Maybe you think you’d like to just turn off your amygdala entirely and be completely without fear, but you don't want NO FEAR, what you want is balance between your amygdala and frontal cortex. To accomplish that, one of the things we need to teach your frontal cortex is to get better at recognizing when your amygdala is overreacting and convincing it to calm back down faster.
The more often and severely your fear response is triggered, the more easily it begins the next time. You've probably noticed that once you're anxious, you get jumpy and it doesn't take much to kick your anxiety up to the next level. It's called "fear potentiated startle" and what it boils down to is that the more trained you are to get afraid, the easier and quicker it happens. Exactly what you DON'T want.
To make matters worse, when you get highly anxious or frightened often, you can very easily begin to make anxious thoughts and behaviors automatic, so they happen over and over again without much if any rational thought, even if they're causing you more harm than good!
For instance, let's say you experience some anxiety while driving on the highway far from home. What initially made you anxious may have nothing to do with driving, the highway, or your distance from home, but your amygdala starts the fight or flight reaction and it scares you so you pull off the highway and take side streets home. The next time you get on the highway you watch your body for signs or evidence that anxiety is lurking again so you're more likely to get afraid (there's that fear potentiated startle thing again) so you DO get anxious.
You remember what you did the last time to feel better so you pull off the highway once again and your fear eventually subsides. After you've "practiced" doing this for a few times, your amygdala will store the highway, or being far from home, or driving itself as something that's dangerous and will trigger the fear response every time it presents itself. Your default response will be to fall into a pattern of negative, scary, and irrational thinking that ultimately results in you pulling off the highway in an attempt to feel better.
That’s the danger of leaving anxiety untreated, it almost always follows that destructive pattern. It gets easier and more automatic to become anxious, fearful, and panicked, while simultaneously your fear reaction gets more severe and leads to avoidance behavior. It’s a vicious cycle that needs to be stopped, but traditional treatment methods are so seldom successful because they require you to attempt to correct an emotional and instinctual reaction on a rational and logical level, which as you probably know, just doesn’t work. In the next section, you’re going to learn how to use what the science tells us about fear to overcome it and how to start teaching your brain NEW AND BETTER default reactions instead of anxiety...