Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman

It is beyond the reach of conscious control or reasoning. Anxiety originating in the amygdala is experienced directly in the body, activating your fight, flight, and freeze responses. Reducing anxiety requires different approaches and strategies, depending where in the brain it is produced. Rewire amygdala-based anxiety with exposure. So rewiring amygdala-based anxiety requires learning to communicate in the language of emotional memories. When faced with a similar object or situation next time, the emotional memory triggers an anxiety response. Once the amygdala associates a situation or object with the emotion fear, then the neurons wire together, fusing into a memory. Instead, the amygdala operates in emotional memories, which you experience directly – not through images or conscious cues. That’s why it never works to tell someone who’s panicking to just calm down. So why does all this matter? Because when anxiety is activated in the amygdala, logic is useless against it. It’s that out-of-body experience when reacting quickly behind the wheel to avoid a crash. In fact, the amygdala is capable of completely overriding your cortex – especially in moments of danger, so you may not consciously realize what you’re doing. Those are cortex-related things, which we’ll explore later.

What’s key about the amygdala-anxiety pathway is that it operates outside of language and logic.

It also activates the sympathetic nervous system, or SNS, which causes physiological changes like fast breathing, a rapid heart rate, dilated pupils, and sweating. These include the hypothalamus, which releases cortisol and adrenaline hormones that prepare the body for action. When switched on, it has direct access to other parts of the brain that can push the body into flight, fight, or freeze mode. The amygdala is the brain’s alarm system it constantly scans for threats and dangers. There are actually two amygdalas, but we refer to them as one. The answer lies in a region of the brain called the amygdala, which comes from the Greek word for almond – because that’s its shape. For example, speaking in front of a large audience poses no inherent danger, so why does the anxiety response kick in beforehand?

But these responses may not be well suited to situations we face today.

Humans have evolved with a strong fear response that protects us from potential danger.

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine M. Pittman