The brain is, simply put, plumbing. It consists of an incredible number of pipework systems which are pruned away and added to in order to store or render
obsolete memories, behaviors and learning. The physical size of our heads means that physical neural pathways of learning cannot be infinite so the brain makes a decision which to keep and which to erase. We are the products of our environments and every second we are alive causes constant and infinite changes to occur in our minds.
Neural pathways are built and pruned as our life experiences grow.Subconscious decisions are made whether to retain or discard learning… we don't even have to become involved consciously with this decision making process, it all happens outside of our consciousness, deep within our brains.
We presume that we are totally in control with every aspect of our lives and bodies, but, the truth is that we are not. Sure, we can decide what we do and where we go, but we are never in command of what happens 'behind the scenes' in the subconscious mind… or are we?
Your anxiety disorder has been caused by an initial catalyst which provided you with a 'fight or flight' response and this was consciously evident… you may remember it. Once you made the conscious connection between this anxious reaction and your perception of fear and danger… from this point on, your subconscious mind started doing all the decision making for you. Your subconscious mind decided to rewire your brain to create a connection between your high anxiety and your perception of that behavior and once you
reacted with fear of the fear, neural pathways began 'knitting' new behaviors into your subconscious mind… autonomic behaviors of fear.This behavior is called Operant Conditioning, a process discovered and studied by Burrhus Frederic Skinner.
Skinner was an American psychologist who pioneered research and advocated behaviorism, which concentrates on understanding how behavior is the manifestation of environmental history with regard to the experience of consequences. In a nutshell, Skinner showed how carrying out certain behaviors followed by a reinforcing stimuli would 'etch' that behavior into the mind as neural pathways of memory and habit are constructed.
We all learn by repetition. Look back to when you learned to drive, read, write, play the piano etc. You did so by creating a constant process of learning. Had you received a driving lesson once every six months, your brain would have made the decision soon after lesson 1 that, because you hadn’t repeated the ‘driving habit’, it wasn’t behavior you needed to retain, so it would ‘prune’ those neural pathways of learning. The next time you had a
lesson, you would need to ‘re-learn’ those behaviors again.
You learn to drive by having a lesson and practicing with short intervals in between, which send a clear message to your subconscious mind – “This is learning you need to retain because it is something I am going to be doing regularly, so it must be important”.
Now think about how, through the cycle of fear you experience, you have PRACTICED being anxious! But, there is a slight difference.The emotion of fear, anxiety, is adaptable.
What do I mean by this?
As we move through life, from one environment to another, we move between safe and not so safe environments. One minute we could be curled up in bed,
the next in war torn Afghanistan. Our anxiety levels adjust to be ‘appropriate’ in each location and when we move from a threatening place back to a none-threatening place our anxiety levels SHOULD drop. But when you develop an anxiety condition, the level doesn’t drop because instead of your mind reading your environment and finding a threat, it reads your anxiety symptoms… your fear is perpetuated by the symptoms of your fear.
Can this be stopped?
Oh yes and quickly!!!
What is the Amygdala and what does it have to do with YOUR anxiety?
The Amygdalae are actually a pair of organs in the brain. They perform an
integral role in the production, processing and storage of emotional reactions.
I liken the Amygdala to the body's anxiety thermostat. Thermostats typically
control temperature, but the Amygdalae, (they are actually a pair of organs)
regulate anxiety emotion in humans. When confronted with something which
could represent a danger, the sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin) send nerve impulses to the Amygdalae in order to have it make a split second decision as to whether the anxiety reaction, often called the 'fight or flight response' would be appropriate. It is like a ‘risk assessment of your environment.
Once the decision is made to react with anxiety, a surge of adrenalin causes a raft of physiological changes within the body and mind, which prepares us for either fighting or fleeing from the danger present. As I explained previously, in humans, the amygdalae perform primary roles in the formation and storage of memories associated with emotional events.
Research indicates that, during fear conditioning, sensory stimuli reach the
amygdalae, where they form associations with memories of the stimuli. The
association between the anxious catalyst and the anxiety reaction causes the
memory to become fixed in the brain. Experiments have shown that administration of stress hormones to mice immediately after they learn something enhances their retention of that behavior when they are tested two days later. This means that if you experience an event and react with anxiety, that connection becomes ingrained into the mind much more effectively…
this is what causes an anxiety disorder.
The amygdalae, especially the basolateral nuclei, are involved in mediating
the effects of emotional arousal on the strength of the memory for the event,
as shown by many laboratories including that of James McGaugh. James L. McGaugh, Ph.D., is an American neurobiologist working in the field of learning and memory. He is currently a professor at the University of
California, Irvine. McGaugh’s laboratories have trained animals on a variety of learning tasks and found that drugs injected into the amygdala after training affect the animals' subsequent retention of the task. These tasks include basic classical conditioning tasks such as inhibitory avoidance, where a rat learns to associate a mild foot-shock with a particular compartment of an apparatus, and more complex tasks such as spatial or cued water maze, where a rat learns to swim to a platform to escape the water.
If a drug that activates the amygdalae is injected into the amygdalae, the
animals had better memory for the training in the task. If a drug that deactivates the amygdalae is injected, the animals had impaired memory for
the task. So, now you will understand that the Amygdalae play a vital role in the
formation and perpetuation of anxiety conditions. That being the case, we can say that by changing the reaction of the Amygdalae in anxiety disorder, we can eliminate the inappropriate anxious reaction.
The Amygdalae only respond to sensory input, which means that any cure
MUST, without question, de-program the anxious response in the Amygdalae
and replace it with a more appropriate response by reprogramming that
response through behavior. So reversing the process, which causes the formation of an anxiety disorder in the Amygdalae, will also render obsolete and destroy the stored, anxious response. It will CURE YOU!
But how can this be done effectively?
How?
In the EXACT same way that your anxiety condition was 'learned' in the first
place. Through a constantly executed group of simple rules, the sensory organs can be manipulated to send messages to the Amygdalae, which remove the
anxious reaction completely. Which FORCE the amygdalae to ‘believe’ that you are safe. This causes the amygdalae to ‘turn down’ your anxiety level to ‘normal’. Fast!
