Lifestyle
Constantly anxious? Ease your mind by asking yourself this one question
Bestselling author Martha Beck has tried many things over her 62 years of life to quell the anxiety that’s been her constant companion since childhood.
The Harvard-trained sociologist experimented with therapy, medication, self-compassion practices and many, many hours of meditation.
Then, as collective worry spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, Beck dug into scientific research on anxiety as she was teaching an online course on creativity, and it led to a thrilling discovery: anxiety and creativity have an inverse relationship. Turn one on and the other turns off.
“It was really one of those aha moments,” Beck, who is also Oprah Winfrey’s go-to life coach, said in an interview. “And I just walked around my room going, ‘I don’t have to be anxious anymore. I know how to shut it down.’”
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life.
Even people who don’t consider themselves creative can tap into this inherent capacity of the human brain to step away from worry and live with more connection and joy, Beck says in her new book, “Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose” (Penguin Random House).
Beck spoke to The Times about how to identify anxiety’s lies, engage the creative side of our brain and why our worries are linked to the structure of our economy.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
How did you come to realize the relationship between creativity and anxiety?
I started using a technique that’s in the book that I call KIST (kind internal self-talk). It’s a form of Tibetan loving-kindness meditation for the self. I started to silently repeat to myself, “May you be happy. May you be well. May you feel safe. May you be protected.” And like a drought condition with a little trickle of water coming in, I focused on that trickle of water where there was no anxiety.
Martha Beck, author of “Beyond Anxiety”
(Photo by Rowan Mangan)
Then I found out that just by using kind self-talk, I could get a client to feel calm in five minutes if they learn to focus their minds on wishing themselves well. Then I added the creativity piece. You start with kindness. Be kind to yourself, as kind as you know how to be to anyone. Come back to kindness and your anxiety will come down to calm. But then, because we live in a world that is basically an externalized structure of the anxiety inside our brains, the moment we’re in touch with the world we get spun into anxiety again, unless we have a really hard anchor into something else. The something else is creativity.
So, kindness gets us to peace, and then instead of saying, “What can I do now?” ask yourself, “What can I make now?” That shift takes you into curiosity and into the part of the brain that connects things together and solves mystery — you’re in creativity. And that opens you up, where anxiety closes you down and crunches you.
“Instead of saying, ‘What can I do now?’ ask yourself, ‘What can I make now?’ That shift takes you into curiosity and into the part of the brain that connects things together and solves mystery — you’re in creativity.”
— Martha Beck, author of “Beyond Anxiety.”
You say that “anxiety always lies.” How can we know it’s anxiety lying?
Fear is a natural response to something threatening in the environment. If you see something scary — someone pulls a gun on you or there’s a bear — you’ll have a jolt of very, very clear, high energy that will say, “Do this.” It’s a very dramatic thing, and we don’t need it very often.
But we’re anxious all the time, because anxiety is not about what’s here. It’s about what we think could be somewhere, someday, maybe. So there’s no limit to it. There’s no rest from it, because it’s not real. Anything that we’re afraid of that isn’t happening now is a self-deception. It’s an innocent lie, but it’s still saying, “You should be afraid.” And if there’s nothing to be afraid of and you’re telling yourself, “I should be afraid,” it’s not the truth of your circumstance. It’s not real. That’s why anxiety always lies.
Your insights in this book were informed by the work of neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, who says the brain’s right hemisphere is home to creativity, compassion and peace, while the analytical, linear left hemisphere is where anxiety lives. The right hemisphere sounds way better, so why wouldn’t we be there all the time?
One of the problems is that the right hemisphere doesn’t track time. We live in a world that requires scheduling and the measurement of time, where people are anxious, where everything is monetary eventually. We’re all engaged in this monetary pursuit, which is the core of our society, and that’s fundamentally anxiety-driven.
Book cover for “Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose,” by Martha Beck
(Penguin Random House)
Is this why you say we need a new economic system to support more right-brained living? What might that look like?
We’re looking at an economy where familiar structures are collapsing. Our model is a rigid pyramid of wealth and power, with the very rich at the top, all the way down to the poor at the bottom. That is culture. Culture is very left brain. An alternative to that is nature. Everything in nature exists in ecosystems. All living things require space; energy, like sunlight; and water, which is the basis of all life on this planet; and ecosystems will emerge. If you doubt it, don’t clean your fridge for a month and then look inside there and see what’s evolved.
People can create economic ecosystems around themselves. The energy is actually desire: you have a natural desire to fulfill your destiny. The water is your creativity: this is what is needed to give shape to your destiny, to take the next step forward, so you start to make things. And then the space is our time. The idea is to give enough time to identify your real desires and to create whatever happens, and I believe it’s like not cleaning your fridge for a few weeks: a system of value begins to emerge in your life and then it starts to spread.
There’s never been a more important time than now to stop anchoring yourself in structures that are collapsing and start investigating your inherent curiosity. If you can give yourself that space and the kindness to be quiet and start to think, “What can I make?” it gets very interesting.
TAKEAWAYS
from “Beyond Anxiety”
What about people who insist they’re not creative?
When NASA tested adults to see how many creative geniuses they could find to hire, they found that 2% of adults rate as creative geniuses. Someone then thought to test 4- and 5-year-olds and found that 98% of them were creative geniuses. So somewhere along the way, our creative genius gets throttled. If you can be creative the way a 4- or 5-year-old is, it’s pure fun. There’s no judgment.
So you have to bring the kindness factor in over and over. I have a friend who puts together jigsaw puzzles and it calms her and soothes her. That’s her way of doing art. If you cook, by taste especially, you’re doing art. If you plant a garden, you’re doing art. If you throw a dinner party, you’re creating something. You make a sandwich, you’re creating. Every one of us human beings is unbelievably constantly creative.
A lot of people don’t feel creative because they’re physically and emotionally exhausted. The recipe for your life should be this: rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, and then repeat.
In the book, you write, “choose to focus on what makes life enjoyable and meaningful.” Sounds like a no-brainer, but why is this so hard to do?
Because the anxious brain says you’ll be safer if you’re always afraid. There’s nothing wrong now, but there will be, so you better stay scared. If you stay scared, you’ll be more productive. But every test they do on creative problem-solving shows that when you’re scared, you can’t do it. It’s just the lie of anxiety speaking through the whole society, and we all agree, “Yes, we should be very worried.” In a society where everything has to be monetized and attention is at a premium, scaring someone will get their attention.
So many people are anxious because their lives are full of demands: work, relationships, family. How do we foster a right-brained approach in that atmosphere?
When you’re in a lot of anxiety, it becomes unbearable. That’s how I found my way through all that meditation to the epiphany. And in situations of turmoil and distress and chaos, there’s more motivation to seek that.
The thing I love about kind internal self-talk is that as you start to bring a little kindness into the equation, you then start to become like one of my favorite Persian poets, Hafiz. Part of this poem he wrote goes: “Troubled? Then stay with me for I am not.” Immediately, the kindness that you give yourself begins to go out to other people. And that makes every interpersonal interaction calmer, more mutually affirming. It takes you into the creativity spiral. It doesn’t just make it calm. It makes it creative. It makes it generative. And if there’s a practical problem to be solved, you don’t want to be in a panic. Any practical problem, any interpersonal problem, any personal problem is made better when we abandon our anxiety, find our kindness and move into what we can make. And then we get so involved with living that way that we transcend anxiety altogether, and we don’t have to go back.
Shelf Help is a wellness column where we interview researchers, thinkers and writers about their latest books — all with the aim of learning how to live a more complete life. Want to pitch us? Email alyssa.bereznak@latimes.com.
The Olympics are exhausting. Above, Taiwan’s Li Yu-Hsiang reacts after competing in the figure skating men’s singles free skating final in Milan on Feb. 13.
Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
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Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images
Let us say up front that watching some of every sport at the Winter Olympics is not as challenging as watching some of every sport at the Summer Olympics. The Summer Olympics are a sprawling collection of activities, where you might see horses or swords or boats or surfboards.
The Winter Olympics still feel very rich, but they’re a bit more focused. My own brain roughly sorts them into team sports like curling and hockey, figure skating, running on snow, going down a hill on snow, sliding down an icy track, and flying through the air in much the way I might if I went skiing or snowboarding, except it’s graceful and on purpose, and you generally do not end up in the hospital.
And I found it all completely captivating.
Franjo Von Allmen of Switzerland in action during the men’s downhill on Feb. 7.
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Alexis Boichard/Agence Zoom/Getty Images
Alpine skiing: One of my limitations as a watcher of downhill skiing is that most of the runs look similar to me unless someone crashes or unexpectedly departs the course. You could show me 10 skiers going down a mountain, and without their times showing up in green or red, I would have no idea which ones were good or which ones were bad. I would simply say, “Great job getting to the bottom very quickly.” And yet, through the fantabulous deployment of technique, you can earn edging someone out by a tenth of a second. A tenth of a second! Or less!
The slalom events are delightful, because they progress from slalom … to giant slalom … to super-G, which is super giant slalom. There is only one way for this to go, as we all know, and that is in the direction of mega super giant slalom, or M-S-G (which makes all other skiing more appealing because it adds umami flavor). I could try not to say “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh” out loud while watching the slalom events, but why? In 50 years, when we are all watching jetpack slalom, I will still say “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
Biathlon: This is the rare sport that seems to me to be fully wicked, for the simple reason that no one should be asked to hit a tiny target after wearing themselves out. Imagine you run 10 miles and then somebody hands you a slingshot and says, “Lie on the ground and hit that 5-Hour Energy drink bottle way over there.” That is unkind. Biathlon also has a rule where missing shots can require you to ski a “penalty loop,” which is the most “coach gets mad and makes you run laps” thing I have ever seen at the Olympics. I admire and sympathize with everyone involved.
Bobsled: Watching a team smoothly (usually) jump as many as four bodies into a very small vehicle — while running — is such a feat that bobsled would be enjoyable if it were only that. But like all of the sliding sports, it also suggests a willingness and an ability to skirt the line between controlled descent and mad careening. I particularly enjoyed the women’s monobob, both because Team USA athlete Elana Meyers Taylor won her first gold at her fifth Olympics and because the word “monobob” (a one-person sled) is delicious and melodic.
Cross-country skiing: I am exhausted just from typing those words. Where I live, we are just getting rid of snow and ice on the ground that hung around for a month. For the first week or two that we existed in its presence, one of my primary goals on any given day was not to traverse it for any reason. At one point, I picked up a heavy sandbag and walked out into my own backyard, laying down a sand track in front of myself, picking my way across the ice rink and making my way to a piece of trash my dog had found somewhere so I could remove it (in case it was something he should not have, like a chicken bone or an ex-mouse; it was in fact a paper towel). By the time I got back to the house, I certainly felt like I had earned a gold medal. What I’m saying is this: I am in awe of cross-country skiers for their stamina, resilience and balance, even though in fairness, they did not have to carry sand at the Olympics.
Curling: Oh, how I love curling. That anyone can slide a 40-ish-pound rock down the ice something like 150 feet and get it to land on a spot the size of your shoe is astonishing. From time to time, a curler makes a shot that seemingly sorts through a clump of red and yellow stones and knocks out all of one color without disturbing the stones of the other color. From 50 yards away! Moreover, you get to hear the players talking. Everybody has mics on, so they chat about what shot they should try, what shot is too risky, what shot the other team will try to make based on what shot they try to make … like baseball, it is meditative, with long periods of deceptive quiet followed by bursts of excitement. Like baseball, it rules.
Figure skating: The best thing about figure skating is that it is beautiful and graceful and athletic, and the programs have become more creative (to my eye) and less staid since I was a kid. Of course, the most difficult thing about it is that a single fall — truly, a single bad moment — can prevent a skater who has worked toward a goal for 15 or even 20 years from realizing that goal, even if it’s a fluke, a one-off, a thing that never happens. NBC’s coverage this year has really focused on sending the camera practically up into the nostrils of a skater who has just had a bad moment so you can have the most visceral possible look at their pain. That does not prevent post-bad-program interviews in which they are asked to explain their pain 30 seconds after it happens, sometimes at the cost of covering people who did well.
It makes sense that U.S. coverage focused, for instance, on the many problems that befell Ilia Malinin in the men’s free skate (resulting in an 8th-place finish for a heavy gold-medal favorite), but there was also triumph for Kazakhstan’s Mikhail Shaidorov, who won the gold medal after a free skate during which the commentators were explaining that he was not really a medal contender this year, but might be in another four years. I mean, you’ve gotta love that.
Freestyle skiing: There is much to love about freestyle skiing, which crosses over with some of the things to love about snowboarding. There are aerials, there are tricks, and there is the aptly named discipline “Big Air.” But perhaps my favorite event is moguls, where the competitors go down a course that is intentionally made up entirely of bumps, and one of the tricks is to let your knees absorb all the bumps so that your upper body barely moves at all. I think everyone who has ever so much as sprained an ankle watches moguls with astonishment. If I consistently say “whoosh” while watching slalom, I consistently say “ow ow ow” while watching moguls.
The U.S. women’s ice hockey team huddles prior to a match against Czechia on Feb. 5 in Milan.
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Jamie Squire/Getty Images
Ice hockey: I am not particularly invested in Olympic ice hockey, particularly the men’s, because it involves so many professional players who play each other all the time, and that’s not what I’m watching the Olympics for. But I try to catch some of the women’s tournament every time. (It’s perhaps not surprising, given the fact that trying to follow the puck has always kept me estranged from hockey, that I so dearly love curling, which has all the ice and all the precise shots, except with a “puck” that is huge and slow.)
Luge: What an absolutely terrifying notion. Surely the most terrifying sport the Olympics could possibly come up with. Only the security offered by doubles luge, in which two people lie on top of each other, could possibly make this feel like a good idea. Lying on your back? Without being able to see where you’re going? If your kid wanted to go down the driveway like this on a flattened cardboard box, you would probably ground them.
Einar Lurås Oftebro of Norway’s Nordic combined team competes on Feb. 11.
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Alex Pantling/Getty Images
Nordic combined: This is cross-country skiing plus ski jumping. Two very efficient ways to cross snow, although one of them requires a ramp and a tolerance for risk. Here’s a question: Why isn’t this biathlon? This could be biathlon, and what is now biathlon could be the ski-n-shoot. I’m just throwing ideas out there. Innovating. (In all seriousness, read up on the status of Nordic combined and the athletes, women in particular, who stand to lose out based on International Olympic Committee decisions about the present and future.)
Short track speedskating: This is the speedskating I like the best, because I am unsophisticated and impatient. I don’t want to watch each person methodically lay down a time that other people then try to beat. I want to watch a bunch of fearless adrenaline junkies go fast around a track like it’s roller derby, except (mostly) trying not to knock each other over. I want to watch them hurl themselves across the finish line, sometimes backwards.
Skeleton: What’s this I’m hearing? Oh, never mind, this is the most terrifying sport they could have created. If you think flying down the track not being able to see where you’re going is scary, you’ll love flying down the track being able to see exactly where you’re going, because you are leading with your head. There’s been a lot of chatter this year about the way the Winter Olympics, more than the Summer Olympics, feel like they’re made up of various ways to barely not splatter yourself across the host city, and nothing says that to me like skeleton. They really only give you a helmet, and I wouldn’t do it in a helmet. I would require a helmet and a shark cage. And honestly at that point, I would just close my eyes.
Ski jumping: Ski jumping is very cool, and it’s kind of unfortunate that coverage got distracted this year by a story about … well, about the suits that the men wear, and how they’re fitted, and some other things. The amount of time that ski jumpers spend in the air is unfathomable to me, and the fact that they land on their feet instead of on an enormous inflatable cushion seems impossible, but they do it.
Germany’s Finn Hoesch competes in men’s sprint ski mountaineering on Feb. 19.
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Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP via Getty Images
Ski mountaineering: I have seen only a bit of this sport, because it’s its first year at the Olympics, and it didn’t really start until Thursday. If you’ve never watched it, here’s what it looked like when I watched it: The athlete runs up the mountain part of the way on skis with “skins” on the bottom for traction. Then the athlete takes off the skis and runs up a set of stairs. Then they put the skis back on, run up the mountain on skis the rest of the way, take the skis off, rip the skins off the skis, put the skis back on, and ski down the mountain. The women’s gold medal was determined not by the speed of running in skis, running out of skis, or skiing, but the speed of changing the gear all those times. (This also can happen in biathlon, where sometimes you ski well and you shoot well, but you spend too much time noodling around with your gun.) It is a truly wild sport, and I loved it instantly. Who hasn’t been foiled on a busy day by the inability to get your shoes on and off quickly?
Snowboard: I love to watch snowboarders, because they are so much less likely to look devastated when something bad happens than, say, figure skaters. This is partly because they often have more than one run, and it certainly doesn’t mean that they are less competitive or work less hard. But the culture of snowboarders seems to be a little different, and from time to time you will see one absolutely wipe out, and then hop up and throw their arms over their head in a combination of “Wooo!” and “I’m fine!” It’s good to have fun.
Speedskating: Speedskating is the sport I admire more than love. As with long-distance running, I am brimming with admiration for the people who do it, but I struggle to be entertained as a spectator. (Other people think this about curling, I realize. Imagine that!)
But this is part of what watching the Olympics is, right? You try out lots of sports. You sample some fast ones, some more slow-paced ones, some with short races and some with long races. And you decide: This one is mine, this is the one I’m going to follow. And it’s great.
Even for those of you who do not choose curling.
Megan Oldham of Team Canada warms up prior to the women’s slopestyle final on Feb. 9.
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Patrick Smith/Getty Images
This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.
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A person walks a dog in front of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 10, 2026.
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
An internal email obtained by NPR details some of the projected refurbishments planned for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The renovations are more modest in scale and scope than what President Trump has publicly outlined for the revamped arts center, and it is unclear whether or not these plans are the extent of the intended renovations.
The email was sent on Feb. 2 by Brooks Boeke, the director of the Friends of the Kennedy Center volunteer program, to tour leaders and some staffers at the arts complex. In a response to NPR emailed Tuesday, Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, wrote: “The Trump Kennedy Center has been completely transparent about the renovations needed to restore and revitalize the institution, ever since these proposals were unveiled for Congressional approval last summer. The changes that the Center will undergo as part of this intensive beautification and restoration project are critical to saving the building, enhancing the patron experience and transforming America’s cultural center into a world-class destination.”
The center’s closure was announced after many prominent artists canceled their planned appearances, saying that the Trump administration had politicized the arts. The Washington National Opera, which had been a resident organization at the Kennedy Center, left its home there last month, citing a “financially challenging relationship” under the center’s current leadership; The Washington Post, in an analysis of Kennedy Center ticket sales last October, reported that ticket sales had plummeted since Trump became the center’s chairman – even before the complex’s board renamed the venue as the Trump-Kennedy Center in December.
In her memo, Boeke cited Carissa Faroughi, the Kennedy Center’s director of the program management office. Boeke said that upcoming renovations to the complex’s Concert Hall will include replacing seating and installing marble armrests, which President Trump touted on his Truth Social platform in December as “unlike anything ever done or seen before!” Other changes include new carpeting, replacement of the wood flooring on the Concert Hall stage and “strategic painting.”
The planned changes to the Grand Foyer, Hall of States and Hall of Nations include a change of color scheme, from the current red carpeting and seating to “black with a gold pattern.” The carpeting and furnishings in these three areas and its electrical outlets were redone just two years ago, according to the Kennedy Center, and were accomplished without interrupting performances and programming.
Other planned work on the complex include upgrades of the HVAC, safety and electrical systems as well as improving parking. It is unclear whether these plans are the extent of the intended renovations; Daravi declined to answer that specific question.
The scope of the project as outlined in the memo differs sharply from public statements by President Trump, who said earlier this month on social media and in exchanges with the press that he intends a “complete rebuilding” and large-scale changes to the Kennedy Center, and that the arts complex is “dilapidated” and “dangerous” in its current state.
Earlier this month, Trump said that a two-year shutdown of the Kennedy Center is necessary to execute these renovations. This idea was echoed by the center’s president, Richard Grenell. Grenell wrote on X that the Kennedy Center “desperately needs this renovation and temporarily closing the Center just makes sense – it will enable us to better invest our resources, think bigger and make the historic renovations more comprehensive.”
On Feb. 1, Trump announced his plans to close the center entirely for two years “for Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” to create what he said “can be, without question, the finest Performing Arts Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World.” He later said that the project would cost around $200 million. The announcement came after many prominent artists had canceled their existing scheduled appearances at the Kennedy Center.
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