The Anxiety Hijack - What You Need to Know About Your Brain to Stop the Cycle

Hello All,

I'd like to talk a little bit about what is happening in your brain when you feel anxious. If you can understand what is happening at a 'cerebral' level, then you might benefit from the relaxation techniques I will cover in later posts. 

The term 'amygdala hijack' was coined by Daniel Coleman in 1996 to describe what is happening to someone in the midst of an anxiety attack. Basically, the amygdala is a part of the brain that is tasked to activate our emotions. It responds to external stimuli and then activates what is called the 'HPA axis' which is expanded to 'hypothalmus-pituitary-adrenal'. I won't go into depth about the HPA axis, but it is the body’s system designed to get us 'jazzed-up' in case we have to fight or flee from a perceived danger. The problem with the amygdala is that it gets turned on a split second before our frontal cortex, which is the part of our brain that is associated with reason and critical thinking. It is because of this that we get hijacked and stuck ruminating on the same thing over and over, sometimes feeling that it is hopeless to try and overcome it. (Obviously, this is a simplification of the neurological functioning associated with anxiety, but it will suffice for my purposes in this article.)

The Hijack 

Ever notice that sometimes you know that what you're scared of is silly but you can't seem to will away the feeling that it isn't? Well this is likely due to the amygdala being activated before the frontal cortex and thus 'hijacking' our rationale and ability to reason out of situationally inappropriate anxiety. When it is activated, it seems as though nothing can talk a person out of the emotion they are experiencing. This is why we must learn to re-train the brain to react less acutely to external stimuli and to lessen the severity of the anxiety hijack. The brain wants to protect you, and this is a good thing, but out of place and in high severity it becomes a problem. So what can you do?

Going Against the Grain 

It seems as though doing anything when the amygdala is activated is impossible. Focus on the word 'seems'. This is because this is untrue. You can do everything you could without the panic button pushed; it’s just that your perception is a tad off. So what can you do to turn it off and allow your rational brain to take over? Well, what you must understand is that the amygdala responds to stress. If it perceives stress, it activates. The more stress, the more it activates. While this happens, the frontal cortex is overridden and you get 'hijacked' and stuck, living in your emotions and ruminating on the same scary thoughts without ability to reason out of it. So this is where you go against the grain. The anxious person often scours the internet to validate their anxiety or tries to find some way to 'prove' that their fear is untrue or to buy some relief from the anxiety. By doing this, the person actually perpetuates the pattern and continues to activate the amygdala and falls further into the trap. Instead of focusing on the anxiety and being afraid of more anxiety, you have to accept it and allow it to run its course without tightening the noose. This is one of the most difficult things for an anxious mind to do because anxiety is such a strong and painful emotion that the person experiencing it wants to figure out a way to make it go away.  But it is precisely this impulse to 'make it go away' that actually perpetuates the cycle. You must learn to let go. 

The Buddhist Ideal 

Going against the grain means to then accept your feelings and fears and to just allow them to 'be' present. This concept is embedded in what Western psychologists (or positive psychologists) are now calling 'mindfulness meditation'. The concept actually originated in Buddhist practice a couple thousand years ago and is an adaptation from the 'noble eightfold path' and an amalgam of various other Buddhist philosophies. 

The idea with mindfulness is to notice the anxiety but do not react positively or negatively to it. Just look at your feelings and body sensations as an onlooker and without any judgement or prejudice. This is a tricky skill to master, but you can do it and the more you practice, the more your brain will re-train itself to react less to the amygdala. By not judging or reacting to your emotions, you will experience less distress and thus diminish the severity of the 'hijack' on your frontal cortex and less rumination and thus - less anxiety. This skill can also be applied to the thoughts and your inner monologue. Often times we say all kinds of things in our inner talk that set off the 'amygdala hijack'. This is where meditation is superbly successful. By accessing our inner thoughts momentarily and letting them pass through us without judging them positively or negatively, we then shut down the hijack and thus feel less anxiety. 

Things to remember and to practice:

·      When you feel anxious, stop and immediately say to yourself, "this is an amygdala hijack - I'm reacting to my emotions and I need to shut off this reaction." But you must do this without fighting it, you do this by accepting the intense emotion and just observing it. 

·      Breathe slowly and deeply inhaling to the counting to 5 or 6, then holding for 3 and then releasing for 10. This will help calm down the body sensations and to keep you focused on the present.

·      Do not react to your anxiety. Do not do anything to try to escape from it. Keep doing what you're doing (so long as you don't have a full blown panic attack and risk fainting, then find a safe place to sit down.) This means: no surfing the internet to find a cause for your anxiety or solution. Doing this will aggravate the issue. 

·      While you're 'riding out' your amygdala hijack, just be compassionate and honest with yourself and realize that by fighting this awful emotion that you are actually making it stronger. Just let it be. 

·      To improve on these steps, you should incorporate a daily mindfulness practice and learn to be 'mindful'. I will be discussing this in future posts and what you can expect from this and how you know if you're meditating properly. 

All the best,

P. Allen B.A. M.A. 

Effective Steps to Reducing Anxiety: Part I - Cognitive Distortions

Hello All,

Today I would like to chat about anxiety. In this chat, I would like to address the following questions: What is anxiety and how does it come to be? And, to begin addressing the core question in this blog series, ask: What can we do to effectively reduce anxiety? 

Most people who experience anxiety claim that they feel afraid or fearful of some eventuality. Often times, they do not even know what this eventuality is, where it came from or how to describe it. It just 'feels' like something is wrong. In other cases, people know exactly what is at the root of their anxiety and can articulate the central issue very well, yet they struggle with how to disengage the thoughts and feelings. They get 'mindlocked.' 

The world of psychiatry and psychology have compartmentalized and labelled the various types of anxiety (i.e., post-traumatic stress, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, panic disorder) with the objective of helping to reduce it under a medical paradigm. 'If we can diagnose it, we know how to treat it.' While this kind of thinking is beneficial to the medical world, its benefit remains questionable to the anxiety sufferer. I believe that it really does not help to solve the issue by labelling it. The fact remains - it is all anxiety and should be thought of as a normal human reaction to various external stimuli. Furthermore, anxiety is something that every human can experience; it's just that some people have more or less of it. But I must also be careful and state that the different kinds of anxiety and causes differ and thus require different kinds of thought or cognitive interventions. This is where delineating types or labelling anxiety is useful. It is not useful to 'wear' a diagnosis, but it may be useful to understand the cause or reason for the anxiety so that we can correct it. Therefore, this blog post is intended only to address anxiety as an emotion inherent to all of us and to provide a beginning insight into how to reduce it in a general sense. 

What is Anxiety? 

To garner a better understanding of anxiety we must think about why we have anxiety in the first place. In situations where humans were attacked or threatened by other animals during the evolutionary process, our bodies responded by creating a nervous system that enabled us to respond to outside stressors; this is called 'the fight or flight response' - or by the medical world our 'sympathetic nervous system.' What this system does is interprets our external situation and decides if it is dangerous or no and when to react. If our central nervous system is activated, we feel jittery, nervous, scared, and sweaty, our heart rate increase and we might feel dizzy, amongst other uncomfortable sensations. In the extreme, we have what are called 'panic attacks,' where these feelings are extremely intense and incredibly frightening.

While outside stressors are largely what our fight-flight response was designed for, humans also have the ability to think and to reason. Sometimes we create stressors in our minds that can activate this nervous system response; specifically, we 'live in our heads.' These stressors could be completely different stressors than what our fight-or-flight response was designed to protect us from  (i.e., job stress, financial stress, bullying, or marital stress).  What often happens is that we ruminate on these stressors and cause the anxiety response to activate. Oftentimes, it is also very difficult to 'let go' of these internal stressors.  We often feed the stressors causing them to grow within us, resulting in further and more intense anxiety. 

Where Does Anxiety Happen? 

What is common to all anxiety is that it happens in the future; that is, unless you're being attacked by someone or something or encountering a dangerous situation. The majority of anxiety is actually conjured by our minds as a reaction to something that may or may not happen in the future. This is how anxiety differs from fear. With fear, we are in direct contact with something that is causing us to be fearful, whereas with anxiety we are fearful of something that we have created in our minds. If you have anxiety right now as you're reading this post - look around the room - is there anything in your immediate vicinity that would or should cause anxiety?  - Probably not. Therefore, if you feel anxiety, yet there is nothing in your immediate situation that is the cause of anxiety. The cause of your anxiety then must reside in your mind. 

STEP I: The First Step to Reduce Anxiety

To begin to understand how we get caught up in anxious thought patterns, it helps to see where we're going wrong. Also, please realize that there is no 'cure' for anxiety and that if someone tells you there exists a cure, they're not acting in your best interests. If anxiety could be cured, we wouldn't be able to react to avoiding car accidents, or protect our children from danger. Anxiety is a normal and necessary human emotion and 'curing' it is not really what we want to do. What we want to do is to reduce it to proportions that are manageable and in sync with our daily moment-to-moment situations. 

Following is a list of though distortions thought to feed anxiety.  While you read them, I would like you to reflect and write down examples of where you are 'guilty' of the distortion and what thought you have that contributes to this distortion. 

Cognitive/thought distortions that feed anxiety: 

• Catastrophizing: taking an event you are concerned about and blowing it out of proportion to the point of becoming fearful. Example: Being reprimanded by your boss over a minor thing and then ruminating afterwards that you will be fired, lose your home and family. 

• Arbitrary Inference: making a judgment with no supporting information. Example: Coming to a conclusion that someone dislikes you without any supporting evidence. 

• Personalization: when a person attributes an external event to himself when there is actually no causal relationship. Example:  A person glares at you on the bus. You decide that person hates you. I often notice this with people who have 'road rage.' When someone cuts them off in traffic, they immediately come to the conclusion that this person did this to spite them instead of considering the notion that the person likely did this without any motive or intention to harm you. 

• Selective Abstraction: when a person makes a judgment based on some information but disregards other information. Example: A person says something negative to you at a party that is of very little influence or interest to others. You stay at the party and have hours of fun and laughter, but then after the party you chose to focus on this minor negative occurrence as the defining event of the party. 

• Overgeneralization: making a board rule based on a few limited occurrences. Example: That because one plane crashed, the plane you will be riding on will surely crash.

• Dichotomous Thinking (black and white thinking): categorizing things into one of two extremes. Example: This kind of thinking usually begins with words like, 'every time' or 'always.' For instance, because one person was rude to me, people will always be rude to me. 

• Labelling: attaching a label to yourself after a negative experience.  Example: Because I have an anxiety disorder, I have a mental illness; Because I felt awkward in a social situation, I am an awkward person. 

(List Extracted from: http://gad.about.com/od/treatment/a/cognitivedist.htm) 

So? How did you do? Did you come up with an example for each type of thought distortion? If not, that's wonderful. If you did - that's great also! This means you are learning about yourself and ways to change how you think in order to reduce your anxiety. Remember, if you know what the problem is and its nature, you will have a good chance at understanding it and defeating it. 

This concludes this first post on a series that I will be writing on anxiety reduction. If you have any questions or comments, please contact bioethicsconsulting@gmail.com

P. Allen B.A M.A.

---

Hello All,

Today I would like to chat about anxiety. In this chat I would like to address the following questions: What is anxiety and how does it come to be? And to begin addressing the core question in this blog series: What can we do to effectively reduce anxiety? 

Most people who experience anxiety claim that they feel afraid or fearful of some eventuality. Often times, they do not even know what this eventuality is, where it came from or how to describe it. It just 'feels' like something is wrong. In other cases, people know exactly what is at the root of anxiety and can articulate the central issue very well, yet they struggle with how to disengage the thoughts and feelings. They get 'mindlocked'. 

The world of psychiatry and psychology have compartmentalized and labelled the various types of anxiety, (i.e. post-traumatic stress, generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, social anxiety, panic disorder) with the objective of helping to reduce it under a medical paradigm. 'If we can diagnose it, we know how to treat it.' While this kind of thinking is beneficial to the medical world, its benefit is remains questionable to the anxiety sufferer. I believe that it really does not help to solve the issue by labelling it. The fact is, it is all anxiety and should be thought of as a normal human reaction to various external stimuli. Furthermore, anxiety is something that everyone has, its just that some people have more or less of it. But I will be careful in stating that the different types of anxiety that are listed above have different underlying causes that have specific strategies designed to overcome them with respect to cognitive behavioural therapy. This blog post is only intending to give general information about anxiety and to offer a very simple basis to examine how we may become anxious with respect to our thought processes. 

What is Anxiety? 

To garner a better understanding or anxiety we must think about why we have any anxiety in the first place. In situations where humans were attacked or threatened by other animals during the evolutionary process, our bodies responded by creating a nervous system that enables us to respond to outside stressors, this is called 'the fight or flight response' or by the medical world: our sympathetic nervous system. What this system does is interprets our external situation and decides if it is dangerous or not. If it is activated, we feel jittery, nervous, scared, sweaty, heart rate increase, dizzy amongst other  uncomfortable sensations. In the extreme, we have what are called 'panic attacks', where these feelings are extremely intense and super frightening and is a full activation of this side of our nervous system. 

While outside stressors are largely what our fight-flight response was designed for, humans also have the ability to think and to reason. Sometimes we create stressors in our minds that can activate this nervous system response, or we 'live in our heads.' These stressors could be completely different stressors than what our fight-or-flight response was designed to protect us from, i.e. job stress, financial stress, bullying, marital stress etc. What often happens is that we ruminate on these stressors and cause the anxiety response to activate. Oftentimes, it is also very difficult to 'let go' of these internal stressors and they can often grow within us and result in further and more intense anxiety. 

Where Does Anxiety Happen? 

What is common to all anxiety is that it happens in the future, that is unless you're being attacked by someone or something or encountering a dangerous situation. The majority of anxiety is actually conjured by our minds as a reaction to something that may or may not happen in the future. This is how anxiety differs from fear. With fear we are in direct contact with something that is causing us to be fearful, whereas with anxiety we are fearful of something that we have created in our minds. If you have anxiety right now as your read this post - look around the room - is there anything in your immediate vicinity that would or should cause anxiety?  Probably not. But if you feel anxiety, yet there is nothing in your immediate situation that is the cause of anxiety, it must reside in your mind. 

STEP I: The First Step to Reduce Anxiety

To begin to understand how we get caught up in anxious thought patterns, it helps to see where we're going wrong. Also, please realize that there is no 'cure' for anxiety and that if someone tells you there is a cure, they're not acting in your best interests. If anxiety could be cured, we wouldn't be able to react to avoiding car accidents, or protect our children from danger. Anxiety is a normal and necessary human emotion and 'curing' it is not really what we want to do. What we want to do is to reduce it to proportions that are manageable and in sync with our situation. 

While you read these, I would like you to reflect and write down examples of where you are 'guilty' of a distortion and what thought you have that contributes to this distortion. 

Here is the list of cognitive/thought distortions that feed anxiety: 

• Catastrophizing: taking an event you are concerned about and blowing it out of proportion to the point of becoming fearful. Example: Being reprimanded by your boss over a minor thing and then ruminating afterwards that you will be fired, lose your home and family. 

• Arbitrary Inference: making a judgment with no supporting information. Example: Coming to a conclusion that someone dislikes you without any supporting evidence. 

• Personalization: when a person attributes an external event to himself when there is actually no causal relationship. Example:  A person glares at you on the bus. You decide that person hates you. I often notice this with people who have 'road rage'. When someone cuts them off in traffic, they immediate come to the conclusion that this person did this to spite them instead of considering the notion that the person likely did this without any motive or intention to harm you. 

• Selective Abstraction: when a person makes a judgment based on some information but disregards other information. Example: A person says something negative to you at a party that is of very little influence or interest to others. You stay at the party and have hours of fun and laughter, but then after the party you chose to focus on this minor negative occurrence as the defining event of the party. 

• Overgeneralization: making a board rule based on a few limited occurrences. Example: That because one plane crashed, the plane you will be riding on will surely crash.

• Dichotomous Thinking (black and white thinking): categorizing things into one of two extremes. Example: This kind of thinking is usually begins with words like 'every time' or 'always'. For instance, because one person was rude to me, people will always be rude to me. 

• Labelling: attaching a label to yourself after a negative experience Example: Because I have an anxiety disorder, I have a mental illness. Because I felt awkward in a social situation, I am awkward. 

(List Extracted from: http://gad.about.com/od/treatment/a/cognitivedist.htm) 

So? How did you do? Did you come up with an example for each type of thought distortion? If not, that's wonderful, if you did - even better. This means you are learning about yourself and ways to change the ways you think and to reduce your anxiety. Remember, if you know what the problem is and its nature, you will have a good chance at defeating it. 

This concludes this first post on a series that I will be writing on anxiety reduction. If you have any questions or comments, please contact bioethicsconsulting@gmail.com

P. Allen B.A. M.A. 

Stress, Anxiety and Depression Reduction: Introduction to An Ethical Approach

Hello All, 

In June I will be embarking on a journey to help people start to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression in their lives. While I know that countless psychologists, psychiatrists, self-help gurus and life coaches have tried to find the most effective methods for helping people with these problems, I have devised a different way of conceptualizing and offering a new approach to these so-called 'illnesses.' 

Whether it be a self-help book, TV psychologist, personal therapist, clinical psychologist, family doctor, or psychiatrist,  what I have found time and time again is that there is a disconnect between what is effective treatment for these issues with respect to both personal value systems and ethics.  What I mean by this is that (a) everyone is different; and that, (b) not all therapies or approaches are suitable or effective considering these differences.  Furthermore, many of these devised therapies have failed to substantiate evidence that they do indeed work or that they are in any way effective or even beneficial – they are often misrepresented or grossly inflated, but the average person could be largely unaware of these shortcomings.

In my research I have found that the mental health landscape is a vast mine field of theories, regurgitations, rhetoric, and in some cases, self-serving claims designed to sell an idea, product, or in the worst case – a pharmaceutical.  I believe that the reason there are so many of these remedies and 'cures' because there is a massive need for these services which then drives a market for mental health remedies.  Sadly, most of these treatments fail and leave the person exasperated and no further ahead than before treatment. But I am not selling a therapy, instead I hope to educate and unearth the pro's and con's of all the existing therapies to promote a more individualized and perhaps truthful way to conquer these problems. 

Noticing the complexity of information surrounding the various theories of stress, anxiety, and depression; the problems in the way we talk about it as a society; the obscurity of the underlying treatment designs and overall effectiveness of various treatments, I have decided to put my training as a medical ethicist to task. By combining my background in psychology, neuroscience, religious studies, medical ethics and law with my own personal journey to conquer stress and anxiety, I have found what I think to be a better way to approach these issues - as an ethical method to designing a treatment regimen or lifestyle that is consistent to your value system and life.

What do I mean by 'An Ethical Method'? 

Quite often people do not fully understand the best explanations for their stress or stress-related illness. They are not versed nor have they done extensive research into what stress is or how they can reduce it effectively. The same goes for anxiety and depression – some of us have a basic understanding, but often it is incomplete or misguided. Because of this, the stressed person often develops coping mechanisms that actually exacerbate stress and cause more stress and perpetuate a trajectory of ‘same old – same old’. What my system or 'paradigm' offers is a way to think about stress, identify it, and to mitigate it ethically, that is; to find the best ways to treat your own stress given all of the methods devised by psychology, modern medicine, and religion and to custom create your own system based on what works for you. By sorting out what is 'ethical' for oneself, the person is empowered to live by their own standards and to heal stress, anxiety, and depression on their own terms, and by doing so, learn how and why they fell into the deep and unforgiving stress chasm in the first place. The ‘ethical method’ sorts out fact from fiction and helps people understand that there is no easy or 'quick fix' and that the best way to conquer stress, anxiety, and depression actually requires a comprehensive strategy and that this strategy is not necessarily existent or coded in psychiatry or clinical psychology but that it is actually existent within the individual. The ethical approach demonstrates that you can control your thoughts, your feelings, and your life on your own terms based on education and principle.

I'm offering one-day seminars on the ethical way through stress, anxiety, and depression in various Canadian cities and will soon will be offering these seminars worldwide. I feel it is time for a new outlook into how we ought to conquer these problems and help people to help themselves. The central pedagogy in my seminar is that education and ethics/personal value systems can work wonders in achieving freedom from these negative emotions and mental states. If we've always tried the same thing and got the same results, then we can expect the same conclusions; it is time for a new method - an ethical one. 

Please see this link for information on Canadian seminar dates or email bioethicsconsulting@gmail.com if you would like to request a seminar in your area. 

P. Allen B.A. M.A.