The Anxiety Skinner Box
Worry is my Anxiety Skinner Box. If you don’t know what I mean by Skinner Box, watch this:
The first time Skinner Box conditioning found me in a significant way was probably in 2016. I got worked up about my undiagnosis-turned-misdiagnosis, seemingly unending appointments with unreasonable doctors, and credited myself and my worry for a brain tumor discovery that took too damn long.
As a result, my lizard brain rationalized that health anxiety led to an eventually-accurate diagnosis and saved my life. My rational brain was like, “Yeah, that tracks,” and my collective brain automatically behaved like that non-zero chance was a certainty for everything in perpetuity because it likes the convenience of patterns (also known as jumping to conclusions). Et voila. Brain damage done.
Then in 2022, some unusual gray matter showed up on a follow-up MRI. That’s when I felt the physical-ness of anxiety all the way in my bones. There was a chance the cancer was doing its thing again, and I was so scared I thought I’d puke.
I went back on Temodar (chemo) after I’d had a horrible, sort-of-allergic, near-death reaction to it. (An allergist thought maybe it was DRESS but was noncommittal because there wasn’t much literature to back her up.*) That trauma unfolded during adjuvant treatment in 2017. So in 2022, I was not only scared of the inoperable tumor but also the prescribed treatment. The blue-lipped, no circulation style PTSD kicked in hard. So hard.**
I was not in a good place, mentally or otherwise. And instead of being scared out loud in a public way, I was hella scared in my head and fucking pissed off to boot.
Not that I didn’t have very good reasons to be angry given that Nazis and fascism were en vogue then too, but that unending cycle of worried outrage paired with routine cancer shit was eating me alive.
As it turned out, the possible tumor growth that showed in imaging was likely necrosis from radiation therapy in 2017.
Thing is, oncologists don’t really know what’s necrosis and what’s cancer on a scan. (And I was a hard “no” on another biopsy.) With brain stem tumors, even slow-growing ones like the uninvited guest in my head, the general consensus is: don’t fuck around, and then find out. That is, treat it like it’s cancer growth; wait and see if that was the case.
So even though the ireggularity appeared to have been necrosis, I got to relive some chemo trauma anyway … as a treat. So my brain basically wrote the following loop and generalized it for subsequent use:
scan > worry > not cancer
Fucking Brain Clippy was then like “Hey, looks like worry helped this one time. Want me to help you with generalized anxiety disorder?” But it wasn’t a question so much as a directive.
Naturally (literally “naturally”, not sarcastically “naturally”) I worried about everything.
And then I had eleventy bajillion more cancer scares in 2024, and between the possible brain tumor reboot, the giant lymph nodes, and the lung nodule, a pattern was firmly established: worry and it probably won’t be more cancer.
It’s so fucked up.
Anyway, bottom line for the uninitiated (those who haven’t dealt with GAD or read something like Unwinding Anxiety) is that with anxiety attacks, my primitive brain is more efficient than it is helpful. Automatically jumping to conclusions that are very hard for my thinking brain to undo in order to, I dunno, save itself from being eaten by saber tooth tigers. (Or ravaged by face-eating leopards?)
But the sooner I understand my lizard brain is calling the shots, the sooner I recognize the Anxiety Skinner Box and the shorter the anxiety attacks.
I guess early detection is for more than mammograms and colonoscopies. The more you know and all that jazz.
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* The joys of rare cancers and diseases are that no one is sure about, well, anything really. Those that are confident? Ninety-nine percent chance they’re just arrogant AF.
** Holy shit. The drug reaction I recounted in that linked post is JUST like my anxiety response. Down to the muffled sounds and the inability to walk. I hadn’t made the connection on that level until now. The biggest difference is the stress registers further along in my GI tract now.