All day every day, I work with people around the world to help them overcome the excessive anxiety, fear, and panic attacks that may be holding them back from the lives they deserve. As much as I love what I do, and couldn’t dream of doing anything else with my life, it never ceases to amaze me how completely misunderstood anxiety and fear is, even by those who suffer in its grip.
Myths and misinformation spread like wildfire, and from thumbing through most of the books on overcoming anxiety at your local bookstore you would think that we haven’t had any new discoveries or advancements in treatment in the past fifty years.
Not true.Anxiety disorders such as phobias, social anxiety, panic disorders, agoraphobia, and generalized anxiety disorder effect as much as fifteen percent of people, and I know how easily your world can be turned upside down by anxiety or panic and how unbelievably strong the urge to avoid feeling the full intensity of your fear can be, because I suffered for years with severe anxiety myself before learning how to free myself and live a better life.
We’re going to talk about what changed that allowed me to conquer my anxiety and panic attacks, but before we do, we need to shatter some myths surrounding anxiety and discover what it REALLY is...
I know from my own personal experience that anxiety feels like an enemy, and it’s easy to understand why you hate it, I hated it too. Maybe you think it’s a disease, character flaw, or abnormality that you’re born and stuck with. I know when I struggled with my anxiety and panic attacks I felt weak, different than everyone else, limited, and like I was somehow sick with an illness that robbed me of my courage.
If any of those incorrect perceptions ring true to you, it’s for one reason and one reason only. You don’t know what anxiety REALLY is.
Hey, don’t feel bad, hardly anyone does, not even many of the so-called “experts”.Until relatively recently, anxiety and fear were pretty
misunderstood. We made a lot of assumptions and plausible guesses about what was happening in our bodies and minds when we were afraid, but we never knew for certain. Technology, specifically in the field of nuclear medicine, is changing the field of psychology and our understanding of our minds rapidly, we're learning and discovering more about how our brain truly works far faster than ever before.
Just a few decades ago we had to rely on "hunches" about why certain thought patterns and mental habits became problematic, and even what caused people to be predisposed to struggle with anxiety in the first place. We
thought maybe it was because our
parents didn't hug us enough, or
hugged us too much, or because
we got dealt a bad genetic hand,
or because we had some sort of
"chemical imbalance".
The strange truth is that, even though many of these theories came from mental health professionals, psychologists, and even doctors, they couldn't prove any of it. We've been conditioned to accept as fact whatever the “experts” tell us, but that's usually because they have some pretty good evidence before they start drawing conclusions on cause. Not always so with psychology. People spend weeks, months, and years in their therapist’s offices talking about their childhoods and relationships assuming that would lead to the solution. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much evidence for that being the most effective treatment for anxiety. We could have just as easily used astrology or voodoo to help, there wasn't much of a standard and people tried any number of treatment approaches that “sounded good”. It was no different than 600 years ago when everyone KNEW the world was flat. That's what everyone’s assumption was, and no one questioned it. If everyone believes it, it MUST be true, right? Until one day someone took a closer look and changed everything....
Like Columbus setting sail into the unknown and discovering new worlds and answers to questions no one had even thought to ask, some among us are using cutting edge technology to unravel the mysteries of our minds and arriving at ANSWERS instead of hunches, theories, or good sounding guesses. Just like the invention of the microscope allowed us to pull back the curtains and peer deeply into things never before possible and as a result helped us take a giant leap forward in our understanding of the world around us, a similar advancement is giving us the same opportunity in the field of psychology. It’s allowing us to look inside a working brain and has given the world a new understanding, a raw and unvarnished look at how your brain REALLY works, at a level unprecedented in human history. The advancement that is taking us into the next evolution of understanding is the Functional MRI (fMRI).
So what is a fMRI? A fMRI is a type of brain scan that uses electromagnetic radiation to allow us to see activity inside your brain in virtually real-time. So while a X-Ray or even CAT scan is more like a snapshot of your brain at a given point in time, a fMRI is more like a hi-def video that allows us to see and understand
far more by viewing what regions of the brain are active and working together given certain conditions and stimuli.
What does all this mean to someone living with anxiety? As it turns out, quite a bit. While we've known for quite some
time what physically happens to our bodies when we undergo fear, we weren't always exactly quite sure HOW it happened, in what order, and what was the cause versus the effect. All that has changed. Now we know precisely what happens in our brain when we experience fear or anxiety on even an unconscious level, and the real significance in knowing how the process is started and what steps it goes through is that it has allowed us to develop better and more effective ways to STOP IT.
I think it's incredibly important and therapeutic for you to understand what’s happening within your brain, on a biological level, when you get anxious or experience fear. The problem is that up until now the only explanations have been in old musty medical texts or thick and difficult to read and understand books developed mostly for people who wear lab coats and pocket protectors. My goal is to take all that knowledge and pare it down to the very essence of what you need to know to better help yourself overcome your anxiety in a way that is simple, fast, and hopefully, a bit less boring than organic chemistry class.
We’re going to start with a summary understanding of what happens in your brain when you experience fear, and that requires a little bit o' biology, but I promise, it's really pretty gosh darn simple...