Why your mother was right about your anxiety

So I was reading this book called How to Deal With Idiots.

(Don’t ask. In my defence, I was more interested in the subtitle …and stop being one yourself)

I was struck by a term used by the author, philosopher Maxime Rovere: bedazzlement. It refers to the confusion we all feel when we are trapped in the flare of a strong emotion. In Rovere’s words: “Like a firework display that blinds you to the rest of the sky, bedazzlement turns everything else dark, and the greater your emotion, the less you can see.

Yes, we’ve all been there. Blinded by anger or resentment or fear. But also, by joy or hope or euphoria. We ourselves are also the idiots we have to deal with.

I am, I think, a logical person. I value rational, analytical thinking. I keep calm and work it out. Weigh up the pros and cons. Look at the evidence. Filter out the signal from the noise.

And yet. I am also a writer with a poet’s temperament. I am bedazzled by beautifully chosen words, sentences that make my head swim. I can be brought to tears by candescent couplets and soaring stanzas. I am a romantic who wants to believe in the best of humanity, in the purity of selfless love. Even against all the evidence.

And so, I, too, the calm and considered thinker, am often bedazzled by a wave of emotion. Rendered helpless, unable to reason until the dazzle fades and normal vision returns.

In his wonderful, little-known ghazal Aaj Jazbaat Ko So Jaane Do, Roshan Wadhera asks us to let emotions subside when they overwhelm us. My translation of the first verse:

Tonight, let these feelings sleep; tonight, they are too heavy to bear.

The words that gather at your lips will falter. Tonight, too heavy to bear.

This plays on the idea that we should let the bedazzlement pass, let the overriding emotion lose its grip. Then, reason and balance can return.

Psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett is revolutionising our understanding of the brain. She would agree, but with a word of caution. We are not essentially rational beings occasionally overwhelmed by waves of unmanageable emotion. Our brain—the one that makes us logical—produces those very emotions. There isn’t a “rational brain” fighting an “emotional brain.”

We grew up on a tidy fable: deep inside sits a little animal that feels; on top sits a sensible human that thinks; and the two wrestle for the steering wheel. Prof Barrett tosses that out. Your brain isn’t a courtroom where reason cross-examines emotion; it’s a prediction engine trying to keep your body’s energy in balance. It doesn’t discover emotions. It constructs them—on the fly—from past experience, the language you’ve learned, your bodily signals, and the situation you’re in.

The brain is busy every moment sending chemicals and nutrients through the body, to deal with its reading of what is about to happen. Your brain is running a budget for your body, by predicting its needs. 

Core affect is the brain’s quick readout of your state along two lines: how pleasant or unpleasant you feel, and how wound-up or low-energy you are. It’s fast, fuzzy, and not an emotion yet—just two numbers your brain tracks all the time.

To turn that fuzzy readout into something usable, the brain applies concepts. A concept is a learned category built from past moments—what you sensed in your body, what you saw and heard, what goal you had, and the words you learned for it. When today’s cues resemble an old pattern, your brain predicts a match, gives it a label, and prepares an action. That prediction is what you experience as an emotion.

A quick example. Your heart is up and your phone buzzes: “Can we talk?” After poor sleep and a tense morning, your brain predicts threat, calls it anxiety, and you brace or avoid. After a good breakfast and a small win early in the day, the same buzz predicts opportunity, calls it excitement, and you lean in. Same body signals; different concept; different emotion and behaviour.

This is both sobering and freeing. Sobering, because there’s no magical “rational brain” to save us from ourselves. Freeing, because we can train the constructor of our emotions—our own mind. The brain creates emotions because it predicts necessary responses to external stimuli. Those predictions are habits, and habits can be altered by changing inputs. In other words: you won’t win by yelling “calm down” at your limbic system; you will by giving your brain better material to work with.

If you are prone to frequent bedazzlement and feel crappy on a regular basis, the good professor has timeless advice for you. In her pathbreaking book, How Emotions Are Made, she apologises for sounding like your mother, but tells you, with robust scientific grounding, that “the road begins with eating healthfully, exercising, and getting enough sleep.” All our mums were right all along, damn it!

When you’re short on sleep, underfed, dehydrated, or inflamed, the internal signals get scratchy and unpleasant. Your prediction engine has to explain that noise, and the quickest story is “something’s wrong”—which tilts you toward anxiety, irritability, and doom. Put the budget in credit—steady sleep, real food at regular times, light movement, morning light—and those signals quieten. The same inbox looks manageable; the same meeting feels less menacing. This isn’t virtue; it’s physiology. Better biology gives the mind cleaner data and more options.

Folks who get anxious often don’t have a “negative personality”; they have a prediction machine that keeps betting on clouds. Through Barrett’s lens, self-criticism and pessimism are what you get when a brain’s habits, body state, and language push its forecasts toward threat and self-blame.

Oh, and your literature teacher was also right! A richer vocabulary helps. If you use coarse catch-all words to capture what you’re feeling (bad/anxious), your brain will reach for coarse actions (ruminate, avoid, self-attack). Don’t just “feel awful.” Try to define what you feel more precisely. Overloaded? Embarrassed? Disappointed? Wary? Underprepared? More precise labels lead to more precise actions.

When the flare hits, yes—let it pass. But don’t stop there. The dazzle isn’t an intruder; it’s a construction made from your body state and your library of meanings and scripts. If you want less glare next time, change the inputs: keep the body’s ledger in credit, expand the words you have for what you feel, and stage small moments that prove your predictions wrong in harmless ways. Your mother wasn’t nagging; she was doing neuroscience without the jargon.

So the practice is simple, not simplistic. Pause when overwhelmed. Name precisely what this feels like, not just “bad.” Alter the scene—light, breath, movement—so the body sends cleaner data. After the storm, update the recipe so that a better emotion gets made next time.

THE SIGNAL IN THE NOISE

Emotions are built, not found. Start upstream; biology first. Then add language and context, and most storms shrink to showers.

 

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