Control Your Anxiety: Rewire Your Brain

By Wayne Douglas Smith Ph.D.

Based on cutting-edge neuroscience and research, "Control Your Anxiety: Rewire Your Brain" offers an evidence-based solution to overcoming anxiety. You will discover how anxiety is produced in your brain, and learn strategies to put you in control of your anxious thoughts. As it turns out, the amygdala and the cortex, both important parts of the brain, are the sources of anxiety. One is in charge of our fight-or-flight response, and the other is the source of worry and obsession. The brain is a powerful tool, so isn't it time you made it work for you instead of against you? By creating small changes in your life, you can rewire the circuits in your brain to minimize your anxiety and start living a better life. The book is useful to professional psychologists and helpful for people in the general public.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: May 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098375843

Wayne Douglas Smith Ph.D.

Wayne Douglas Smith studied physics and psychology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and was employed as a psychologist for forty years. The book is dedicated to Wayne's beloved mother, Zula Smith. Wayne lives in Virginia Beach with his wife, the environmentalist, Kale Warren.

Book preview

Chapter 1:

Pathways to Anxiety

Anxiety is created in the brain, and it cannot occur without contributions from two specific brain organs: the cortex and the amygdala. These are the neural sources of anxiety in the brain that can initiate an emotional response. The cortex is the pathway of sensations, thoughts, logic, conscious memory, and planning.

Anxiety treatment typically targets the cortex-pathway, because scientists have more access to what this part of the brain focuses on. If you find that your thoughts keep turning to ideas or images that increase your anxiety, or get stuck on trying to think of solutions to problems, you are probably experiencing cortex-based anxiety. The amygdala pathway, on the other hand, can create the powerful effects that anxiety has on the body.

The amygdala’s numerous connections to other parts of the brain allow it to mobilize a variety of bodily reactions very quickly. In less than a tenth of a second, the amygdala can provide a surge of adrenaline, increase blood pressure and heart rate, and produce muscle tension. The amygdala pathway does not produce thoughts that you are aware of, and it operates more quickly than the cortex can.

Therefore, it creates many aspects of an anxiety response without your conscious control. If you feel your anxiety has no apparent cause, you are usually experiencing the effects of anxiety arising from the amygdala pathway. Your awareness of the amygdala is likely to be based on your experience of its effects on you, such as nervousness or having aggressive impulses.

Therapists and counselors seldom discuss the amygdala when treating anxiety disorders. This is surprising, given that most experiences of anxiety involve of the amygdala. Even when the cortex is the source of anxious thinking, it is the amygdala that causes the physical sensations of anxiety to occur: pounding heart, perspiration, muscle tension.

Medications, such as Xanax (alprazolam) and Ativan (lorazepam), have the effect of sedating the amygdala. Such tranquilizing medications are very effective at quickly reducing anxiety, but they do nothing to change the circuitry of the amygdala. They don’t help change the amygdala in ways that will help long-term.

To understand the amygdala’s role in anxiety, it is important to know that as you go about your day, the amygdala notices sounds and sights even though you may not be consciously focused on them. The amygdala is on the lookout for anything that might indicate harm. If it detects potential danger, it sets off the fear response, which is an alarm in the body that prepares us for fight or flight.

Evolutionary psychologists suggest that we are the descendants of frightened people. Early humans whose amygdala reacted to potential dangers and produced a strong fear response were most likely to behave in cautious ways and be protective of their children. This meant they were more likely to survive and pass their genes on to future generations.

On the other hand, early humans who were too calm to worry about whether a predator was nearby were less likely to survive. Through natural selection, humans living today are the descendants of people whose amygdala’s produced very effective fear responses. Having a protective, fear-producing amygdala is nearly universal among humans.

Therefore, it’s not surprising that anxiety disorders are the most common mental problem people experience, affecting more than forty million adults in the United States (Kessler and Walters, 2005). Given that the dangers in our lives have been significantly reduced since prehistoric times, it may seem strange that so many people are still experiencing high levels of anxiety. Unfortunately, the amygdala is operating on the lessons it learned in the days of our early ancestors.

The amygdala still assumes that the best response to danger is running, fighting, or freezing in place. It prepares the body to initiate these responses whether they are appropriate or not. But these fear-responses don’t fit the twenty-first century situations that most of us live in, and they don’t help us in the way they once did. For instance, people are predisposed to fear spiders and snakes rather than cars and guns, even though the latter are more deadly than the former.

The Cortex Pathway

Understanding how the cortex and the amygdala operate, and the ways in which they relate to one another, will help you understand what happens when these organs malfunction. This basic knowledge will provide you with insight into how to resist your anxiety response. We’ll start with the cortex, which is the gray outer layer of your brain.

The cortex is the source of many of your most impressive abilities, but it is capable of creating a great deal of anxiety. The cerebral cortex is divided into two halves: the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. It is also divided into different sections, called lobes. The lobes have different functions, such as processing vision and hearing, and putting sensory information together to allow you to understand the world.

The cortex is the perceiving and thinking part of the brain. In addition to providing sights, sounds, and other perceptions, the cortex attaches meaning to those perceptions. So you don’t just see an old woman and hear her voice. Rather, you recognize her as your grandmother and understand the specific meaning of the sounds she is making.

Beyond providing you with the ability to interpret different situations, your cortex allows you to use logic, produce language, and plan ways of acting. The cortex is capable of evaluating the usefulness of various responses, such as flight or fight. The cortex pathway to anxiety begins with your sense organs.

Your eyes, ears, nose, taste buds, and skin are all sources of information about the world. All of your knowledge has come through your sense organs and has been interpreted by different parts of your cerebral cortex. When information comes in through your sense organs, it is directed through the thalamus, which is like the grand central station of the brain.

The thalamus is a central relaying station that sends signals from your eyes and ears to the cortex. When information comes into the thalamus, it is sent out to the various lobes to be processed and interpreted. Then the information travels to other parts of the brain, including the frontal lobes behind the forehead. This is where the information is put together so that you can perceive and understand the world.

The Frontal Lobes

The frontal lobes are one of the most important parts of the cortex. Located directly behind the forehead and eyes, they are the largest set of lobes in the human brain, and they are much larger than the frontal lobes of most other animals. The frontal lobes receive information from all of the other lobes, then put it together as an integrated experience from the world.

The frontal lobes are said to have executive functions, meaning that they supervise many other brain processes. The frontal lobes help us anticipate the results of situations, plan our actions, initiate responses, and use feedback from the world to change our behaviors. Unfortunately, these impressive capacities also lay the groundwork for anxiety to develop. The cortex pathway is often a source of anxiety. This is because the frontal lobes anticipate and interpret situations, which often leads to anxiety.

For example, anticipation can lead to a common cortex-based process that creates worry. Because of our highly developed frontal lobes, humans have the ability to predict future events and imagine their consequences. Worry is an outgrowth of anticipation of negative outcomes. It is a cortex-based process that creates thoughts and images that provoke a great deal of fear and anxiety.

Some people have a cortex that is masterful at worrying, taking any situation and imagining negative results. If your pattern of worrying is serious enough that it interferes with your daily life, then you may be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.

When the cortex pathway to anxiety is discussed, we’re talking about the interpretations, images, and worries that the frontal lobes of the cortex creates. We are focusing on the the anticipatory thoughts that create anxiety when no danger is present. When therapists assist people with modifying their thoughts to reduce worry, they are focusing on the cortex.

The Amygdala Pathway

The other pathway involves the amygdala. It initiates the physical experience of anxiety. The amygdala’s strategic location and connections throughout the brain enable it to control the release of hormones, and it can activate areas of the brain that create the physical symptoms of anxiety. The amygdala can exert immediate effects. The amygdala is located near the center of the brain. The brain actually has two amygdala’s, one in the left hemisphere and one in the right hemisphere.

Because the amygdala is an almond-shaped structure, it gets its name from the Greek word for almond. The amygdala is the source of many of our emotional reactions, both positive and negative. The amygdala both forms and recalls your emotional memories. When you understand this, your emotional reactions will probably make more sense to you.

The Lateral Nucleus

The amygdala is divided into two sections that play essential roles in creating emotional responses. The lateral nucleus is the section that receives incoming messages from the senses. It constantly scans your experiences and is at the ready to respond to any indication of danger. Like a built-in alarm system, its job is to identify any threat you see, hear, or smell, and then send a danger signal. It gets its information directly from the thalamus. In fact, it receives information before the cortex does, which is important to keep in mind.

The reason the lateral nucleus gets information so fast is because the amygdala pathway is the more direct route from our senses. The amygdala is wired to respond quickly enough to save your life. Its rapid response is possible because of a shortcut in brain wiring that allows information to get to the lateral nucleus of the amygdala directly (Armony and LeDoux, 1995).

When our eyes, ears, nose, or fingertips receive information, it travels from these sense organs to the thalamus, and the thalamus sends it directly to the amygdala. At this time, the thalamus also sends the information to the appropriate areas of the cerebral cortex for higher-level processing. However, the amygdala receives the information before it can be processed by the various lobes in the cortex.

This means the lateral nucleus of the amygdala can react to protect you from danger before your cortex even knows what the danger is. Information goes directly from the thalamus to the amygdala, allowing the amygdala to react before you have time to use your cortex to think.

The Central Nucleus

The amygdala can accomplish its quick response because of the special properties of another section within it: the central nucleus. This small cluster of neurons has connections with a number of highly influential structures in the brain, including the hypothalamus and the brain stem. This circuit can signal the sympathetic nervous system to activate the release of hormones into the bloodstream, increase respiration, and activate muscles, all in a fraction of a second.

The close connection of the central nucleus to elements of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) provides the amygdala with a great deal of influence over the rest of the body. The SNS is made up of neurons in the spinal cord that connect with nearly every organ system in the body. This allows the SNS to influence dozens of physical responses, including your heart beat.

The role of the SNS is to create the fight or flight response. This effect is balanced by the influence of the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which allows us to rest and digest. During fear-provoking situations, the lateral nucleus sends messages to the central nucleus to activate the SNS. At the same time, the central nucleus also activates the