On Anxiety

"Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms."
— Paulo Coelho

For the better part of 200,000 years, anxiety and fear have kept us alive.

Our amygdala, the part of our brain that processes threat detection, actually works faster than our frontal lobe, and is tied directly into parts of our nervous system that control every aspect of our experience. Before our frontal lobe is even recruited to participate, our amygdala has signaled danger to the hypothalamus and brain stem, and the nervous system has activated a whole-body "fight, flight, or freeze" response. This happens in milliseconds, and all of this occurs before the rational part of our brain even gets to participate.

Nature, however, is a great systems engineer.

The medial prefrontal cortex is the part of our brain that mediates the fear response of the amygdala. It can identify certain events as false alarms, and shut down the whole body fear response. In most people, these two parts of the brain are balanced, and play a harmonious dance that allows us to identify real threats, and ignore events that are not actually a threat.

Here is where things get a bit wild. Trauma and extreme fear, or even just the prolonged and repeated experience of fear physically rewires our brain. The amygdala becomes super charged and the medial prefrontal cortex becomes significantly underpowered. Studies show that naming stresses and strong emotions out loud, in words, can substantially reduce our experience of anxiety and unpleasant emotions. It turns out that the ancient idea that words can have almost magic power to them, is backed by science. The joke is on us though, because FMRI studies show that the part of our brain that is responsible for translating feelings into words, becomes substantially underpowered when we are experiencing anxiety and trauma.

Fear literally steals our ability to utter the very words of power that break its hold on us.

Why all the science? I thought this was about therapy?

That's the thing. Anxiety isn't just worry. It isn't just stress. Its not worrying about your bills or your student loans, or the next performance rating at work.

Anxiety is your body interpreting the stresses of daily life as life threatening events.

The groundbreaking work of scientists like Bessel van der Kolk help show us that anxiety and trauma cannot always be solved by talk therapy alone. Our verbal and language centers can be compromised so strongly during trauma processing that the words literally lose their meaning.

So what do we do then?

Do the therapy anyway. Connect with your true self. Learn what is driving your thoughts and feelings and learn how to shape your world through how you talk and think about your own experiences. These things are frontline approaches that have shown tremendous success for a huge number of people who struggle with anxiety and intrusive thoughts.

But also: Do not forget your body. The anxiety lives in your body. The trauma is stored in your mind, but your experience of it will be felt in the body. There is currently a huge debate going on in therapy circles because new studies show that trauma does not literally live in the fascia, but people like van der Kolk never actually claimed that it did. When they say "the body keeps the score" or "trauma lives in the body" they mean that our experience of that anxiety and trauma is experienced body-first. It's not just a thought, it's something that your whole body is doing.

Yoga. EMDR. Cold exposure therapy. Walking. Stretching. Lifting weights. Dance. The physiological sigh. Box breathing. Swimming.

These are all excellent tools, and you will have to earnestly try them all to find the ones that your body responds to. Every body is a unique puzzle, so you will have to be kind and patient with yourself. It takes time.

Anxiety is a core function, using a system that is wired into the deepest parts of our bodies…it's not going to simply go away.

We need to address what we can in the mind, work with what we can in our bodies, and somewhere along the way, we discover a way to live with what is left.