suffering from heightened anxiety and other mental challenges — these conditions are correlated with above average achievement. A 2021 survey by SAP, Qualtronics, and Mindshare showed that C-suite and executive respondents were 80 percent more likely than managers and individual contributors to report at least one mental health symptom. Other studies have observed that CEOs experience depression at more than twice the rate of the general population.

Morra has concluded, after years of interviewing hundreds of clinicians, researchers, and leaders, that you can learn to love your anxiety. You can tame and leverage it. You can turn anxiety into a loyal partner that makes you more focused, driven, resilient, and self-aware.

This updated view of anxiety was such a revelation to Morra that she wrote a book about it. It’s called The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower. The Next Big Idea Club picked as one of the top leadership books of 2023.

Here are two of my biggest take aways from my conversation with Morra:

1. If you give anxiety a job, it can become an asset. Many of us associate anxiety with weakness or helplessness. Anxiety that triggers “shampoo cycles” of negative self-talk may, indeed, result in a kind of helplessness. But if we experience anxiety as a state of enhanced cognitive performance, selected for by evolution as a physiological response to challenge, we can use it to our advantage.
2. Anxiety is like a home alarm system — it’s useful as long as there aren't too many false alarms. Properly calibrated, anxiety is signal, the right response to a challenging situation. Anxiety that is triggered too often is noise. The trick is knowing the difference. William Burroughs said, in a 1970 interview, the paranoid are those "who have some idea as to what is actually gong on.” This is sometimes true. One could also say, sometimes the anxious are those who have some idea what is actually going on. In this sense, the anxious provide an essential service to the rest of us.

I would describe myself as experiencing less anxiety than the average person — I thank my parents for providing me with a relatively low stress childhood and the genetic lottery for this outcome. I do suffer from — and enjoy — a moderate case of attention deficit disorder, which I prefer to describe as a "novelty bias." Like Morra, I have come to love my brain type, which is characterized by both an attraction to new information and ideas, and a tendency to hyperfocus on that which mosts interests me.

I have long believed that it makes sense that there would be evolutionary pressure in favor of a diversity of brain types. An ancestral tribe comprised of people different types of brains is more likely to thrive than a tribe of people with undifferentiated "normal" brains, much as more cognitively diverse teams have been shown to outperform less diverse teams in business environments. Last week I searched online for any support for this view (we might call this a confirmation bias fishing excursion), and I found this: A 2021 paper in the Cambridge University Press proposing a theory of The Evolution of ‘Complementary Cognition. These anthropologists failed to cite my influential 2010 blog post on the topic entitled Learning to Love Your Mental Disorder (I jest ;).

What we are arriving at, here, is a far more optimistic theory of human flourishing. We succeed in teams, and what those teams need is a distribution of personality types. Have a little anxiety disorder? A pinch of ADHD? Step right up, you sound perfect.

Listen to my conversation with Morra on Apple or Spotify, and please assure us that you are not entirely free of psychological challenges in the comments below ;)