Was it anxiety . . . or was it anthrax?
In an excerpt from her book On Edge, journalist Andrea Petersen weaves the latest research about anxiety with her own struggle post-9/11
In the days after the towers fell, the Wall Street Journal set up a temporary newsroom in SoHo, and I was asked to join a group of reporters who would continue writing about the aftermath of 9/11. I threw myself into the work.
I wrote a story about New Yorkers who had heard from old lovers, schoolteachers, and even therapists on 9/11. I wrote another about local businesses that weren’t sure whether they should remove the World Trade Center from their logos. I wrote about residents of the financial district who, having lost access to their apartments, were being put up in fancy boutique hotels. One man had hotel employees remove a picture above the bed that reminded him of the desperate men and women he had seen jumping from the burning towers.
One of my assignments was to cover the anthrax attacks in New Jersey. I can’t think of a story more tailor-made to unhinge an anxious person: an unknown assailant sending white powder through the mail that could be lethal when inhaled.
I spent several days camped out front of one of the target post offices in Trenton in a scrum of other reporters. Periodically a spokesman would appear to deliver a bit of news. There was a 7-Eleven across the street, and one day I picked up a bottle of orange Gatorade, took a swig, and put the rest in my purse.
I must not have closed the cap securely because the bottle leaked, sending sticky liquid all over the lip balms, crumpled receipts, and other detritus at the bottom of my bag. And my cellphone. When I pulled it out, it was drenched and dead. A little wave of orange sloshed back and forth within the display like a mini lava lamp. To file my story that day, I had to run back and forth across the busy road between the post office and a pay phone, dictating the words to my editor in New York.
Sometimes I spent the night at a hotel in New Jersey, but usually I’d drive the 90 minutes or so back to my apartment in Brooklyn. I wanted to see my boyfriend, Brad. He was also becoming irritated by my constant absence. I’d spend the night in Brooklyn or at Brad’s apartment and then drive back to Trenton in my rental car in the morning.
The stresses were mounting. Brad. The driving. Long hours pursuing stories. Anthrax.
It is late at night, after 11 p.m., and I’m driving from Trenton to my hotel in a nearby town after a long day of reporting, when I start to feel breathless. A slight pressure builds in my chest. My heart beats quickly. Spots dance in front of my eyes. My grip on the steering wheel tightens.
I try to breathe slowly, deeply. You’re just having a panic attack, I say to myself. I keep driving down the dark highway, but the symptoms are getting worse. My hands sweat. The edges of my vision are fuzzy. Every muscle tenses. Then I see a sign with a capital H and an arrow. There’s a hospital nearby.
I drive straight to the emergency room, leave the car in the driveway, and race up to the triage nurse on duty. “I’m a journalist, and I’ve been writing about anthrax,” I say in a rush. “I’ve been at the post office where the letters came through, the ones with anthrax in them. I’m scared that I could have it.”
“You think you have anthrax?” the nurse says, looking alarmed. “I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait outside. Someone will meet you there.”
I’m hustled out of the hospital and dumped in the driveway. Standing there alone, bathed in the spotlight of the red and white emergency room sign, I start to feel ridiculous. I haven’t actually been inside the post office. I haven’t touched any anthrax-laced letters. I haven’t touched anyone who has touched an anthrax-laced letter. There’s really no way I could have contracted it. I’m just having a panic attack about the very idea of having anthrax.
Afew minutes later an ambulance appears, and a guy in an orange hazmat suit jumps out. I sheepishly explain that I’ve been reporting a story on anthrax but don’t have it myself. The man gets back in, and the ambulance drives away.
After that I hit a wall. I was working on a feature story about a small-town New Jersey mayor who had become an unlikely force in the anthrax attack response. It was slated for page one, for the coveted “A-hed” centre column. (The name A-hed has to do with the stars and dashes around the headline.) The A-hed and the “leders” were the most sought-after slots in the paper, reserved for the best stories, and competition was fierce. I had only a couple of days to turn the story around.
For the first time in my career, I couldn’t do it. When I sat down to write, I felt strangely lost. I couldn’t find my focus, couldn’t see how the story should unfold. I’d write a sentence, then delete it, the blinking cursor a pulsing reproach. With the deadline bearing down at me, I panicked and strung together random vignettes. I felt nauseous as I hit the send button on the email to my editor.
It wasn’t a surprise when she called, sounding disappointed and confused. I was usually a reliable reporter and writer. “Try it again,” she said. I did. And again I failed. The story was killed. When my anxiety soars, I have a hard time concentrating. My mind overflows with worries, leaving scant room for information of the non-doomsday variety. For decades, psychologists have theorized that anxiety hijacks some of the brain’s cognitive capacity, even in people without full-blown anxiety disorders. The idea is that there’s a battle of resources and that worry gobbles up prime real estate. If your attention is focused on potential threats, you have fewer resources to devote to your goal — whether it is getting your point across in a meeting with the boss or, in my case, writing a story about a New Jersey mayor.
Research has not always borne out these theories, however. In fact, the research into anxiety’s effects on cognition is mixed and inconclusive. We know that in people with anxiety disorders, planning is generally unaffected. However, they show deficits in spatial navigation and working memory (short-term memory that allows us to process and manipulate information). Working memory is what lets us follow the thread of a conversation and tally a running bar tab. It is critical for reasoning and decision making.
For those without disorders, new research is showing that situational anxiety — the kind many of us feel before a big presentation — may actually enhance working memory when the task is difficult.
In a 2016 study, researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) had 30 people with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and 30 people in a control group do a working memory task called the “n-back.” The task has several versions. In the 1-back, people are given a string of numbers and have to indicate if the one they are seeing is the same as or different from the number just before. In the 2-back, they need to remember the number two places before.
As you can imagine, the 1-back is easy and the 3-back is quite difficult. To induce anxiety, subjects are sometimes told they might receive a shock to the wrist. At other times, participants are told that they are safe and that no shock is forthcoming.
In the study, the healthy controls did more poorly during the1-back and 2-back when they were threatened with a shock. But during the tougher 3-back task, anxiety actually helped them do better. In the GAD patients, however, the threat of shock disrupted working memory whether the task was easy or hard.
Another study by the same NIMH research group had people with GAD, social anxiety disorder, and healthy controls do the same n-back task while in an fMRI scanner. The anxious subjects had a markedly different pattern of brain activity than the non-anxious ones, which could explain the difference in performance: they had less activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And the wonky brain activity in those subjects was similar whether they were threatened with shocks or not.
The anxiety prone, however, may not be doomed to suffer lacklustre performance. They may not even have to learn to jettison the anxiety. Instead, a simple mind trick could help.
You simply tell yourself that you’re excited.
It sounds absurd, but a series of studies by Alison Wood Brooks, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, has found that when people think of their anxiety as excitement, they perform better on a range of tasks. (True, the subjects in Wood Brooks’s studies weren’t screened for full-blown anxiety disorders, so it is unclear how well the tactic would work for those of us whose amygdalae are already on overdrive.)
Wood Brooks put young people in a variety of stressful situations. For example, some had to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” in front of a researcher. To ratchet up their anxiety, they were told that they were performing in front of a karaoke expert and would be paid based on how well they did.
In the singing study, some of the participants went right to the task. Others were told to first say “I am anxious” and to try to believe it. A third group was prompted to say “I am excited.”
It turns out that the participants who said “I am excited” before their performances were better at matching the pitch, tempo and volume of the song than those in the other two groups. They also said they felt more excited than the other two groups. It wasn’t that the excited group wasn’t on edge: they reported that they felt as anxious as everyone else, and their heart rates were just as elevated. But simply reframing that anxiety as excitement made them sing better.
Wood Brooks got similar results when she had people give a speech and take a challenging math test. The subjects who were prompted to reappraise their anxiety as excitement scored better on the test and were judged to be more persuasive and confident speakers.
In these experiments, she had some participants try to relax by stating “I am calm” before the speech task and “Try to remain calm” before the math task. But doing that didn’t seem to help.
Wood Brooks conjectures that it is a lot harder to transform anxiety into tranquility than it is to convert it to excitement. With the former, you have to fight anxiety’s effect on the body — the jackedup heart rate, the butterflies in the stomach — whereas in the latter you have only to change your attitude. She calls it moving from a threat mindset to an opportunity mindset.
Thankfully, my blown front-page story was not the start of a professional downward slide. Back in New York, I redeemed myself with a string of solid articles. After another few months, the special post-9/11 group was disbanded, and I soon moved over to write about health for our thennew Personal Journal section.