Rewire Your Anxious Brain summary

Neurons that fire together, wire together. This means that when anxiety is triggered by a certain event or object, those neural pathways forge in the brain and strengthen over time. If you want to reduce amygdala-based anxiety, then you have to change the activation patterns.

But emotional memories created by the amygdala are difficult to access consciously. And they can’t be erased. Instead, you have to form new associations that compete with the old ones. You do this by exposing the amygdala to your anxiety triggers.

The cortex is the wrinkled, outer layer of the brain – what we often picture when we imagine the organ. It's the thinking and perceiving part that helps you interpret situations and anticipate future events. And it operates in a very different way from the amygdala. 

Remember that the amygdala initiates physiological responses and creates emotional memories. Anxiety produced there is directly experienced and isn’t consciously controlled. The cortex, on the other hand, operates in thoughts, images, and language. 

Jenny is a high school senior. One day, an envelope arrives from the college she applied to. She starts to imagine it contains a rejection letter and can’t bring herself to open it. Over the next few days, the letter sits on her desk – and Jenny starts to worry about her future. But when she finally opens the envelope, she realizes it’s not a rejection. They’re offering her admission.

It’s often the case that the things we anticipate are much worse than the actual situation. There’s a danger in getting so caught up in our thoughts that we start to mix them up with the facts – just like Jenny did with her college acceptance letter. Scientists call this cognitive fusion, where we take thoughts and feelings as absolute truth and confuse them with reality.

Reducing anxiety requires different approaches and strategies, depending where in the brain it is produced. Anxiety originating in the amygdala is experienced directly in the body, activating your fight, flight, and freeze responses. It is beyond the reach of conscious control or reasoning. The most effective strategies for this anxiety involve calming the amygdala through slow breathing, relaxing tense muscles, meditation, and exercise. Rewiring this amygdala pathway requires exposing yourself to the trigger repeatedly, and applying these relaxation techniques while in the grip of anxiety. This way, your amygdala can learn that you’re safe and form new emotional memories.

The cortex, on the other hand, produces worrying thoughts, negative interpretations, and alarming images that can also activate the amygdala’s anxiety response. It is the conscious mind stuck in rumination, trying to anticipate future events or prepare for the worst. To reduce this type of anxiety, you must learn to change your thought patterns through mindfulness, distraction, and play – and replace anxious thoughts with something productive and positive, like coping thoughts.