Tame Your Anxiety With The Rubber Ducky Method
When you connect the parts in your own mind, you have your solution!
Posted on 04-24-2019, Read Time: Min
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When you feel stressed, tell your problems to a rubber ducky. This may sound crazy, but it works. Here’s why.
Stress comes from cortisol, the brain chemical that animals release when they smell a predator. Cortisol creates a full-body sense of alarm that says your survival is threatened, even though you don’t consciously think that. Talking to a rubber ducky helps you locate the threat so you can do what it takes to ease it.
Cortisol turns on for reasons that are hard to make sense of. It’s controlled by neural pathways built from your past cortisol experiences. You use these old pathways because they’re so well-developed. The electricity in your brain flows like water in a storm, finding the paths of least resistance. When a new experience resembles an old threat, your alarm bells are triggered but you don’t know why.
Tell it to the duck and your verbal brain works together with your mammal brain. You may prefer a live human, but other people may not understand your problem. That shifts your attention to their circuits rather than yours. The rubber ducky understands you curiously well.
I learned this method from software engineers, who call it the “rubber ducky debugging method.” When a computer coder has tried everything and is still stuck, they are advised to pull out the rubber ducky and explain the whole problem. A solution soon emerges.
I would have sneered at this, but it has happened to me a lot. When I can’t get a website to work after so many tries, I tend to groan in a way that brings my husband running. He can’t really help because he doesn’t know the tools I’m working with. But as I explain the problem to him, I suddenly see a solution that I didn’t see before. Now I’m embarrassed to have brought him in when the answer seems obvious, so I assure him that I was completely baffled a moment ago.
Searching for words helps you find the circuits you’re triggering, and that frees you to find alternatives. It’s harder when you talk to a friend because you accommodate their perspective. Talking to a duck-shaped piece of plastic helps you get straight to the heart of things.
You may insist that your anxiety is too deep for this to work. Let’s look closer at how a gazelle relieves anxiety when it’s chased by a lion. The smell of a lion triggers cortisol, and that tells the gazelle’s brain to scan for more detail about the threat. Then the gazelle focuses on escape routes rather than the lion itself. It concentrates on the path in front of it, and if one path is blocked it looks for another. When it successfully escapes, it goes back to grazing and that feels good.
When your cortisol is triggered, your brain scans for details of the threat. That’s why everything looks bad once your cortisol is on. You look for escape routes, but none of them seem good enough. The big human brain can anticipate problems with every possible solution. Your billions of neurons can imagine lions that are not physically there. A big brain can end up feeling threatened a lot, even in a relatively safe life.
Stress comes from cortisol, the brain chemical that animals release when they smell a predator. Cortisol creates a full-body sense of alarm that says your survival is threatened, even though you don’t consciously think that. Talking to a rubber ducky helps you locate the threat so you can do what it takes to ease it.
Cortisol turns on for reasons that are hard to make sense of. It’s controlled by neural pathways built from your past cortisol experiences. You use these old pathways because they’re so well-developed. The electricity in your brain flows like water in a storm, finding the paths of least resistance. When a new experience resembles an old threat, your alarm bells are triggered but you don’t know why.
Tell it to the duck and your verbal brain works together with your mammal brain. You may prefer a live human, but other people may not understand your problem. That shifts your attention to their circuits rather than yours. The rubber ducky understands you curiously well.
I learned this method from software engineers, who call it the “rubber ducky debugging method.” When a computer coder has tried everything and is still stuck, they are advised to pull out the rubber ducky and explain the whole problem. A solution soon emerges.
I would have sneered at this, but it has happened to me a lot. When I can’t get a website to work after so many tries, I tend to groan in a way that brings my husband running. He can’t really help because he doesn’t know the tools I’m working with. But as I explain the problem to him, I suddenly see a solution that I didn’t see before. Now I’m embarrassed to have brought him in when the answer seems obvious, so I assure him that I was completely baffled a moment ago.
Searching for words helps you find the circuits you’re triggering, and that frees you to find alternatives. It’s harder when you talk to a friend because you accommodate their perspective. Talking to a duck-shaped piece of plastic helps you get straight to the heart of things.
You may insist that your anxiety is too deep for this to work. Let’s look closer at how a gazelle relieves anxiety when it’s chased by a lion. The smell of a lion triggers cortisol, and that tells the gazelle’s brain to scan for more detail about the threat. Then the gazelle focuses on escape routes rather than the lion itself. It concentrates on the path in front of it, and if one path is blocked it looks for another. When it successfully escapes, it goes back to grazing and that feels good.
When your cortisol is triggered, your brain scans for details of the threat. That’s why everything looks bad once your cortisol is on. You look for escape routes, but none of them seem good enough. The big human brain can anticipate problems with every possible solution. Your billions of neurons can imagine lions that are not physically there. A big brain can end up feeling threatened a lot, even in a relatively safe life.
Tell a Friend vs. Tell a Duck
We have all been advised to unburden ourselves to a friend. That is valuable, of course, but remember the many advantages of your Rubber Ducky:
- It’s always available
- It can’t repeat what you say to others
- It doesn’t think something is wrong with you
- They have enough time to hear the whole story
- It doesn’t need background or clarification of technical terms
- It doesn’t expect you to accommodate their perspective
- It doesn't expect you to reciprocate
Confiding in a live human is good, but these conversations don’t always solve your problem. Sometimes, you waste a lot of time looking for a person who understands your complex problem. Sometimes, these conversations create friction because the other person doesn’t get it, but they are miffed when you reject their perspective. In the end, it helps to know the value of talking out loud. It helps your brain find the connections between the separate parts of a problem. Your problems are unique because your neural pathways are unique. Other people will not see all the parts the way you do. When you connect the parts in your own mind, you have your solution!
So, buy a rubber ducky and keep it handy. You will learn to trust your own power to relieve threatened feelings.
Author Bio
| Loretta Breuning, Ph.D., author of Tame Your Anxiety, is Founder of the Inner Mammal Institute. As Professor Emerita of Management at California State University, East Bay, her work has been featured in Forbes, Time, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Psychology Today, Men’s Health, The Dr. Oz Show, and many more nationally-recognized outlets. Visit www.innermammalinstitute.org Connect Loretta Breuning Follow @innermammal |
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