I’m not someone who likes to be told what to do without an explanation. I refuse to follow directions I don’t understand. It’s caused me problems on more than one occasion, but I know I’m not alone. But once I learn how something works and why I ought to act, I’m likely to follow through.
That’s why I got tired of reading the same advice about anxiety: exercise. I know that’s a thing, but I didn’t feel like trying exercise to relieve anxiety until I found out why it works. It turns out that when we’re anxious, we set off the fight-flight-freeze response in our brains. If we exercise while we’re anxious, our bodies send signals back to the brain saying, “We successfully escaped the saber-toothed tiger. Good job. You can rest now.” And then we relax. That explanation made me willing to try it.
So when I’m asked about what to do about anxiety, I’m hesitant to offer advice without good explanations of the reasoning behind it.
Once we understand a bit about how our brains create anxiety, and why they do it, we’re more likely to try things that might work, and also we can come up with tailor-made answers for our unique circumstances.
But it’s hard to find new, creative solutions unless we understand the principles around what’s going on inside our heads.
My goal is to unpack a lot of the science around anxiety in an approachable way. Over the next several posts, I plan to cover information about anxiety and how it works in the brain.
Topics to Cover
The first thing to address is: What is anxiety? You may know it when you feel it, but we need to break it down, describe it and put it into words.
I’m also going to talk about the Three-Part Brain: the part of the brain we share with the reptiles, the part that we share with the mammals, and the part that is exclusive to primates. The three parts have different priorities and roles, and we need each of them for different things. It’s a great working model to use when we’re trying to figure out what is going on inside ourselves and how to get back on track.
Next is the anatomy of anxiety. There are two different circuits in the brain that create the experience of anxiety. The first is the Worry Loop, the second is the Fear Circuit. Fear and worry are the two basic components of anxiety, and I’ll explain how they each operate in the brain.
For each anxiety circuit, we’ll discuss healthy and dysfunctional anxiety. There is such a thing as healthy anxiety. Up to a point, it serves a purpose. Beyond a point, it becomes a problem. We need to both honor the anxiety that keeps us safe and know when it’s time to do something about it.
There are several different causes of anxiety, neurologically speaking. I don’t mean your ex and your car payment. I’m talking about conditioning, where we learn to be anxious about something, either over repeated exposure, or maybe one traumatic exposure. There are also genetic and environmental factors that cause one person to be more anxious than another when they’ve been through similar circumstances.
I’ll also cover treatments for anxiety. There’s a lot of diversity here. There are plenty of things you can do yourself, whether focusing on calming your body down or engaging your thinking brain to get your cognitive self back in control of the situation. We’ll also cover different types of therapy, should you need some professional help with your anxiety. And we’ll address medications. I’m not a medical doctor or a prescriber, and I can’t give medical advice, but I can cover how different types of medications work in your brain, so that you are armed with information if you decide you need to talk to your doctor.
Bite-Sized Portions
While the science behind anxiety has been rapidly progressing over the last couple of decades, and a number of great books have been written on anxiety, a lot of people prefer bite-sized pieces of information. Too much information all at once doesn’t help, and asking someone to read a book about anxiety often triggers anxiety.
Lots of people come to therapy too stressed out and with no free time or energy to read a long book. But they do want to know how their brains work. And this information will be useful to them when anxiety or panic strike, so it’s my job to educate them. But I understand that sometimes it’s hard to remember what you learned while you’re anxious. That’s a normal anxiety response. So if I put it in writing, I’ll have something to refer people to later.
One of the best books about trauma (and the anxiety that goes along with it) is The Body Keeps the Score. It’s an amazing book, and I highly recommend it. But unfortunately, eight times out of ten, if a client tells me they have tried to read it, they also say they were triggered by it and had to put it down.
I totally get it. I was triggered the first time I read it, even after years of doing my own healing work. That volume of really dense information is also highly emotionally charged, so readers get triggered, which shuts down the thinking part of the brain. Then it’s next to impossible to read, much less remember anything you’ve read.
Conclusion
This past year has been a hard one for many of us, with global and national crises creating and compounding personal crises. And anxiety has been one of the effects of this period that has been difficult to escape. I’ve seen it everywhere, not just with clients, but in friends and family, and also in myself.
Dealing with my own anxiety in this last year involved an ongoing discussion in my head. I’ve been managing it, but it’s taken extra, conscious effort at every turn. And as I talk to people, so many who are struggling, I return to the lessons I’ve learned about myself. I know will go above and beyond when I understand why I’m doing something in the first place. And I’m know that I’m not the only one. Knowledge gives us power over anxiety. While it’s not a magic cure, it outlines a path to finding a solution to your anxiety that works best for each of us.