• Anxiety disorders currently affect approximately 40 million adult Americans.
• Experts say people have negativity bias, which means we’re hardwired to pay more attention to threatening and scary information than positive, assuring information.
• This can increase feelings of stress and anxiety in many people, but there are a number of ways practicing optimism can help.

As the most common mental illness in the United States, anxiety disorders affect 40 million adults.

“If we look at anxiety from a psychological understanding, we think about it as a miscalculation. Anxiety happens when we overestimate the likelihood that something bad will happen and underestimate our ability to handle it,” Natalie Dattilo, PhD, clinical psychologist and director of psychology at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, told Healthline.

Fears and anxiety come from an innate place, said Steve Gross, licensed social worker and founder of the Life is Good Kids Foundation.

“Human beings have something called human negativity bias, which means we are hardwired to pay more attention to threatening and scary information than positive, assuring information,” Gross told Healthline.

This tracks back to survival when early humans hunted for food, water, and shelter. The constant threat of attack kept humans in fight-or-flight mode.

“Some anxiety is a physiological response when your body produces a lot of adrenaline and goes in threat detection mode. While the anxiety may be a hyper-exaggeration of the risk of something, the body is trying to keep you safe,” said Gross.

1. Change your brain

When Dattilo works with clients with anxiety, she uses talk therapy to shift their thinking.

“I talk about how our ways of thinking become very entrenched neurologically. If we want to change the way we think about ourselves, people, and the world, it takes time to create new pathways,” she said.

“The brain is very flexible and malleable and changeable and has the ability to form new connections between parts of the brain that don’t communicate that much. It takes time, repetition, and new experiences to help solidify new thoughts we’re trying to practice,” she added.

Dattilo explained that the part of the brain called the orbitalfrontal cortex (OFC), which is important for the integration of information from the intellectual, rational, and emotional centers, is bigger and more developed in people who tend to be more optimistic and less anxious.

When she works with clients, she first aims for them to recognize that there are different ways of thinking. Then they discuss a setback to identify which patterns of thinking are problematic.

For instance, through a series of questions, Dattilo and the client will determine what was going through their mind as the setback happened and what they think about it now. Then Dattilo determines how much of their thoughts they’re using to predict what will happen in the future, and what actions they take and don’t take based on that.

The most important component is practicing new ways of thinking.

“Many people abandon their efforts too soon before noticing any change has stuck and maintained. An important part of treatment is a maintenance stage where we have done a lot of thought editing/active treatment and then spend time practicing the new way of thinking and consolidating or storing those ideas so they are more available to you and become the default way of thinking,” Dattilo said.

2. Breakdown your fears

People who have chronic anxiety (called generalized anxiety disorder), tend to have catastrophic thinking that involves expecting things not to work out.

“They can be on edge and have a hard time relaxing. They overprepare, overworry, and overthink,” Dattilo said.

She refers to this as a crisis of confidence.

Understanding your fear and gaining information about your fear is the antidote to fear, notes Gross.

“If you have a fear, understanding the odds of it happening can put things into perspective cognitively. A lot of people have a distorted perception of the threat that’s going on in the world,” he said. “You want to be mindful that ‘yes’ things can happen, but other things can happen too.”

“You want to realistically assess the likelihood of a negative event and accurately assess your ability to handle it,” he added.

Dattilo helps clients do this by asking them to think about a recent upsetting event and on a scale of 0 to 100, answer the following:

How likely is it that this will never resolve or change?

For people who tend to overestimate the likelihood, she challenges them to accept that realistically most things tend to resolve over time.

What’s the likelihood that this event will affect everything in your life?

Thinking about how the event is affecting some areas and not others, can help one realize that it isn’t as catastrophic as originally thought.

What other factors might have contributed to the event?

Owning a role in the outcome of the event is important, says Dattilo.

Additionally, part of this process includes accepting that fear isn’t the enemy, notes Gross.

“There is risk in everything we do and anxiety is a hyper-exaggeration about the risk of something,” he said.

For example, if you’re worried about talking in school or at work and making a fool out of yourself, he says to think about what would happen if that were the case, as well as other outcomes that could occur.

“Is it possible that you could talk and people like what you say?

You want to be able to imagine positive outcomes, as well as realize that negative outcomes won’t destroy you,” he said.