My mission is to change the paradigm in how we live with emotions, the ones we want and the ones we don't, so that we can learn to use them to our advantage. I'm dedicated to translating science into relatable and actionable tools for mental health, including game-based digital therapeutics.
Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is a professor of psychology and neuroscience, Director of the Emotion Regulation Lab at Hunter College, The City University of New York, and co-founder and CSO of Arcade Therapeutics, where she creates clinically validated game-based therapeutics for mental health. In addition to her scientific work, including over 100 peer-reviewed articles, she has written on topics such as anxiety, the impact of digital technology on wellbeing, and kids and parenting for outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and the BBC. She has been featured throughout the media, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, NPR, ABC, CBS, CNN, The Today Show, and Bloomberg Television.
Emotions and our ability to flexibly control them play a key role in mental and physical health. With this as a starting point, our current research examines teen anxiety and risk factors in suicide, the role of cognitive biases in anxiety, stress, and substance-related problems, digital therapeutics, and the impact of technology on well-being and relationships. Fundamental to all these questions is the need to better understand the conditions under which emotions, thoughts, and behavior are aligned to promote our well-being and how interventions or behavioral change can optimize this balance.
Using a multidisciplinary approach (observation, behavior, physiology, brain imaging, eye tracking, novel analytic approaches, and animal-human translational models), our work and that of others in the field highlight the importance of emotional and cognitive flexibility in well-being and disorder, and the need for personalization in the development of novel interventions for stress and anxiety, including the development of digital therapeutics that reduce barriers to access while minimizing perilous aspects of the digital ecosystem.
Future Tense argues for the radical idea that anxiety is a feature of being human, not a bug. When we tap into our anxiety instead of attack it like an illness, we realize that human anxiety evolved to not only be protective, but to build our creative capacity to be productive. Anxiety achieves this by making us into time travelers, propelling us into future thinking, where we are smarter, more focused, and more hopeful in the face of challenge.
This book details how – and why – we should adopt a new mindset about anxiety – a fresh set of beliefs and insights that allow us to use anxiety as information so we can leverage it rather than be overwhelmed by it. I share real-world examples and stories combined with the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, genetics, biology, and sociology. This book celebrates the lives of people who are using anxiety to their advantage and with the goal of making the world a better place. The best solutions in the world won’t stick if our view of anxiety unintentionally accelerates it.
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