Every experience your amygdala considers a possible threat it stores away in its archives and remembers. It’s why you can ride a bike without falling after 20 years and why even when you’re 80 years old your brain remembers to pull your hand away from the hot stove. Once those memories are established, they’re permanent. I know that what you may want more than anything is to be able to just forget you ever had anxiety and go back to how you used to be, but unfortunately it’s not going to happen quite like that. Once your brain has those experiences in “the vault”, it’s not going anywhere. You’re stuck with the memory.
Your amygdala never forgets, but what you CAN do is put the memory in perspective by creating new, more positive memories for it to draw upon. If you had an anxiety attack in an airplane for instance, you would be preconditioned to become anxious in an airplane again and would likely feel some degree of anxiety the next time you flew. However, if you got on board an airplane once a week and coped with your anxiety better so it didn’t escalate and trigger your fear response, in a relatively short amount of time, you would have enough positive or at least neutral memories around flying so your amygdala would no longer consider it a threat and you could fly comfortably and without anxiety again. If you flew often enough and learned how to control your stress response, you could actually make 30,000 feet a place you feel very relaxed and at peace at!
Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. Repeatedly subjecting yourself to a feared situation and continuing to cope with it in an unhealthy manner such as with anxiety, by having a panic attack, or by leaving the situation to bring relief has the INVERSE effect of actually giving your amygdala MORE ammunition to come to the conclusion that the situation and your associated feelings ARE a threat. The more frequently you get anxious in a situation and the more severe your fear gets, the more negative memories get created. When this occurs overcoming your fear becomes increasingly difficult and the likelihood that you’ll continue to feel your anxiety on an ongoing basis unless you make radical changes skyrockets.
Confronting your anxiety the WRONG way can actually be far worse that not facing it at all and can create a deeper, more pervasive, and automatic stress response.
Remember, your amygdala is ALWAYS “in training” and learning, so you need to be absolutely certain you’re teaching it to behave the way you WANT.
There is a way to accomplish this re-training of your amygdala to respond the way you want WITHOUT setting off your fear response, and it’s through a concept called “over-learning”.
The military has been using the strategy for hundreds of years, but at it’s most basic, over-learning is simply practicing the behavior or response you WANT to have when it’s NOT urgent, so when it IS urgent it can be performed automatically and without thought.
Over-learning must be done when you can “practice without pressure”. Think about watching a basketball game and seeing a player making free throws that can decide the outcome of the entire game or season. They have to perform flawlessly with the roar of the crowd and the opposing fans doing everything in their power to distract them all while adrenaline surges through their bodies, but they do. They would never be able to make those difficult shots under that tremendous pressure if they hadn’t spent hours in an eerily quiet gym, with no one else around, silently making shot, after shot, after shot, until the process
became so automatic they could let go and just let their body do what it learned during practice. As difficult as it may be to grasp and as counterintuitive as it may
sound, what you need to do is learn until you are able to forget.
Of course the difficulty with this as it applies to anxiety is that in the early stages of treatment, it’s incredibly challenging to face a feared situation and NOT react with fear, there’s simply been too much practice getting anxious for the amygdala to allow anything else. What’s needed, and what virtually no treatment plans typically incorporate, is a way for over-learning to take place WITHOUT the opportunity for anxiety to begin.
When I was developing my programs for anxiety, this struck me as very odd. It made no more sense to me to ask someone to learn to cope with their anxiety in a better way by putting them directly into the situation that CAUSED the anxiety then it would be for a military general to try and teach the troops to march during the battle. Soldiers are taught to march on command during peacetime, so when needed, they can march in war without thought or hesitation and rely on their training. The learning is done BEFORE the battle, not DURING.
Based upon this concept of over-learning BEFORE the battle is why I put so much effort into pioneering the advanced audio sessions that I include with my programs. They allow you to put on headphones in a place where you feel safe and secure and begin “practicing without pressure” the tactics you’ll be learning throughout the program so you can become proficient with them prior to them ever being needed. What we’ve discovered is that by using the audio sessions in conjunction with the treatment plan I developed allows you to quickly learn the skills you need in a way that makes them automatic. From that point forward, just like a professional basketball player can relax and make perfect free throws in the midst of chaos, you’ll be able to put into action the strategies that allow you to conquer your anxiety and panic when you’re actively going through even the most severe stress response.
If you’re using one of my programs that includes this type of audio resource (I consider it so critical to treatment all my programs include it), then it’s easy and you can refer to your program manual itself for instructions on how best to incorporate the audio into your recovery. If you’re NOT using one of my programs that takes advantage of this concept, what you can do instead is focus on taking the smallest steps possible in facing your feared situations so as NOT to elicit a full-blown fight or flight reaction, which can set you back and negatively train your amygdala further. This is easier to accomplish with some fears than others, for instance, it’s very difficult to face your fear of flying or of driving on the highway a “little bit”, which is why I engineered the audios I offer, but you can still attempt to implement the concept to some lesser degree without the structure of my programs.
These are only two concepts I think you need to be aware of, I obviously get far more in-depth in my programs themselves, but I think being mindful of them and their impacts on your recovery from anxiety will help you evaluate any treatment you may be considering and implement whatever your decision is most effectively.
Now there’s a few more things you need to know, and I think this next section may be the most important of all....