All about Anxiety

 Can you hear the inner critic inside of your head? The critic blames you for things that go wrong. The critic compares you to others - to their achievements and abilities - and finds you wanting. The critic sets impossible standards of perfection and then beats you up for the smallest mistake. The critic keeps an album of your failures, but never once reminds you of your strengths or accomplishments. The critic has a script of “shoulds” as to to how you are to live your life and screams that you are wrong or bad if your needs drive you to violate his rules. The critic tells you to be the best - and if you’re not then you’re nothing. He calls you names - stupid, incompetent, ugly, selfish, weak - and makes you believe that all of them are true.

Or, do you find yourself going to bed and waking up with racing thoughts? Replaying all of the things that you need to do and don’t have the time for. You may be worrying about all of the event’s of the day or stressing about a meeting at work or better yet what your life is going to look like in 10 years. You can’t help it. You just can’t help these thoughts from ruminating over and over again through your mind.

Did you know that when we have these thoughts, a lot of things are happening in our brains and body. The thought alone activates the amygdala, which is a small region in the brain. The amygdala sends a distress signal and perceives danger and sends the distress signal to our bodies. Our fight or flee response is activated and the stress hormone is being released through our nervous system. You may notice, if you pay close attention, your heart starts to beat faster then normal, your breathing becomes more rapid, and your senses become sharper.

This fight or flight response was designed to keep us alive for thousands of years. It’s primary job is to keep us safe from perceived danger. While this fight-or-flight response happens automatically, it isn’t always accurate. Sometimes we respond in this way even when there is no real immediate threat. This is where anxiety comes in. Anxiety results when the fight or flight response becomes triggered too easily and too frequently. The brain has learned to keep this activated for long periods of time and the thinking produces more thinking which continues to set off our alarms. Our brains produce between 60,000 to 70,000 thoughts in one day and approximately 90 percent are thoughts from the previous day. These thinking patterns become new habits of the brain and those connections start to become part of our neurological wiring.

The amazing thing is that our brain has the capacity to change and we can teach it how to change. This concept in neuroscience is called neuroplasticity. We can teach our brains to learn new experiences, new patterns, new habits which will actually begin to change our brain and then our feelings change. When you make these changes you start to feel different - about yourself and the world around you. This takes practice, and I promise you, it’s totally worth it and it works!