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Your No-Nonsense Brain/Anxiety Breakdown

Neurologically speaking, the creation of anxiety is challenging to pinpoint. In the scientific community, neurobiological researchers, such as Dr. Martin, Dr. Ressler, Dr. Binder, and Dr. Nemeroff, attribute the basis of this anxiety complex to the involvement of neurotransmitters and neuroanatomy, along with their strong link to circuits in the limbic system, brain stem, and higher cortical brain areas.3 Still, even with anxiety’s sophisticated neurological nature, there is a widely accepted, straightforward view. For the sake of clarity (and also because you’ve probably got a lot on your mind!), we’ll consider the brain/anxiety breakdown from this straightforward view, too. Here we go…

The first step toward the manifestation of anxiety begins when any thought or event occurs and we misinterpret it as a threat. This triggers the limbic system of our brain, where most of our feelings are molded. I suppose that’s why it’s known as the hub of emotion. The parts of this hub most associated with anxiety are the amygdala and the hypothalamus.

The amygdala’s role is to process stimuli and respond with emotion.4 In fact, Dr. Richter-Levin and Dr. Akirav have confirmed that the amygdala is the most specifically engaged brain structure both in emotional responses and in the development of emotional memories.5 More specifically with regard to anxiety, Dr. Martin and her colleagues found that the amygdala formulates fear while establishing fear-based memories. Whether interpreted correctly or not, when the amygdala grasps danger, it sends a warning to the hypothalamus.6 The hypothalamus then notifies the sympathetic nervous system.7 Pretty heady stuff!

The sympathetic nervous system revs your body up like a biker at a Hell’s Angels’ mixer, sparking the adrenal gland, which produces the adrenaline response! That’s what you feel when you’re feeling anxious, though lots of activity behind the scenes is in effect.

The adrenaline response creates a host of systemic actions, such as increased energy, maximized concentration, improved reflexes, a quickened heart beat to propel more blood to the muscles to make you stronger, focused vision, and more. This process helps us when we need to protect ourselves from a legit danger. However—and this should not be a shocker at this point—this brain process can hurt us when we misinterpret danger. This misinterpretation sets our brains into anxiety mode by attaching fear-based thoughts, beliefs, and stories to safe or neutral things, and that encourages the adrenaline response. And the brain, having learned this fallacious lesson of danger, repeatedly encourages the adrenaline response when confronted by those particular “dangerous” stimuli. And what would you say this means the brain is now providing? That’s right, boys and girls—an ongoing pattern of false fear messages!

But the adrenal gland isn’t only activated in the face of perceived danger. Remember, the amygdala is the brain’s emotional reaction center. It processes other intense emotions,8 including excitement and uncertainty. Working together with the amygdala, the hypothalamus responds to these emotions as it would to anxiety, by engaging the sympathetic nervous system to prepare the body for effort.9 This can account for adrenaline without fear. Unfortunately, when the adrenaline response is triggered by excitement or uncertainty, people with a genetic neurological predisposition to anxiety often misinterpret it as…anxiety. Again, it is this misinterpretation that establishes triggers for anxiety along with the subsequent beliefs attached to the experience.

So the differences between excitement-based adrenaline, uncertainty-based adrenaline, and fear-based adrenaline are not necessarily physiological, but psychological. They are perspective-driven. Adrenaline is adrenaline! In other words, the differences are not in the adrenaline itself, but are predicated on how one perceives their adrenaline response in a specific situation. For example, if you were about to skydive out of an airplane for the first time, you might feel terrified. For an experienced skydiver on their fiftieth jump, the feeling could be described by any word synonymous with “wee!” or “yahoo!” Same adrenaline, differently labeled.

In any given moment, if you misinterpret excitement or uncertainty-based adrenaline as fear, you will be anxious. As such, you will then most likely label the context in which you experienced this adrenaline as dangerous and continue to be afraid. For example, Iris often felt anxious arriving at parties, though it wasn’t due to a social phobia. The truth is, she didn’t know why she suffered such party dread. With treatment, Iris soon accepted that parties can be fraught with uncertainty over who you might meet or whether you’ll enjoy yourself as the evening progresses. She had been misinterpreting her uncertainty-based adrenaline as a threat, which sent her off to the anxiety races! The more she misinterpreted this threat, the more intimidating parties became. And the more she fought “party anxiety,” the more she taught her brain to protect her from “dangerous parties” with an even bigger adrenaline wave. By adding additional scary false beliefs to this process, like “I can’t take the noise and chaos at parties,” she created a monster of a party phobia!

For the most part, your misinterpretation of danger is the fuel for anxiety. Following consistent, specific misinterpretations of danger, the brain is the engine that drives that struggle deeper, until one walks the right path to undo the cycle created by anxiety. These misinterpretations are generally synonymous with false beliefs. We’ll discuss the importance of changing our false beliefs, along with strategies on how to do so, in detail in a later chapter.

For now, understanding your brain’s role in anxiety is a big step toward making your anxiety getaway! In fact, this understanding fast tracks you to the key strategy on outsmarting your brain’s false fear messages to make that very getaway. This strategy is called “exposure.”

Read on!

It’s in the Labeling

Although our survival instinct, accompanied by its adrenaline release, can be triggered by unfamiliar situations, it’s the false danger labels we assign these situations that encourage anxiety. For example, eager actors who are about to go onstage for the opening night of a play experience adrenaline. But they don’t call it “panic,” or consider it “dangerous” or “wrong.” They call their adrenalized experience “butterflies.” And their “butterflies” label is based on the manner in which they accept the excitement of the evening along with the uncertainty over how the play will be received. Performing in front of a crowd is their jam!

How you label your adrenaline experience is key. Trouble arises when you label an adrenaline surge as “wrong,” “bad,” “terrible,” or just something that should most definitely not be happening. Granted, when your system is flooded with adrenaline in a situation that most would agree does not warrant it, there can be confusion. It doesn’t seem to make sense. This confusion propels the mind to ask, “Why? Why am I feeling this way? What is happening to me?” For instance, if you’re driving home from work on a route that you’ve taken daily for years and, suddenly, your system is flooded with adrenaline, it’s natural to question it. Unfortunately, the untreated anxiety sufferer attaches a self-defeating label or scary story to this surge—the opening line likely being some version of, “Oh no. Something is definitely wrong.”

To repeat, although your biological inclination is to avoid discomfort, it’s your “scary” labeling of the uncomfortable experience that sets this whole anxiety monster in motion. The biological inclination is part of what makes us human. The error is indulging it with your anxious creative narrative in the face of misperceived danger.

Jeffrey, a man in his late twenties, feared the night. He said he just didn’t like the way it made him feel. This began one evening when he became ill. He said it might’ve occurred after eating a cheeseburger. All he remembered was that he felt sick, it was uncomfortable, it was night, and he didn’t like it.

What Jeffrey didn’t know following this short, mysterious illness, was that he taught his brain to fear the night by avoiding going out after sundown.

BOOM! Hello, nighttime anxiety, or so-called fear of the dark (a.k.a. nyctophobia).

The more Jeffrey avoided going out at night, the more he taught his brain that night was “bad.” Night was dangerous. And, more specifically, that night would make him ill. You might ask, “Why didn’t he develop a fear of cheeseburgers instead?” It’s anybody’s guess. This is the nature of irrational fear. Because Jeffrey believed the discomfort of feeling ill was intolerable, he sought an explanation and fell on “the night,” due to the timing of his illness. And like brains do when lacking more specific, relevant data, Jeffrey’s brain gave him an unfortunate assist by making a quick association. Though seemingly efficient, this energy-saving brain tactic often leads to errors.

Beyond his perspective, why would Jeffrey label “feeling ill” as horrendous, rather than just unpleasant? Objectively, there was no emergency. No major threat to his survival. So what gives?

First, based on a longstanding pattern of avoiding discomfort, Jeffrey had developed a low frustration tolerance. Feeling ill was uncomfortable, and this discomfort for Jeffrey was intolerable. So he searched for a way to run from it.

But more importantly, the unknown itself can be uncomfortable. Ability to tolerate the unknown is a major factor in the degree of anxiety struggle for any individual. Think about a person you know who rarely struggles with anxiety. A person who almost never seems anxious. Typically, they have a strong ability to tolerate the unknown (we’ll discuss how this can be cultivated soon).

Jeffrey had a limited ability to tolerate the unknown, due to his pattern of fighting experiences where he was uncertain of the outcome. Of course, certainty of an outcome is never an option. Even when we expect an outcome based on a consistent result pattern, it can still change. For years, I fed our dog dry food. Then one day he refused to eat without my adding some wet dog food to the mix. I was certain that wouldn’t happen. It never had before, therefore it wasn’t supposed to happen at present. Try telling that to a hungry, salivating canine!

There is no certainty, just varying degrees of uncertainty. For Jeffrey that night, the uncertainty was, “Why do I feel ill?” He searched and searched for an answer, to no avail. When no clear cut answer was available, he fell upon “night,” led by his overwhelming desire to make the unknown…known. And when he avoided going out one evening for fear of feeling ill again, he taught his brain that “night” was a dangerous experience. That darkness was a hazardous and probable risk to his survival. The more he avoided it, the worse his fear of night became.

Avoidance is the Enemy

Whenever you avoid what you fear, you forge a neural pathway within your brain that associates the fear-inducing stimuli with a threat to your survival. In other words, you are erroneously teaching your brain to protect you from that stimuli via your survival instinct’s fight-or-flight response. The more you avoid what you fear, the deeper that groove in your brain becomes (a deep groove, but definitely not groovy!). The deeper the groove of this self-created neural pathway, the more often it takes you to a place of anxiety whenever triggered by the fear-inducing stimuli to which you’ve now developed an association. This is all unintentional on your part, of course. No need to start beating yourself up. It won’t help anyway. You were simply adhering to your biological inclination to seek pleasure and avoid pain. However, now it’s time to turn your life around and claim your calm. Enough of these needless fears with their time-wasting anxiety symptoms!

One of the biggest challenges in overcoming fear is that, although the brain learns lessons quickly, it does not unlearn lessons quickly. Ever traveled by train? On every trip, trains obey the direction of the tracks. If an engineer wanted to take the train in a different direction, but lacked the track, it would not be possible. New tracks would be necessary to divert the train onto a new course. And once a train has a destination on a track, it churns with momentum. The challenge lies in laying the new track. Like most goals in life, it would take patience, effort, and commitment to build that new path.

There is a similar challenge in facing anxiety and changing your brain’s chemistry. In other words, creating a new neural pathway that is unafraid of what you currently fear is going to take some effort. But it can absolutely be done. You can change your brain’s response to your anxiety-provoking stimulus by creating a new neural pathway (or laying new brain train tracks).

This might seem daunting. But just as all of our brains can be taught fear, they also have the capacity to unlearn fear. Our brain’s ability to do so lies in its neuroplasticity. For over forty years, there have been research studies proving the brain’s neuroplasticity, which is defined as the brain’s ability to affect changes in brain regions, neuron linkages, and associations. Research has even proven over time that the brain can engender new neurons by a process called “neurogenesis.”10 So what does this mean for outsmarting your brain’s false fear messages? It means you can generate calm in the face of your anxiety by changing how your brain perceives and experiences its triggers via specific actions—the very actions we’ll be discussing in short order!

Generally speaking, if you set something in motion in one direction, you can send it in another direction, too! Remember “the law of inertia” lesson in high school? I, myself, may have been asleep during that one. Let’s refresh: In 1687, Sir Isaac Newton (of gravity fame) proved that a body or an object will continue moving in the direction it’s moving until it is acted upon with force to redirect its movement.11 So to overcome anxiety, you’re going to have to expend some effort redirecting rather than avoiding.

The Seductive Nature of Avoidance

Anxiety isn’t sexy, but its avoidance is seductive. How do you stop yourself from avoiding anxiety when it feels so good in the moment? Most people would agree that when you avoid the very experience that brings you terror, you obtain great relief. Problem solved… Not! There is no real relief and no problem solved when avoidance is involved (Go ahead and sing this phrase, you know you want to!).

Avoidance is made of smoke and mirrors. Magicians often use smoke and mirrors to hide their tricks from the audience and blur reality. Should the audience see beyond the smoke and mirrors, reality would lead to disappointment for a lot of magic fans. The reality of avoiding anxiety will lead to disappointment, too. Avoidance is not only seductive, but deceptive. It urges your mind to believe you’re seeing something that you’re not. That something is relief.

Through avoidance, you always fortify what you fear. Always. It’s unintentional on your part, of course. You don’t mean to solidify your struggle. You’re just looking for a way out of your anxiety prison. And the seductive nature of avoidance is hard to resist. Avoidance is a little like the Venus fly trap. Its beauty draws prey in, then its fangs eat it whole. Yikes!

Pete, an affable, good-looking guy in his late thirties, had been single all his life. At thirty-nine, he began to question if he’d be alone for the rest of it. He now hoped for a girlfriend, but had no idea what attaining this goal would entail. He had never had one. He was only familiar with one-night stands. He never learned how to truly connect with a woman, other than through quick and easy physical intimacy. This was now leaving him empty and unfulfilled.

Pete arrived in my office feeling lost. He described his recent attempts at dating with the purpose of developing a relationship, but he didn’t know how to relate to women. Specifically, it made him anxious to discuss anything during a date due to a self-described absence in communication skills. Sure, he could charm women at bars with small talk. But when it came to substance or a true intimate moment, he felt powerless.

During his dates, women clued in fast on Pete’s inability to address any deep subject matter. He believed this rendered him non-relationship material in their eyes. “I clam up when women start to ask me questions about my life. I try to answer, but I don’t know what to say. I definitely don’t want to talk about my father skipping out on us when I was ten. Or my alcoholic mother. Plus, I know they’re expecting me to ask them things and listen to their problems. I think they want me to ask questions that show I care. But I honestly don’t even know how. It makes me too nervous. I start sweating and stammering. I think they’re immediately turned off. I’ve only gotten to a second date once in my life. She seemed as nervous as I was, but after that second date, she never texted me back. When I have a fair amount of alcohol in me, small talk is easy. Women don’t seem to expect you to have a meaningful conversation at a bar. That’s where I’m most comfortable. A few drinks in, I’m not worried about how women perceive me. I mean, who cares, right? I’ll never see them again. I’ve actually started back at the bars. I think I’m gonna cancel my online dating apps. I might not be cut out for a relationship. Maybe I should just accept that and give up.”

Though he was a bit misguided, I gave kudos to Pete for the attempt to challenge his brain’s false fear messages by going on dates. I reiterated that, through avoidance, he had long ago taught his brain that dating and intimacy were dangerous. I then asked Pete how long he had been dating with the goal of working toward a relationship. Resigned, he said, “Over two months, with about one date every week. So, maybe eight dates.” So much for commitment!

When I asked if he’d been modifying his dating routine based on lessons learned, he needed clarification. I explained that examining one date’s responses to questions he asked could provide observational data to apply on subsequent dates. For example, if Pete asked about a woman’s family with interest and she leaned in, then shared, that question would suggest a positive step toward connecting. Pete could then incorporate this question as connection practice during dates. In effect, this would challenge his brain’s false fear messages rather than foster them. I asked again, this time more directly, if he changed his behavior at all during these eight dates. “No, I was just trying to survive the dates. I was mostly hoping my hands wouldn’t shake or that I didn’t look too nervous.”

It struck me that although Pete believed he was afraid of intimacy, it seemed what Pete truly feared was potential criticism and rejection. This resonated with Pete. “I think that’s right. I’m constantly trying to avoid caring about a woman because if I do and she criticizes me or breaks up with me, I’d be crushed. I suppose that’s why spending time with women I have no real interest in is easier.” Pete’s fears of criticism and rejection are a main theme of social anxiety. The centralized pattern being attempts to avoid judgment, criticism, and rejection—often at all costs.

By running from his fear, Pete encouraged more fear. In other words, by avoiding asking questions during a date (and avoiding dating entirely for most of his life), Pete reinforced his fear. Thus, his avoidance continued to teach his brain that real intimacy could lead to terrible risk of judgment, criticism, and rejection. As a faithful student, his brain continued to trigger his fight-or-flight mechanism when in situations with potential to connect on a sincere level. All in all, Pete taught his brain to send false fear messages to his system, preparing Pete for mortal danger. So when faced with possible closeness, his body flooded with adrenaline, which in turn he interpreted as anxiety. The more Pete avoided asking questions, the more fearful he became. His brain then continued to send false fear messages, maintaining this cycle, much to Pete’s dismay.

The science-proven, effective way of outsmarting your brain’s false fear messages is never via the push of avoidance, but through a counterintuitive pull.

In chapters to follow, we’ll talk about how to stop yourself from avoiding anxiety, so you can finally make your anxiety getaway and claim your calm. But for now, it’s crucial you understand that your avoidance is maintaining your anxiety. And not only maintaining, but encouraging it, reinforcing it, and ensuring that it’s going to cause you to suffer. Avoiding anxiety is ultimately like inviting someone you despise into your home and then advocating for their lengthy stay. Totally irrational, right?

Moving on…

Pete’s focus on trying to survive dating without appearing anxious leads us to another manner in which one elicits false fear messages. In fact, it happens to be how anxiety is born!

Drumroll, please…

In the Beginning, There Was “The Battle”

An anxiety problem is created through your fighting it. It’s created through the battle you try to survive, hoping that what you consider a hate-filled, terrifying torturer will flee, never to return. But like Star Trek’s infamous enemy The Borg says, “Resistance is futile!” Futile and destructive.

In his book White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, Daniel Wegner, PhD, described the results of his innovative research on thought resistance. His experiments demonstrated that after instructing subjects not to think of white bears during the specified trials, they were unable to stop their brain from entertaining thoughts overflowing with these little white bears.12 Dr. Wegner’s experiments are a great example of the reality of battling anxiety. Who hasn’t thought something unpleasant and found that the more they tried to stop thinking about it, the more they thought about it? These findings also support the spiritually-grounded adage “What you resist, persists.”

Keep in mind, too, that when you fight anxiety, you create a certain conflict-based energy, the same as when you fight any externally-based conflict in the world. Conflict is a kind of energy, and energy is key to life. So by fighting anxiety, you’re giving it life. Basically, you’re Dr. Frankenstein creating your very own monster. And in the words of Dr. Frankenstein, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”