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The ABC Method of Easing Anxiety

Guest post by Debbie Hampton, author/blogger at The Best Brain Possible

Occasional anxiety is a normal, expected part of life. You might feel anxious when faced with a challenging project at work, before taking a test, or when trying to make a big decision. But when nervous feelings are common and not about something specific, that's not healthy.

For a person with an anxiety disorder, the anxiety rarely goes way and can get worse over time. The mental and physical symptoms can interfere with daily activities such as job performance, school, work, and relationships.

The Difference Between Worry and Anxiety

While worry and anxiety can both make life challenging, they are two distinct things occurring in different parts of your brain. You can experience worry without anxiety, and anxiety without worry.  Very simply, worrying is thinking about something, and anxiety is feeling it.

Worrying occurs in your mind and involves your thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, interacting with your limbic system. The limbic system is an ancient collection of structures located deep inside the brain which control basic emotions and instincts. The same brain circuits that allow your super-smart brain to plan and problem solve allow you to worry, but the limbic system adds an emotional punch.

These circuits activate too frequently and can get stuck in the on position, causing negative mental and physical health consequences.

Anxiety is physically based, shows up as bodily symptoms, actions, and behaviors, and primarily involves the limbic system and the brain's fear circuit. Oftentimes, anxiety doesn’t have a specific reason that you can pinpoint and just presents as a symptom, like an upset stomach or shortness of breath.

Worrying and Anxiety Have Beneficial Origins

Worry and anxiety developed for your protection. Both are really your brain’s way of learning from past experiences to try to steer you clear of potential danger in the future. Your brain’s number one priority is always keeping you alive. When something bad happens, your thinking brain notices what preceded the event and tries to figure out patterns and connections within that occurrence and to past bad experiences that might have predicted it.

When remembering a deadly predator’s territory meant the difference between life or death, worry and anxiety were evolutionary advantages which aided our ancestors. But today when your brain can find hundreds of reasons to sound the alarm daily and connect things that don’t have any correlation, these circuits activate too frequently and can get stuck in the on position, causing negative mental and physical health consequences.

People with an anxiety disorder are three to five times more likely to go to the doctor and six times more likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness.

In the book, The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time, Alex Korb describes it like this:

“Imagine you’re a baseball pitcher and you have a hat you always wear, and then one day you don’t wear the hat, and you lose the game and feel ashamed. Your limbic system wants to avoid that feeling in the future, so it notices, ‘Hey, I forgot to wear my hat. That must be the reason I lost.’ Even though not wearing your lucky hat probably didn’t cause the loss, once your limbic system assumes a possible connection, it becomes hard to unlearn it. From then on, not wearing the hat triggers.”

So even though worry and anxiety are a natural, even beneficial, feature of being human, learning to manage them is an essential part of mental health. When your mental resources are busy worrying, you can’t use them for other things. Worry keeps you from focusing on and putting energy into what’s really important, can make it harder to connect with other people, and can be just mentally exhausting! And anxiety is even worse. According to The Anxiety And Depression Association Of America, anxiety disorders are the most common mental diagnosis in the U.S. and go hand-in-hand with depression. People with an anxiety disorder are three to five times more likely to go to the doctor and six times more likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness.

The ABC Method of Easing Anxiety

Anxiety can be understood and lessened by remembering “The ABC’s of Anxiety.”

Awareness

The first step in decreasing anxiety is to become aware of it. When your brain observes something that it thinks is worthy of sounding the alarm, notice that your heart is racing or that your breathing has become shallow as it is happening.

This is really developing a sense of mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply being aware of what’s happening as it’s happening. This may sound odd. However, David Eagleman writes, in his book Incognito, “Almost the entirety of what happens in your mental life is not under your conscious control.” So, mindfulness is a way of learning to watch yourself think.

Science has proven, beyond any doubt, that a steady practice of mindfulness induces real beneficial changes in the brain. 

Focusing on the here and now helps you to become aware of anxiety-producing thoughts and emotions, acknowledge them without judgment and realize they may not be accurate reflections of reality. Through practicing mindfulness, thoughts and emotions lose their power over your brain and body, and you can start to detach from them.

Science has proven, beyond any doubt, that a steady practice of mindfulness induces real beneficial changes in the brain. Studies have shown mindfulness to significantly improve a variety of conditions, including anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Belief

Next, evaluate the validity of the alarm. Consciously try to determine a causal link to an event or situation, past, present, or future. You may not be able to pinpoint a specific reason and that's OK. If you can, formulate a conscious belief about the anxiety-producing thing. If you can't, assure your brain that you are safe. There is no danger.

When an implicit memory gets called up in the present, you probably won't consciously know it’s a memory. 

Beliefs are most often below your conscious awareness and based on implicit memories, which are made up of your past programming, wounds, and experiences. Implicit memory is sometimes referred to as automatic memory because it uses your past to remember things without thinking about them. When an implicit memory gets called up in the present, you probably won't consciously know it’s a memory. You may just experience it through emotions, behaviors, and bodily sensations, such as anxiety.

By practicing mindful awareness, you can lessen the control your subconscious has over you. Here’s your chance to interrupt anxiety-producing automatic negative thinking patterns by working with your mind to reframe thoughts and insert new beliefs that empower and encourage you.

Coping

Lastly, you respond to your beliefs with coping mechanisms. Coping can involve a subconscious, non-productive habit, like eating a pint of ice cream or totally avoiding the situation making you anxious. These are mindless, reactive behaviors from your past programming, which aren't helpful.

If you become mindful of your anxiety and thought processes, you can consciously choose to respond with a healthy coping mechanism, like going for a walk or writing in a journal. It’s entirely possible to change your coping mechanisms from negative bad habits to more positive routines which help decrease your anxiety in the first place.

About the Author

Debbie Hampton recovered from a suicide attempt and resulting brain injury to become an inspirational and educational writer. She is the author of Beat Depression And Anxiety By Changing Your Brain and Sex, Suicide and Serotonin: How These Things Almost Killed and Healed Me. She writes for The Huffington Post, MindBodyGreen, and her own website, The Best Brain Possible, where she shares lifestyle and mental health practices she used to rebuild her brain and find joy.

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The posts on this blog are for information only. They are neither intended to substitute for a relationship with your doctor or other healthcare provider, nor do they constitute medical or healthcare advice of any kind. Any information in these posts should not be acted upon without consideration of primary source material and professional input from one’s own healthcare providers.