These methods focus on different aspects of the anxiety response, including the amygdala and cortex pathways, and emphasize the brain’s neuroplasticity, its ability to change itself.
Techniques for Calming the Amygdala:
- CPR for the Amygdala: This exercise involves distracting the amygdala to interrupt its rumination loop. It uses brain games such as movement exercises, category or narrative activities, numbers tasks, or songs and word games. For example, you can list ten onomatopoeias or form as many words as you can using the letters in your name. This is not just for calming the nervous system in the moment, but it also has longer-term impacts, reversing the effects of the neurons that trigger the fear response.
- Breathing Exercises: Using breath work as a form of distraction to calm the amygdala. This involves focusing on the breath to help redirect attention away from anxious thoughts and feelings. Controlled breathing, such as slow, deep breaths for 8 to 12 seconds can promote relaxation.
- Self-Havening: This involves using mindful touch, along with breathing, to calm the mind and body, creating a new neurobiological opportunity.
- Pendulation: This tool enhances the ability to be in a healthy relationship with multiple feeling states by shifting attention back and forth between a source of distress and something neutral or comforting. For example, focusing on the neutral feeling of a pinky finger while experiencing a headache.
- Exercise: Engaging in physical activity, especially aerobic exercise, can help reduce muscle tension, lower adrenaline levels, and use up glucose released by the stress response, leading to relaxation.
Techniques for Modifying Cortex-Based Anxiety:
- Identifying Anxiety-Igniting Thoughts: Recognising the specific thoughts and images that trigger anxiety is the first step in modifying them. You can make a list of your most common anxious thoughts.
- Reframing: Reframing techniques involve looking at situations in a more positive light, which can disrupt negative thought patterns. This can be done by using word confusion, play on words, or by considering alternative outcomes. It is not about denying a situation, but choosing to react differently to it.
- Mindfulness: Practicing mindfulness helps you see your anxiety from a distance, observe it without getting caught up in it, and accept it as just an experience. It involves observing your thoughts and feelings without judgment, and focusing on the present moment.
- Defusion: Defusion involves creating distance from your thoughts by recognising them as just thoughts, rather than facts. For example, putting anxious thoughts in quotation marks.
- Coping Thoughts: Substituting anxiety-igniting thoughts with coping thoughts that promote calmness and better coping skills.
- Values Clarification: Therapists can help staff to identify what is most important for them in their lives and work, which may assist them to move towards a more value-consistent life and cope with anxiety. This can involve exploring what would be different if anxiety disappeared and how values would be embodied without anxiety. You can complete exercises where you consider what you would like your days to be like, beyond just “having no anxiety”.
- Mental Rehearsal: Using mental rehearsal and visualisation to strengthen neural freeways, and creating a new pattern of responding. For example, visualising a positive outcome to an anxiety-provoking event.
Additional Rewiring Techniques:
- Setting Relaxation Anchors: Creating an anchor by associating a relaxed state with a specific word or gesture.
- Identifying Triggers: Recognizing the triggers that activate anxiety can help in creating strategies to manage them.
- Exposure Exercises: Gradually exposing oneself to feared situations or objects to reduce the amygdala’s response. It is important to monitor your thoughts and not to increase anxiety unnecessarily during exposure exercises.
- “Name That Story!”: Labeling frequent thought processes as if naming a film can help step out of the process of fusion.
- Journaling: Recording recurrent worry patterns and themes can provide insight and help identify triggers.
- Challenging Thoughts: The sources emphasize the importance of challenging your thoughts by questioning their validity. You can consider where a thought originated, what assumptions it holds, and the impact it has on your life.
- Hypothesis Testing: This involves rating the accuracy of your thoughts and beliefs to see how realistic they are.
- Learning from Setbacks: The sources encourage viewing setbacks as learning opportunities and part of the process of change, which can be approached with mindful acceptance and compassion.
- Working with the Body: Becoming aware of how the body responds to anxiety can serve as an alert to pause, breathe deeply, and use mindfulness.
Rewiring an anxious brain involves using a combination of techniques that target both the amygdala and cortex pathways. These exercises range from calming the amygdala through distraction and relaxation, to modifying cortex-based thoughts through cognitive restructuring, mindfulness, and values clarification. The key to success is understanding the different sources of anxiety and applying the appropriate strategies, while embracing the brain’s capacity for change through consistent practice and effort.