Phone Call Anxiety and the Amygdala

A commenter linked to this blog by a girl who fears phone calls and extemporaneous conversations:

I have massive phone anxiety.

I feel a bit silly saying that, since using a telephone seems like the simplest task possible. But thanks to my brain cranking my anxiety up to 11, a phone call can be pretty daunting. I’ve tried to encourage people in my life not to randomly call me, but most quickly go back to their own telephone habits and my phone is ringing soon enough. They think I’m just part of a younger generation who prefers texting and email, and a little phone call won’t hurt. Part of the problem is this particular anxiety makes me feel fairly pathetic due to how simple and universal the task is, so I’ve never wanted to explain precisely why I’d prefer texts or emails. But I’m trying to be more open about mental illness, including anxiety, so I want to explain exactly why I hate the phone so much.

What my anxiety boils down to is basically this: Social situations terrify me because I’m certain I’ll be rejected or mocked for saying something embarrassing or foolish. I’m overly concerned with how others judge me (thanks childhood bullies and overly demanding adults!).

This sounds weird. But you have to understand, when your amygdala doesn’t regularly encounter stress and fearful circumstances, it loses the ability to cope, and that causes ever more minor stresses to seem insurmountable. Here, this probably began with bad social interactions when she was young, which she then avoided to get amygdala relief, rather than engaging in them more to desensitize herself. When phone calls became stressful, she moved to texts. Because she texts all the time now, they are tolerable. But if an easier way to communicate came along, like telepathy via an anonymized wireless neural network, she would get a text, her pulse would rise, she’d begin to freak out, and she’d complain about people who still text, when they could just send out brain waves anonymously that didn’t matter.

If the girl who wrote the blog spent her days trying to evade Saber Toothed Tigers, phone calls would be a relaxing and pleasant diversion from a life of fear and terror. You can see how as she avoids that which she finds uncomfortable, she makes the situation worse. As I read her account, she almost sounds like someone who studied a foreign language, but by not actually using it for communication regularly, she can only understand it in the written form. I guess speaking is a complex cognitive task, requiring prioritizing all sorts of stuff, from facial expressions, to intonations, to words, to nuances, to hand gestures, to the unspoken body language. Do it enough, and that cognitive process flows so effortlessly that you don’t even think about it. Her amygdala has just lost the ability over the phone to make that process flow with just words and intonations, and once her amygdala get’s tripped by that, it becomes even more incapable of focusing clearly, which only trips it more.

The comments are interesting, and show the scope of what may be a rising problem in the background.

I was just reading an article a few days ago about how people were being conditioned to jump at any movement, because their phone’s vibration was conditioning them (their amygdala) to feel shock at any movement. As a result, anything which generated a vibration would pop their brain’s shock/focus circuitry. Get in a car and let the driver start it, and “AAaaaahhhh!” It is possible that due to texting, this fear of speaking is growing, and making the vibration effect worse. This can be problematic, since the amygdala forms such associations very easily, and they can’t be erased. The connections almost never beak down once formed. They can only be suppressed through a very weak circuit which suppresses the initial trigger circuit, and which can be undone immediately.

Of course, if you give in to your amygdala, and try to baby it, it will become a monster, and begin infiltrating its angst elsewhere, as seen in the comments:

And telling people about it is stupidly embarassing. I’ve actually contemplated feigning deafness so I could ask for non-phone contact options without people thinking I’m weird.

Next up:

My worst anxiety is with e-mail though. It happens differently, I can check my personal e-mail in general. If I skip a day or I am waiting for something important, I just can’t check. It hurts, in a ‘physical pain’ way. Once I succeed, I need to rest, as if I did something incredibly physically demanding. It’s weird and embarassing. My university e-mail is *always* daunting. I haven’t opened it for a couple months now. I know I miss a lot of important communication with profs (I sometimes get around this by giving them my personal e-mail). I look like a flake all the time, and it’s damaging to my studies. Somehow, telling people that you haven’t read the e-mail they sent 2 weeks ago because of anxiety sounds ridiculous.

Pretty soon, it gets to this point:

My phone anxiety is partnered with my anxiety about answering the front door. The buzz of the doorbell sends me right into panic mode, and none of my windows are placed such that I have a good view of the person without them seeing that I’m home. I need some kind of text-based door screening device, or I suppose a camera would do the job.

In general these things follow a pattern. Just like a junkie needs to hit rock bottom, where the cost of their addiction is so painful it makes their addiction intolerable, so do these people. When the real world consequences of this amygdala weakening and baby-ing reach the point that their pain is worse than that which is motivating the avoidant behavior, these amygdalae will conclude it is less painful to just use the phone or check their email, rather than flunk out of college or miss a call for help from a dying relative.

The answer to avoiding all of this is to find a way enjoy the amygdala burn. If she could learn to feel the anxiety, view it as similar to the painful burn you feel lifting weights, and visualize the feeling as building strength in her mind, she might have a better chance of welcoming the pain, and then overcoming it. It is a strange quirk of the amygdala. If you embrace a painful stress, you view it as good, you make yourself want the changes which it will bring, and you try to force yourself to feel it, that stress will disappear, and fade back into the background of your life. The more you let yourself panic in the face of it, the more you try to push it away, the stronger it becomes. It literally is just like a guy who views lifting ten pounds as so painful he avoids it, and pretty soon he can’t lift five pounds.

She should begin by purposely triggering herself a little, maybe by having someone call her at a specific time, when she is ready for it. Then she should focus on and feel the angst, on an intellectual level. Turn it over in her mind. Poke it a little and see what happens. Then contemplate that she just induced it with no long term ill effect, felt it, and her brain is stronger. Next time, do a little more, as if lifting more weight at each workout. Then get an unexpected call, and recognize that is the ultimate in weight lifting for her brain, and do it, with the express purpose of feeling the stress. Soon she will begin to welcome feeling the stress, viewing it as making her stronger. As she does, that anxiety would dissipate, and she would begin to feel a sense of personal power over it.

Until you learn to feel stress intellectually, willingly, and embrace it, and link it in your mind with acquiring strength and power, it will completely own you. You can wait until Apocalypse forces your hand, or you can do it before then, when the pain is smaller and the force required to overcome it much less.

I’d choose less myself.