Where did the disease model of anxiety—the idea that anxiety is a dangerous experience to be avoided and eradicated at all costs — being? In Future Tense, I argue that this view unintentionally makes anxiety worse and thus does more harm than good.

For Lit Hub, I take readers through a brief history of the demonization of anxiety, starting with Medieval Europe and Christian healers of the soul and ending with how psychologists and psychiatrists, modern healers of the soul, have inadvertently spread these faulty ideas about anxiety.

Read more here. 

In a recent Author Talk with McKinsey & Company, I discuss how our beliefs about anxiety influence how we experience this challenging emotion in our lives — whether at home or work. 

In conversation with McKinsey Global Publishing’s Daniella Seiler, we explore how people can reclaim their relationship with anxiety, so it works for, and not against, them.

Watch or read the full interview about making anxiety your ally here.

I thoroughly enjoyed this thought-provoking conversation with Jonathan Bastian about the core ideas of Future Tense on the wonderful KCRW, NPR podcast Life Examined. 

We unpack questions like: Has the desire to control and avoid anxiety made the problem worse? Is anxiety the problem, or are over zealous attempts to inoculate ourselves against the emotion of anxiety making us more fragile and amplifying the problem? Is there a right way to be anxious? 

Listen to the podcast here. 

An exciting new publication from the Emotion Regulation Lab!

Lead author Sarah Myruski and I recently published a new study exploring how parental scaffolding - helping kids work through the challenge themselves rather than doing it for them - contributes to the development of emotion regulation (ER) in children, measured via a brain measure called the late positive potential (LPP). We found that higher-quality parent scaffolding predicted more effective child ER measured at the level of the brain. As I write about in Future Tense, parents strengthen kids' emotional skills when they support them in working through challenges. 

Full citation: Myruski, S., & Dennis-Tiwary, T. A. (2022). Observed parental spontaneous scaffolding predicts neurocognitive signatures of child emotion regulation. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 177, 111–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.05.004