Contents
“Anxiety appears because of the way we interpret reality”
Psychology
We spoke with Ferrán Cases about how he overcame his anxiety and what must be done so that it does not reappear
Only those who experience anxiety frequently can talk about it. And Ferrán Cases, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, has spent many years of his life living with this disorder. Why would we see the positive side in this matter? It could be said that thanks to anxiety, the author of ‘The Little Book of Anxiety’ has learned a lot about himself and is being able to help hundreds of people not only better understand their emotions, but also reduce them to almost zero the crises that this disorder provokes.
Have you gotten over your anxiety or are you still having episodes?
It’s been seven years since I completely got over it. Sometimes it is said that anxiety cannot be overcome, that you have to learn to live with it. I absolutely deny this sentence. Let me explain: anxiety is a natural mechanism of the body that helps us detect a danger and react to it. Of course you have to learn to live with it, it is part of our defense mechanism, but when it is pathological, which is what we are dealing with, it is overcome. This happens when this same mechanism is active for 24 hours due to unrealistic fears. So what we will have to do is learn to overcome fears.
He says that anxiety appears not because of what happens to us on a daily basis but because of what we think about what happens to us. How can that anxiety-producing thought be paralyzed?
Exactly, anxiety always appears because of how we are interpreting our reality. We must understand that our brain is equating a danger of the type “I have an exam tomorrow” to “a car is coming at 100km an hour straight towards me.” For him it is exactly the same. So our goal to curb these fears is to use the appropriate tools to re-educate our brain so that it stops interpreting these stimuli as real dangers and thus activates this defense or attack mechanism that we were talking about. This is achieved by creating habits with tools such as meditation or sports, for example.
Apparently, no one who suffers from anxiety knows how to breathe correctly… How did you learn to breathe better so as not to call out anxiety?
I learned in a Tai Chi class. When you are desperate to solve a problem like anxiety, you are going to try things that you would never think he would try. That happened to me, and I fell in love with that discipline. They taught me to breathe diaphragmatically and my symptoms were greatly reduced. Over time and studying it, I realized that breathing does not vary much from a yawn, and helping other people to get out of anxiety, I realized that all of us who suffer from this pathology yawn beyond our possibilities. So working with the ‘Bye bye anxiety’ neuroscience team, we figured out how much that kind of breathing triggered. Among many things, to give you an idea, it reduces the heart rate, and cools the body, relaxes the nervous system and the amygdala stops being hyperactivated, which makes you stop feeling those annoying symptoms.
And what about the 5 × 4 theory you talk about in your book?
It is a way that I was devising to order a series of habits necessary to reduce the symptoms that anxiety causes us. We know that, to create a habit and for your brain to interpret it as such, that practice must have two specific characteristics: it must be located after and before the same habit and it must be rewarded afterwards.
These two characteristics are essential, because it is what will make your brain consider that it is important, that you really need it and that, therefore, you repeat it and finally that habit is built. It is the sum of repetition to the neurochemistry of pleasure. Thus, the 5 × 4 theory consists, applying these two principles, in doing 4 basic exercises to reduce our symptoms in 5 minutes each. It is about making a kind of wheel that contains yoga, ‘qi gong’, sports and meditation in 20 minutes when we get up in the morning.
Would you associate insomnia with anxiety?
It may or may not be related. But it is common to find people who suffer from anxiety and who have insomnia. The best thing in these cases is to work with sleep habits. I can tell you some little things to do before going to sleep that you can apply as of tonight: do not eat a large meal, turn off the screens at least half an hour before and keep the room fresh and tidy, for example.
What would you say to someone who occasionally suffers from anxiety?
It comes out of this, but be clear that to achieve it you need to do your part. There are no magic wands or “fabulous” gurus that heal everything. The recipe is knowledge, tools and willpower. Behind that fear that causes anxiety, there is all the good that will happen to you in life.
About Ferrán Cases
Ferran Cases (@ferrancases) is a tireless student on anxiety and is the creator of one of the most complete and effective methods on the subject: ‘Bye bye anxiety’, successfully tested for nine years on more than 2.000 people. It has a team of professionals made up of psychologists, psychiatrists and scientists and gives workshops and conferences throughout the country.