The mental cognitive processes that we're targeting are ones that narrow human beings' repertoire and make it harder for them to learn to be more flexible, to take advantage of the opportunities in front of them. We can have something to help with in areas like child development or organizations and schools, or maybe even how peoples interact with each other, one to the other. We've taken the work into things like prejudice and stigma, because if we can't solve that we have planes flying into buildings. So it applies broadly because anywhere that a human mind goes these processes go.

Holding anxiety as your own enemy, and that it has to go down, diminish it, go away and not happen here is a kind of self-invalidating, interiorly focused process that would get you even more entangled with these processes. Instead, what we're going to need to learn to do is to allow your history to bring into the present thoughts and feelings and memories, and to sort of hold them mindfully and self-compassionately, and then focus on what you do and bring them along for that journey.

In Scandinavia probably the most worker-supportive part of the planet, they have the highest rate of chronic pain and worker-related disability. So any kind of pain and difficulty is so much unwelcome that if you say that you're in pain, we're going to even pay you full salary to quit work because you're burned out, inside that what you're going to create is gigantic amounts of chronic pain syndrome. Scandinavians spend 15 percent of their gross national product on disability. 50 percent of the public health nurses are on disability. And that's where we're headed in the U.S. too.

One dangerous definition of happiness is to think of happiness as kind of a warm, joyful feeling in your heart that you have to pursue and grab and hold onto for fear that it'll go away. A better way to think about happiness that actually is something that I think you can reach towards is, it's living in accord with your values and in a way that is more open and accepting of your history as it echoes into the present, that's more self-affirming, self-validating and values-based. The Greeks had a word for it; they called it eudaimonia. And it is something that will empower human lives.

If a therapist is feeling insecure in therapy, a lot of therapists will try to sort of push that aside to try to do the therapy. Instead, we would ask people to get with that feeling of insecurity, because after all, the client is being asked to do the same thing. It has a kind of a quality of two human beings in the same situation, really, working through these psychological processes. And yeah, you hired me; I'm working for you as a therapist. But I'm not up here and you're down there. And what you're struggling with, at other times and with other areas I'm struggling with.

There is a middle path between indulgence and suppression, but the culture has overwhelmed that in the cacophony that has been created in the modern world and the commercial encouragement of avoidance and indulgence on the one hand, or suppression and "just do it," treating yourself as an object on the other. We've got to find a way that's more compassionate, softer, that allows us to move forward towards the kind of lives that we really want to live.

Could we take anxiety to be something that may be of importance, may even be meaningful? And it says something about your history, and could we learn to sort of hold it in a way that's more compassionate, to sort of bring the frightened part of you close and treat it with some dignity, and keep focused instead on what kind of life you want to live connected to what kind of meaning and purpose. That's going to be a quicker, more self-compassionate and more certain journey forward inside things like panic disorder.