What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [29]
If you scored 10–11, you are in the lowest 10 percent of anxiety.
If you scored 13–14, you are in the lowest quarter.
If you scored 16–17, your anxiety level is about average.
If you scored 19–20, your anxiety level is around the seventy-fifth percentile.
If you scored 22–24 and you are male, your anxiety level is around the ninetieth percentile.
If you scored 24–26 and you are female, your anxiety level is around the ninetieth percentile.
If you scored 25 and you are male, your anxiety level is at the ninety-fifth percentile.
If you scored 27 and you are female, your anxiety level is at the ninety-fifth percentile.
THE AIM of this section is to help you decide if you should try to change your general anxiety level. There are no hard-and-fast rules, but to make this decision, you should take all three hallmarks—irrationality, paralysis, and intensity—into account. Here are my rules of thumb:
If your score is at the ninetieth percentile or above, you can probably improve the quality of your life by lowering your general anxiety level—regardless of paralysis and irrationality.
If your score is at the seventy-fifth percentile or above, and you feel that anxiety is either paralyzing you or that it is unfounded, you should probably try to lower your general anxiety level.
If your score is 18 or above, and you feel that anxiety is both paralyzing you and that it is unfounded, you should probably try to lower your general anxiety level.
Lowering Your Everyday Anxiety
Everyday anxiety level is not a category to which psychologists have devoted a great deal of attention. The vast bulk of work on emotion is about “disorders”—helping “abnormal” people to lead “normal” emotional lives. In my view, not nearly enough serious science has been done to improve the emotional life of normal people—to help them lead better emotional lives. This task has been left by default to preachers, profiteers, advice columnists, and charismatic hucksters on talk shows. This is a gross mistake, and I believe that one of the obligations of qualified psychologists is to help members of the general public try to make rational decisions about improving their emotional lives. Enough research has been done, however, for me to recommend two techniques that quite reliably lower everyday anxiety levels. Both techniques are cumulative, rather than one-shot fixes. They require twenty to forty minutes a day of your valuable time.
The first is progressive relaxation, done once or, better, twice a day for at least ten minutes. In this technique, you tighten and then turn off each of the major muscle groups of your body, until you are wholly flaccid. It is not easy to be highly anxious when your body feels like Jell-O. More formally, relaxation engages a response system that competes with anxious arousal. If this technique appeals to you, I recommend Dr. Herbert Benson’s book The Relaxation Response.4
The second technique is regular meditation. Transcendental meditation (TM) is one useful, widely available version of this. You can ignore the cosmology in which it is packaged if you wish, and treat it simply as the beneficial technique it is. Twice a day for twenty minutes, in a quiet setting, you close your eyes and repeat a mantra (a syllable whose “sonic properties are known”) to yourself. Meditation works by blocking thoughts that produce anxiety. It complements relaxation, which blocks the motor components of anxiety but leaves the anxious thoughts untouched. Done regularly, meditation usually induces a peaceful state of mind. Anxiety at other times of the day wanes, and hyperarousal from bad events is dampened. Done religiously, TM probably works better than relaxation alone.5
There also exists a quick fix. The minor tranquilizers—Valium, Dalmane, Librium, and their cousins—relieve everyday anxiety. So does alcohol. The advantage of all these is that