416. The surprising neuroscience behind your anxiety

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Speaker 1: Hello everybody, I'm Jemma Spake and welcome back to the Psychology of Your Twenties, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments, and transitions of our twenties and what they mean for our psychology. Hello everybody, Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. It is so great to have you here. Back for another episode. Today we are going to talk about anxiety, but not in the usual way that we normally talk about anxiety, or not in the usual way that anxiety is spoken about generally. We are going to do instead a complete and in depth look into the neuroscience behind why anxiety happens, why it lingers, why it continues to be this like frustrating, sometimes like uncontrollable part of life. I think knowing the intricacies behind anxiety and understanding the neuroscience behind the reactions that are going on in our brain is honestly sometimes the most important step in becoming less anxious, because you start to like distance yourself from the feelings, you start to remove personal blame, you start to understand the systems better, and you are able to apply logic and this information to your feelings. That I think counteracts the I don't know, counteracts the illogical nature of anxiety. That's what's been really helpful for me, and I think just being able to explain what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling, why I'm feeling whatever I am puts this distance between me and my anxiety. So that's what we're going to do today. From talking about the function of different brain areas to neurotransmitters, cell networks, the neuroscience of fear, there is a lot to cover that is honestly well as a little bit of a psychology note. Know this. I find it's so fascinating not typically spoken about. So without further ado, let's get into the neuroscience behind your anxiety. Firstly, why does anxiety feel so serious even if we rationally know, even if we consciously know, like the world isn't ending, like I'm gonna be okay, this thing is actually not a threat. Why does our brain still take it to the extreme? Anxiety feels so serious because your brain is not built to be calm, It is not built to be fair. It's especially not interested in your sense of fulfillment at all. It doesn't care if you're happy, first and foremost, it is built to protect you. It does not care if you feel fulfilled, It doesn't care if you feel okay. It cares that you're alive. The system, your brain system, the system behind your anxiety, would rather overreact and protect you than underreact and have something terrible happen. One of the most useful ways neuroscientists now explain this is through prediction. A prediction model of anxiety. Our brain predicts more than it reacts, so much of what your unconscious brain is doing throughout the day is essentially just like constantly constantly making predictions about what is likely to happen next. It consumes a large part of our unconscious mind. In anxiety, or amongst people who have anxiety, those predictions become more tilted towards threat and uncertainty, whereas with someone who doesn't have anxiety, those predictions are more realistic and they're easier to dismiss, which if you are somebody who is anxious, probably feels literally impossible. I don't think I've ever been able to dismiss an anxious thought in my life without observing it, interrogating it, overthinking it. But this is what happens in the minds of people without anxiety, they don't have the same what we call learnt uncertainty. This is something that a paper in twenty twenty two I think was published in twenty twenty two describes where essentially, if you have anxiety, your brain has become primed to look for all the things in a situation that you don't understand, all the things that you aren't certain of, and fill in those gaps with whatever will be the worst case scenario so that you can prepare. This is why your anxiety can become so all consuming because it is focused on ambiguity. It is obsessed with uncertainty and the possibility of threat, and that possibility is always going to be there. It is a fact of life that's part of being alive, but our brain can't help but fixate on it. This helps explain why your brain becomes like obsessed with certain thoughts, sensations, or themes or what ifs, the very things that it cannot solve or cannot know. For certain of the things that it becomes most obsessed with, it is not because those things are objectively the most important part of reality. It's not that they're more likely to happen. It's not that they're more common. It is just this anxious fallacy that the more I worry, the more it must be true. The truth is is it's just that your brain has assigned these hypotheticals as important to think about more because they are scary, more because they are things that you can fixate on because there are so many possibilities, less because they are likely to happen. The other thing that this threat detection system is built to do is generalize based on past experiences. Being the machine that it is, your brain is a machine. Once you may have experienced one dangerous or distressing situation, it becomes easier for your brain to then assume that every situation has the possibility of morphing into that worst case scenario. This is what is often referred to as fear generalization, and it is why anxiety tends to grow and expand over time. You know, you can have a panic attack in a supermarket once, and then over time, as your brain begins to expect this fear in more and more situations, now you start to dread going into any supermarket, going into anywhere that's public, going anywhere where there are like people around you. You know, one humiliating social moment can spread into anxiety around eye contact, public speaking, being perceived at all one scary bodily sensation can generalize into the fear of exercise, fear around caffeine, heat, crowds, even excitement. These Like it sounds irrational, right, that that fear could spread so rapidly, But it's it may be irrational, it's not random, it's fear generalization. Now, this is where anxiety gets really irritating, because it's because it starts to reach all these like broader aspects of life that shouldn't be scary, Like why do I have this reaction the same reaction to getting a cup of coffee as I would being chased by a tiger? Well, you know, from the outside, yes, ordering a coffee is trivial. But from the inside, these small moments encompass multiple anxiety inducing aspects and multiple moments of ambiguity. It might involve being watched speaking whilst you're feeling shaky, making a mistake, feeling trapped in the queue, noticing your heart rate, you know, worrying that you're panic, that your blush freeze, that people will judge you. To the conscious, rational part of you, it is just a quick interaction. You are just ordering a coffee. But really the brain is not only it's not just computing the objective event. It's computing the meaning behind the event, and the meaning and the harm or the anxiety of past experiences, and it's the whole army. It thinks that every situation could become the worst thing. Ever, when we feel the sense of anxiety, our bodies and minds react in a way that basically makes it as easy as possible to get away, to notice more, to be more alert, to stay on guard, to fight back. From the bodies and the brain's point of view, this is useful. Putting us into this activated state is useful because if something dangerous does happen out of this hypothetical situation we've created, it's best to be prepared. But when there's a false alarm, and if you have anxiety, it's constant false alarms, this bodily reaction starts to feel disproportionate and starts to really dominate over all other feelings. This is where the distinction between immediate fear and sustained anxiety becomes really interesting. A twenty twenty or twenty two thousand and three, I think actually two thousand and three review published in the European Journal of Farm Ecology looked at evidence from animal and human studies and basically was trying to figure out, like, why is this overreaction happening. Essentially, what they found was that in the brain of somebody without anxiety, the amygdala, the switch that turns off the amygdala and turns off the fear response is just as receptive as the same switch getting turned on. So basically, yes, their fear may spike in similar ways to us, their anxiety may spike to similar things, but it can be turned off just as quickly, meaning that sensations are allowed to kind of transpire or occur, and then we're able to move on. In the brains of people with anxiety, in the amygdala amygdalas of people with anxiety, that switch, that same switch can be turned on just as quickly, but it cannot be turned off. So a lot of people think that it the on switch that's broken, right, the AMIG dealer is more receptive, more reactive. That is definitely true in some situations, But really where anxiety comes from is not the immediate fear, It is the inability to downregulate that fear. It is the inability to turn off that fear. Another really important idea here is about inter reception, and this is basically the brain's ability to sense and interpret what is happening inside your body and react accordingly. The American neuroscientist Arthur Craig he talks about this in that same paper on one I think one published very soon after, and he argues that the brain is not just mapping what is happening outside the body, it's also mapping what's happening inside the body. So it's also thinking about heart rate, breathing, temperature, pain, muscle tension, nausea, and it's using that information to actually help construct our emotions about our external environment as well how we should react. Essentially, it's a two way street. Yes, our emotions control our bodily reactions. Our bodily reactions control our emotions. The thing is, when we're anxious, our bodily reactions triggered by our anxiety are really confusing because a lot is going on. Everything is like on full speed, and so our brain, getting locked into that two way bi directional relationship and stream of information, takes this as evidence that something must actually be going wrong. It takes that as evidence that our irrational emotions must be onto something, meaning that it continues to further stimulate us, continues to further activate this stress response. Essentially, what's happening is something freaks you out based on past experiences or based on an irrational fear. Your body is unable to turn off that sensation, that initial sensation of anxiety, that initial sensation of year and being scared and tension, meaning that the body starts to take your mind starts to take those bodily sensations as fact that something is actually going wrong. I'm hoping that you guys are kind of seeing this cycle here, right, or just this like downward spiral where it becomes so difficult to interrupt these signals and say, actually, no, everything is okay, we are fine, because it just the evidence that something is wrong is just as internal as it is external, or the evidence that things are okay is a lot weaker compared to this internal bodily signal that everything is actually on fire. Talking more about the neuroscience of this, that same researcher Dr Craig expanded on this idea in a two thousand and nine review published in Like a Eu. I can't remember the name, but a neuroscience journal, and he focused on another part of the brain called the anterior intu That is a brain region, he argued, is especially important for turning raw bodily signals into conscious subjective feelings. His claim is that people with anxiety may have a dysfunction in this region, meaning that, like we were talking about with that mind body connection, anxious feelings are more physically persuasive because we find it harder that the insular finds it harder to argue or disentangle ourselves from what it sees as physical proof. Basically, it becomes harder in the brain of somebody with anxiety to shut down our own brain's interpretation of our own physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong. What I'm really trying to get out here is it's not you. It is all these systems. It is all this neurological stuff going on. That means that we cannot separate a thought from a feeling. We cannot separate rate as well our emotional experience from our anxiety and from what's going on in our bodies. A two thousand and four study carried out by researchers from the University College London looked into this a little bit closer. They kind of wanted to figure out whether this was really, you know, the crux of why people are anxious, or why some people have debilitating anxiety and some people don't. The researchers put seventeen participants into an fMRI scanner and they asked them to do a heartbeat detection task. Essentially, they said, we're not going to take your pulse in the usual external way, what do you think your heart rate is? Permitut Essentially, how good are you at counting your own heart rate and figuring out your own pulse. Most interestingly, people who were who got a more accurate number, who were like, yep, I think my heart rate is around seventy two beats per minute, forty nine beats per minute. It didn't matter if it was high or low. They were more accurate in their assessment, reported stronger negative emotional experiences. What this paper essentially suggests is that your brain monitors your body closely to determine how scared it should be. So if your brain is highly tuned to internal changes, small shifts and heart rate, small shifts in breathing tension, in any way that becomes more psychologically meaningful to it. In an anxious state, that means that the body constantly feels that there is and the brain constantly feels like there is ample evidence internally that something is going wrong again. This is all because your mind would rather interrupt your peace ten times unnecessarily than miss one thing that might have hurt you. That is why anxiety often feels bigger than the situation itself, and all of these neurological processes, all of these anatomical areas, are all trying to keep that process going so that you survive life. Going even deeper into the neuroscience behind your anxiety, we also, obviously at some point need to talk about the role of certain neurotransmitters, specifically to neurotransmitters gabba and glutamate. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you would have heard me talk about these so much. The two g's, these two chemical messengers basically control alongside a bunch of other things, but they are a big part of how reactive or regulated your brain is. In very simple terms, glutamate is what helps neurons fire and communicate. It gets them all excited, It stimulates them. Gabba is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it helps to quiet or dampen neuractivity. It just it calms everybody down. I always think about them as like good cop and bad cop in a way, like glutamate all like this. I think about them as like glutamate is the fun exciting arms who gives the kids all the sugar, rouse them up with games with candy is like getting them are excited, and then gabba is like the responsible parent who then has to get everybody ready for bedtime and do like the grown up job. Research on anxiety disorders has argued that it's not simply that we have more glutamate, more of that excitator and you're a transmitter in our system. It's that we may also have less gabba, or we may be less receptive to gabba or have an imbalance in both, which is why drugs that boost GABBA signaling and the way that GABBA can be received, like benzodiazepines, reduce acute anxiety, because the theory goes, they're balancing out the neurochemical reactions. This is another thing your anxiety may come down to. Of course, all these things are kind of happening at the same time. So it's not like these are different explanations, they're all combined. But sometimes what it does come down to, on top of these other elements, it's just differences in your brain chemistry that increase or decrease your sensitivity to certain neurotransmitters that go on to shape how you feel in response to the world. I just think it's so fascinating that we have this intense emotional experience that being our anxiety, and then when you start to understand it through a neuroscientific lens, it all makes sense. It all makes sense why it all feels so uncontrollable, because there are things operating behind the scenes that can't be brought into your control, that you do not have conscious say over, that just leave you responding to the consequences or outcomes of the imbalance or of the lack or excess of activity. You'll probably know the frustration. If you have anxiety and you're listening to this episode, you have definitely had somebody tell you just to stop worrying about it, or to simply stop thinking about it. What people without anxiety don't realize is that that would mean going against like everything that your brain in particular, is programmed to do like. You do not have the same efficient, top down attentional control that the average person without anxiety has. Instead, you have a different attentional system, one that is stimulus driven threat driven. Basically, for you, it is a lot harder to ignore the scary thoughts, to ignore the scary situations, because anxiety is not only making the threat seem bigger, it's reducing your capacity for calm, it's reducing your capacity for goal directed focus and rationalization. And it's also this weird conundrum whereby in order to address our anxiety like we have, you know, trying to avoid it doesn't work. Like when people say worry about it less, think about it less. Well, that actually can at times enlarge our fear and make us think about it more. I feel like by now, I feel like we all know about this very famous experiment, like the white bear experiment. You might also know it as the white elephant experiment. To give a refresh, This was an experiment very famous in the eighties where a researcher told a bunch of participants, whatever you do, don't think about a white elephant, or don't think about a white bear. Every time you think about it, ring the bell, ring the bell. As soon as this thought has it intruded. He also told a bunch of participants like, here is a list of things you can think about. You can think about the white bear. You can also think about this and this and this. Whatever you want to think about. You have complete permission to do it. When people were told to think about the bear less, when people were told not to think about it, it became a fixation point, right. It became this obsessional thing because why are we not allowed to think about it? What's wrong with this thing? What's bad about thinking about it? That means that we can't do that? And your brain begins to run away with it. It's the same with your anxiety. Study after study shows when we are given instructions to suppress a thought, to ignore a stimulus, to ignore a thought, our level of fear towards that thought increases. Firstly, but also we just think about it in excess of if we've just been allowed to think about it casually all along. And because of this, anxiety becomes a self perpetuating cycle that's really difficult to break, making our initial fears worse and worse and worse. So I feel like I've given you a lot of information. This is the neuroscientific side of this so far. Just to give you a little mini summary, your brain is built to protect you, not to fulfill you. All it cares about is your survival. There are certain areas in the brain that are in control of your survival and of detecting things that may threaten your survival. In people with anxiety, these areas aren't always operating properly, and that creates longer and longer ongoing sense of fear towards ambiguous situations. There is also the combined changes in neurotransmittered levels that kind of explains this a little bit. And also this inability to down regulate your fear or to rationally interrupt your fear and say, hey, this actually isn't that important, This actually isn't going to happen, and to believe that, and so all of this shrinks our lives significantly, to say the least. I want to break down how we can take those neuroscientific principles though and apply them in the opposite direction. Knowing what we know about the new neuroscience behind anxiety, how can we kind of take that knowledge flip it on its head and do better for our anxious feelings. Essentially, what I'm saying is that as much as our brain is pushing us to have a certain reaction to fear and ambiguity, there is a way that we can rewire our brains away from anxious thoughts. Knowing what we now know about the underlying neuroscience, we basically have to teach our brain new connections, new connections between ambiguous situations and the expected fear. And we do that by creating new associations between the things that we fear and what we think or what we know the outcome will be. Basically, rather than trying to completely erase all of our exposure to a trigger, rather than trying to avoid something that scares us at all costs, all we need to do is show our brain that a different outcome is possible. Remember, your brain is just a machine that learns through repeated patterns, repeated exposure, through repetition. The more that you associate this thing that you fear with something that is positive, the more that it learns to expect that in the future, and it changes the X to Y prediction model that it's operating on. We need to have experiences. If you're going to use neuroscience to battle against your anxiety, you need to be focused on having experiences that contradict your anxious predictions, basically meaning you have to go further into the belly of your anxiety. In psychology, we call this exposure therapy. I'm sure you've heard it. Essentially, what it's saying is if we assume every for example, social interaction will always be unbearable, the most powerful way we can rewire that situation is by going into those feared situations and proving to ourselves that that catastrophic outcome is not going to happen or will not happen as often as we expect it to, basically saying, your brain, my brain, your brain, you are lying to me. These predictions are false. We're basically trying to set up our anxiety and, like a sting operation, to prove that it's a liar by going into the room, going into the space, getting on the plane, standing up in front of the people, and undoing that prediction that everything is going to go terribly and providing proof that it's not. You know, if you fear speaking up in front of others because you think that everybody's going to judge you, everybody's going to notice how anxious you are, everybody is going to reject you. A way to kind of set up that prediction and to prove that it's false is to go into those situations more and more and more, to prove that that doesn't happen every time, that actually that rarely happens. The prediction model is false. The new learning isn't necessarily this is always going to be fine, or I'm always going to feel confident, or there is nothing to fear. The new learning is simply that, like, I can be in that fearful situation. A, It's probably not as likely as I thought, but be I will survive regardless. There is also evidence that how you engage with the fear matters as well, not just the outcome, And that brings me to our practical tips for dealing with an anxious mind, And the number one thing you can do other than exposure is to simply verbalize what you are feeling, rather than keeping it stuck inside of your mind to fester. In twenty fifteen, they did this randomized control trial with people who were afraid of public speaking, and these people were assigned to basically get up in front of a room and talk, and they were either asked to label their anxiety or to ignore it, meaning they were asked to either explicitly put their feelings and their fears about what was going to happen into words, or they were just going to have to do exposure and get up in front of people and see what happened. What they found was that people who were able to say this is an anxious feeling, I'm scared here, my physical symptoms of anxiety are coming are really derived from this fear and not from the fact that this situation is actually harmful. They did better almost every single time. Essentially, they were able to rewire their fear, not necessarily by suppressing their anxious thoughts, but actually by bringing the anxious thought more into their focus, being able to approach it and also see that it was a liar, see that it wasn't true, and see that it was something that operated beyond what they consciously and deliberately wanted to do. So that's one of the best things you can do if you're feeling anxious is just literally say I am anxious. I know it goes against so much of how we think we're meant to process our emotions, which is to avoid them and to not acknowledge them. This is saying do the opposite. This is saying go in deeper. Tip number two relies on a similar cognitive distancing technique, and it essentially says, what I'm essentially going to tell you to do is to learn how to relate to your thoughts as mental events beyond you, rather than facts that are coming from within you. In a really interesting series of studies from twenty fourteen, researchers found that using your name or a non first person pronoun or somebody else's name during an anxious moment was an incredible form of emotional regulation. Basically, the first level of cognitive distancing from your anxiety would be saying I'm having an anxious thought. The second level, the level that they found, were saying Gemma is experiencing an anxious thought, or saying giving your anxiety a completely different name, basically labeling the part of you that felt anxious as something that was operating outside of you. So Kevin is making me feel anxious. Kevin's having a really bad day today. Brian is really trying to get me stirred up. Noticing your anxious thoughts not as just coming from you, but from something beyond you that you don't necessarily want or you don't have to necessarily associate with. So like when you feel fear, being like oh, instead of thinking, oh my god, I feel I feel fear. This is coming from me. This is intuition being like, oh, that's Miranda again, that's Miranda being being such like an asshole. Miranda's just like really getting on my nerves at the moment it stops you. The reason this works is because it stops you from completely embodying the thought as your own and puts the blame or assigns the blame to an outside source. Why this works is because it stops, well, it doesn't completely stop, but it interrupts that body mind connection that says, if fear and anxiety is coming from me internally, it must mean that it's saying something important. It must mean that it's given me some kind of signal q hint about the state of the world around me. It must mean that I should be scared. Because of course, we trust ourselves and we trust our own feelings the most and above all others. Obviously, if you're if you're anxious. So if you are somebody with anxiety, we know from this research and from the neuroscience we've already spoken about that that connection and your ability to interpret those physical sensations is providing false evidence for things that aren't actually occurring or that aren't actually as dangerous as you think they are. So assigning the anxious thought, assigning the corresponding bodily sensations to an outside force, to a Kevin or a Brian or a Miranda, this anxious little character that occasionally comes and visits you and makes you feel terrible, interrupts that to your brain logical assumption that to feel anxiety must mean that something is wrong because it is coming from you, and who could you trust more than yourself. This is kind of similar to my third tip, which is to bring in humor. Call labeling your anxiety as Brian or Kevin or Miranda makes it kind of funny compared to the intensity of the feeling. The opposite of anxiety is not peace, It is laughter. I don't know who said that, but they were a very very wise individual. When our anxiety is bad, everything feels really serious because all we know, our mind is taking this as a life or death situation that makes it difficult to laugh so, or makes it difficult to make it feel less serious than it is. But adding back in the ridiculousness of the situation snaps you out of the anxiety cycle much quicker than a lot of other techniques. And honestly, like anxiety is literally hilarious at times, like it is hilarious, how ridiculous and dramatic it is, like the fact that it truly believes every single bad thing that could happen in the world could and will, and it's currently happening to you. The fact that it genuinely wants you to believe that is really funny. It's like a child. Our anxiety is like a little petulant child. And there's increasing evidence that laughing at the absurdity of our anxiety firstly helps by taking that nervous energy and turning those bubbles of fear into like fear of excitement. It secondly helps because of that psychological distancing. But when speaking about neuroscience, the third way that laughter helps is that it actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Like I said, the opposite of anxiety is not peace, it is laughter. Because when we laugh, it stimulates Laughter literally stimulates the vagus nerve. This is the primary component of our parasympathetic nervous system, the system that calms us down and shuts off our anxiety. Activating that nerve, Activating that system shifts us into a state of rest and recovery rather than alertness. This one twenty eighteen Japanese paper also found that just hearing laughter can improve stress, anxiety cortisol levels. Literally watching a comedy show, watching your favorite sitcom. I'm currently rewatching Girls, which is like, I find that so funny, watching the funniest home videos? Is that still a thing? Like no, but anything like that will like neurologically calm you down if you can laugh. That is a mental and emotional circuit breaker. It is a way for your parasympathetic nervous system to say, why would I be laughing if I wasn't safe? Like this is again you playing psychological warfare, like back at your anxiety, Like your anxiety wants to throw all of these delusional, ridiculous situations at it. Take the like, take the ridiculousness of it, and laugh at it. Laughter as a circuit breaker works because it is something that yes, triggers our parasympathetic nervous system. It also triggers gabber. It triggers oxytocin. Basically, imagine anxiety as like this toy train on like a circular track. It's going round and round and round. It's getting faster and far and faster. We all know the feeling. The circuit breaker, the laughter, whatever your circuit breaker is, is like a kid disconnecting a piece of the track, flooding the system with oxytocin, flooding the system with gabber, like turning it all down, switching off the batteries. I read this fantastic article from this psychologist called doctor Lucas who wrote about the three neurological circuit breakers that are best for anxiety. These are a stimulating gabber and oxytocin. By forcing ourselves to slow down, forcing ourselves to walk slower, eat slower, sleep more, therefore resetting ourselves. That's the first great circuit breaker. B is a parasympathetic circuit breaker, so like laughter, but also like relaxing your tongue and your jaw. I don't know if you've heard about this, but letting your mouth and jaw go slack, is like a biological cheek code for relaxation. Like one of the first nodes or points of your vagus nerve is like right below your ear towards your jaw. All signals go past this point, Like all activating signals have to flow through this point to like tell your body to speed up and get stressed and get anxious. So if you reduce to tension around that origin point of your vagus nerve, it is like the equivalent of holding down like the on and off button on your phone or your computer for like five seconds. Like it is a literal like like you have a circuit break, and you have an off switch like in your body that you can activate. And the final circuit breaker that doctor Lucas talks about is ones that activate your anterior singular cortex, basically the part of your brain that communicates between the conscious and the unconscious, instinct and executive functioning. We can power on that part of the brain that lets us interrupt unconscious and nonsensical thoughts by simple mindfulness exercises, by doing grounding exercises, by refocusing our attention and asking our attention to focus only on the present. So watching rain drops down a window slowly eating and savoring a meal, doing a body scan. The five four three two one sensory technique basically refocusing your attention outwards, only focusing on what's going around you and really sinking into that stops you from getting pulled inwards. Those are your circuit breakers. Circuit breakers that that work through your vegus nerve circuit breakers that work through neurotransmitter release. Circuit breakers that work through turning on the parts of you that can downregulate. Finally, if you really want to trick the neurological mechanisms of your anxiety to switch off for a few minutes, it's gonna sound, but any kind of specifically forward movement will literally trick your brain into calming down. Now. This idea is kind of borrowed from principles of eye movement, Desensitization and reprocessing Therapy EMDR. It's everywhere at the moment, It's highly effective. This is most effective for people who are experiencing PTSD. However, the mechanism behind it is really interesting and can also be applied at a more basic general level. At a basic level EMDR or this eye movement therapy involves something as simple as walking forward, and it uses what we call bilateral stimulation. So essentially, when you walk forward, when you do some kind of forward movement, the rhythmic way that your brain tracks movement from side to side and the optic flow that it experiences from stuff moving past you going past you gives you the psychological set that you are overcoming something. So essentially, if your anxiety is all in your mind, like actually, let me explain this differently, when your anxiety is actually fear based, so something is actually going wrong. When you're experiencing fear, your brain wants you to run away, wants you to fight, wants you to pursue some kind of forward movement away over or through the problem. So what it will want you to do is to run away. It will want you to fight, maybe it will want you to hide, but mainly it wants you to pursue some kind of like I am leaving this situation kind of movement when it knows that you're experiencing that, when your brain feels that you are running away, feels that you were escaping, it will slowly turn off some of your anxiety because the anxiety or the fear is no longer needed because it's already prompted you to do what you do or to do something that it's going to help you in that situation. That that is like the mechanism behind fear and when there is an actual threat, when we're experiencing anxiety and the threat isn't real, we can still activate that same natural biological, psychological way of activating calm by again going outside and walking, riding our bike, going to a boxing class, stimulating that same optic flow, that same bilateral stimulation that would ordinarily tell our brain that we are doing something about a fear stimulus, but is now telling our brain that we are doing something about this anxiety or this this thing that is triggering our anxiety. Literally, walking is like the most simplest way of way to do this. And I know it sounds silly to be like, you're feeling anxious, go on a walk, but like motion direction, momentum stops you from just like stewing in the fear neurologically, psychologically, and physically. If you are finding yourself stuck in an anxious spiral, one of the most underrated things things you can do is to simply get up and walk, not on a treadmill outside, get up and walk around your house, Get up and do some kind of physical movement, same way that like doing jumping jacks, doing mountain climbers, any kind of physical movement calms down the body when we are in a kind of like anxious spiral because it's just staying like I'm doing something about it, Like it's okay, you can calm down, like you can, we can turn that off now because I'm listening. It's basically like I've listened to the siren. Turn off the siren. We are doing our escape protocol. So these are just some of the ways that we can take what we know about the neuroscientific principles and origins of anxiety and kind of twist them in our favor. I think anxiety makes it feel like our brain is not our friend and not our own. And knowing these strategies or having these strategies teaches us how to play the same game that our anxiety is playing back at our anxiety, or it's teaching us how to learn the quirks and patterns and kind of idiosyncrasies of our anxiety and to emulate them ourselves and kind of play them back. Like it's definitely like a bit of a SIOP. Obviously, there are so many things that we didn't mention here, and there are so many ways. Oh, there's so many factors contributing to our anxiety that have nothing to do with neuroscience and that have no neuroscientific basis at all. But I think if your main focus right now is gaining more of a scientific explanation and understanding of your anxiety, this is a really great place to start. Understanding the neurotransmitters, understanding your brain's attentional regulation systems, understanding the different parts of your brain that are involved in basically creating anxiety, creates distance. I know some people will be like, well, that's just over in actualizing. I know that some people will think that this is an excuse for not feeling your feelings. I still think that it's good to feel anxious, and like I said, it's a dangerous game to suppress or avoid your anxiety. But I still think it's very, very valuable. But at the end of the day, being able to say like this feeling is not one that I have complete ownership over. Being able to reapply logic to our anxiety when anxiety likes to remove all logic is so so helpful, and I think it's why. Yeah, I don't know. I just think that teaching the neuroscience of anxiety is something that we should be doing more rather than just obsessing and only focusing on the emotional side of it, only focusing on the physical side of it, only focusing on the social side of it, Like you cannot understand why you behave the way you do in certain social situations, why you behave the way you do in work situations, or any number of situations if you don't understand like the framework and the pillars and the systems along which your anxiety is kind of running and influencing your behavior. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I know it was a little bit ranty at times, kind of all over the place, but when I get into the science, like I get so into it. So but again, I really do hope that you enjoyed this episode. I hope that you learned something from it and that you know it just helped you understand you and your brain a little bit better as you go through an anxious moment or kind of a more anxious period of life. So with that being said, I think we're done for the day. Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself. We will talk very very soon.