What Creates Anxiety In The Brain & How To Calm Anxiety
Anxiety Counselling Brisbane
Understanding what creates anxiety in the brain and how to calm the anxious brain.
Understanding What Creates Anxiety in the Brain and How to Calm the Anxious Brain.
There are two different pathways in the brain that cause anxiety. The current neuroscience research shows us that anxiety occurs due to what's known as either bottom-up triggering of emotion or top-down triggering of emotion.
Bottom-up triggering of emotion happens through our perception of something. An example is, out of the corner of my eye I see a dark object in the corner of the room, with this perceptual information I start to have a reaction to it (I start to imagine its a large spider, and I’m terrified of spiders) or I hear my partner saying something to me in a certain tone and I have an emotional reaction to it.
Top-down triggering of emotions is seen when we feel comfortable and calm, we know that we are safe and nothing bad is going to happen to us, but all of a sudden we have thought that triggers emotion. An example might be, I’ve forgotten to pay my phone bill, for the third time in a row and we start to feel panic due to the thought we are.
These two pathways need to be understood so we can learn how to best work with anxiety and our response to it. Keeping in mind that the goal is not to get rid of anxiety completely, rather we want to have a mindful reaction to anxiety. When we can bring mindfulness into our experiences we are better able to enter into an observational role, that enables us to learn to tolerate our emotions and modify our responses.
When it comes to understanding what creates anxiety it’s important to know that everything comes from our environment.
What I mean by this is that we receive huge amounts of sensory information to our brain through our senses, our eyes, ears, skin, touch, smell. All of this sensory information goes directly to a part in our brain called the thalamus, which then works to sort all the information it’s receiving so it can send it where it needs to go.
The thalamus sends information to our cortex and amygdala. Important to know, is that the information that comes through, is all raw and unprocessed data. You can think of the amygdala like a demanding boss who wants to see things right away, they want to see it quick, even if the thalamus isn’t quite done processing it, the amygdala doesn’t care, it wants a snapshot right now!
With this snapshot, our amygdala then asks the question (remember the information is not very clear)
Is this something I go towards or is this something run away from? Or should I not do anything at all?
The cortex on the hand doesn’t see or hear things as quickly as the amygdala does, this means that we don’t pick things up as fast as the amygdala. Which is why we can react without really thinking about things. Our amygdala takes over and we can make a sudden swerve on the road or dart away from that swooping magpie that might not be in our line of sight.
This is our amygdala hijacking our cortex, because it sensed and saw something quicker than our cortex did, and it caused us to react.
From here the cortex sends information back to the amygdala (because the amygdala is always watching the cortex and alert to what it says) which may change how the amygdala reacts. This is where there can be some relief at times even though our amygdala is activated, because our cortex has said ‘Hey that’s not a spider, that’s just an old sock in the corner!’
When we have a bottom-up triggering that happens through our perception the thalamus sends sensory information straight to the amygdala, so the amygdala is activated directly. As in the case with trauma, when for example, we may have experienced a traumatic event and there was a certain song playing at the time of the event. The replay of the song re-activates the amygdala all of its own accord.
When we have top-down triggering, the thalamus sends information directly into the cortex pathway. Our Amygdala is not reacting however our cortex has identified something is dangerous or threatening (anxious thoughts start) even though our amygdala didn’t recognise it as dangerous. Once the thoughts and images appear in our cortex the amygdala sees it and reacts. Because, hey, it trusts our cortex to know!
An example is seeing an email in our inbox, our amygdala isn’t threatened by an email, however, our cortex notices that the email is from a company we had a job interview at and we immediately starts feeling anxious and thinking the worst- it’s a rejection email. Because the amygdala is always watching the cortex ( and also trusts what it says) it reacts and starts to feel anxious because of the thoughts and information we are sending it.
In summary, sometimes we are picking up on sensory information through the thalamus that is going directly to our amygdala and causing anxiety and other times it's going through the cortex. We may be safe and calm and it’s our negative thoughts we are saying that the amygdala picks up on and reacts to which activates our anxiety. When it comes to information going to the amygdala we know that the amygdala is always faster than out cortex. I work with less information as mentioned and does mistakes. Whereas our cortex adds in logic and reasoning.
When we feel anxious and the amygdala is activated, it can take some time for our body and nervous system to ground. This is because our amygdala is wired to take precedence over our cortex. Our cortex gets turned off and the amygdala takes over in a state of fear.
When we have anxiety that comes from the bottom up triggering also what's sometimes referred to as unexplained anxiety, we need experience-based interventions to work with the anxiety. This means interventions that focus on the body as well as the cortex.
When we have anxiety that results from top-down triggering or worrying we need cortex based interventions to work with anxiety and the thinking thoughts that activate the amygdala.
So when we are working with anxiety it's important that we know which pathway we need to be focusing on, as well as working with both body-based approaches and cognitive approached. Often with interventions that only work with thoughts and talking you are talking to your cortex but the problem is the amygdala. It's like trying to drive a car with a paddle and you cant understand why you can't start the car!The amygdala’s role in anxiety.
Anxiety and the Amygdala
The term amygdala means almond. Its also about the size of an almond in our brain! We often talk about the amygdala, but did you know that we actually have two Amygdalae. One on the left and one on the right. The amygdala sometimes gets seen as something to get rid of but it is responsible for creating both positive and negative emotions. It enacts our fight, flight and freeze response and it also has some influence in the role of bonding and attachment. It has many important roles to play and the good news is that it is always learning, so we want to be able to teach our amygdala new things, especially when it comes to anxiety.
The role of the amygdala is that it attaches emotional significance to things. It decides whether or not this should be excited about something, or if something isn’t of interest to us. It’s constantly evaluating and creating memories based on our experiences, and it's our life experience that are actually teaching and educating our amygdala. If we have had life experiences that have been threatening or traumatic our amygdala remembers this and creates a fear response to those memories.
The Amygdala is designed to be our protector, It’s goal is to protect us. It has good intentions although it's not always right that something is dangerous. It doesn’t help us think through things or remember what worked in the past, its role is to activate our fight, flight, freeze response and it has some fears it is more pre-disposed to develop than others given our time back in the day as cave dwellers.
The amygdala was shaped in the days when we needed to run and hide from dangerous things and fight of other people or animals. It had fears around things like animals, heights, water and crowded environments make sense given our human history.
The good news is that we can teach our amygdala new things.
For all human beings the fight/flight/freeze response is a normal, automatic and unconscious process that is activated by the amygdala way before your cortex has time to process all the available information. The cortex can’t understand what’s happening before the amygdala has engaged and changed all sorts of things all over your body. (eg cortisol release, increased heart rate, the rush of blood, digestion stops). You might feel dizzy, you might have extra energy, the mouth gets dry, dilated pupils, you might hyperventilate and take in more oxygen, stimulating the epinephrine and adrenalin, which relaxes the bladder and brings up nausea.
Once the amygdala is activated it does take some time for it to de-activate, and it’s not something that can be stopped per se. You can however learn to not activate the amygdala.
How does the amygdala learn?
The amygdala learns on the basis of pairings, it makes emotional memories and encodes whatever is going on as dangerous, even if those signals are inaccurate. When a trigger is paired with a negative event (something that elicits a negative emotional reaction which causes fear) the trigger elicits a fear reaction. An example is the smell of a certain body wash which is associated with an event that was traumatic.
Thankfully you can learn the language of the amygdala and you can train your amygdala to rewire those connections.
Remember, the amygdala does not talk to you in thoughts and it’s not logical. If you have a thought, it’s not the amygdala, you don’t HEAR I’m in danger you FEEL it. The amygdala also has to learn a certain way. It has to learn to experience and go through a situation. It has to have new and multiple good experiences so that it will change its opinion and wiring! It’s not only by reasoning that the amygdala gets changed, but it’s also through experience. So we have to teach the amygdala with experience and we also have to address the thoughts coming from our cortex. We need to control what the cortex is exposing the amygdala to.
Anxiety counselling & soothing techniques for the amygdala
When we experience anxiety it can be normal feel as though we can't think straight, that’s because our amygdala has hijacked the system. It’s also important to know that you are not ab-normal, and everyone has this happen to them.
When we are feeling panicked it is also normal to feel as though it’s difficult to bring ourselves back down to a place where we feel calm or to use our breathing techniques. Once a panic attack is activated it can take a little while for it to go down, and it just means that your body is reacting. This is because once the amygdala is activated, it can take a while for things to re-set. If you start to get worried about having a panic attack you can start to reduce to activation. There’s no switch to turn it off, but there is an effective approach which I will talk more on below.
Something that makes anxiety feel worse is the catastrophic interpretations we can make when we feel anxiety. We might think to ourselves ‘I’m going crazy’ or ‘This is all going to turn out badly’. Mostly, what is actually true, is that many of us were very anxious before an exam or presentation but we got a good outcome or things turned out well.
This is because anxiety is not a predictor of an outcome and anxiety reaches it’s peak before an experience not during.
Sometimes people talk about worrying or thinking about their challenges as a way to get relief. The truth is to some degree, worrying is a way to reduce anxiety. The process of worrying, which is also known as generating negative outcomes (by focusing on something in your cortex you can give you a small amount of temporary relief). Working with anxiety is about reducing the activation of our amygdala and finding more healthy and helpful ways to reduce amygdala activation rather than using rumination or avoidance of what triggers anxiety.
Let's say you have an activated amygdala, neurons are firing and the symptoms we see fight, flight or freeze are happening. The research shows us that these interventions can have an immediate effect in calming anxiety:
Diaphragmatic breathing
Yoga
Exercise
FMRI results show us that within a matter of minutes, these interventions can reduce the activation to the amygdala faster than taking a Xanax. We also know that if we are engaging in regular exercise or yoga, that when we call on these strategies the amygdala is in a lower level resting state than if we are not using these practises at all. So not only are these practices something that can have an immediate positive effect but if you have these regular practices as part of your routine you are going to have a calmer amygdala in general.
How to Reduce Anxiety
Here are a few practical ways you can work with anxiety.
Reducing muscle tension
muscle relaxation counteracts the sympathetic nervous system SNS (fight/flight/freeze activation) and gives feedback to the amygdala, that’s different from staying in a tense posture. The amygdala is monitoring us and if it’s getting the feedback we are tense, it continues to feel danger is present. So working with muscle relaxation is one way that we can send the amygdala information it understands because again, we can't talk to the amygdala but we can breathe, we can relax our muscles and work with other body-based interventions to tell the amygdala we are safe.
Exercise
There is a plethora of research that shows that after only 20 minutes of exercise a decrease in anxiety can be measured. Exercise makes certain serotonin receptors in the amygdala decrease. It also makes sense that our amygdala wants us to run, so exercise is going to feel like a good thing (again the amygdala isn’t about logic and reasoning). Regular exercise also reduces the general level of the sympathetic nervous system and counteracts the level of activation we typically get.
Schedule worry time during the day
Having a set time of day and time limit can also allow you to get your worries out of the way! You might like to choose a time that works for you and set a timer to worry for 10 minutes each day. Once you are done you can say I already worried during the day!
Get good sleep
Sleep is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. Getting better sleep means a more relaxed amygdala. REM sleep is when we are restocking the shelves of our neurotransmitters. We want to help our brain to get the balance of chemicals right. W need and we can ensure this happens by getting good sleep. If you don't get good REM sleep your amygdala can become more activated and vice versa. If you get more sleep your amygdala is happier. So its a yes for extended and uninterrupted sleep!
Avoid alcohol and caffeine
Alcohol and caffeine will stop you from going into certain stages of sleep. Ideally, avoid prescription sleep drugs, melatonin is ok.
Thoughts before bed are important
We want to replace activating or scary thoughts with relaxing ones. If we think scary thoughts we don’t fall asleep. We need thoughts in our brain that will not scare our amygdala. One effective way to do this is to replace the amygdala activating thoughts with someone else’s words. When someone else is talking to you through a podcast or audiobook it can be hard to think about your own thoughts because words block words. ( note music tends not to work as well as podcasts or books).
Additional supports
Breathing techniques can help you prepare for bed and get you into a sleep routine. If you can't fall asleep for 30 min, do something relaxing but stay in the dark.
Try CBTI For insomnia, google the website for resources.
Exposure and anxiety
Some people have more activated amygdalas than others. Whether this was because you came into the world with a more activated amygdala than the average person or you have experienced more trauma. Regardless of which it’s important to know that there are interventions that can teach the amygdala a new way of responding.
In therapy one way of working with the amygdala is through exposure. Exposure is the way we teach the amygdala new things. This includes how to change the amygdala’s minds about what’s dangerous and what’s positive.
If you want the amygdala to learn something you have to take something that your amygdala thinks of as dangerous and put the amygdala in that situation, so it is in a position to learn something new and have a different, more positive experience. This means we need to expose the amygdala to what it fears. Notice I said your amygdala not you. When we are put your amygdala in the presence of something that the amygdala sees of dangerous we are going to feel anxiety. The amygdala is going to react and we have to lean in towards some of the anxiety to move through it..
The fear for many people is that this is going to take a long time. However your amygdala is pretty smart and it can learn new lessons within a few minutes!
Can you work with anxiety without feeling anxious?
The amygdala makes new connections only when it’s circuitry is activated.
We can’t teach the amygdala or change anxiety without being present to a little anxiety. Working with anxiety means we don’t want to avoid what we are fearful of. Avoidance is a way of robbing your amygdala of it’s opportunity to learn and telling it we should be scared. When we expose our amygdala to what makes it anxious we are getting the amygdala’s attention. When we put it in the presence of things that make it anxious we can start to teach our amygdala that anxiety is not a signal of danger, it’s a signal our amygdala is reacting.
We need the experience anxiety for exposure to be successful and as we start to experience anxiety and stay with our experience, we can begin to feel the anxiety going down! If you can stick with your amygdala through the experience the anxiety will decrease.
In therapy the way we can begin to teach your amygdala looks like:
1. Helping you get comfortable with the sensations of anxiety eg heart rate increase
2. Supporting you to increase your tolerance and providing you with resources
3. Extinguishing the fear response by teaching the amygdala something new
4. Creating a new learning opportunity to examine the negative thoughts and prediction’s
How to Manage Anxiety Related Thoughts?
Working with anxious thoughts is often about learning how to get comfortable with our thoughts and not making them wrong or fearful. When we talk about working with anxious thoughts we are talking about working with the cortex.
The cortex is the thinking and perceiving part of our brain. It processes sensory information to interpret what we see and hear and it attaches meaning and memory to your perception so you can put things into context. It also provides understanding and has the ability to interpret situations. It uses logic and reasoning and helps us in understanding language and planning.
We know that the cortex can create thoughts and images and it can do so in the absence of any evidence of danger. This is important when it comes to anxiety.
An example of how our cortex can influence anxiety might be:
You are sleeping in your bed at night and you hear a scratching on your window and you begin to have these panicked thoughts in your cortex that someone is trying to break into your room.
You can be sitting quietly and you begin to think, my partner is cheating on me, enter all anxious thoughts and worries.
You might send a text friend and not get a reply so you think something has happened to them or that they are rejecting you. Danger signals are getting sent straight to the amygdala.
Our cortex is good at creating situations and the more creative and imaginative we are the better we are at doing it! This is where our imaginations can get the best of us! The truth is, our cortex is constructing reality, it’s not a tape recorder or video that’s recoding what’s actually happening. There’s different ways the cortex can see things that aren’t even there and our cortex can also fill in information based on our fears and prior experiences.
How does the cortex create anxiety?
Well, it cannot create anxiety itself, only the amygdala can create fear and anxiety The cortex ignites it like turning on the ignition in your car, it gets the car started but that isn’t what moves the car.
The way our cortex initiates anxiety is though interpreting situations. It can also anticipate situations that don’t ever happen. When our cortex creates thoughts, our amygdala react’s and says ‘Ok, I’ll go with that, the cortex is saying it so it must be true!’
The amygdala does get information directly from the thalamus as we said and it can create anxiety on its own, however sometimes the cortex adds in more anxiety or it is the source of anxiety due to our thoughts!
When it comes to our thoughts we need to remember that we can literally scare our amygdala with our thoughts.
We want to watch how we are thinking because how we are thinking matters to my amygdala, and we are learning ways to manage that. The cortex has very few ways to turn the amygdala off, and we don’t want our amygdala to be stuck watching the scary thought channel!
The cortex responds to:
Education
Argument
Logic
Experience
Discussion and exploration of ideas that can change the amygdala
Some new thoughts to consider?
How any time do you feel nervous about something and it doesn’t happen?
How many times do you feel nervous about something and its ok?
Anxiety doesn’t mean it’s going to go badly?
Panic attacks and anxiety feel awful, they are a terrible feeling but they not a prediction of danger or failure.
Mindfulness and Anxiety
Increasing mindfulness can help people feel more comfortable with certain thoughts To help the cortex think survival of the busiest. Whatever you use the most in your cortex gets stronger and stronger, if you don’t use it you lose it. So we want to focus on stopping the unhelpful thoughts. The circuitry that’s the most used becomes the circuitry that survives.
You can interrupt and change your thinking process by exercising muscles in your brain that will change the patterns of your thinking. If you learn to interrupt and change your thinking processes you change the cortex.
Pessimism, guilt shame, catastrophizing, perfectionism are all the types of thoughts that activate the amygdala and cause anxiety. These are thoughts that actually make us feel worse. We want to think of these types of thoughts as if someone was passing us a scalding hot potato, what do you do with a hot potato when someone hands you one? You drop it like it’s hot!
Thoughts come into our heads all the time and we want to not be afraid of our thoughts, but we do want to change them by recognising it’s the cortex that is actually interpreting things as a problem, it’s not the actual event or situation we are in itself that is the problem.
We can also change anxious thoughts
‘I can’t handle rejection’ or ‘someone saying no’ can be tested by asking someone out to who will purposefully say no, so we learn how to deal with it, rather than being afraid of it. We don’t need to erase thoughts, but we can replace them. We can begin to get comfortable with our thoughts knowing they are just thoughts!
I hope this article has shown you that there are many ways you can be supported to work with anxiety and that it is possible to begin to teach the amygdala something new and change it’s responses!. You can also read some more about anxiety and understanding it HERE.
Natajsa Wagner is a Clinical psychotherapist providing trauma informed psychotherapy and counselling in Brisbane. Natajsa's approach is deeply human and she works to recognise the wisdom inherent in all human beings. She is a passionate about seeing people as more than their "pathology" and advocates for clinicians look beyond a person's challenges or symptoms and begin to recognise the tremendous courage and resilience of the human spirit to cope with life's experiences.