Did you know that chronic and prolonged anxiety actually changes your brain? That's why an anxiety disorder is a mental illness. The brain is unwell. It's not working the way it's supposed to.
To be more specific - the amygdala (the part of the brain that triggers your fight or flight response and the release of your stress hormones) - gets bigger as a result of chronic anxiety.
The bigger it gets, the better it gets at doing its job.
And since its job is to prepare you for danger (i.e. make you anxious), a bigger amygdala is definitely not your friend.
How do we undo this and allow the amygdala to return to normal?
We do it by removing the fear from our anxiety symptoms.
Fear of our symptoms keeps us stuck. Fear of our symptoms keeps reinforcing the message in the brain that our amygdala needs to prepare us for danger.
Removing the fear from our anxiety symptoms - by gradually bringing a level of acceptance to them - slowly reverses the growth of the amygdala. Reducing the neural connections in the amygdala allows it to return to normal.
That means you get your life back and anxiety stops being in control.
We don't remove anxiety from our lives completely. That's not the goal. Anxiety is a normal healthy response that humans need for survival. What we remove is the overactive / hyperactive response in the brain - so that we no longer experience a myriad of anxiety symptoms day and night.
Feel free to contact me here if you have questions or need some advice on anxiety recovery.
Cheers David
