May 11, 2026 • 44 mins
Anxiety has a way of making ordinary moments feel life-or-death. A simple interaction can feel significant, a passing thought can spiral into catastrophe, and your body can react as if something is deeply wrong - even when rationally you know you’re probably okay. In this episode, we get into the neuroscience behind anxiety - why your brain becomes obsessed with certain thoughts, why false alarms feel so convincing, and what actually helps when you want to feel less trapped inside your own mind.
We explore:
• Why anxiety feels so intense and urgent
• Our physical and emotional reactions to anxiety
• The role of GABA and glutamate in anxiety
• Why trying to ‘stop thinking about it’ doesn’t work
• How avoidance perpetuates the anxious cycle
• Practical ways for living with an anxious brain
Happy listening!
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Our favourite sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9559819/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2555
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01332-2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027273580000057X
The Psychology of your 20s is not a substitute for professional mental health help. If you are struggling, distressed or require personalised advice, please reach out to your doctor or a licensed psychologist.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here. Back for another episode.
Today we are going to talk about anxiety, but not
in the usual way that we normally talk about anxiety,
or not in the usual way that anxiety is spoken
about generally. We are going to do instead a complete
(00:46):
and in depth look into the neuroscience behind why anxiety happens,
why it lingers, why it continues to be this like frustrating,
sometimes like uncontrollable part of life. I think knowing the
intricacies behind anxiety and understanding the neuroscience behind the reactions
that are going on in our brain is honestly sometimes
(01:08):
the most important step in becoming less anxious, because you
start to like distance yourself from the feelings, you start
to remove personal blame, you start to understand the systems better,
and you are able to apply logic and this information
to your feelings. That I think counteracts the I don't know,
(01:29):
counteracts the illogical nature of anxiety. That's what's been really
helpful for me, and I think just being able to
explain what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling, why I'm feeling
whatever I am puts this distance between me and my anxiety.
So that's what we're going to do today. From talking
about the function of different brain areas to neurotransmitters, cell networks,
(01:52):
the neuroscience of fear, there is a lot to cover
that is honestly well as a little bit of a
psychology note. Know this. I find it's so fascinating not
typically spoken about. So without further ado, let's get into
the neuroscience behind your anxiety. Firstly, why does anxiety feel
(02:16):
so serious even if we rationally know, even if we
consciously know, like the world isn't ending, like I'm gonna
be okay, this thing is actually not a threat. Why
does our brain still take it to the extreme? Anxiety
feels so serious because your brain is not built to
(02:37):
be calm, It is not built to be fair. It's
especially not interested in your sense of fulfillment at all.
It doesn't care if you're happy, first and foremost, it
is built to protect you. It does not care if
you feel fulfilled, It doesn't care if you feel okay.
It cares that you're alive. The system, your brain system,
(03:00):
the system behind your anxiety, would rather overreact and protect
you than underreact and have something terrible happen. One of
the most useful ways neuroscientists now explain this is through prediction.
A prediction model of anxiety. Our brain predicts more than
it reacts, so much of what your unconscious brain is
(03:22):
doing throughout the day is essentially just like constantly constantly
making predictions about what is likely to happen next. It
consumes a large part of our unconscious mind. In anxiety,
or amongst people who have anxiety, those predictions become more
tilted towards threat and uncertainty, whereas with someone who doesn't
(03:44):
have anxiety, those predictions are more realistic and they're easier
to dismiss, which if you are somebody who is anxious,
probably feels literally impossible. I don't think I've ever been
able to dismiss an anxious thought in my life without
observing it, interrogating it, overthinking it. But this is what
happens in the minds of people without anxiety, they don't
(04:05):
have the same what we call learnt uncertainty. This is
something that a paper in twenty twenty two I think
was published in twenty twenty two describes where essentially, if
you have anxiety, your brain has become primed to look
for all the things in a situation that you don't understand,
all the things that you aren't certain of, and fill
in those gaps with whatever will be the worst case
(04:27):
scenario so that you can prepare. This is why your
anxiety can become so all consuming because it is focused
on ambiguity. It is obsessed with uncertainty and the possibility
of threat, and that possibility is always going to be there.
It is a fact of life that's part of being alive,
but our brain can't help but fixate on it. This
(04:49):
helps explain why your brain becomes like obsessed with certain thoughts, sensations,
or themes or what ifs, the very things that it
cannot solve or cannot know. For certain of the things
that it becomes most obsessed with, it is not because
those things are objectively the most important part of reality.
It's not that they're more likely to happen. It's not
that they're more common. It is just this anxious fallacy
(05:13):
that the more I worry, the more it must be true.
The truth is is it's just that your brain has
assigned these hypotheticals as important to think about more because
they are scary, more because they are things that you
can fixate on because there are so many possibilities, less
because they are likely to happen. The other thing that
(05:35):
this threat detection system is built to do is generalize
based on past experiences. Being the machine that it is,
your brain is a machine. Once you may have experienced
one dangerous or distressing situation, it becomes easier for your
brain to then assume that every situation has the possibility
(05:57):
of morphing into that worst case scenario. This is what
is often referred to as fear generalization, and it is
why anxiety tends to grow and expand over time. You know,
you can have a panic attack in a supermarket once,
and then over time, as your brain begins to expect
(06:17):
this fear in more and more situations, now you start
to dread going into any supermarket, going into anywhere that's public,
going anywhere where there are like people around you. You know,
one humiliating social moment can spread into anxiety around eye contact,
public speaking, being perceived at all one scary bodily sensation
(06:38):
can generalize into the fear of exercise, fear around caffeine, heat, crowds,
even excitement. These Like it sounds irrational, right, that that
fear could spread so rapidly, But it's it may be irrational,
it's not random, it's fear generalization. Now, this is where
anxiety gets really irritating, because it's because it starts to
(07:02):
reach all these like broader aspects of life that shouldn't
be scary, Like why do I have this reaction the
same reaction to getting a cup of coffee as I
would being chased by a tiger? Well, you know, from
the outside, yes, ordering a coffee is trivial. But from
the inside, these small moments encompass multiple anxiety inducing aspects
(07:23):
and multiple moments of ambiguity. It might involve being watched
speaking whilst you're feeling shaky, making a mistake, feeling trapped
in the queue, noticing your heart rate, you know, worrying
that you're panic, that your blush freeze, that people will
judge you. To the conscious, rational part of you, it
is just a quick interaction. You are just ordering a coffee.
(07:45):
But really the brain is not only it's not just
computing the objective event. It's computing the meaning behind the event,
and the meaning and the harm or the anxiety of
past experiences, and it's the whole army. It thinks that
every situation could become the worst thing. Ever, when we
(08:06):
feel the sense of anxiety, our bodies and minds react
in a way that basically makes it as easy as
possible to get away, to notice more, to be more alert,
to stay on guard, to fight back. From the bodies
and the brain's point of view, this is useful. Putting
us into this activated state is useful because if something
(08:28):
dangerous does happen out of this hypothetical situation we've created,
it's best to be prepared. But when there's a false alarm,
and if you have anxiety, it's constant false alarms, this
bodily reaction starts to feel disproportionate and starts to really
dominate over all other feelings. This is where the distinction
between immediate fear and sustained anxiety becomes really interesting. A
(08:53):
twenty twenty or twenty two thousand and three, I think
actually two thousand and three review published in the European
Journal of Farm Ecology looked at evidence from animal and
human studies and basically was trying to figure out, like,
why is this overreaction happening. Essentially, what they found was
that in the brain of somebody without anxiety, the amygdala,
(09:17):
the switch that turns off the amygdala and turns off
the fear response is just as receptive as the same
switch getting turned on. So basically, yes, their fear may
spike in similar ways to us, their anxiety may spike
to similar things, but it can be turned off just
(09:39):
as quickly, meaning that sensations are allowed to kind of
transpire or occur, and then we're able to move on.
In the brains of people with anxiety, in the amygdala
amygdalas of people with anxiety, that switch, that same switch
can be turned on just as quickly, but it cannot
be turned off. So a lot of people think that
(09:59):
it the on switch that's broken, right, the AMIG dealer
is more receptive, more reactive. That is definitely true in
some situations, But really where anxiety comes from is not
the immediate fear, It is the inability to downregulate that fear.
It is the inability to turn off that fear. Another
really important idea here is about inter reception, and this
(10:23):
is basically the brain's ability to sense and interpret what
is happening inside your body and react accordingly. The American
neuroscientist Arthur Craig he talks about this in that same
paper on one I think one published very soon after,
and he argues that the brain is not just mapping
what is happening outside the body, it's also mapping what's
(10:45):
happening inside the body. So it's also thinking about heart rate, breathing, temperature, pain,
muscle tension, nausea, and it's using that information to actually
help construct our emotions about our external environment as well
how we should react. Essentially, it's a two way street. Yes,
our emotions control our bodily reactions. Our bodily reactions control
(11:07):
our emotions. The thing is, when we're anxious, our bodily
reactions triggered by our anxiety are really confusing because a
lot is going on. Everything is like on full speed,
and so our brain, getting locked into that two way
bi directional relationship and stream of information, takes this as
evidence that something must actually be going wrong. It takes
(11:30):
that as evidence that our irrational emotions must be onto something,
meaning that it continues to further stimulate us, continues to
further activate this stress response. Essentially, what's happening is something
freaks you out based on past experiences or based on
an irrational fear. Your body is unable to turn off
(11:53):
that sensation, that initial sensation of anxiety, that initial sensation
of year and being scared and tension, meaning that the
body starts to take your mind starts to take those
bodily sensations as fact that something is actually going wrong.
I'm hoping that you guys are kind of seeing this
(12:13):
cycle here, right, or just this like downward spiral where
it becomes so difficult to interrupt these signals and say, actually, no,
everything is okay, we are fine, because it just the
evidence that something is wrong is just as internal as
it is external, or the evidence that things are okay
(12:36):
is a lot weaker compared to this internal bodily signal
that everything is actually on fire. Talking more about the
neuroscience of this, that same researcher Dr Craig expanded on
this idea in a two thousand and nine review published
in Like a Eu. I can't remember the name, but
a neuroscience journal, and he focused on another part of
(12:58):
the brain called the anterior intu That is a brain region,
he argued, is especially important for turning raw bodily signals
into conscious subjective feelings. His claim is that people with
anxiety may have a dysfunction in this region, meaning that,
(13:18):
like we were talking about with that mind body connection,
anxious feelings are more physically persuasive because we find it
harder that the insular finds it harder to argue or
disentangle ourselves from what it sees as physical proof. Basically,
it becomes harder in the brain of somebody with anxiety
to shut down our own brain's interpretation of our own
(13:42):
physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong.
What I'm really trying to get out here is it's
not you. It is all these systems. It is all
this neurological stuff going on. That means that we cannot
separate a thought from a feeling. We cannot separate rate
as well our emotional experience from our anxiety and from
(14:04):
what's going on in our bodies. A two thousand and
four study carried out by researchers from the University College
London looked into this a little bit closer. They kind
of wanted to figure out whether this was really, you know,
the crux of why people are anxious, or why some
people have debilitating anxiety and some people don't. The researchers
put seventeen participants into an fMRI scanner and they asked
(14:28):
them to do a heartbeat detection task. Essentially, they said,
we're not going to take your pulse in the usual
external way, what do you think your heart rate is?
Permitut Essentially, how good are you at counting your own
heart rate and figuring out your own pulse. Most interestingly,
people who were who got a more accurate number, who
(14:51):
were like, yep, I think my heart rate is around
seventy two beats per minute, forty nine beats per minute.
It didn't matter if it was high or low. They
were more accurate in their assessment, reported stronger negative emotional experiences.
What this paper essentially suggests is that your brain monitors
your body closely to determine how scared it should be.
(15:12):
So if your brain is highly tuned to internal changes,
small shifts and heart rate, small shifts in breathing tension,
in any way that becomes more psychologically meaningful to it.
In an anxious state, that means that the body constantly
feels that there is and the brain constantly feels like
(15:33):
there is ample evidence internally that something is going wrong again.
This is all because your mind would rather interrupt your
peace ten times unnecessarily than miss one thing that might
have hurt you. That is why anxiety often feels bigger
than the situation itself, and all of these neurological processes,
(15:53):
all of these anatomical areas, are all trying to keep
that process going so that you survive life. Going even
deeper into the neuroscience behind your anxiety, we also, obviously
at some point need to talk about the role of
certain neurotransmitters, specifically to neurotransmitters gabba and glutamate. If you've
(16:14):
been listening to this podcast for a while, you would
have heard me talk about these so much. The two g's,
these two chemical messengers basically control alongside a bunch of
other things, but they are a big part of how
reactive or regulated your brain is. In very simple terms,
glutamate is what helps neurons fire and communicate. It gets
(16:37):
them all excited, It stimulates them. Gabba is the main
inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it helps to quiet or dampen neuractivity.
It just it calms everybody down. I always think about
them as like good cop and bad cop in a way,
like glutamate all like this. I think about them as
like glutamate is the fun exciting arms who gives the
(17:01):
kids all the sugar, rouse them up with games with
candy is like getting them are excited, and then gabba
is like the responsible parent who then has to get
everybody ready for bedtime and do like the grown up job.
Research on anxiety disorders has argued that it's not simply
that we have more glutamate, more of that excitator and
(17:22):
you're a transmitter in our system. It's that we may
also have less gabba, or we may be less receptive
to gabba or have an imbalance in both, which is
why drugs that boost GABBA signaling and the way that
GABBA can be received, like benzodiazepines, reduce acute anxiety, because
(17:43):
the theory goes, they're balancing out the neurochemical reactions. This
is another thing your anxiety may come down to. Of course,
all these things are kind of happening at the same time.
So it's not like these are different explanations, they're all combined.
But sometimes what it does come down to, on top
of these other elements, it's just differences in your brain
chemistry that increase or decrease your sensitivity to certain neurotransmitters
(18:09):
that go on to shape how you feel in response
to the world. I just think it's so fascinating that
we have this intense emotional experience that being our anxiety,
and then when you start to understand it through a
neuroscientific lens, it all makes sense. It all makes sense
why it all feels so uncontrollable, because there are things
(18:30):
operating behind the scenes that can't be brought into your control,
that you do not have conscious say over, that just
leave you responding to the consequences or outcomes of the
imbalance or of the lack or excess of activity. You'll
probably know the frustration. If you have anxiety and you're
(18:51):
listening to this episode, you have definitely had somebody tell
you just to stop worrying about it, or to simply
stop thinking about it. What people without anxiety don't realize
is that that would mean going against like everything that
your brain in particular, is programmed to do like. You
(19:12):
do not have the same efficient, top down attentional control
that the average person without anxiety has. Instead, you have
a different attentional system, one that is stimulus driven threat driven. Basically,
for you, it is a lot harder to ignore the
(19:33):
scary thoughts, to ignore the scary situations, because anxiety is
not only making the threat seem bigger, it's reducing your
capacity for calm, it's reducing your capacity for goal directed
focus and rationalization. And it's also this weird conundrum whereby
in order to address our anxiety like we have, you know,
(19:57):
trying to avoid it doesn't work. Like when people say
worry about it less, think about it less. Well, that
actually can at times enlarge our fear and make us
think about it more. I feel like by now, I
feel like we all know about this very famous experiment,
like the white bear experiment. You might also know it
(20:19):
as the white elephant experiment. To give a refresh, This
was an experiment very famous in the eighties where a
researcher told a bunch of participants, whatever you do, don't
think about a white elephant, or don't think about a
white bear. Every time you think about it, ring the bell,
ring the bell. As soon as this thought has it intruded.
(20:41):
He also told a bunch of participants like, here is
a list of things you can think about. You can
think about the white bear. You can also think about
this and this and this. Whatever you want to think about.
You have complete permission to do it. When people were
told to think about the bear less, when people were
told not to think about it, it became a fixation point, right.
(21:02):
It became this obsessional thing because why are we not
allowed to think about it? What's wrong with this thing?
What's bad about thinking about it? That means that we
can't do that? And your brain begins to run away
with it. It's the same with your anxiety. Study after
study shows when we are given instructions to suppress a thought,
to ignore a stimulus, to ignore a thought, our level
(21:23):
of fear towards that thought increases. Firstly, but also we
just think about it in excess of if we've just
been allowed to think about it casually all along. And
because of this, anxiety becomes a self perpetuating cycle that's
really difficult to break, making our initial fears worse and
worse and worse. So I feel like I've given you
(21:46):
a lot of information. This is the neuroscientific side of
this so far. Just to give you a little mini summary,
your brain is built to protect you, not to fulfill you.
All it cares about is your survival. There are certain
areas in the brain that are in control of your
survival and of detecting things that may threaten your survival.
(22:10):
In people with anxiety, these areas aren't always operating properly,
and that creates longer and longer ongoing sense of fear
towards ambiguous situations. There is also the combined changes in
neurotransmittered levels that kind of explains this a little bit.
And also this inability to down regulate your fear or
(22:35):
to rationally interrupt your fear and say, hey, this actually
isn't that important, This actually isn't going to happen, and
to believe that, and so all of this shrinks our
lives significantly, to say the least. I want to break
down how we can take those neuroscientific principles though and
apply them in the opposite direction. Knowing what we know
(22:59):
about the new neuroscience behind anxiety, how can we kind
of take that knowledge flip it on its head and
do better for our anxious feelings. Essentially, what I'm saying
is that as much as our brain is pushing us
to have a certain reaction to fear and ambiguity, there
(23:24):
is a way that we can rewire our brains away
from anxious thoughts. Knowing what we now know about the
underlying neuroscience, we basically have to teach our brain new connections,
new connections between ambiguous situations and the expected fear. And
(23:45):
we do that by creating new associations between the things
that we fear and what we think or what we
know the outcome will be. Basically, rather than trying to
completely erase all of our exposure to a trigger, rather
than trying to avoid something that scares us at all costs,
all we need to do is show our brain that
a different outcome is possible. Remember, your brain is just
(24:07):
a machine that learns through repeated patterns, repeated exposure, through repetition.
The more that you associate this thing that you fear
with something that is positive, the more that it learns
to expect that in the future, and it changes the
X to Y prediction model that it's operating on. We
(24:28):
need to have experiences. If you're going to use neuroscience
to battle against your anxiety, you need to be focused
on having experiences that contradict your anxious predictions, basically meaning
you have to go further into the belly of your anxiety.
In psychology, we call this exposure therapy. I'm sure you've
(24:48):
heard it. Essentially, what it's saying is if we assume
every for example, social interaction will always be unbearable, the
most powerful way we can rewire that situation is by
going into those feared situations and proving to ourselves that
that catastrophic outcome is not going to happen or will
(25:09):
not happen as often as we expect it to, basically saying,
your brain, my brain, your brain, you are lying to me.
These predictions are false. We're basically trying to set up
our anxiety and, like a sting operation, to prove that
it's a liar by going into the room, going into
the space, getting on the plane, standing up in front
(25:31):
of the people, and undoing that prediction that everything is
going to go terribly and providing proof that it's not.
You know, if you fear speaking up in front of
others because you think that everybody's going to judge you,
everybody's going to notice how anxious you are, everybody is
going to reject you. A way to kind of set
(25:53):
up that prediction and to prove that it's false is
to go into those situations more and more and more,
to prove that that doesn't happen every time, that actually
that rarely happens. The prediction model is false. The new
learning isn't necessarily this is always going to be fine,
or I'm always going to feel confident, or there is
(26:14):
nothing to fear. The new learning is simply that, like,
I can be in that fearful situation. A, It's probably
not as likely as I thought, but be I will
survive regardless. There is also evidence that how you engage
with the fear matters as well, not just the outcome,
And that brings me to our practical tips for dealing
(26:36):
with an anxious mind, And the number one thing you
can do other than exposure is to simply verbalize what
you are feeling, rather than keeping it stuck inside of
your mind to fester. In twenty fifteen, they did this
randomized control trial with people who were afraid of public speaking,
and these people were assigned to basically get up in
(26:58):
front of a room and talk, and they were either
asked to label their anxiety or to ignore it, meaning
they were asked to either explicitly put their feelings and
their fears about what was going to happen into words,
or they were just going to have to do exposure
and get up in front of people and see what happened.
What they found was that people who were able to
say this is an anxious feeling, I'm scared here, my
(27:22):
physical symptoms of anxiety are coming are really derived from
this fear and not from the fact that this situation
is actually harmful. They did better almost every single time. Essentially,
they were able to rewire their fear, not necessarily by
suppressing their anxious thoughts, but actually by bringing the anxious
(27:45):
thought more into their focus, being able to approach it
and also see that it was a liar, see that
it wasn't true, and see that it was something that
operated beyond what they consciously and deliberately wanted to do.
So that's one of the best things you can do
if you're feeling anxious is just literally say I am anxious.
I know it goes against so much of how we
(28:05):
think we're meant to process our emotions, which is to
avoid them and to not acknowledge them. This is saying
do the opposite. This is saying go in deeper. Tip
number two relies on a similar cognitive distancing technique, and
it essentially says, what I'm essentially going to tell you
to do is to learn how to relate to your
thoughts as mental events beyond you, rather than facts that
(28:29):
are coming from within you. In a really interesting series
of studies from twenty fourteen, researchers found that using your
name or a non first person pronoun or somebody else's
name during an anxious moment was an incredible form of
emotional regulation. Basically, the first level of cognitive distancing from
(28:53):
your anxiety would be saying I'm having an anxious thought.
The second level, the level that they found, were saying
Gemma is experiencing an anxious thought, or saying giving your
anxiety a completely different name, basically labeling the part of
you that felt anxious as something that was operating outside
(29:13):
of you. So Kevin is making me feel anxious. Kevin's
having a really bad day today. Brian is really trying
to get me stirred up. Noticing your anxious thoughts not
as just coming from you, but from something beyond you
that you don't necessarily want or you don't have to
necessarily associate with. So like when you feel fear, being
(29:36):
like oh, instead of thinking, oh my god, I feel
I feel fear. This is coming from me. This is
intuition being like, oh, that's Miranda again, that's Miranda being
being such like an asshole. Miranda's just like really getting
on my nerves at the moment it stops you. The
reason this works is because it stops you from completely
(29:57):
embodying the thought as your own and puts the blame
or assigns the blame to an outside source. Why this
works is because it stops, well, it doesn't completely stop,
but it interrupts that body mind connection that says, if
(30:18):
fear and anxiety is coming from me internally, it must
mean that it's saying something important. It must mean that
it's given me some kind of signal q hint about
the state of the world around me. It must mean
that I should be scared. Because of course, we trust
ourselves and we trust our own feelings the most and
(30:39):
above all others. Obviously, if you're if you're anxious. So
if you are somebody with anxiety, we know from this
research and from the neuroscience we've already spoken about that
that connection and your ability to interpret those physical sensations
is providing false evidence for things that aren't actually occurring
or that aren't actually as dangerous as you think they are.
(31:04):
So assigning the anxious thought, assigning the corresponding bodily sensations
to an outside force, to a Kevin or a Brian
or a Miranda, this anxious little character that occasionally comes
and visits you and makes you feel terrible, interrupts that
(31:24):
to your brain logical assumption that to feel anxiety must
mean that something is wrong because it is coming from you,
and who could you trust more than yourself. This is
kind of similar to my third tip, which is to
bring in humor. Call labeling your anxiety as Brian or
Kevin or Miranda makes it kind of funny compared to
the intensity of the feeling. The opposite of anxiety is
(31:48):
not peace, It is laughter. I don't know who said that,
but they were a very very wise individual. When our
anxiety is bad, everything feels really serious because all we know,
our mind is taking this as a life or death
situation that makes it difficult to laugh so, or makes
it difficult to make it feel less serious than it is.
(32:11):
But adding back in the ridiculousness of the situation snaps
you out of the anxiety cycle much quicker than a
lot of other techniques. And honestly, like anxiety is literally
hilarious at times, like it is hilarious, how ridiculous and
dramatic it is, like the fact that it truly believes
(32:32):
every single bad thing that could happen in the world
could and will, and it's currently happening to you. The
fact that it genuinely wants you to believe that is
really funny. It's like a child. Our anxiety is like
a little petulant child. And there's increasing evidence that laughing
at the absurdity of our anxiety firstly helps by taking
(32:55):
that nervous energy and turning those bubbles of fear into
like fear of excitement. It secondly helps because of that
psychological distancing. But when speaking about neuroscience, the third way
that laughter helps is that it actually activates the parasympathetic
nervous system. Like I said, the opposite of anxiety is
(33:16):
not peace, it is laughter. Because when we laugh, it
stimulates Laughter literally stimulates the vagus nerve. This is the
primary component of our parasympathetic nervous system, the system that
calms us down and shuts off our anxiety. Activating that nerve,
Activating that system shifts us into a state of rest
(33:38):
and recovery rather than alertness. This one twenty eighteen Japanese
paper also found that just hearing laughter can improve stress,
anxiety cortisol levels. Literally watching a comedy show, watching your
favorite sitcom. I'm currently rewatching Girls, which is like, I
find that so funny, watching the funniest home videos? Is
(34:01):
that still a thing? Like no, but anything like that
will like neurologically calm you down if you can laugh.
That is a mental and emotional circuit breaker. It is
a way for your parasympathetic nervous system to say, why
(34:23):
would I be laughing if I wasn't safe? Like this
is again you playing psychological warfare, like back at your anxiety,
Like your anxiety wants to throw all of these delusional,
ridiculous situations at it. Take the like, take the ridiculousness
of it, and laugh at it. Laughter as a circuit
breaker works because it is something that yes, triggers our
(34:47):
parasympathetic nervous system. It also triggers gabber. It triggers oxytocin. Basically,
imagine anxiety as like this toy train on like a
circular track. It's going round and round and round. It's
getting faster and far and faster. We all know the feeling.
The circuit breaker, the laughter, whatever your circuit breaker is,
is like a kid disconnecting a piece of the track,
(35:08):
flooding the system with oxytocin, flooding the system with gabber,
like turning it all down, switching off the batteries. I
read this fantastic article from this psychologist called doctor Lucas
who wrote about the three neurological circuit breakers that are
best for anxiety. These are a stimulating gabber and oxytocin.
(35:31):
By forcing ourselves to slow down, forcing ourselves to walk slower,
eat slower, sleep more, therefore resetting ourselves. That's the first
great circuit breaker. B is a parasympathetic circuit breaker, so
like laughter, but also like relaxing your tongue and your jaw.
I don't know if you've heard about this, but letting
(35:52):
your mouth and jaw go slack, is like a biological
cheek code for relaxation. Like one of the first nodes
or points of your vagus nerve is like right below
your ear towards your jaw. All signals go past this point,
Like all activating signals have to flow through this point
to like tell your body to speed up and get
(36:12):
stressed and get anxious. So if you reduce to tension
around that origin point of your vagus nerve, it is
like the equivalent of holding down like the on and
off button on your phone or your computer for like
five seconds. Like it is a literal like like you
have a circuit break, and you have an off switch
like in your body that you can activate. And the
(36:32):
final circuit breaker that doctor Lucas talks about is ones
that activate your anterior singular cortex, basically the part of
your brain that communicates between the conscious and the unconscious,
instinct and executive functioning. We can power on that part
of the brain that lets us interrupt unconscious and nonsensical
(36:57):
thoughts by simple mindfulness exercises, by doing grounding exercises, by
refocusing our attention and asking our attention to focus only
on the present. So watching rain drops down a window
slowly eating and savoring a meal, doing a body scan.
The five four three two one sensory technique basically refocusing
(37:21):
your attention outwards, only focusing on what's going around you
and really sinking into that stops you from getting pulled inwards.
Those are your circuit breakers. Circuit breakers that that work
through your vegus nerve circuit breakers that work through neurotransmitter release.
Circuit breakers that work through turning on the parts of
(37:41):
you that can downregulate. Finally, if you really want to
trick the neurological mechanisms of your anxiety to switch off
for a few minutes, it's gonna sound, but any kind
(38:02):
of specifically forward movement will literally trick your brain into
calming down. Now. This idea is kind of borrowed from
principles of eye movement, Desensitization and reprocessing Therapy EMDR. It's
everywhere at the moment, It's highly effective. This is most
effective for people who are experiencing PTSD. However, the mechanism
(38:26):
behind it is really interesting and can also be applied
at a more basic general level. At a basic level
EMDR or this eye movement therapy involves something as simple
as walking forward, and it uses what we call bilateral stimulation.
So essentially, when you walk forward, when you do some
kind of forward movement, the rhythmic way that your brain
(38:49):
tracks movement from side to side and the optic flow
that it experiences from stuff moving past you going past
you gives you the psychological set that you are overcoming something.
So essentially, if your anxiety is all in your mind,
like actually, let me explain this differently, when your anxiety
(39:13):
is actually fear based, so something is actually going wrong.
When you're experiencing fear, your brain wants you to run away,
wants you to fight, wants you to pursue some kind
of forward movement away over or through the problem. So
what it will want you to do is to run away.
It will want you to fight, maybe it will want
(39:34):
you to hide, but mainly it wants you to pursue
some kind of like I am leaving this situation kind
of movement when it knows that you're experiencing that, when
your brain feels that you are running away, feels that
you were escaping, it will slowly turn off some of
your anxiety because the anxiety or the fear is no
longer needed because it's already prompted you to do what
(39:55):
you do or to do something that it's going to
help you in that situation. That that is like the
mechanism behind fear and when there is an actual threat,
when we're experiencing anxiety and the threat isn't real, we
can still activate that same natural biological, psychological way of
activating calm by again going outside and walking, riding our bike,
(40:20):
going to a boxing class, stimulating that same optic flow,
that same bilateral stimulation that would ordinarily tell our brain
that we are doing something about a fear stimulus, but
is now telling our brain that we are doing something
about this anxiety or this this thing that is triggering
our anxiety. Literally, walking is like the most simplest way
(40:41):
of way to do this. And I know it sounds
silly to be like, you're feeling anxious, go on a walk,
but like motion direction, momentum stops you from just like
stewing in the fear neurologically, psychologically, and physically. If you
are finding yourself stuck in an anxious spiral, one of
the most underrated things things you can do is to
simply get up and walk, not on a treadmill outside,
(41:05):
get up and walk around your house, Get up and
do some kind of physical movement, same way that like
doing jumping jacks, doing mountain climbers, any kind of physical
movement calms down the body when we are in a
kind of like anxious spiral because it's just staying like
(41:26):
I'm doing something about it, Like it's okay, you can
calm down, like you can, we can turn that off
now because I'm listening. It's basically like I've listened to
the siren. Turn off the siren. We are doing our
escape protocol. So these are just some of the ways
that we can take what we know about the neuroscientific
principles and origins of anxiety and kind of twist them
(41:49):
in our favor. I think anxiety makes it feel like
our brain is not our friend and not our own.
And knowing these strategies or having these strategies teaches us
how to play the same game that our anxiety is
playing back at our anxiety, or it's teaching us how
to learn the quirks and patterns and kind of idiosyncrasies
(42:10):
of our anxiety and to emulate them ourselves and kind
of play them back. Like it's definitely like a bit
of a SIOP. Obviously, there are so many things that
we didn't mention here, and there are so many ways. Oh,
there's so many factors contributing to our anxiety that have
nothing to do with neuroscience and that have no neuroscientific
basis at all. But I think if your main focus
(42:33):
right now is gaining more of a scientific explanation and
understanding of your anxiety, this is a really great place
to start. Understanding the neurotransmitters, understanding your brain's attentional regulation systems,
understanding the different parts of your brain that are involved
in basically creating anxiety, creates distance. I know some people
(42:58):
will be like, well, that's just over in actualizing. I
know that some people will think that this is an
excuse for not feeling your feelings. I still think that
it's good to feel anxious, and like I said, it's
a dangerous game to suppress or avoid your anxiety. But
I still think it's very, very valuable. But at the
end of the day, being able to say like this
feeling is not one that I have complete ownership over.
(43:22):
Being able to reapply logic to our anxiety when anxiety
likes to remove all logic is so so helpful, and
I think it's why. Yeah, I don't know. I just
think that teaching the neuroscience of anxiety is something that
we should be doing more rather than just obsessing and
only focusing on the emotional side of it, only focusing
(43:44):
on the physical side of it, only focusing on the
social side of it, Like you cannot understand why you
behave the way you do in certain social situations, why
you behave the way you do in work situations, or
any number of situations if you don't understand like the
framework and the pillars and the systems along which your
anxiety is kind of running and influencing your behavior. So
(44:06):
I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I know it
was a little bit ranty at times, kind of all
over the place, but when I get into the science,
like I get so into it. So but again, I
really do hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope
that you learned something from it and that you know
it just helped you understand you and your brain a
(44:26):
little bit better as you go through an anxious moment
or kind of a more anxious period of life. So
with that being said, I think we're done for the day.
Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will
talk very very soon.
Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the
Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through
the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and
what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back
(00:24):
to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is
so great to have you here. Back for another episode.
Today we are going to talk about anxiety, but not
in the usual way that we normally talk about anxiety,
or not in the usual way that anxiety is spoken
about generally. We are going to do instead a complete
(00:46):
and in depth look into the neuroscience behind why anxiety happens,
why it lingers, why it continues to be this like frustrating,
sometimes like uncontrollable part of life. I think knowing the
intricacies behind anxiety and understanding the neuroscience behind the reactions
that are going on in our brain is honestly sometimes
(01:08):
the most important step in becoming less anxious, because you
start to like distance yourself from the feelings, you start
to remove personal blame, you start to understand the systems better,
and you are able to apply logic and this information
to your feelings. That I think counteracts the I don't know,
(01:29):
counteracts the illogical nature of anxiety. That's what's been really
helpful for me, and I think just being able to
explain what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling, why I'm feeling
whatever I am puts this distance between me and my anxiety.
So that's what we're going to do today. From talking
about the function of different brain areas to neurotransmitters, cell networks,
(01:52):
the neuroscience of fear, there is a lot to cover
that is honestly well as a little bit of a
psychology note. Know this. I find it's so fascinating not
typically spoken about. So without further ado, let's get into
the neuroscience behind your anxiety. Firstly, why does anxiety feel
(02:16):
so serious even if we rationally know, even if we
consciously know, like the world isn't ending, like I'm gonna
be okay, this thing is actually not a threat. Why
does our brain still take it to the extreme? Anxiety
feels so serious because your brain is not built to
(02:37):
be calm, It is not built to be fair. It's
especially not interested in your sense of fulfillment at all.
It doesn't care if you're happy, first and foremost, it
is built to protect you. It does not care if
you feel fulfilled, It doesn't care if you feel okay.
It cares that you're alive. The system, your brain system,
(03:00):
the system behind your anxiety, would rather overreact and protect
you than underreact and have something terrible happen. One of
the most useful ways neuroscientists now explain this is through prediction.
A prediction model of anxiety. Our brain predicts more than
it reacts, so much of what your unconscious brain is
(03:22):
doing throughout the day is essentially just like constantly constantly
making predictions about what is likely to happen next. It
consumes a large part of our unconscious mind. In anxiety,
or amongst people who have anxiety, those predictions become more
tilted towards threat and uncertainty, whereas with someone who doesn't
(03:44):
have anxiety, those predictions are more realistic and they're easier
to dismiss, which if you are somebody who is anxious,
probably feels literally impossible. I don't think I've ever been
able to dismiss an anxious thought in my life without
observing it, interrogating it, overthinking it. But this is what
happens in the minds of people without anxiety, they don't
(04:05):
have the same what we call learnt uncertainty. This is
something that a paper in twenty twenty two I think
was published in twenty twenty two describes where essentially, if
you have anxiety, your brain has become primed to look
for all the things in a situation that you don't understand,
all the things that you aren't certain of, and fill
in those gaps with whatever will be the worst case
(04:27):
scenario so that you can prepare. This is why your
anxiety can become so all consuming because it is focused
on ambiguity. It is obsessed with uncertainty and the possibility
of threat, and that possibility is always going to be there.
It is a fact of life that's part of being alive,
but our brain can't help but fixate on it. This
(04:49):
helps explain why your brain becomes like obsessed with certain thoughts, sensations,
or themes or what ifs, the very things that it
cannot solve or cannot know. For certain of the things
that it becomes most obsessed with, it is not because
those things are objectively the most important part of reality.
It's not that they're more likely to happen. It's not
that they're more common. It is just this anxious fallacy
(05:13):
that the more I worry, the more it must be true.
The truth is is it's just that your brain has
assigned these hypotheticals as important to think about more because
they are scary, more because they are things that you
can fixate on because there are so many possibilities, less
because they are likely to happen. The other thing that
(05:35):
this threat detection system is built to do is generalize
based on past experiences. Being the machine that it is,
your brain is a machine. Once you may have experienced
one dangerous or distressing situation, it becomes easier for your
brain to then assume that every situation has the possibility
(05:57):
of morphing into that worst case scenario. This is what
is often referred to as fear generalization, and it is
why anxiety tends to grow and expand over time. You know,
you can have a panic attack in a supermarket once,
and then over time, as your brain begins to expect
(06:17):
this fear in more and more situations, now you start
to dread going into any supermarket, going into anywhere that's public,
going anywhere where there are like people around you. You know,
one humiliating social moment can spread into anxiety around eye contact,
public speaking, being perceived at all one scary bodily sensation
(06:38):
can generalize into the fear of exercise, fear around caffeine, heat, crowds,
even excitement. These Like it sounds irrational, right, that that
fear could spread so rapidly, But it's it may be irrational,
it's not random, it's fear generalization. Now, this is where
anxiety gets really irritating, because it's because it starts to
(07:02):
reach all these like broader aspects of life that shouldn't
be scary, Like why do I have this reaction the
same reaction to getting a cup of coffee as I
would being chased by a tiger? Well, you know, from
the outside, yes, ordering a coffee is trivial. But from
the inside, these small moments encompass multiple anxiety inducing aspects
(07:23):
and multiple moments of ambiguity. It might involve being watched
speaking whilst you're feeling shaky, making a mistake, feeling trapped
in the queue, noticing your heart rate, you know, worrying
that you're panic, that your blush freeze, that people will
judge you. To the conscious, rational part of you, it
is just a quick interaction. You are just ordering a coffee.
(07:45):
But really the brain is not only it's not just
computing the objective event. It's computing the meaning behind the event,
and the meaning and the harm or the anxiety of
past experiences, and it's the whole army. It thinks that
every situation could become the worst thing. Ever, when we
(08:06):
feel the sense of anxiety, our bodies and minds react
in a way that basically makes it as easy as
possible to get away, to notice more, to be more alert,
to stay on guard, to fight back. From the bodies
and the brain's point of view, this is useful. Putting
us into this activated state is useful because if something
(08:28):
dangerous does happen out of this hypothetical situation we've created,
it's best to be prepared. But when there's a false alarm,
and if you have anxiety, it's constant false alarms, this
bodily reaction starts to feel disproportionate and starts to really
dominate over all other feelings. This is where the distinction
between immediate fear and sustained anxiety becomes really interesting. A
(08:53):
twenty twenty or twenty two thousand and three, I think
actually two thousand and three review published in the European
Journal of Farm Ecology looked at evidence from animal and
human studies and basically was trying to figure out, like,
why is this overreaction happening. Essentially, what they found was
that in the brain of somebody without anxiety, the amygdala,
(09:17):
the switch that turns off the amygdala and turns off
the fear response is just as receptive as the same
switch getting turned on. So basically, yes, their fear may
spike in similar ways to us, their anxiety may spike
to similar things, but it can be turned off just
(09:39):
as quickly, meaning that sensations are allowed to kind of
transpire or occur, and then we're able to move on.
In the brains of people with anxiety, in the amygdala
amygdalas of people with anxiety, that switch, that same switch
can be turned on just as quickly, but it cannot
be turned off. So a lot of people think that
(09:59):
it the on switch that's broken, right, the AMIG dealer
is more receptive, more reactive. That is definitely true in
some situations, But really where anxiety comes from is not
the immediate fear, It is the inability to downregulate that fear.
It is the inability to turn off that fear. Another
really important idea here is about inter reception, and this
(10:23):
is basically the brain's ability to sense and interpret what
is happening inside your body and react accordingly. The American
neuroscientist Arthur Craig he talks about this in that same
paper on one I think one published very soon after,
and he argues that the brain is not just mapping
what is happening outside the body, it's also mapping what's
(10:45):
happening inside the body. So it's also thinking about heart rate, breathing, temperature, pain,
muscle tension, nausea, and it's using that information to actually
help construct our emotions about our external environment as well
how we should react. Essentially, it's a two way street. Yes,
our emotions control our bodily reactions. Our bodily reactions control
(11:07):
our emotions. The thing is, when we're anxious, our bodily
reactions triggered by our anxiety are really confusing because a
lot is going on. Everything is like on full speed,
and so our brain, getting locked into that two way
bi directional relationship and stream of information, takes this as
evidence that something must actually be going wrong. It takes
(11:30):
that as evidence that our irrational emotions must be onto something,
meaning that it continues to further stimulate us, continues to
further activate this stress response. Essentially, what's happening is something
freaks you out based on past experiences or based on
an irrational fear. Your body is unable to turn off
(11:53):
that sensation, that initial sensation of anxiety, that initial sensation
of year and being scared and tension, meaning that the
body starts to take your mind starts to take those
bodily sensations as fact that something is actually going wrong.
I'm hoping that you guys are kind of seeing this
(12:13):
cycle here, right, or just this like downward spiral where
it becomes so difficult to interrupt these signals and say, actually, no,
everything is okay, we are fine, because it just the
evidence that something is wrong is just as internal as
it is external, or the evidence that things are okay
(12:36):
is a lot weaker compared to this internal bodily signal
that everything is actually on fire. Talking more about the
neuroscience of this, that same researcher Dr Craig expanded on
this idea in a two thousand and nine review published
in Like a Eu. I can't remember the name, but
a neuroscience journal, and he focused on another part of
(12:58):
the brain called the anterior intu That is a brain region,
he argued, is especially important for turning raw bodily signals
into conscious subjective feelings. His claim is that people with
anxiety may have a dysfunction in this region, meaning that,
(13:18):
like we were talking about with that mind body connection,
anxious feelings are more physically persuasive because we find it
harder that the insular finds it harder to argue or
disentangle ourselves from what it sees as physical proof. Basically,
it becomes harder in the brain of somebody with anxiety
to shut down our own brain's interpretation of our own
(13:42):
physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong.
What I'm really trying to get out here is it's
not you. It is all these systems. It is all
this neurological stuff going on. That means that we cannot
separate a thought from a feeling. We cannot separate rate
as well our emotional experience from our anxiety and from
(14:04):
what's going on in our bodies. A two thousand and
four study carried out by researchers from the University College
London looked into this a little bit closer. They kind
of wanted to figure out whether this was really, you know,
the crux of why people are anxious, or why some
people have debilitating anxiety and some people don't. The researchers
put seventeen participants into an fMRI scanner and they asked
(14:28):
them to do a heartbeat detection task. Essentially, they said,
we're not going to take your pulse in the usual
external way, what do you think your heart rate is?
Permitut Essentially, how good are you at counting your own
heart rate and figuring out your own pulse. Most interestingly,
people who were who got a more accurate number, who
(14:51):
were like, yep, I think my heart rate is around
seventy two beats per minute, forty nine beats per minute.
It didn't matter if it was high or low. They
were more accurate in their assessment, reported stronger negative emotional experiences.
What this paper essentially suggests is that your brain monitors
your body closely to determine how scared it should be.
(15:12):
So if your brain is highly tuned to internal changes,
small shifts and heart rate, small shifts in breathing tension,
in any way that becomes more psychologically meaningful to it.
In an anxious state, that means that the body constantly
feels that there is and the brain constantly feels like
(15:33):
there is ample evidence internally that something is going wrong again.
This is all because your mind would rather interrupt your
peace ten times unnecessarily than miss one thing that might
have hurt you. That is why anxiety often feels bigger
than the situation itself, and all of these neurological processes,
(15:53):
all of these anatomical areas, are all trying to keep
that process going so that you survive life. Going even
deeper into the neuroscience behind your anxiety, we also, obviously
at some point need to talk about the role of
certain neurotransmitters, specifically to neurotransmitters gabba and glutamate. If you've
(16:14):
been listening to this podcast for a while, you would
have heard me talk about these so much. The two g's,
these two chemical messengers basically control alongside a bunch of
other things, but they are a big part of how
reactive or regulated your brain is. In very simple terms,
glutamate is what helps neurons fire and communicate. It gets
(16:37):
them all excited, It stimulates them. Gabba is the main
inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it helps to quiet or dampen neuractivity.
It just it calms everybody down. I always think about
them as like good cop and bad cop in a way,
like glutamate all like this. I think about them as
like glutamate is the fun exciting arms who gives the
(17:01):
kids all the sugar, rouse them up with games with
candy is like getting them are excited, and then gabba
is like the responsible parent who then has to get
everybody ready for bedtime and do like the grown up job.
Research on anxiety disorders has argued that it's not simply
that we have more glutamate, more of that excitator and
(17:22):
you're a transmitter in our system. It's that we may
also have less gabba, or we may be less receptive
to gabba or have an imbalance in both, which is
why drugs that boost GABBA signaling and the way that
GABBA can be received, like benzodiazepines, reduce acute anxiety, because
(17:43):
the theory goes, they're balancing out the neurochemical reactions. This
is another thing your anxiety may come down to. Of course,
all these things are kind of happening at the same time.
So it's not like these are different explanations, they're all combined.
But sometimes what it does come down to, on top
of these other elements, it's just differences in your brain
chemistry that increase or decrease your sensitivity to certain neurotransmitters
(18:09):
that go on to shape how you feel in response
to the world. I just think it's so fascinating that
we have this intense emotional experience that being our anxiety,
and then when you start to understand it through a
neuroscientific lens, it all makes sense. It all makes sense
why it all feels so uncontrollable, because there are things
(18:30):
operating behind the scenes that can't be brought into your control,
that you do not have conscious say over, that just
leave you responding to the consequences or outcomes of the
imbalance or of the lack or excess of activity. You'll
probably know the frustration. If you have anxiety and you're
(18:51):
listening to this episode, you have definitely had somebody tell
you just to stop worrying about it, or to simply
stop thinking about it. What people without anxiety don't realize
is that that would mean going against like everything that
your brain in particular, is programmed to do like. You
(19:12):
do not have the same efficient, top down attentional control
that the average person without anxiety has. Instead, you have
a different attentional system, one that is stimulus driven threat driven. Basically,
for you, it is a lot harder to ignore the
(19:33):
scary thoughts, to ignore the scary situations, because anxiety is
not only making the threat seem bigger, it's reducing your
capacity for calm, it's reducing your capacity for goal directed
focus and rationalization. And it's also this weird conundrum whereby
in order to address our anxiety like we have, you know,
(19:57):
trying to avoid it doesn't work. Like when people say
worry about it less, think about it less. Well, that
actually can at times enlarge our fear and make us
think about it more. I feel like by now, I
feel like we all know about this very famous experiment,
like the white bear experiment. You might also know it
(20:19):
as the white elephant experiment. To give a refresh, This
was an experiment very famous in the eighties where a
researcher told a bunch of participants, whatever you do, don't
think about a white elephant, or don't think about a
white bear. Every time you think about it, ring the bell,
ring the bell. As soon as this thought has it intruded.
(20:41):
He also told a bunch of participants like, here is
a list of things you can think about. You can
think about the white bear. You can also think about
this and this and this. Whatever you want to think about.
You have complete permission to do it. When people were
told to think about the bear less, when people were
told not to think about it, it became a fixation point, right.
(21:02):
It became this obsessional thing because why are we not
allowed to think about it? What's wrong with this thing?
What's bad about thinking about it? That means that we
can't do that? And your brain begins to run away
with it. It's the same with your anxiety. Study after
study shows when we are given instructions to suppress a thought,
to ignore a stimulus, to ignore a thought, our level
(21:23):
of fear towards that thought increases. Firstly, but also we
just think about it in excess of if we've just
been allowed to think about it casually all along. And
because of this, anxiety becomes a self perpetuating cycle that's
really difficult to break, making our initial fears worse and
worse and worse. So I feel like I've given you
(21:46):
a lot of information. This is the neuroscientific side of
this so far. Just to give you a little mini summary,
your brain is built to protect you, not to fulfill you.
All it cares about is your survival. There are certain
areas in the brain that are in control of your
survival and of detecting things that may threaten your survival.
(22:10):
In people with anxiety, these areas aren't always operating properly,
and that creates longer and longer ongoing sense of fear
towards ambiguous situations. There is also the combined changes in
neurotransmittered levels that kind of explains this a little bit.
And also this inability to down regulate your fear or
(22:35):
to rationally interrupt your fear and say, hey, this actually
isn't that important, This actually isn't going to happen, and
to believe that, and so all of this shrinks our
lives significantly, to say the least. I want to break
down how we can take those neuroscientific principles though and
apply them in the opposite direction. Knowing what we know
(22:59):
about the new neuroscience behind anxiety, how can we kind
of take that knowledge flip it on its head and
do better for our anxious feelings. Essentially, what I'm saying
is that as much as our brain is pushing us
to have a certain reaction to fear and ambiguity, there
(23:24):
is a way that we can rewire our brains away
from anxious thoughts. Knowing what we now know about the
underlying neuroscience, we basically have to teach our brain new connections,
new connections between ambiguous situations and the expected fear. And
(23:45):
we do that by creating new associations between the things
that we fear and what we think or what we
know the outcome will be. Basically, rather than trying to
completely erase all of our exposure to a trigger, rather
than trying to avoid something that scares us at all costs,
all we need to do is show our brain that
a different outcome is possible. Remember, your brain is just
(24:07):
a machine that learns through repeated patterns, repeated exposure, through repetition.
The more that you associate this thing that you fear
with something that is positive, the more that it learns
to expect that in the future, and it changes the
X to Y prediction model that it's operating on. We
(24:28):
need to have experiences. If you're going to use neuroscience
to battle against your anxiety, you need to be focused
on having experiences that contradict your anxious predictions, basically meaning
you have to go further into the belly of your anxiety.
In psychology, we call this exposure therapy. I'm sure you've
(24:48):
heard it. Essentially, what it's saying is if we assume
every for example, social interaction will always be unbearable, the
most powerful way we can rewire that situation is by
going into those feared situations and proving to ourselves that
that catastrophic outcome is not going to happen or will
(25:09):
not happen as often as we expect it to, basically saying,
your brain, my brain, your brain, you are lying to me.
These predictions are false. We're basically trying to set up
our anxiety and, like a sting operation, to prove that
it's a liar by going into the room, going into
the space, getting on the plane, standing up in front
(25:31):
of the people, and undoing that prediction that everything is
going to go terribly and providing proof that it's not.
You know, if you fear speaking up in front of
others because you think that everybody's going to judge you,
everybody's going to notice how anxious you are, everybody is
going to reject you. A way to kind of set
(25:53):
up that prediction and to prove that it's false is
to go into those situations more and more and more,
to prove that that doesn't happen every time, that actually
that rarely happens. The prediction model is false. The new
learning isn't necessarily this is always going to be fine,
or I'm always going to feel confident, or there is
(26:14):
nothing to fear. The new learning is simply that, like,
I can be in that fearful situation. A, It's probably
not as likely as I thought, but be I will
survive regardless. There is also evidence that how you engage
with the fear matters as well, not just the outcome,
And that brings me to our practical tips for dealing
(26:36):
with an anxious mind, And the number one thing you
can do other than exposure is to simply verbalize what
you are feeling, rather than keeping it stuck inside of
your mind to fester. In twenty fifteen, they did this
randomized control trial with people who were afraid of public speaking,
and these people were assigned to basically get up in
(26:58):
front of a room and talk, and they were either
asked to label their anxiety or to ignore it, meaning
they were asked to either explicitly put their feelings and
their fears about what was going to happen into words,
or they were just going to have to do exposure
and get up in front of people and see what happened.
What they found was that people who were able to
say this is an anxious feeling, I'm scared here, my
(27:22):
physical symptoms of anxiety are coming are really derived from
this fear and not from the fact that this situation
is actually harmful. They did better almost every single time. Essentially,
they were able to rewire their fear, not necessarily by
suppressing their anxious thoughts, but actually by bringing the anxious
(27:45):
thought more into their focus, being able to approach it
and also see that it was a liar, see that
it wasn't true, and see that it was something that
operated beyond what they consciously and deliberately wanted to do.
So that's one of the best things you can do
if you're feeling anxious is just literally say I am anxious.
I know it goes against so much of how we
(28:05):
think we're meant to process our emotions, which is to
avoid them and to not acknowledge them. This is saying
do the opposite. This is saying go in deeper. Tip
number two relies on a similar cognitive distancing technique, and
it essentially says, what I'm essentially going to tell you
to do is to learn how to relate to your
thoughts as mental events beyond you, rather than facts that
(28:29):
are coming from within you. In a really interesting series
of studies from twenty fourteen, researchers found that using your
name or a non first person pronoun or somebody else's
name during an anxious moment was an incredible form of
emotional regulation. Basically, the first level of cognitive distancing from
(28:53):
your anxiety would be saying I'm having an anxious thought.
The second level, the level that they found, were saying
Gemma is experiencing an anxious thought, or saying giving your
anxiety a completely different name, basically labeling the part of
you that felt anxious as something that was operating outside
(29:13):
of you. So Kevin is making me feel anxious. Kevin's
having a really bad day today. Brian is really trying
to get me stirred up. Noticing your anxious thoughts not
as just coming from you, but from something beyond you
that you don't necessarily want or you don't have to
necessarily associate with. So like when you feel fear, being
(29:36):
like oh, instead of thinking, oh my god, I feel
I feel fear. This is coming from me. This is
intuition being like, oh, that's Miranda again, that's Miranda being
being such like an asshole. Miranda's just like really getting
on my nerves at the moment it stops you. The
reason this works is because it stops you from completely
(29:57):
embodying the thought as your own and puts the blame
or assigns the blame to an outside source. Why this
works is because it stops, well, it doesn't completely stop,
but it interrupts that body mind connection that says, if
(30:18):
fear and anxiety is coming from me internally, it must
mean that it's saying something important. It must mean that
it's given me some kind of signal q hint about
the state of the world around me. It must mean
that I should be scared. Because of course, we trust
ourselves and we trust our own feelings the most and
(30:39):
above all others. Obviously, if you're if you're anxious. So
if you are somebody with anxiety, we know from this
research and from the neuroscience we've already spoken about that
that connection and your ability to interpret those physical sensations
is providing false evidence for things that aren't actually occurring
or that aren't actually as dangerous as you think they are.
(31:04):
So assigning the anxious thought, assigning the corresponding bodily sensations
to an outside force, to a Kevin or a Brian
or a Miranda, this anxious little character that occasionally comes
and visits you and makes you feel terrible, interrupts that
(31:24):
to your brain logical assumption that to feel anxiety must
mean that something is wrong because it is coming from you,
and who could you trust more than yourself. This is
kind of similar to my third tip, which is to
bring in humor. Call labeling your anxiety as Brian or
Kevin or Miranda makes it kind of funny compared to
the intensity of the feeling. The opposite of anxiety is
(31:48):
not peace, It is laughter. I don't know who said that,
but they were a very very wise individual. When our
anxiety is bad, everything feels really serious because all we know,
our mind is taking this as a life or death
situation that makes it difficult to laugh so, or makes
it difficult to make it feel less serious than it is.
(32:11):
But adding back in the ridiculousness of the situation snaps
you out of the anxiety cycle much quicker than a
lot of other techniques. And honestly, like anxiety is literally
hilarious at times, like it is hilarious, how ridiculous and
dramatic it is, like the fact that it truly believes
(32:32):
every single bad thing that could happen in the world
could and will, and it's currently happening to you. The
fact that it genuinely wants you to believe that is
really funny. It's like a child. Our anxiety is like
a little petulant child. And there's increasing evidence that laughing
at the absurdity of our anxiety firstly helps by taking
(32:55):
that nervous energy and turning those bubbles of fear into
like fear of excitement. It secondly helps because of that
psychological distancing. But when speaking about neuroscience, the third way
that laughter helps is that it actually activates the parasympathetic
nervous system. Like I said, the opposite of anxiety is
(33:16):
not peace, it is laughter. Because when we laugh, it
stimulates Laughter literally stimulates the vagus nerve. This is the
primary component of our parasympathetic nervous system, the system that
calms us down and shuts off our anxiety. Activating that nerve,
Activating that system shifts us into a state of rest
(33:38):
and recovery rather than alertness. This one twenty eighteen Japanese
paper also found that just hearing laughter can improve stress,
anxiety cortisol levels. Literally watching a comedy show, watching your
favorite sitcom. I'm currently rewatching Girls, which is like, I
find that so funny, watching the funniest home videos? Is
(34:01):
that still a thing? Like no, but anything like that
will like neurologically calm you down if you can laugh.
That is a mental and emotional circuit breaker. It is
a way for your parasympathetic nervous system to say, why
(34:23):
would I be laughing if I wasn't safe? Like this
is again you playing psychological warfare, like back at your anxiety,
Like your anxiety wants to throw all of these delusional,
ridiculous situations at it. Take the like, take the ridiculousness
of it, and laugh at it. Laughter as a circuit
breaker works because it is something that yes, triggers our
(34:47):
parasympathetic nervous system. It also triggers gabber. It triggers oxytocin. Basically,
imagine anxiety as like this toy train on like a
circular track. It's going round and round and round. It's
getting faster and far and faster. We all know the feeling.
The circuit breaker, the laughter, whatever your circuit breaker is,
is like a kid disconnecting a piece of the track,
(35:08):
flooding the system with oxytocin, flooding the system with gabber,
like turning it all down, switching off the batteries. I
read this fantastic article from this psychologist called doctor Lucas
who wrote about the three neurological circuit breakers that are
best for anxiety. These are a stimulating gabber and oxytocin.
(35:31):
By forcing ourselves to slow down, forcing ourselves to walk slower,
eat slower, sleep more, therefore resetting ourselves. That's the first
great circuit breaker. B is a parasympathetic circuit breaker, so
like laughter, but also like relaxing your tongue and your jaw.
I don't know if you've heard about this, but letting
(35:52):
your mouth and jaw go slack, is like a biological
cheek code for relaxation. Like one of the first nodes
or points of your vagus nerve is like right below
your ear towards your jaw. All signals go past this point,
Like all activating signals have to flow through this point
to like tell your body to speed up and get
(36:12):
stressed and get anxious. So if you reduce to tension
around that origin point of your vagus nerve, it is
like the equivalent of holding down like the on and
off button on your phone or your computer for like
five seconds. Like it is a literal like like you
have a circuit break, and you have an off switch
like in your body that you can activate. And the
(36:32):
final circuit breaker that doctor Lucas talks about is ones
that activate your anterior singular cortex, basically the part of
your brain that communicates between the conscious and the unconscious,
instinct and executive functioning. We can power on that part
of the brain that lets us interrupt unconscious and nonsensical
(36:57):
thoughts by simple mindfulness exercises, by doing grounding exercises, by
refocusing our attention and asking our attention to focus only
on the present. So watching rain drops down a window
slowly eating and savoring a meal, doing a body scan.
The five four three two one sensory technique basically refocusing
(37:21):
your attention outwards, only focusing on what's going around you
and really sinking into that stops you from getting pulled inwards.
Those are your circuit breakers. Circuit breakers that that work
through your vegus nerve circuit breakers that work through neurotransmitter release.
Circuit breakers that work through turning on the parts of
(37:41):
you that can downregulate. Finally, if you really want to
trick the neurological mechanisms of your anxiety to switch off
for a few minutes, it's gonna sound, but any kind
(38:02):
of specifically forward movement will literally trick your brain into
calming down. Now. This idea is kind of borrowed from
principles of eye movement, Desensitization and reprocessing Therapy EMDR. It's
everywhere at the moment, It's highly effective. This is most
effective for people who are experiencing PTSD. However, the mechanism
(38:26):
behind it is really interesting and can also be applied
at a more basic general level. At a basic level
EMDR or this eye movement therapy involves something as simple
as walking forward, and it uses what we call bilateral stimulation.
So essentially, when you walk forward, when you do some
kind of forward movement, the rhythmic way that your brain
(38:49):
tracks movement from side to side and the optic flow
that it experiences from stuff moving past you going past
you gives you the psychological set that you are overcoming something.
So essentially, if your anxiety is all in your mind,
like actually, let me explain this differently, when your anxiety
(39:13):
is actually fear based, so something is actually going wrong.
When you're experiencing fear, your brain wants you to run away,
wants you to fight, wants you to pursue some kind
of forward movement away over or through the problem. So
what it will want you to do is to run away.
It will want you to fight, maybe it will want
(39:34):
you to hide, but mainly it wants you to pursue
some kind of like I am leaving this situation kind
of movement when it knows that you're experiencing that, when
your brain feels that you are running away, feels that
you were escaping, it will slowly turn off some of
your anxiety because the anxiety or the fear is no
longer needed because it's already prompted you to do what
(39:55):
you do or to do something that it's going to
help you in that situation. That that is like the
mechanism behind fear and when there is an actual threat,
when we're experiencing anxiety and the threat isn't real, we
can still activate that same natural biological, psychological way of
activating calm by again going outside and walking, riding our bike,
(40:20):
going to a boxing class, stimulating that same optic flow,
that same bilateral stimulation that would ordinarily tell our brain
that we are doing something about a fear stimulus, but
is now telling our brain that we are doing something
about this anxiety or this this thing that is triggering
our anxiety. Literally, walking is like the most simplest way
(40:41):
of way to do this. And I know it sounds
silly to be like, you're feeling anxious, go on a walk,
but like motion direction, momentum stops you from just like
stewing in the fear neurologically, psychologically, and physically. If you
are finding yourself stuck in an anxious spiral, one of
the most underrated things things you can do is to
simply get up and walk, not on a treadmill outside,
(41:05):
get up and walk around your house, Get up and
do some kind of physical movement, same way that like
doing jumping jacks, doing mountain climbers, any kind of physical
movement calms down the body when we are in a
kind of like anxious spiral because it's just staying like
(41:26):
I'm doing something about it, Like it's okay, you can
calm down, like you can, we can turn that off
now because I'm listening. It's basically like I've listened to
the siren. Turn off the siren. We are doing our
escape protocol. So these are just some of the ways
that we can take what we know about the neuroscientific
principles and origins of anxiety and kind of twist them
(41:49):
in our favor. I think anxiety makes it feel like
our brain is not our friend and not our own.
And knowing these strategies or having these strategies teaches us
how to play the same game that our anxiety is
playing back at our anxiety, or it's teaching us how
to learn the quirks and patterns and kind of idiosyncrasies
(42:10):
of our anxiety and to emulate them ourselves and kind
of play them back. Like it's definitely like a bit
of a SIOP. Obviously, there are so many things that
we didn't mention here, and there are so many ways. Oh,
there's so many factors contributing to our anxiety that have
nothing to do with neuroscience and that have no neuroscientific
basis at all. But I think if your main focus
(42:33):
right now is gaining more of a scientific explanation and
understanding of your anxiety, this is a really great place
to start. Understanding the neurotransmitters, understanding your brain's attentional regulation systems,
understanding the different parts of your brain that are involved
in basically creating anxiety, creates distance. I know some people
(42:58):
will be like, well, that's just over in actualizing. I
know that some people will think that this is an
excuse for not feeling your feelings. I still think that
it's good to feel anxious, and like I said, it's
a dangerous game to suppress or avoid your anxiety. But
I still think it's very, very valuable. But at the
end of the day, being able to say like this
feeling is not one that I have complete ownership over.
(43:22):
Being able to reapply logic to our anxiety when anxiety
likes to remove all logic is so so helpful, and
I think it's why. Yeah, I don't know. I just
think that teaching the neuroscience of anxiety is something that
we should be doing more rather than just obsessing and
only focusing on the emotional side of it, only focusing
(43:44):
on the physical side of it, only focusing on the
social side of it, Like you cannot understand why you
behave the way you do in certain social situations, why
you behave the way you do in work situations, or
any number of situations if you don't understand like the
framework and the pillars and the systems along which your
anxiety is kind of running and influencing your behavior. So
(44:06):
I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I know it
was a little bit ranty at times, kind of all
over the place, but when I get into the science,
like I get so into it. So but again, I
really do hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope
that you learned something from it and that you know
it just helped you understand you and your brain a
(44:26):
little bit better as you go through an anxious moment
or kind of a more anxious period of life. So
with that being said, I think we're done for the day.
Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will
talk very very soon.
Host
Jemma Sbeghen
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