How many perceived threats and pressures do you encourage on a daily basis that set the stage for your brain’s false fear messages?
Some Common Family and Societal Pressures Many of Us Perpetuate
✻Need for great friends and acceptance by peers
✻Need for clarity of direction and purpose in life (education, career pursuit, etc.)
✻Having a “good” body
✻Loving yourself or having a good self-esteem
✻Wearing fashionable clothing
✻Advancement in career, plus respect of boss and coworkers
✻Need to maintain a youthful appearance
✻Finding the “right” romantic partner to avoid being “alone”
✻Marriage by a certain age
✻Earning a bigger income
✻Driving a status-oriented car
✻Keeping up with the Joneses
With approximately 275 million people around the globe struggling with an anxiety disorder,1 it seems like few places on Earth are immune to anxiety.
US statistics suggest that one in thirteen people struggle with anxiety.2 In addition to the common genetic predisposition described in chapter 2, the most likely reason for anxiety is the influence of our society’s expectations, pressures, and desires.
That said, ultimately we as individuals are responsible for pulling our brain’s anxiety trigger, not any societal pressure. And by accepting responsibility for your anxiety’s creation, you can also empower yourself with the accountability to extinguish it. I know it’s a drag for most of us to hold ourselves accountable for our mental health, but if we want to be healthy, properly functioning adults living a life of freedom, it’s the way there.
We’ll discuss how to put out your anxiety fire by outsmarting your brain’s false fear messages soon. For now, it’s important for you to understand that you’re unintentionally encouraging your brain’s transmittal of these messages, setting yourself up to stimulate trouble with a capital A (for anxiety, that is).
Your No-Nonsense Brain/Anxiety Breakdown
Neurologically speaking, the creation of anxiety is challenging to pinpoint. In the scientific community, neurobiological researchers, such as Dr. Martin, Dr. Ressler, Dr. Binder, and Dr. Nemeroff, attribute the basis of this anxiety complex to the involvement of neurotransmitters and neuroanatomy, along with their strong link to circuits in the limbic system, brain stem, and higher cortical brain areas.3 Still, even with anxiety’s sophisticated neurological nature, there is a widely accepted, straightforward view. For the sake of clarity (and also because you’ve probably got a lot on your mind!), we’ll consider the brain/anxiety breakdown from this straightforward view, too. Here we go…
The first step toward the manifestation of anxiety begins when any thought or event occurs and we misinterpret it as a threat. This triggers the limbic system of our brain, where most of our feelings are molded. I suppose that’s why it’s known as the hub of emotion. The parts of this hub most associated with anxiety are the amygdala and the hypothalamus.
The amygdala’s role is to process stimuli and respond with emotion.4 In fact, Dr. Richter-Levin and Dr. Akirav have confirmed that the amygdala is the most specifically engaged brain structure both in emotional responses and in the development of emotional memories.5 More specifically with regard to anxiety, Dr. Martin and her colleagues found that the amygdala formulates fear while establishing fear-based memories. Whether interpreted correctly or not, when the amygdala grasps danger, it sends a warning to the hypothalamus.6 The hypothalamus then notifies the sympathetic nervous system.7 Pretty heady stuff!
The sympathetic nervous system revs your body up like a biker at a Hell’s Angels’ mixer, sparking the adrenal gland, which produces the adrenaline response! That’s what you feel when you’re feeling anxious, though lots of activity behind the scenes is in effect.
The adrenaline response creates a host of systemic actions, such as increased energy, maximized concentration, improved reflexes, a quickened heart beat to propel more blood to the muscles to make you stronger, focused vision, and more. This process helps us when we need to protect ourselves from a legit danger. However—and this should not be a shocker at this point—this brain process can hurt us when we misinterpret danger. This misinterpretation sets our brains into anxiety mode by attaching fear-based thoughts, beliefs, and stories to safe or neutral things, and that encourages the adrenaline response. And the brain, having learned this fallacious lesson of danger, repeatedly encourages the adrenaline response when confronted by those particular “dangerous” stimuli. And what would you say this means the brain is now providing? That’s right, boys and girls—an ongoing pattern of false fear messages!
But the adrenal gland isn’t only activated in the face of perceived danger. Remember, the amygdala is the brain’s emotional reaction center. It processes other intense emotions,8 including excitement and uncertainty. Working together with the amygdala, the hypothalamus responds to these emotions as it would to anxiety, by engaging the sympathetic nervous system to prepare the body for effort.9 This can account for adrenaline without fear. Unfortunately, when the adrenaline response is triggered by excitement or uncertainty, people with a genetic neurological predisposition to anxiety often misinterpret it as…anxiety. Again, it is this misinterpretation that establishes triggers for anxiety along with the subsequent beliefs attached to the experience.
So the differences between excitement-based adrenaline, uncertainty-based adrenaline, and fear-based adrenaline are not necessarily physiological, but psychological. They are perspective-driven. Adrenaline is adrenaline! In other words, the differences are not in the adrenaline itself, but are predicated on how one perceives their adrenaline response in a specific situation. For example, if you were about to skydive out of an airplane for the first time, you might feel terrified. For an experienced skydiver on their fiftieth jump, the feeling could be described by any word synonymous with “wee!” or “yahoo!” Same adrenaline, differently labeled.
In any given moment, if you misinterpret excitement or uncertainty-based adrenaline as fear, you will be anxious. As such, you will then most likely label the context in which you experienced this adrenaline as dangerous and continue to be afraid. For example, Iris often felt anxious arriving at parties, though it wasn’t due to a social phobia. The truth is, she didn’t know why she suffered such party dread. With treatment, Iris soon accepted that parties can be fraught with uncertainty over who you might meet or whether you’ll enjoy yourself as the evening progresses. She had been misinterpreting her uncertainty-based adrenaline as a threat, which sent her off to the anxiety races! The more she misinterpreted this threat, the more intimidating parties became. And the more she fought “party anxiety,” the more she taught her brain to protect her from “dangerous parties” with an even bigger adrenaline wave. By adding additional scary false beliefs to this process, like “I can’t take the noise and chaos at parties,” she created a monster of a party phobia!
For the most part, your misinterpretation of danger is the fuel for anxiety. Following consistent, specific misinterpretations of danger, the brain is the engine that drives that struggle deeper, until one walks the right path to undo the cycle created by anxiety. These misinterpretations are generally synonymous with false beliefs. We’ll discuss the importance of changing our false beliefs, along with strategies on how to do so, in detail in a later chapter.
For now, understanding your brain’s role in anxiety is a big step toward making your anxiety getaway! In fact, this understanding fast tracks you to the key strategy on outsmarting your brain’s false fear messages to make that very getaway. This strategy is called “exposure.”
Read on!
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