It is possible to rewire your anxious brain using a variety of techniques and tools from different therapeutic approaches. Many of these approaches. Here are some of those specific tools and techniques:
- Mindfulness:
- Mindfulness is a technique that can help you observe your anxiety without judgment. Instead of trying to control or escape your anxiety, you can use mindfulness to become aware of your thoughts and feelings as they arise, which allows you to create a distance from them.
- Mindful breathing is not a strategy to relax or control anxiety, but it is a defusion strategy that allows you to make contact with experience as it is, without the usual evaluative thoughts.
- Mindfulness can be used to notice the process of thinking, evaluating, feeling, and remembering rather than just the products of these activities.
- By paying attention to the present moment, you are able to observe your anxious thoughts and feelings without getting caught up in them, which can be helpful in creating new neural pathways.
- Meditation, a form of mindfulness, can reduce the tendency to feel fear and can change default brain activity patterns.
- Mindfulness exercises can help clients just notice what is going on inside of them without getting involved with trying to change their experience.
- A daily practice of mindfulness can help to transform anxiety.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT):
- ACT focuses on accepting difficult thoughts and feelings rather than trying to control or eliminate them.
- This approach teaches that anxious thoughts and feelings are not symptoms of anything but facets of human experience.
- ACT encourages you to alter how you respond to your emotional and psychological experiences instead of trying to change the experiences themselves.
- By accepting anxiety, you can create space to live your life according to your values.
- Therapy is framed as an opportunity to learn new ways of responding to anxiety, instead of letting anxiety be an obstacle to doing what you want to do.
- Creative hopelessness exercises can help you experience that your efforts to control anxiety have not worked, motivating you to try new approaches.
- ACT uses defusion techniques to help clients develop a new relationship with their thoughts.
- Neuroplasticity-Based Techniques:
- Self-havening: Self-havening techniques use mindful touch to create space between the reactive and the calm brain. These techniques are designed to change the brain to help manage stress and heal thoughts and beliefs.
- Self-havening involves gently touching your face, arms, and hands, which can help calm the amygdala, the part of the brain that is associated with anxiety.
- Mental Rehearsal: This involves using the brain’s ability to recall sensory memories to create new patterns by repeatedly thinking of positive experiences, which helps build new neural pathways.
- Pendulation: This technique involves shifting your attention between a source of distress and a neutral or comforting sensation, which helps your brain cope with difficult feelings.
- CPR for the Amygdala: This technique can be used to preoccupy working memory to stop the amygdala’s rumination loop. It includes using movement, category or narrative activities, number tasks, and song or word games. It can reinforce your internal locus of control and can be used both in the moment and as a preventative measure.
- Self-havening: Self-havening techniques use mindful touch to create space between the reactive and the calm brain. These techniques are designed to change the brain to help manage stress and heal thoughts and beliefs.
- Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP):
- NLP techniques aim to understand how individuals organise their mental processes and thoughts.
- Reframing is an NLP technique that involves changing how you view a situation, looking for a positive or beneficial perspective instead of just seeing the negative. It is not denial, but an acknowledgement that things may not have gone the way you would have preferred but that you have a choice in how you react.
- Timeline therapy is an NLP technique that works with your subconscious to alter the way you view past memories and learned behaviours, which can help to change anxiety.
- Submodality work helps to change patterns and habits of thought through repetitive action or thought that then becomes a new habit.
- HeartMath Techniques:
- These techniques focus on empowering your emotional restructuring and repatterning so that healthier perceptions, emotions, and attitudes become a more automatic and familiar way of being.
- They can help change the energetics in your subconscious, which can shift your perceptions of anxiety provoking situations.
- Techniques such as the Power of Neutral, Attitude Breathing, Cut-Thru, and Heart Lock-In can help to clear anxiety and help you to transform overcare back into true care.
- Exposure Therapy (within an Acceptance Framework):
- While CBT is not the focus, exposure therapy can be used within an acceptance framework, where it’s about altering your response to emotional and psychological experiences, rather than their structure or content. The goal is to help you experience your feelings fully, without avoidance.
- Exposure involves gradually facing your fears to activate the neural circuitry that holds the emotional memories you want to modify. This can involve experiencing sights, sounds and other stimuli that cause anxiety in order to allow the brain to create new connections.
- By practicing exposure, you can communicate new information to the brain which reduces the influence of anxiety. It can help you establish calmer responses instead of automatically going into a fear response.
- Other techniques:
- Using your breath and movement to train your arousal system.
- Focusing on your values to guide your behaviour instead of your anxiety.
- Externalising your anxiety as something separate from yourself.
- Challenging your demands and editing your thoughts.
- Focusing on your strengths and resources.
Summary To rewire your anxious brain, a variety of techniques can be used which move beyond traditional approaches. . Approaches like mindfulness, ACT, NLP, HeartMath and specific neuroplasticity techniques, all offer different ways of working with the brain to create new, less anxious responses. These techniques include, creating a space between you and your thoughts, accepting difficult feelings, and using touch, movement, and imagery to create new pathways in the brain. By combining a range of these methods, you can begin to create a brain that is more resilient to anxiety.
Tags: Rewire Your Anxious Brain, Mindfulness, ACT, Neuroplasticity, Self-Havening, NLP, Reframing, Exposure Therapy, HeartMath, Emotional Regulation, Anxiety Management, Alternative Therapies