Pod Insights The Psychology of your 20s 416. The surprising neuroscience behind your anxiety About this episode Anxiety has a way of making ordinary moments feel life-or-death. A simple interaction can feel significant, a passing thought can spiral into catastrophe, and your body can react as if something is deeply wrong - even when rationally you know you’re probably okay. In this episode, we get into the neuroscience behind anxiety - why your brain becomes obsessed with certain thoughts, why false alarms feel so convincing, and what actually helps when you want to feel less trapped inside your own mind.
We explore:
• Why anxiety feels so intense and urgent
• Our physical and emotional reactions to anxiety
• The role of GABA and glutamate in anxiety
• Why trying to ‘stop thinking about it’ doesn’t work
• How avoidance perpetuates the anxious cycle
• Practical ways for living with an anxious brain
Happy listening!
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Our favourite sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9559819/
https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn2555
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-022-01332-2
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S027273580000057X
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3:12 Jemma Sbeg? Hello, everybody. I'm Jemma Sbeg 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.
3:31 Jemma Sbeg? 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 frustrating, sometimes uncontrollable part of life. I think knowing the intricacies behind anxiety and understanding
4:11 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
4:37 Jemma Sbeg? I don't know, it counteracts the illogical nature of anxiety. That's what's been really helpful for me. Um, 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 gonna 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, I, as a little bit of a psychology nerd, you guys know this, I find it so fascinating, not typically spoken about. So without further ado, let's get into the neuroscience behind your anxiety.
5:21 Jemma Sbeg? 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, it does not care if you feel fulfilled. It doesn't care if you feel okay. It cares that you're alive.
6:05 Jemma Sbeg? The, 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.
6:51 Jemma Sbeg? 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, 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 it 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.
7:30 Jemma Sbeg? 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 are the things that it becomes most obsessed with. It is not because those things are objectively the most important part of reality.
8:15 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
8:36 Jemma Sbeg? 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,
9:21 Jemma Sbeg? 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 that 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, a 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
10:08 Jemma Sbeg? 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'll panic, that you'll 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.
10:53 Jemma Sbeg? 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 sending in the whole army. It thinks that every situation could become the worst thing ever. When we feel this 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 brains point of view, this is useful. Putting us into this activated state is useful.
11:35 Jemma Sbeg? 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, oh twenty, two thousand and three, I think, actually, two thousand and three review. Published in the European Journal of Pharmacology, looked at evidence from animal and human studies. And basically was trying to figure out, like, why is this overreaction happening?
12:17 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
12:39 Jemma Sbeg? 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 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's the on switch that's broken, right? The amygdala is more receptive, more reactive. That is definitely true in some situations. But really where anxiety comes from is not the immediate fear.
13:20 Jemma Sbeg? It is the inability to down regulate that fear. It is the inability to turn off that fear. Another really important idea here is about interoception. 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 or 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
14:04 Jemma Sbeg? our emotions about our external environment as well and 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 bidirectional 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 on to something.
14:43 Jemma Sbeg? Meaning that it continues to further stimulate us, continues to further activate the 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.
15:07 Jemma Sbeg? Yeah, fear and 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 the 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.
15:52 Jemma Sbeg? That same researcher, Dr Craig. Expanded on this idea in a two thousand and nine review published in. Um, like, a neuro, I can't remember the name, but a neuroscience journal. And he focused on another part of the brain called the anterior insular. 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.
16:33 Jemma Sbeg? 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 brains. Interpretation of our own physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong. What I'm really trying to get at 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 as well our emotional experience from, from our anxiety and from what's going on in our bodies.
17:15 Jemma Sbeg? 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 F M R I 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 per minute? 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.
17:59 Jemma Sbeg? 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 in 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 like there is. And the brain constantly feels like there is ample evidence internally that something is going wrong.
18:44 Jemma Sbeg? 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. 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 two neurotransmitters, GABA and glutamate. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you would have
19:24 Jemma Sbeg? heard me talk about these so much, the two Gs. 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. GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it helps to quiet or dampen neural activity. It just, it calms everybody down. I always think about them as like good cop and bad cop in a way like glutamate or like this. I think about them as like glutamate is the fun, exciting aunt
20:08 Jemma Sbeg? who like gives the kids all the sugar, riles them up with games, with candy, is like getting them all excited. And then GABA is like the responsible parent who then has to like 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 excitatory neurotransmitter in our system. It's that we may also have less GABA, or we may be less receptive to GABA, or have an imbalance in both, which is why drugs that boost GABA signaling and the way that GABA can be received, like benzodiazepines, reduce acute anxiety because
20:51 Jemma Sbeg? 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, Sometimes what it does come down to on top of these other elements is 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. It's, 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.
21:37 Jemma Sbeg? 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 were 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 realise is that you, that would mean going against like everything that your brain in particular is programmed to do.
22:19 Jemma Sbeg? 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 rationalisation. And it's also this weird conundrum whereby, in order to address our anxiety, like
23:03 Jemma Sbeg? we have, you know, trying to avoid it doesn't work. Like, when people say, worry about it less, think about it less.
23:13 Jemma Sbeg? 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 fa- this very famous experiment, like the white bear experiment. You might also know it as the white elephant experiment. Um, to give a refresh, this was an experiment very famous in the eighties. Where a researcher um 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 intruded. He also told a bunch of participants, like, here is a list of things you can think about.
23:53 Jemma Sbeg? You can think about the white bear, you can also think about this and this and this, whatever you wanna 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 like 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.
24:38 Jemma Sbeg? Of if we'd 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.
25:23 Jemma Sbeg? And that creates longer, a longer ongoing sense of fear towards ambiguous situations. There is also the combined changes in neurotransmitter 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
26:04 Jemma Sbeg? in the opposite direction, knowing what we know about the neuroscience behind anxiety. How can we kind of take that knowledge, flip it on its head and do better for our anxious feelings?
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31:03 Jemma Sbeg? Essentially, what I'm saying is that as much as our brain is pushing us to have a certain reaction to fear and to 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
31:43 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
32:27 Jemma Sbeg? Basically meaning you have to go further into the belly of your anxiety. In psychology, we 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, you brain, you are lying to me. These predictions are false. We're basically trying to set up our anxiety in like a sting operation to prove that it's a liar
33:13 Jemma Sbeg? 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 like that doesn't happen every time, that actually that rarely happens. The prediction model is false.
33:55 Jemma Sbeg? The new learning isn't necessarily this is always gonna be fine, or I'm always gonna 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 B, 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 like 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.
34:36 Jemma Sbeg? In two thousand and fifteen, they did this randomized control trial with people who were afraid of public speaking. And these people were assigned to um 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 gonna happen into words. Or they were just gonna 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.
35:19 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
36:01 Jemma Sbeg? Tip number two relies on a similar cognitive distancing technique. And it essentially says, what I'm essentially gonna 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 two thousand and 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.
36:45 Jemma Sbeg? The second level, the level that they found was 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.
37:27 Jemma Sbeg? 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.
37:50 Jemma Sbeg? 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 cue, 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, or if you are somebody with anxiety,
38:33 Jemma Sbeg? 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 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
39:19 Jemma Sbeg? and who could you trust more than yourself. This is kind of similar to my third tip, which is to bring in humour. Call, you know, you're labelling your anxiety as Brian or Kevin or Miranda, makes it kind of funny compared to like 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 we know our mind is taking this as a life or death situation.
39:52 Jemma Sbeg? That makes it difficult to laugh. So it 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 is 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.
40:36 Jemma Sbeg? 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 feelings 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.
41:20 Jemma Sbeg? Activating that nerve, activating that system shifts us into a state of rest and recovery rather than alertness. This one two thousand and 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, I don't know, funniest home videos, is that still a thing? Like, no, but anything like that. Um. Will like neurologically calm you down. If you can laugh, that is a mental and emotional circuit breaker.
42:06 Jemma Sbeg? It is a way for your parasympathetic nervous system to say,
42:11 Jemma Sbeg? 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 these delusional ridiculous situations at it. Take the del- 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 GABA, 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 faster and faster, we all know the feeling. The circuit breaker, the laughter, whatever your circuit breaker is, is like a kid,
42:54 Jemma Sbeg? disconnecting a piece of the track, flooding the system with oxytocin, flooding the system with GABA. Like, turning it all down, switching off the batteries. I read this fantastic article from this psychologist called Dr. Lucas, who wrote about the three neurological circuit breakers that are best for anxiety. These are A, stimulating GABA 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.
43:38 Jemma Sbeg? I don't know if you've heard about this, but letting your mouth and jaw go slack is like a biological cheat 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 activated 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 attention 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 breaker, you have an off switch like in your body that you can activate.
44:20 Jemma Sbeg? And the final circuit breaker that Dr Lucas talks about is um ones that activate your anterior cingulate 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 raindrops down a window, slowly eating and savoring a meal, doing a body scan,
45:04 Jemma Sbeg? um 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 hap- that work through your vagus nerve, circuit breakers that work through neurotransmitter release, circuit breakers that work through turning on the parts of you that can down regulate.
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50:16 Jemma Sbeg? Finally, if you really want to trick the neurological mechanisms of your anxiety to switch off for a few minutes, it's gonna sound cliche. 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, uh, 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.
50:58 Jemma Sbeg? 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 sense that you are overcoming something.
51:32 Jemma Sbeg? 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,
52:13 Jemma Sbeg? it will slowly turn off some of your anxiety because the anxiety or the fear is no longer needed because it has already prompted you to do what you do, or to do something that is going to help you in that situation.
52:27 Jemma Sbeg? That is, 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, 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.
53:12 Jemma Sbeg? 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 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 um 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.
53:52 Jemma Sbeg? Because it's just saying 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. 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.
54:36 Jemma Sbeg? 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 psyop. Obviously, there are so many things that we didn't mention here, and there are so many ways, or 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.
55:19 Jemma Sbeg? Basically, creating anxiety creates distance. Um, I know some people will be like, well, that's just over-intellectualizing. 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, like, 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
56:02 Jemma Sbeg? 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 behaviour. So I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I know it was a little bit ranty at times and kind of all over the place, but when I get into the science, like I, I get so into it. So, but again, I really do hope that you enjoyed this episode.
56:47 Jemma Sbeg? I hope that you learnt 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.
57:13 Jemma Sbeg? I've been really trying to prioritize my health in a realistic way this year. And something that has kept me really motivated is my Whoop. I am such a data person, which is why I love Whoop, because I can genuinely see why my body feels differently depending on the day, why I'm running differently, why I'm maybe less focused. Whoop effortlessly tracks my sleep, it tracks my strain, my recovery, my stress, and most importantly, my overall health. And it just gives me all that data and all those patterns so I can make better decisions, which includes knowing when to go easy and knowing when to go hard. New members can try Whoop with a 30 day free trial before committing to a membership. That's join.whoop.com/psychology for your free month of Whoop.
57:57 Jemma Sbeg? This episode is sponsored by Gymshark. Gymshark has spent over 14 years obsessing over gym clothing and the people who wear it. And let me just say, I think we all know they are very, very good at what they do. No, seriously, their stuff is so good. Their everyday seamless collection is light, it's soft, it's stretchy. All of their stuff just looks good on and it's made for people who love to exercise, whatever exercise that is, lifting, cardio, Pilates, running around campus, maybe just doing errands. Discover Gymshark and find your new favorite gym clothing at gymshark.com.
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