And We’re Rolling with Steph Hunt
Future Tense: Why Anxiety Can Be Your Advantage
Steph Hunt interviews Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary
Steph Hunt:
Welcome, Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary. So wonderful to have you on the show.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
Thanks, Steph. So great to be with you.
Steph Hunt:
I first heard of your work listening to Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman.
Oh my gosh — Armchair Expert is one of the top podcasts in the world. Were you feeling nervous? Were you feeling anxious appearing on that show?
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
I did, definitely. But that was really because I was excited.
I was “nerve-cited.”
And I’d made the choice to actually go in person, too, because what I find — we’re all living the Zoom lifestyle now, or the Riverside lifestyle — is that being with people and having that human connection helps take those nerves down a little.
Now, that might not be the solution for everyone, but for me, I thought through that. So I went in more on the excited side than the worried side.
But anxiety is all on that spectrum.
If I went into that saying, Oh my gosh, I’m really anxious about talking with Dax and Monica, versus saying, I’m really excited and I wonder what’s going to happen, it changes that whole set of possibilities.
And I’ve been practising doing that for a long time.
It’s one reason I wrote the book, which is really about making a shift in our lives about how we think about anxiety and anxiety-provoking things.
Steph Hunt:
I’m the same.
I like to connect. I try to connect, and I find that really comforting if you can kind of anchor into that connection and trying to help each other.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
And they’re such super people — very welcoming, very funny, very cool.
Steph Hunt:
Now let’s get into your research and your book, which, as you say, is all about reframing anxiety.
You say we’re taught that anxiety can be quite dangerous — something similar to a disease. We have to eradicate it, forget it, get rid of it.
But actually, the discomfort of anxiety can be a really important tool.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
That’s absolutely right.
And I talk about this “disease story” as something that just isn’t helpful anymore. It’s actually getting in our way.
When you have this metaphor that anxiety is like a disease, it primes us to do unhelpful things when it comes to anxiety:
Avoid it. Suppress it.
And that gives us fewer opportunities to learn and build skills to deal with it.
Thinking of anxiety this way — whether it’s day-to-day anxiety or even an anxiety disorder — makes us fear it.
It’s kind of like the three Fs:
We feel it as dangerous, we fear it, and we flee from it.
That’s the vicious cycle of anxiety, because it always spirals anxiety out of control.
Any time you try to suppress something, it bounces back stronger.
There’s that famous example: if I tell you not to think of a white bear, what’s the first thing you think about?
A white bear.
Our emotions work the same way.
But even more importantly, when we try to eradicate anxiety and avoid it, we’re not learning to leverage it.
And we forget that we’re all born anxious.
It’s not something only some of us have. Everyone is on that spectrum.
When we start thinking of anxiety as a feature of being human instead of a bug or malfunction, everything changes.
Steph Hunt:
And what does that mean — that we’re born anxious?
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
It means anxiety is the emotion we have when we think about the future.
That’s why I called the book Future Tense.
Anxiety is all about the future.
It’s not fear.
Fear is what you feel when there is certain and present danger in the moment.
A snake is about to bite you — that’s fear.
You freeze, fight, or flee.
That’s what fear primes us to do.
But anxiety makes us think about the future, where something bad could happen.
So I could be thinking the day before Armchair Expert: I could bomb this. I could totally have no chemistry with Dax and Monica. It could be terrible.
But when I’m anxious, I also understand that something good is still possible.
Maybe I’ll actually be really good.
Because when you’re anxious, you’re not despairing.
You still believe there’s reason to hope.
You still believe you can do something about the future.
And so anxiety isn’t just about threat and negativity.
It’s also about the possibility of hope.
And it primes us to work to make those positive outcomes reality.
When you start thinking of anxiety that way — as how we navigate an uncertain future and work toward our best outcomes — it becomes essential.
It’s not a malfunction.
The trick is learning to be anxious in the right way.
That’s not easy.
It feels bad because it needs to grab us and make us pay attention.
That’s the task of mental health:
Not feeling zero anxiety.
But bearing that anxiety, feeling that discomfort, and going through it to make your life better.
That’s mental health.
Not the absence of anxiety.
Steph Hunt:
Anxiety has had a really bad PR problem, hasn’t it?
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
It really has.
I think of myself as a publicist for anxiety sometimes.
And that’s about a mindset reset.
There was a great Harvard study in 2013 about the power of reframing anxiety.
They brought in people diagnosed with social anxiety disorder and had them give a public speech in front of judges with no prep time.
That’s hard for anyone.
But before the speech, half the participants were told:
You’re going to feel awful. Your heart will race. You’ll sweat. But that’s not panic. That’s your body preparing you to perform at your best.
They explained the science behind it.
The result?
Those people performed significantly better.
Their blood pressure was lower.
Their heart rates looked more like people rising to a challenge than people panicking.
The only difference was being taught to think differently about anxiety.
And we can do that every day.
We can walk into a podcast interview saying:
Yes, my heart is racing — because I’m preparing to perform.
And that story changes us psychologically and biologically.
It helps us.
Anxiety becomes our ally.
Steph Hunt:
I’m so intrigued by elite performers — Lady Gaga doing the Super Bowl halftime show, for example.
Elite athletes and performers know anxiety is a double-edged sword, don’t they?
They know how to use it.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
Exactly.
It is a double-edged sword.
But the way we’ve talked about it in mental health has often been:
Oh, you feel anxious? Better soothe yourself. Better make it go away. Here’s medication.
Now, some people absolutely need therapy support.
Some benefit from medication.
That’s real.
But therapy doesn’t teach us to destroy anxiety.
It teaches us to work through it and build skills with it.
That’s what all anxiety is asking us to do.
We need language that helps us think about it that way.
Anxiety is a call to listen.
To ask:
What is this information telling me? What can I do with it? How can I channel it?
That’s what we should teach people.
Not that anxiety is dangerous and destructive.
Steph Hunt:
There are so many anxiety tips out there that it can feel overwhelming.
But I love your framework.
Can you walk us through it?
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
Absolutely.
I’m actually a little anti-self-help, because endless checklists can make people feel like failures.
Success isn’t zero struggle.
We have to fall down before we rise.
So instead of endless tips, I teach a framework.
If anxiety has a vicious cycle, it also has a virtuous cycle.
And that virtuous cycle has three Ls:
Listen. Leverage. Let go.
First: Listen.
When anxiety hits, don’t shove it down.
Get curious.
Create a little space.
A breathing practice helps.
I use the 4-7-8 technique:
Breathe in for 4
Hold for 7
Exhale for 8
That calms the nervous system.
Then ask:
What’s really here?
The other day I woke at 3am worrying.
When I got curious, I realised I was stressing about a work deadline I’d been pretending was far away.
Once I acknowledged it and made a simple plan — just one email the next morning — my anxiety dropped immediately.
That’s leverage.
Using anxiety as information and preparation.
Then comes let go.
You can’t stay future-focused forever.
You have to come back to the present.
For me, that’s breathing.
For someone else it might be music, walking, calling a friend, talking to a therapist.
That’s self-care.
And when we practise those three steps — listen, leverage, let go — anxiety starts serving us instead of controlling us.
Steph Hunt:
It can be hard to know if anxiety is helpful or unhelpful.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
And the only way to know is to listen first.
Sometimes there’s nothing useful there.
Sometimes life is just hard and you need sleep or Netflix.
That’s okay.
But if we always avoid listening, the problem stays.
A fitness metaphor is much better than a disease metaphor.
Like physical fitness, emotional fitness requires practice.
You build slowly.
You strain a little.
You get stronger.
And that’s how emotional resilience develops.
Steph Hunt:
You also talk about parenting and not overprotecting our kids from anxiety.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
Yes.
And it’s hard.
The best thing we can do to help our kids feel good is often to let them feel bad — and support them through it.
We get anxious about their anxiety, so we try to erase it.
I tell a story in the book about teaching my son to ride a bike.
He was scared.
I gave him this awful tough-love lecture.
And by accident, I recorded it.
When I played it back, I was horrified.
I’d basically told him to “man up.”
I denied his feelings.
And I realised I was reacting from my discomfort.
There’s powerful research from Eli Lebowitz’s SPACE therapy — Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions.
Instead of treating the child directly, they teach parents to respond differently.
For example, if a child refuses school due to anxiety, many parents accommodate:
Okay, stay home.
But that reinforces the cycle.
SPACE teaches parents to lovingly stop accommodating and help the child move through discomfort.
And after six weeks, the child’s anxiety symptoms improve as much as if the child had received gold-standard CBT themselves.
That tells us something profound:
Helping kids move through anxiety is one of the greatest gifts we can give them.
Steph Hunt:
Wow.
I love your book.
It’s been described as radical — and I guess it is.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
It is.
But we can do this.
We’re not fragile.
Even when we suffer.
Even when we fall down.
We can still be mentally healthy.
That’s not failure.
That’s being human.
Steph Hunt:
And finally — what are you looking forward to?
What’s next?
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
Personally, my kids are becoming tweens and teens, so I’m trying to practise what I preach.
Professionally, my mission is to keep talking about these ideas.
I’m developing workshops around what I call The Flip Method — flipping the script on anxiety.
It’s about identifying the vicious cycle, cultivating the virtuous cycle, checking our physical foundations like sleep and nutrition, and regaining a sense of purpose and positivity.
The world feels uncertain.
But we need to reconnect with possibility.
That’s what this framework is about.
Steph Hunt:
Wonderful.
We’ll have to chat again.
I’d love to have you back.
Dr. Tracey Dennis-Tiwary:
Thank you so much, Steph. I really appreciated speaking with you today.
Steph Hunt:
Thank you.
