The Fascinating Human Brain- Part 5: Anxiety

Anxiety, in contrast to fear, is a vague, diffuse feeling of worry or apprehension. (Fear, in that sense, is much more manageable than anxiety, because it is specific, and thus something you can directly address.)

Intermittent anxiety is normal and adaptive. For example, if you tell a lie and worry about covering it up, then hopefully you will feel the anxiety and not do it again. But an ONGOING state of anxiety is toxic to your body.

When you are anxious, your brain goes into a hyper alert state. This produces the stress hormones, especially cortisol, that I talked about earlier. The effect of these chemicals causes the roughening of the walls of your arteries, which causes excess stuff to STICK to them. Thus, there is a HIGH correlation between anxiety and coronary artery disease.

The amygdala, as I shared before, is that part of your brain that is responsible for your fight/flight response. If your amygdada isn't calmed, then your hippocampus starts to shrink, which in turn makes your amygdala less and less controllable. It becomes a downward spiral.

Last time I mentioned with depression that certain anti-depression meds help preserve and heal the hippocampus. The hippocampus CAN and WILL rebuild, if it's not under high levels of stress, but it takes time.

As a counselor with a highly anxious client, helping involves much more than just calming them. Highly anxious people usually have a deeply engrained way of dealing with stressful things in their life that they need your help to see. But oftentimes, a person cannot begin to be reflective until you help them develop physical ways of calming themselves. But see how necessary it is to understand the neurology of that, if you are going to help them?