Working with Surprises
Below is an introduction to some research that might be helpful for seeing anxiety a bit differently than we normally would. Many therapists, or individuals that are used to psychology terms, are probably familiar with anxiety being a nervous system response. Yes, that’s true - and - it can be seen as more. Anxiety is the internal [signal] that something is not balanced – we’re not in homeostasis - and is a particular mode we can that helps us return to homeostasis.
I’ll start off illustrating a new fundamental principle that can be applied to the universal pain felt by mental illness - and for our purposes, we will be focusing on the many manifestations of anxiety. If our physical bodies raise our temperature when there’s a virus, we are using that imagery of a virus as it affects our thinking. That virus is uncertainty.
Karl Friston and the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging have proposed the theory of free energy principle (FEP). In this theory, uncertainty - a very intellectual, worrisome-sounding notion - is simply ‘surprise’, something ‘unexpected’, or outside of what our minds had conceived. That’s the first half of FEP. The second half of FEP is that cognition and action are synonymous. Meaning, when you notice ‘surprise’ it is, by definition, a feeling of being surprised and a category for something your mind had not anticipated. Therefore, you can use your actions to soothe the sense of ‘surprise’ or you can sit back, learn what caused the unanticipated. This second proponent is called embodied cognition. What that means is that your actions are going to have a direct result on your perception, not just that what you perceive will guide your actions.
Now, FEP has a good deal to say about how to change uncertainty, but for introduction-sake, we will set the scene for anxiety. Thinking about something that has us feeling anxious (social situation, going home to family, new job, anything), it’d be fair to say there’s some uncertainty there. That’s one kind of uncertainty. The other kind of uncertainty is not knowing what effect it will have on you and whether/if you will be okay. Being okay is this idea of homeostasis. So think of how your body returns to its usual resting temperature and how a fever is necessary for doing so. Anxiety is trying to anticipate ways to make sure you can get back to homeostasis.
However, there are certain points where anxiety reaches a threshold and becomes an anxiety disorder. In this sense, think of your anxiety becoming disordered, disorganized, chaotic. It no longer functions - to get you back to homeostasis - as it should. Solms (2021, p. 101) reminds us of the embodied cognition principle in that voluntary behavior is “feeling your way through the problem”: you will continue to make actions in hopes that they will help you feel better in a situation. With anxiety disorders, though, your anxiety increases to a point where your voluntary actions are impacted. You freeze and you feel frozen. That is because your mind is telling you to stay still so that the threat does not get worse. Adaptive, yes, but it doesn’t help us change our perception in that very real way of guiding behavior. And this is where we hope to expand by giving you more awareness of how anxiety becomes disordered and how FEP can help you change your perception through changing actions.
The impression of FEP is that this occurs without conscious thought, but conscious thought is still necessary (hence the hard problem of what is mind and brain). The FEP uses terms like ‘action’, ‘prediction’, and ‘belief’ with ideas like motivation, movement, navigation, adaptability. Solms also uses the navigation motif in his illustration of the FEP brain at work. Many might be familiar with the more-mature areas of the brain responsible for decision-making, memory recall, and logic (think hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and its associated substructures). FEP occurs in another area of the brain. Just to situate ourselves in brief terminology, there are a number of brain structures that are going to be good to know going forward, as detailed by Solms (2021, p. 140-141):
Superior colliculi - This area of the brain likes to draw maps of whatever we might be planning to do and draws out the expected path. Think of the chess board. And then the prefrontal cortex is responsible for determining what the actions and targets are going to be, i.e., creates the chess pieces.
Basal ganglia, subcortical - We just discussed how the chess pieces are laid out by the cortex, well now think as if the chess pieces were on their own tracks and moving like machinery. The basal ganglia is responsible for maintaining these tracks that deal with automated behavior.
Future blog posts will continue this discussion of FEP,. It’ll be good to keep in mind that not only is the content of anxiety automated. We already see this in many of the discussions surrounding (para)sympathetic nervous system responses. But the content has a role to play in being an element of a larger prediction your brain does. In the future we’ll see how there are two routes to managing anxiety.
Solms, M. (2021). The hidden spring: A journey to the source of consciousness. W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc.
