How to retrain your anxious brain

To retrain an anxious brain, it’s important to understand that anxiety is a complex response involving different parts of the brain, especially the amygdala and the cortex. The amygdala is responsible for the fight, flight, or freeze response, while the cortex handles thoughts, logic, and planning. Retraining your brain involves using the principle of neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change its structure and responses. This means you can create new neural pathways and weaken old, anxiety-inducing ones.

Here’s a detailed approach on how to retrain your anxious brain, without using Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:

• Understanding the Brain’s Role: Recognise that anxiety is created by the brain. It’s not a sign of weakness or a personal failing. Understanding the roles of the amygdala and cortex can help you target your efforts.
• Identifying Triggers: The first step is identifying what triggers your anxiety. This means being aware of situations and events that cause you to feel anxious. This is essential for rewiring the amygdala and the cortex.
  • Pay attention to your thoughts, images and bodily sensations.
  • Note how you respond to your anxiety and how well that works.
  • Recognise that triggers may be associated with emotional memories.
  • Anxiety responses can be identified by how they affect your daily life, the amount of distress they cause, and how often they occur.
• Mindfulness and Acceptance: Practice mindfulness to become more aware of your thoughts and feelings without judgment. Mindfulness is a way to observe your anxiety rather than try to control or escape it.
  • Remember that you cannot choose what comes into your mind, but you can choose what you pay attention to.
  • Bring compassion and kindness to your private experiences, by not arguing or struggling with them.
  • Be open to whatever you are feeling, instead of avoiding it.
  • Use mindfulness to get outside the anxiety, seeing it as an experience you are having.
  • Use your cortex to look at your anxiety from a distance, instead of being trapped by it.
  • Mindfulness is a skill that requires practice.
  • Try to be mindful of how your breathing, your heart, and your thoughts are affected by your anxiety.
  • Do not use mindfulness to control or fix your anxiety, as this is a step back to old, unworkable patterns of behaviour.
  • Approach your anxious thoughts with a beginner’s mindset, being open to the fact that there may be other possibilities.
  • Use mindfulness as the opposite of avoidance.
• Relaxation Techniques: Regularly practice relaxation techniques to help calm your nervous system.
  • Deep breathing activates the body’s natural relaxation response and switches off the stress response.
  • When you relax, your emotional mind hands control back to your intellectual mind.
  • Hypnotherapy is another way to relax and enter a solution-creating mode.
  • Guided relaxation is another option that you could use.
• Psychosensory Techniques: Use touch to promote calm and healing in the brain.
  • Havening: Use gentle touch, such as stroking your face, arms, or hands, to release calming delta waves in the brain. This can help to depotentiate traumatic memories.
• Heart-Centred Breathing is another psychosensory technique that can help to calm you.
• Clenching your left fist for 30 seconds can also promote a feeling of calm.
• Passing a ball from hand to hand or spinning anxiety away can also provide a means to calm the mind.
• Rewiring the Amygdala: The amygdala learns through experience.
  • Exposure Therapy: Gradually expose yourself to anxiety-provoking situations to teach your amygdala that these situations are not dangerous.
    • Create a hierarchy of feared situations, starting with the least anxiety-provoking and gradually working your way up to more difficult situations.
    • During exposure, stay in the situation until your anxiety diminishes, rather than fleeing from it.
    • Remember, you need to activate your amygdala to rewire it.
  • Mental Rehearsal: Use rehearsal to create a new pattern of thought and behaviour.
• Managing Cortex-Based Anxiety:
  • Challenge Negative Thoughts: When anxious, your cortex may produce negative thoughts, images and interpretations. Learn to recognise when the cortex is producing these anxiety-inducing thoughts.
    • Replace anxiety-provoking thoughts with more adaptive and positive ones.
    • Be skeptical of anxiety-igniting thoughts.
    • Do not argue with negative thoughts, as this tends to keep the focus on them, and maintain the neural circuitry that creates them.
    • Instead of trying to erase negative thoughts, replace them with positive thoughts.
    • When you have an anxious thought like, “I can’t handle this,” replace it with, “This isn’t easy, but I will get through it”.
  • Shift Your Focus: Learn to shift your attention and focus away from negative thought patterns.
    • The cortex may focus on worries and rumination, learn to shift your focus to other thoughts.
  • Left Brain Engagement: Engage in activities that activate your left brain, such as reading, games, exercise, and meditation.
  • Conscious Questioning: When feeling anxious, ask yourself a series of questions to channel your anxiety intentionally, such as “What are my strengths and resources?”.
• Clean Language: Use clean language to challenge your thoughts.
• Communication Model: Use a communication model to challenge your thoughts.
• Self-Compassion: Treat yourself with the same kindness and understanding you would offer a friend.
  • Beating yourself up for being anxious will make things worse.
  • Learn to soothe your anxious self with empathy and acceptance.
  • If you are having a hard time with anxiety, ask yourself if you are telling yourself something that is scaring your emotional brain.
  • When talking to yourself, use language that soothes rather than alarms.
• Solution-Focused Approach: Instead of trying to understand why you feel anxious, focus on what you would like to achieve and how you can move towards that goal. Ask, “How can I comfort myself?” or “How will I celebrate my victory over anxiety?”. Focus on making changes and addressing causes of anxiety later, if necessary.
• Values-Based Actions: Identify your values, and then commit to acting in line with them, even when you are anxious. This can help you move towards a meaningful life, despite feelings of anxiety.
• Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP): Use NLP to reprogram your mind and responses towards different situations.
  • Stop fighting your anxiety and allow it to exist, but teach yourself to not add more stress.
  • Identify anxiety triggers to begin to address the root cause.
  • Reframe your anxiety triggers, to see anxiety as a powerful skill that shows how fast your mind can adapt.
  • View anxiety as an accomplishment that you have learned by repetition.
  • Use timelines to see the potential of the future, but distance yourself from the emotions.
• Lifestyle Changes:
  • Sleep: Get sufficient sleep to reduce emotional arousal.
  • Exercise: Engage in regular physical activity to help regulate the stress response.
  • Positive Thinking: Practise positive thinking to balance the white and grey matter in your brain.
• Breaking Bad Habits:
  • Identify Habit Loops: Recognise that anxiety can be a habit loop. Map out your anxiety habit loops by identifying the triggers, behaviour, and result.
  • Don’t Use Willpower Alone: Recognise that willpower alone isn’t always effective in changing habits because your old brain will take over when you are stressed.
  • Focus on Rewards: Identify what you get from your anxiety behaviours and why other strategies haven’t worked in the past.
  • Find Rewarding Behaviours: Replace your anxiety behaviours with rewarding ones.
• The Importance of Action: Understand that action will help you move forward, rather than avoiding the situation.
• Engage in activities that make you anxious, but do not react. Surrender and do nothing. You will teach your brain that it has been wrong about every one of those threats.
• You must practice not doing the things that fuel your anxiety disorder, such as googling symptoms.
• When you focus your attention away from the fear, your brain will learn to put its focus where you want it, not where your mistaken brain craves it.
• Be Patient: Changing thought patterns takes time and consistency.
  • Do not get discouraged if change doesn’t happen immediately.
  • Remember that you have been practicing anxiety for a long time and it may take a while to practice new patterns of thinking.
• Focus
  • Learn the basics of meditation, which is all about focus, usually on the breath.
  • Let thoughts come and go without judgment, without engaging with them or building a story around them.
• Avoid Over-Information: Limit the amount of information you consume regarding anxiety.

By consistently applying these strategies, you can change your brain’s responses to anxiety and develop healthier thought patterns and emotional reactions. The key is to be patient, persistent, and kind to yourself throughout the process.