Throughout school, I was never interested in learning. I was much more interested in my friends and having fun. Every teacher at parent conferences said some version of the following: “She understands the work but talks too much during class.” Well, this was all true until my first psychology class during Senior year of high school. I enjoyed being in class and even doing the homework - say what?!

This love of learning about the many different areas of psychology has continued and has been especially fueled by my interest in anxiety and stress. I am currently working on the Certified Clinical Anxiety Treatment Professional training, and I wanted to share a (hopefully) easy to read version of what I have learned so far about anxiety and the brain.

You may have heard of the amygdala. This part of our brain is responsible for our emotional responses and processing of memories. It activates our ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ response and is responsible for involuntary reactions to fear. This is why we experience anxiety to stimuli (person, place, thing, sound, situation, etc.) that has previously been a stressful / fearful / traumatic experience. Our brain, in the amygdala, has now associated that stimuli with a particular emotional response. For example, if you have been bitten by a poodle, you might become anxious when you see poodles or you might become anxious when you see any dog. Sometimes our fears can become generalized.

anxiety response emotional fear brain amygdala | reduce anxiety response

This is also why we sometimes feel anxiety when there is “nothing” to be anxious about. Although there is nothing inherently dangerous and there are no known triggers, our brain is interpreting the stimuli as threatening. To teach our brain to respond differently, we have to let it have a different experience. We have to let our brain learn through experience that this stimuli is not actually threatening.

If we use the dog bite example: the more experiences we have with poodles (and or any dogs) that do not bite us, we are likely to experience less and less anxiety or fear when we see them.

When there is no inherent danger, try to: Challenge yourself to sit with the anxiety you are feeling and not take “flight" to escape the anxiety. If we continue to take “flight” in situations where there is no actual danger, it continues to teach our brain that it should respond to the stimuli with fear.

When sitting with the anxiety, you can tell your brain things such as - “There is no threat here. I am safe. This is not dangerous.” Let your brain have new experiences, so that it can respond with anxiety less often. Your brain will thank you later!