But that’s a lot of information to gather. The primitive part of your brain responsible for collecting information about the molecular shifts in your body is too unsophisticated to say whether a particular change is good or bad, much less what you should do about it. That job belongs to a much more advanced part of your “thinking brain” called the insular cortex (IC). It’s the IC’s job to take all the information from the primitive brain about the various micro-shifts constantly occurring in your body and give that constellation of symptoms (heart rate, body temperature, degree of muscle tension, respiration, chemical shifts, etc.) a label that identifies it as a particular emotion. Having labeled it, the IC then sends messages back down to the primitive brain so it can tell your body how to adjust or what behaviors to enact so that you can function most effectively in any given situation.
I Love Lucy’s Brain
The IC usually does a great job, but when it gets bombarded with too much information too fast, sometimes the process breaks down. There is an old gag that first aired on the classic television program I Love Lucy. Lucy and her friend Ethel are at work in a chocolate factory. Their job is to wrap the chocolates that roll past them on a conveyor belt so that they are ready for packing. The supervisor, fed up with them for having failed at every other job in the plant, tells them that if even one chocolate goes to the packing department unwrapped, Lucy and Ethel will be fired.
It all starts out just fine. The chocolates roll past at a manageable pace, and Lucy and Ethel capably and confidently wrap each piece. Suddenly the conveyor belt starts speeding up. They have to move faster and faster. Pretty soon, they are mortified to discover that they just can’t keep up. In desperation, Lucy and Ethel start shoving chocolates in their mouths, stuffing them down the front of their dresses, hiding them in their chef’s hats, hiding them around the room — anything to prevent the chocolates from getting to the packing department unwrapped and costing them their jobs. The supervisor comes out and, failing to notice that their mouths and uniforms are bursting with candy, sees that the conveyor belt is empty, compliments them on their good work, and yells up the production line, “Speed it up a little!”
Sometimes, especially when people struggle with chronic anxiety, the IC is like Lucy in the chocolate factory. The primitive brain/limbic system is throwing so much information at it so quickly, the IC just can’t wrap each emotion in the correct package. Eventually it gets overwhelmed, labels everything “anxiety” just to get it over with, and goes fishing.
Why does this happen? For some people it’s because they have either lived through prolonged, traumatic events or at least experienced singularly stressful situations that left their nervous systems stressed and overwhelmed. For these folks, their IC gave up a long time ago. As a result, every time they experience almost any heightened emotional state (excitement, stress, anger, anticipation), it feels like anxiety.
Other people may not have experienced particularly traumatic events in life, but they simply have an underdeveloped IC that can’t process information as rapidly as it should. The good news is that, for either of the above groups, brain research shows that the brain is like a muscle. Just like physical exercise builds muscle tissue, creating bigger muscles, different thinking exercises and behaviors create thicker, faster neural connections between different parts of the brain. The process by which we can “beef up” the volume of different structures in the brain is called neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity allows the brain to constantly rewire itself so that it can retain new information and adapt to new environments.
A Body of Fear
The process of reframing that I described at the beginning of this chapter (in the story of my public speaker client) is one simple exercise that helps the IC learn (or, in some cases, relearn) its job of wrapping and packaging emotions correctly. Consciously renaming a particular experience as something else teaches the IC to stop automatically slapping an “anxiety” wrapper on every heightened state that bubbles up from the primitive brain and, instead, be more and more sophisticated and efficient at detecting subtle differences between different heightened states.
It is beyond the scope of this book to help you identify all the different feelings that can masquerade as anxiety or trigger feelings of anxiety. But the most important distinction to make is the one between anxiety and fear. Although people commonly use these two terms interchangeably, from a psychological perspective they are quite different. Fear is the natural, biological, and appropriate response to an imminent threat. Anxiety is when the brain’s natural fear circuits get hijacked by something that isn’t an immediate danger or could even be good for us (for instance, accepting a great new job or standing up for ourselves). In a sense, anxiety is fear’s evil twin.
We develop the capacity for fear early. By eight months in utero, a baby’s fear and protection circuitry is fully developed and ready for action. Throughout life, in the face of a real threat, this circuitry injects chemicals into our brain and bloodstream to ramp up our senses and speed up our reaction time so that we can see all the ways we could respond and, if necessary, escape. When the fear-systems in our brain work properly, they serve a protective function, warning us away from danger and easing off once the threat has passed.
Anxiety hijacks this God-given fear-threat system and causes us either to fear things that could be good for us (e.g., new opportunities, commitment in a healthy relationship), experience disproportionate responses (either in intensity or duration) to actual threats, or suffer feelings of panic when, in fact, no danger exists (e.g., panic attacks).
In short, fear, as unpleasant as it may be, can be a great gift, a servant of our physical, emotional, and spiritual health and well-being. But anxiety represents a threat to our physical, emotional, and spiritual integrity that, left unchecked, can tear our lives apart.
Feeling Burned Out?
People often say they feel “burned out” by their struggles with anxiety, but most are unaware of the deeper truth behind this metaphor. Imagine soaking your hands in bleach for several hours, even days. You would get a chemical burn that left your skin severely raw and irritated. Even brushing up against something afterward might hurt tremendously. In a similar way, the chemicals (glucocorticoids) produced by the brain’s fear response are caustic. When persistently stressful or traumatic events trigger prolonged or too intense exposure to these chemicals, they create something like a chemical burn on your amygdala, the CEO of the fear/protection system. At the very least, this can cause us to feel every stressor more acutely, making it harder to respond in a calm, rational way. If anxiety persists, the amygdala blasts chemicals at another part of the brain called the hippocampus, which stores emotional memories.
If the amygdala is the CEO of your fear/protection system, the hippocampus is the board secretary. While the amygdala is triggered in the presence of a threat, it’s the hippocampus’ job to “take notes” and remember that a particular event was anxiety-producing in the past. The next time you encounter that same event, or even something remotely similar, the hippocampus triggers the amygdala and reminds you that you “should” feel anxious — even if there is no practical immediate threat present. In the face of long-term stress, or an unusually traumatic stressor, the amygdala can blast so many stress chemicals at the hippocampus that it can cause it to shrink (like you might curl up in a ball if someone was yelling at you for a long time). When this happens, we tend to become less emotionally flexible and more easily stuck in unpleasant emotional states. In a sense, as the hippocampus shrinks, the secretary loses the notebooks filled with our happy memories and resourceful ideas and retains only the notebooks filled with frightening, scary, and traumatic experiences. Although this is not a pleasant experience, our brain responds this way to constant or overwhelming stress so that we can always be ready to respond to whatever new threats come our way.
At its best, this partnership between the amygdala and hippocampus enables us to anticipate and head off potential problems. At worst, it causes us to develop an anxiety disorder in which an undercurrent of constant worry or even bursts of terror intrude upon every aspect of our lives.
The takeaway