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My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
All right, Sophia, tell me about how we started this story.
She moved in for two weeks, lasted five days, left a mess and then pressed her ear against their bedroom door and burst in screaming.
When, kicked out to a hotel, she called her son-in-law's workplace, pretending his partner had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance, faked a medical emergency and spoiler, that was just the beginning.
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Hello everybody, I'm Gemma Spike and welcome back to The Psychology of Your 20s, the podcast where we talk through the biggest changes, moments and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology.
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show, welcome back to the podcast.
It is so great to have you here back for another episode.
Today we are going to talk about anxiety, but not in the usual way that we normally talk about anxiety, or not in the usual way that anxiety is spoken about generally.
We are going to do instead, a complete and in-depth look into the neuroscience behind why anxiety happens, why it lingers, why it continues to be this frustrating, sometimes uncontrollable part of life.
I think knowing the intricacies behind anxiety and understanding it, the neuroscience behind the reactions that are going on in our brain, is honestly sometimes the most important step in becoming less anxious, because you start to like distance yourself from the feelings.
You start to remove personal blame.
You start to understand the systems better and you are able to apply logic and this information to your feelings faster.
That, I think, counteracts the I don't know, counteracts the illogical nature of anxiety.
That's what's been really helpful for me.
And I think just being able to explain what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling, why I'm feeling, whatever I am, puts this distance between me and my anxiety.
So that's what we're going to do today from talking about the function of different brain areas to neurotransmitters, cell networks, the neuroscience of fear.
There is a lot to cover that is honestly well as a little bit of a psychology nerd.
You guys know this.
I find it so fascinating, not typically spoken about.
So without further ado, let's get into it.
The neuroscience behind your anxiety.
Firstly, why does anxiety feel so serious?
Even if we rationally know, even if we consciously know like the world isn't ending, like I'm going to be okay.
This thing is actually not a threat.
Why does our brain still take it to the extreme?
Anxiety feels so serious because your brain is not built to be calm.
It is not built to be fair.
It's especially not interested in your sense of fulfillment at all.
It doesn't care if you're happy.
First and foremost, it is built to protect you.
It does not care if you feel fulfilled.
It doesn't care if you feel okay.
It cares that you're alive.
The system, your brain system, the system behind your anxiety, would rather overreact and protect you than underreact and have something terrible happen.
One of the most useful ways neuroscientists now explain this is through prediction, a prediction model of anxiety.
Our brain predicts more than it reacts.
So much of what your unconscious brain is doing throughout the day is essentially just like constantly reacting, constantly making predictions about what is likely to happen next.
It consumes a large part of our unconscious mind.
In anxiety, or amongst people who have anxiety, those predictions become more tilted towards threat and uncertainty, whereas with someone who doesn't have anxiety, Those predictions are more realistic and they're easier to dismiss which, if you are somebody who is anxious, probably feels literally impossible.
I don't think I've ever been able to dismiss an anxious thought in my life without observing it, interrogating it, overthinking it.
But this is what happens in the minds of people without anxiety.
They don't have the same What we call learnt uncertainty.
This is something that a paper in 2022 I think it was published in 2022 describes where essentially, if you have anxiety, your brain has become primed to look for all the things in a situation that you don't understand, all the things that you aren't certain of.
And fill in those gaps with whatever will be the worst case scenario so that you can prepare.
This is why your anxiety can become so all-consuming.
Because it is focused on ambiguity.
It is obsessed with uncertainty and the possibility of threat.
And that possibility is always going to be there.
It is a fact of life.
That's part of being alive.
But our brain can't help but fixate on it.
This helps explain why your brain becomes like obsessed with certain thoughts, sensations or themes or what ifs.
The very things that it cannot solve or cannot know for certain are the things that it becomes most obsessed with.
It is not because those things are objectively the most important part of reality.
It's not that they're more likely to happen.
It's not that they're more common.
It is just this anxious fallacy that the more I worry, the more it must be true.
The truth is, is it's just that your brain has assigned these hypotheticals as important to think about.
More because they are scary.
More because they are things that you can fixate on, because there are so many possibilities.
Less because they are likely to happen.
The other thing that this threat detection system is built to do is generalize, based on past experiences.
Being the machine that it is, Your brain is a machine.
Once you may have experienced one dangerous or distressing situation, it becomes easier for your brain to then assume that every situation has the possibility of morphing into that worst case scenario.
This is what is often referred to as fear generalization.
And it is why anxiety tends to grow and expand over time.
You know you can have a panic attack in a supermarket once and then, over time, as your brain begins to expect this fear in more and more situations, now you start to dread going into any supermarket, going into anywhere that's public, going anywhere where there are people around you.
One humiliating social moment can spread into anxiety around eye contact, public speaking being perceived at all.
One scary bodily sensation can generalize into the fear of exercise, fear around caffeine, heat crowds, even excitement.
It sounds irrational that that fear could spread so rapidly, but it may be irrational.
It's not random.
It's fear generalization.
Now this is where anxiety gets really irritating, because it starts to reach all these broader aspects of life.
That shouldn't be scary.
Why do I have this reaction now?
The same reaction to getting a cup of coffee as I would being chased by a tiger.
Well, from the outside, yes, ordering a coffee is trivial.
But from the inside, these small moments encompass multiple anxiety-inducing aspects and multiple moments of ambiguity.
It might involve being watched speaking ill Whilst.
You're feeling shaky, making a mistake, feeling trapped in the queue, noticing your heart rate, worrying that you'll panic, that you'll blush freeze, that people will judge you.
To the conscious, rational part of you, it is just a quick interaction.
You are just ordering a coffee.
But really the brain isn't not only.
It's not just computing the objective event, it's computing the meaning behind the event and the meaning and the harm or the anxiety of past experiences, and it's sending in the whole army.
It thinks that every situation could become the worst thing ever.
When we feel this sense of anxiety, our bodies and minds react in a way that basically makes it as easy as possible to get away, to notice more, to be more alert, to stay on guard, to fight back.
From the body's and the brain's point of view, this is useful.
Putting us into this activated state is useful because if something dangerous does happen out of this hypothetical situation we've created, it's best to be prepared.
But when there's a false alarm and if you have anxiety, it's constant false alarms this bodily reaction starts to feel disproportionate and starts to really dominate over all other feelings.
This is where the distinction between immediate fear and sustained anxiety becomes really interesting.
A 2020 or 2003 I think actually 2003 review published in the European Journal of Pharmacology looked at evidence from animal and human studies and basically was trying to figure out like why is this overreaction happening?
Essentially what they found was that In the brain of somebody without anxiety, the amygdala the switch that turns off the amygdala and turns off the fear response, is just as receptive as the same switch getting turned on.
So basically yes, their fear may spike in similar ways to us, their anxiety may spike to similar things, but it can be turned off just as quickly, meaning that sensations are allowed to kind of transpire occur, and then we're able to move on.
In the brains of people with anxiety, in the amygdalas of people with anxiety, that switch, that same switch can be turned on just as quickly and but it cannot be turned off.
So a lot of people think that it's the on switch that's broken, right?
The amygdala is more receptive, more reactive.
That is definitely true in some situations, but really where anxiety comes from is not the immediate fear.
It is the inability to down-regulate that fear.
It is the inability to turn off that fear.
Another really important idea here is about interoception.
And this is basically the brain's ability to sense and interpret what is happening inside your body and react accordingly.
The American neuroscientist Arthur Craig.
He talks about this in that same paper or one, I think one published very soon after.
And he argues that the brain is not just mapping what is happening outside the body.
It's also mapping what's happening inside the body.
So it's also thinking about heart rate, breathing temperature pain, muscle tension nausea, and it's using that information to actually help construct our emotions about our external environment as well and how we should react.
Essentially, it's a two-way street.
Yes, our emotions control our bodily reactions.
Our bodily reactions control our emotions.
The thing is, when we're anxious, our bodily reactions, control triggered by our anxiety, are really confusing, because a lot is going on.
Everything is like on full speed.
And so our brain, getting locked into that two-way bidirectional relationship and stream of information, takes this as evidence that something must actually be going wrong.
It takes that as evidence that Our irrational emotions must be on to something, meaning that it continues to further stimulate us, continues to further activate the stress response.
Essentially, what's happening is something freaks you out, based on past experiences or based on an irrational fear.
Your body is unable to turn off that sensation, that initial sensation of anxiety, that initial sensation of fear and being scared and tension, meaning that the body starts to take, your mind starts to take those bodily sensations as fact that something is actually going wrong.
I'm hoping that you guys are kind of seeing the cycle here.
Right.
Or just this like downward spiral where it becomes so difficult to interrupt these signals and say actually no, everything is OK.
We are fine because it just the evidence that something is wrong is just as internal as it is external.
Or the evidence that things are okay is a lot weaker compared to this internal bodily signal that everything is actually on fire.
Talking more about the neuroscience of this.
That same researcher, Dr Craig, expanded on this idea in a 2009 review published in um like a neuro, i can't remember the name, but a neuroscience journal and he focused on another part of the brain called the anterior insula.
That is a brain region, he argued, is especially important for turning raw bodily signals into conscious subjective feelings.
His claim is that people with anxiety may have a dysfunction in this region.
Meaning that, like we were talking about, with that mind-body connection, anxious feelings are more physically persuasive because we find it harder the insula finds it harder to argue or disentangle ourselves from what it sees as physical proof.
Basically, it becomes harder in the brain of somebody with anxiety to shut down our own brain's interpretation of our own physical reactions as being evidence that something is truly wrong.
What I'm really trying to get at here is it's not you.
It is all these systems.
It is all this neurological stuff going on.
That means that we cannot separate a thought from a feeling.
We cannot separate as well our emotional experience from our anxiety and from what's going on in our bodies.
A 2004 study carried out by researchers from the University College London looked into this a little bit closer.
They kind of wanted to figure out whether this was really the crux of why people are anxious, or why some people have debilitating anxiety and some people don't.
The researchers put 17 participants into an fMRI scanner and they asked them to do a heartbeat detection task.
Essentially, they said, We're not going to take your pulse in the usual external way.
What do you think your heart rate is per minute?
Essentially, how good are you at counting your own heart rate and figuring out your own pulse?
Most interestingly, people who got a more accurate number, who were like yep, I think my heart rate is around 72 beats per minute.
49 beats per minute.
It didn't matter if it was high or low, they were more accurate in their assessment.
Reported stronger negative emotional experiences.
What this paper essentially suggests is that your brain monitors your body closely to determine how scared it should be.
So if your brain is highly scared, tuned to internal changes, small shifts in heart rate, small shifts in breathing tension, in any way, that becomes more psychologically meaningful to it.
In an anxious state.
That means that the body constantly feels like there is and the brain constantly feels like there is ample evidence internally that something is going wrong.
Again.
This is all because your mind would rather interrupt your peace 10 times unnecessarily than miss one thing that might have hurt you.
That is why anxiety often feels bigger than the situation itself.
And all of these neurological processes, all of these anatomical areas are all trying to keep that process going so that you survive.
Going even deeper into the neuroscience behind your anxiety.
We also obviously at some point need to talk about the role of certain neurotransmitters, specifically two neurotransmitters GABA and glutamate.
If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you would have heard me talk about these so much.
The two Gs, These two chemical messengers, basically control alongside a bunch of other things, but they are a big part of how reactive or regulated your brain is.
In very simple terms, glutamate is what helps neurons fire and communicate.
It gets them all excited.
It stimulates them.
GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter, meaning it helps to quiet or dampen neural activity.
It calms everybody down.
I always think about them as like good cop and bad cop in a way, like glutamate or like this.
I think about them as like glutamate is the fun, exciting aunt who like gives the kids all the sugar, riles them up with games, with candy is like getting them all excited.
And then Gabba is like the responsible parent who then has to like get everybody ready for bedtime and do like the grown-up job.
Research on anxiety disorders has argued that it's not simply that we have more anxiety glutamate, more of that excitatory neurotransmitter in our system, it's that we may also have less GABA or we may be less receptive to GABA or have an imbalance in both, which is why drugs that boost GABA signaling and the way that GABA can be received, like benzodiazepines, reduce acute anxiety because the theory goes they're balancing out the neurochemical reactions this is another thing your anxiety may come down to of course all these things are kind of happening at the same time so it's not like these are different explanations they're all combined but Sometimes what it does come down to on top of these other elements is just differences in your brain chemistry that increase or decrease your sensitivity to certain neurotransmitters that go on to shape how you feel in response to the world.
I just think it's so fascinating that we have this intense emotional experience, that being our anxiety.
And then when you start to understand it through a neuroscientific lens, it all makes sense.
It all makes sense why it all feels so uncontrollable?
Because there are things operating behind the scenes that can't be brought into your control, that you do not have conscious say over, that just leave you responding to the consequences or outcomes of the imbalance or of the lack or excess of activity.
You'll probably know the frustration.
If you have anxiety and you were listening to this episode you have definitely had somebody tell you just to stop worrying about it or to simply stop thinking about it.
What people without anxiety don't realize is that that would mean going against everything that your brain, in particular, is programmed to do.
You do not have the same efficient top-down attentional control that the average person without anxiety has.
Instead, you have a different attentional system, one that is stimulus driven, threat driven.
Basically for you, it is a lot harder to ignore the scary thoughts, to ignore the scary situations, because anxiety is not only making the threat seem bigger, it's reducing your capacity for calm, it's reducing your capacity for goal-directed focus and rationalization.
And it's also this weird conundrum whereby, in order to address our anxiety like we have, you know, trying to avoid it doesn't work, like when people say, worry about it less, think about it less.
Well, that actually can at times enlarge our fear and make us think about it more.
I feel like by now, I feel like we all know about this very famous experiment, like the white bear experiment.
You To give a refresh.
This was an experiment very famous in the 80s where a researcher told a bunch of participants whatever you do, don't think about a white elephant, or don't think about a white bear.
Every time you think about it, ring the bell.
Ring the bell as soon as this thought has intruded.
He also told a bunch of participants like, Here is a list of things you can think about.
You can think about the white bear.
You can also think about this and this and this.
Whatever you want to think about, you have complete permission to do it.
When people were told to think about the bear less, when people were told not to think about it, it became a fixation point right.
It became this obsessional thing because why are we not allowed to think about it?
What's wrong with this thing?
What's bad about thinking about it?
That means that we can't do that, and your brain begins to run away with it.
It's the same with your anxiety.
Study after study shows when we are given instructions to suppress a thought, to ignore a stimulus to ignore a thought, our level of fear towards that thought increases, firstly.
But also we just think about it in excess of if we've just been allowed to think about it casually all along.
And because of this, anxiety becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that's really difficult to break, making our initial fears worse and worse and worse.
So I feel like I've given you a lot of information.
This is the neuroscientific side of this so far.
Just to give you a little mini summary.
Your brain is built to protect you, not to fulfill you.
All it cares about is your survival.
There are certain areas in the brain that are in control of of your survival and of detecting things that may threaten your survival.
In people with anxiety.
These areas aren't always operating properly and that creates a longer, ongoing sense of fear towards ambiguous situations.
There is also the combined changes in neurotransmitter levels.
That kind of explains this a little bit.
And also this inability to down-regulate your fear or to rationally interrupt your fear and say hey, this actually isn't that important.
This actually isn't going to happen.
And to believe that.
And so all of this shrinks our lives significantly to say the least.
I want to break down how we can take those neuroscientific principles though, and apply them in the opposite direction.
Knowing what we know about the neuroscience behind anxiety, how can we kind of take that knowledge, flip it on its head and do better for our anxious feelings?
Do you remember when Diana Ross double tapped Lil' Kim's boobs at the VMAs?
Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people.
I know what you're thinking.
What the hell does George Bush got to do with Lil' Kim?
Well, you can find out on the Look Back At It podcast.
I'm Sam Jay.
I'm Alex English.
Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it.
Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill waxing all about crack in the 80s.
To be clear, 84 was big to me, not just because of crack.
I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so y'all know.
I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack.
So I'm starting to see that there's a through line.
We also have eggs on the table right now.
Thank you for finishing that sentence.
Yes.
I don't think there's a more important year for black people.
Really?
Yeah.
For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.
Listen to Look Back at It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to my new podcast.
Learn the hard way with me, your host and your favorite therapist, Keir Gaines.
And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests.
I'm talking Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark.
Sometimes, when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing.
And we're still chasing it.
And we don't know when we've done enough because people scoreboard.
Why?
Life becomes about wins and losses.
Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you're here on Earth.
Are you a good person because you're afraid?
Because that's two different intentions, bro.
Absolutely.
And that's two different levels of trust.
I want you to just really be a good person.
Join me, Keir Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing growth, fatherhood pressure and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hard Way, and listen now.
My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
Wait a minute, Dakota.
How bad did it get?
Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself.
She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five.
She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture.
And then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming.
She did not burst in while they were... She did.
They kicked her out and paid for her hotel.
And they thought, it's finally over.
Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
He called every hospital in the city and his partner was making coffee the entire time.
She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son?
Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot waiting for him to see if he would show up.
When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him.
She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station?
Spoilers!
Karma's going to show up in the best way possible.
So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to podcasts.
If you're watching the latest season of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding Kate Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
I like the bougie style of Housewives show.
I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
On the podcast Reality with the King I Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances and the tea everybody's talking about.
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At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
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Hey, it's Edwin Castro, also known as Castro1021.
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Listen to the 1021 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Essentially, what I'm saying is that, as much as our brain is pushing us to have a certain reaction to fear and ambiguity, there is a way that we can rewire our brains away from anxious thoughts, knowing what we now know about the underlying neuroscience.
We basically have to teach our brain new connections, new connections between ambiguous situations and the expected fear.
And we do that by creating new associations between the things that we fear and what we think or what we know.
The outcome will be
Basically, rather than trying to completely erase all of our exposure to a trigger, and rather than trying to avoid something that scares us at all costs, all we need to do is show our brain that a different outcome is possible.
Remember your brain is just a machine that learns through repeated patterns, repeated exposure, through repetition.
The more that you associate this thing that you fear with something that is positive, the more that it learns to expect that in the future and it changes the X to Y prediction model that it's operating on.
We need to have experiences.
If you're going to use neuroscience to battle against your anxiety, you need to be focused on having experiences that contradict your anxious predictions.
Basically meaning that you have to go further into the belly of your anxiety.
In psychology, we call this exposure therapy.
I'm sure you've heard it.
Essentially what it's saying is, if we assume every, for example, social interaction will always be unbearable, the most powerful way we can rewire that situation is by Going into those feared situations and proving to ourselves that that catastrophic outcome is not going to happen, or will not happen as often as we expect it to.
Basically saying, your brain, my brain, you brain, you are lying to me.
These predictions are false.
We're basically trying to set up our anxiety in like a sting operation to prove that it's a liar, by going into the room, going into the space, getting on the plane, standing up in front of the people and undoing that prediction that everything is going to go terribly and providing proof that it's not.
If you fear speaking up in front of others because you think that everybody's going to judge you, everybody's going to notice how anxious you are.
Everybody is going to reject you.
A way to kind of set up that prediction and to prove that it's false is to go into those situations more and more and more to prove that that doesn't happen every time, that actually that rarely happens.
The prediction model is false.
The new learning isn't necessarily this is always going to be fine, or I'm always going to feel confident, or there is nothing to fear.
The new learning is simply that I can be in that fearful situation.
A it's probably not as likely as I thought, but B I will survive.
Regardless, there is also evidence that how you engage with the fear matters as well, not just the outcome.
And that brings me to like our practical tips for dealing with an anxious mind.
And the number one thing you can do other than exposure is to simply verbalize what you are feeling, rather than keeping it stuck inside of your mind to fester.
In 2015, they did this randomized control trial with people who were afraid of public speaking.
And these people were assigned to basically get up in front of a room and talk.
And they were either asked to label their anxiety or to ignore it, meaning they were asked to either explicitly put their feelings and their fears about what was going to happen into words, or they were just going to have to do exposure and get up in front of people and see what happened.
What they found was that people who were able to say this is an anxious feeling, I'm scared here, my physical symptoms of anxiety are coming back are really derived from this fear and not from the fact that this situation is actually harmful.
They did better almost every single time.
Essentially, they were able to rewire their fear, not necessarily by suppressing their anxious thoughts, but actually by bringing the anxious thought more into their focus.
Being able to approach it and also see that it was a liar, see that it wasn't true and see that it was something that operated beyond what they consciously and deliberately wanted to do.
So that's one of the best things you can do if you're feeling anxious is just literally say I am anxious.
I know it goes against so much of how we think we're meant to process our emotions, which is to avoid them.
And to not acknowledge them.
This is saying do the opposite.
This is saying go in deeper.
Tip number two relies on a similar cognitive distancing technique.
And it essentially says what I'm essentially going to tell you to do is to learn how to relate to your thoughts as mental events beyond you rather than facts that are coming from within you.
In a really interesting series of studies from 2014, researchers found that using your name or a non first person pronoun or somebody else's name during an anxious moment was an incredible form of emotional regulation.
Basically.
The first level of cognitive distancing from your anxiety would be saying I'm having an anxious thought.
The second level.
The level that they found was saying Gemma is experiencing an anxious thought, or saying giving your anxiety a completely different name.
Basically labeling the part of you that felt anxious as something that was operating differently outside of you.
So Kevin is making me feel anxious.
Kevin's having a really bad day today.
Brian is really trying to get me stirred up.
Noticing your anxious thoughts not as just coming from you, but from something beyond you that you don't necessarily want or you don't have to necessarily associate with.
So like when you feel fear, being like, oh, instead of thinking, oh my God, I feel fear.
This is coming from me.
This is intuition.
Being like, oh, that's Miranda again.
That's Miranda being such like an asshole.
Miranda's just like really getting on my nerves at the moment.
It stops you.
The reason this works is because it stops you from completely embodying the thought as your own and puts the blame, or assigns the blame, to an outside source.
Why this works is because it stops.
Well, it doesn't completely stop, but it interrupts that body-mind connection that says if fear and anxiety is coming from me internally, it must mean that it's saying something important.
It must mean that it's giving me some kind of signal cue hint about the state of the world around me.
It must mean that I should be scared, because of course We trust ourselves and we trust our own feelings the most, and above all others.
Obviously, if you're anxious or if you are somebody with anxiety.
We know from this research and from the neuroscience we've already spoken about that that connection and your ability to interpret those physical sensations matters is providing false evidence for things that aren't actually occurring or that aren't actually as dangerous as you think they are.
So assigning the anxious thought, assigning the corresponding bodily sensations to an outside force, to a Kevin or a Brian or a Miranda, this anxious little character that occasionally comes and visits you and makes you feel terrible interrupts that to your brain logical assumption that to feel anxiety must mean that something is wrong because it is coming from you.
And who could you trust more than yourself?
This is kind of similar to my third tip, which is to bring in humor.
Labeling your anxiety as Brian or Kevin or Miranda makes it kind of funny compared to the intensity of the feeling.
The opposite of anxiety is not peace.
It is laughter.
I don't know who said that, but they were a very, very wise individual.
When our anxiety is bad, Everything feels really serious because we know our mind is taking this as a life or death situation.
That makes it difficult to laugh.
It makes it difficult to make it feel less serious than it is.
But adding back in the ridiculousness of the situation snaps you out of the anxiety cycle much quicker than a lot of other techniques.
And honestly, like anxiety is literally hilarious at times.
Like it is hilarious how ridiculous and dramatic it is.
Like the fact that it truly believes every single bad thing that could happen in the world could and will and is currently happening to you.
The fact that it genuinely wants you to believe that is really funny.
It's like a child.
Our anxiety is like a little petulant child.
And there's increasing evidence that laughing at the absurdity of our anxiety firstly helps by taking that nervous energy and turning those bubbles of fear into feelings of excitement.
It secondly helps because of that psychological distancing.
But when speaking about neuroscience, the third way that laughter helps is is that it actually activates the parasympathetic nervous system.
Like I said, the opposite of anxiety is not peace.
It is laughter.
Because when we laugh, laughter literally stimulates the vagus nerve.
This is the primary component of our parasympathetic nervous system, the system that calms us down and shuts off our anxiety.
Activating that nerve, activating that system, shifts us into a state of rest and recovery rather than alertness.
This one 2018 Japanese paper also found that just hearing laughter can improve stress anxiety cortisol levels.
Literally watching a comedy show, Watching your favorite sitcom.
I'm currently re-watching Girls, which is like.
I find that so funny.
Watching, I don't know, Funniest Home Videos, is that still a thing?
Like, no.
But anything like that will neurologically calm you down.
If you can laugh, that is a mental and emotional circuit breaker.
It is a way for your parasympathetic nervous system to say why would I be laughing if I wasn't safe?
This is, again, you playing psychological warfare. back at your anxiety.
Your anxiety wants to throw all these delusional, ridiculous situations at it.
Take the ridiculousness of it and laugh at it.
Laughter as a circuit breaker works, because it is something that yes, triggers our parasympathetic nervous system.
It also triggers GABA.
It triggers oxytocin.
Basically, imagine anxiety is like this toy train on like a circular track.
It's going round and round and round.
It's getting faster and faster and faster.
We all know the feeling.
The circuit breaker, the laughter, whatever your circuit breaker is, is like a kid disconnecting a piece of the track, flooding the system with oxytocin, flooding the system with GABA, like turning it all down, switching off the batteries.
I read this fantastic article from this psychologist called Dr Lucas, who wrote about the three neurological circuit breakers that are best for anxiety.
These are A stimulating GABA and oxytocin.
By forcing ourselves to slow down, forcing ourselves to walk slower, eat slower, sleep more, therefore resetting ourselves.
That's the first great circuit breaker.
B is a parasympathetic circuit breaker.
So like laughter, but also like relaxing your tongue and your jaw.
I don't know if you've heard about this, but letting your mouth and jaw go slack is like a biological cheat code for relaxation.
One of the first nodes or points of your vagus nerve is right below your ear towards your jaw.
All signals go past this point.
All activating signals have to flow through this point to tell your body to speed up and get stressed and get anxious.
So if you reduce tension around that origin point of your vagus nerve, It is like the equivalent of holding down the on and off button on your phone or your computer for five seconds.
It is a literal... You have a circuit breaker.
You have an off switch in your body that you can activate.
And the final circuit breaker that Dr Lucas talks about is ones that activate your anterior cingulate cortex, basically the part of your brain that communicates between the conscious and the unconscious, instinct and executive functioning.
We can power on that part of the brain that lets us interrupt unconscious and nonsensical thoughts, and by simple mindfulness exercises, by doing grounding exercises, by refocusing our attention and asking our attention to focus only on the present.
So watching raindrops down a window, slowly eating and savoring a meal, doing a body scan, the 5-4-3-2-1 sensory technique Basically refocusing your attention outwards, only focusing on what's going around you and really sinking into that stops you from getting pulled inwards.
Those are your circuit breakers.
Circuit breakers that work through your vagus nerve.
Circuit breakers that work through neurotransmitter release.
Circuit breakers that work through turning on the parts of you that can downregulate.
Do you remember when Diana Ross double-tapped Lil' Kim's boobs at the VMAs?
Or when Kanye said that George Bush didn't like black people.
I know what you're thinking.
What the hell does George Bush got to do with Lil' Kim?
Well, you can find out on the Look Back At It podcast.
I'm Sam Jay.
I'm Alex English.
Each episode, we pick a here, unpack what went down, and try to make sense of how we survived it.
Including a recent episode with Mark Lamont Hill waxing all about crack in the 80s.
To be clear, 84 was big to me, not just because of crack.
I'm down to talk about crack all day, but just so y'all know.
I mean, at this point, Mark, this is the second episode where we've discussed crack.
So I'm starting to see that there's a through line.
We also have eggs on the table right now.
Thank you for finishing that sentence.
I don't think there's a more important year for black people.
Really?
Yeah.
For me, it's one of the most important years for black people in American history.
Listen to look back at it on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to my new podcast.
Learn the hard way with me, your host and your favorite therapist, Keir Gaines.
And in recognition of Mental Health Awareness Month, I'm bringing over a decade of my own experience in the mental health field and conversations with so many incredible guests.
I'm talking Tripp Fontaine, Ryan Clark.
Sometimes, when we're in the pursuit of the thing, we get so wrapped up in the chase that we don't realize that we are in possession of the thing.
And we're still chasing it.
And we don't know when we've done enough because people scoreboard.
Why?
Life becomes about wins and losses.
Steve Burns, Dustin Ross, because you find it important to be a good person while you're here on Earth.
Are you a good person because you're afraid?
Because that's two different intentions, bro.
Absolutely.
And that's two different levels of trust.
I want you to just really be a good person.
Join me, Keir Gaines, as we have real conversations about healing growth, fatherhood pressure and purpose on my new podcast, Learn the Hard Way.
Open your free iHeartRadio app, search Learn the Hard Way and listen now.
My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
Wait a minute, Dakota, how bad did it get?
Well, it got bad enough that her son-in-law had to eventually arrest her himself.
She moved in for two weeks, lasted for five.
She left nail clippings in the bathtub, candy stuck to the furniture.
And then she pressed her ear against the bedroom door and burst in screaming.
She did not burst in while they were... She did.
They kicked her out and paid for her hotel.
And they thought, it's finally over.
Days later, she called her son-in-law at work, claiming that his partner had been in some kind of freak accident and had been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance.
He called every hospital in the city and his partner was making coffee the entire time.
She faked a medical emergency just to test whether or not he loved her son?
Yeah, and she sat in the hospital parking lot waiting for him to see if he would show up.
When that didn't work, she walked into the son-in-law's police station and filed a kidnapping report against him.
She filed a kidnapping report against him in his own police station?!
!
Spoilers!
Karma's going to show up in the best way possible.
So if you want to hear how this story ends, search OK Storytime on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening to podcasts.
Hey, it's Edwin Castro, also known as Castro1021.
And I'm Konky, his best friend and business manager.
And we've got a new show called The 1021 Podcast.
I'm taking you behind the scenes on how I became one of Twitch's most popular streamers.
We also love sports.
And with the World Cup right around the corner, we'll be breaking down the biggest storylines ahead of the big tournament here in the USA.
Listen to the 1021 podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
If you're watching the latest season of the Real Housewives of Atlanta, you already know there's a lot to break down.
Portia accusing Kelly of sleeping with a married man.
They holding K. Michelle back from fighting Drew.
Pinky has financial issues.
I like the bougie style of Housewives show.
I think it looks like it's going to be interesting.
On the podcast Reality with the King I Carlos King, recap the biggest moments from your favorite reality shows, including the Real Housewives franchise, the drama, the alliances and the tea everybody's talking about.
As an executive producer in reality television, I'm not just watching it.
I understand the game.
As somebody who creates shows, I'll even say this.
At the end of the day, when people are at home, they want entertainment.
To hear this and more, listen to Reality with the King on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Finally, if you really want to trick yourself, the neurological mechanisms of your anxiety, to switch off for a few minutes.
It's going to sound cliche, but any kind of specifically forward movement will literally trick your brain into calming down.
Now, this idea is kind of borrowed from principles of eye movement, desensitization and and reprocessing therapy, EMDR.
It's everywhere at the moment.
It's highly effective.
This is most effective for people who are experiencing PTSD.
However, the mechanism behind it is really interesting and can also be applied at a more basic general level.
At a basic level.
EMDR, or this eye movement therapy, involves something as simple as walking forward, and it uses what we call bilateral stimulation.
So essentially, when you walk forward, when you do some kind of forward movement, the rhythmic way that your brain tracks movement from side to side and the optic flow that it experiences from stuff moving past you, going past you gives you the psychological sense that you are overcoming something.
So essentially, if your anxiety is all in your mind, like actually let me explain this differently.
When your anxiety is actually fear-based, so something is actually going wrong.
When you're experiencing fear, Your brain wants you to run away, wants you to fight, wants you to pursue some kind of forward movement away over or through the problem.
So what it will want you to do is to run away.
It will want you to fight.
Maybe it will want you to hide.
But mainly it wants you to pursue some kind of like I am leaving this situation now kind of movement.
When it knows that you are experiencing, that when your brain feels that you are running away, feels that you are escaping, it will slowly turn off some of your anxiety, because the anxiety or the fear is no longer needed, because it has already prompted you to do what you do or to do something that is going to help you in that situation.
That is the mechanism behind fear and when there is an actual threat.
When we're experiencing anxiety and the threat isn't real, we can still activate that same natural biological, psychological way of activating calm by again going outside and walking, riding our bike, going to a boxing class, stimulating that same optic flow, that same bilateral stimulation that would ordinarily tell our brain that we are doing something about a fear stimulus but is now telling our brain that we are doing something about this anxiety or this thing that is triggering our anxiety.
Literally, walking is like the most simplest way of way to do this and I know it sounds silly to be like you're feeling anxious.
Go on a walk.
But like motion direction, momentum stops you from just like stewing in the fear neurologically, psychologically and physically.
If you are finding yourself stuck in an anxious spiral, one of the most underrated things you can do is to simply get up and walk, not on a treadmill outside.
Get up and walk around your house.
Get up and do some kind of physical movement.
Same way that, like doing jumping jacks, doing mountain climbers, any kind of physical movement calms down the body when we are in a kind of like anxious spiral, because it's just saying like I'm doing something about it.
Like, it's okay.
You can calm down.
We can turn that off now because I'm listening.
It's basically like, I've listened to the siren, turn off the siren.
We are doing our escape protocol.
So these are just some of the ways that we can take what we know about the neuroscientific principles and origins of anxiety and kind of twist them in our favor.
I think anxiety makes it feel like our brain is not our friend and not our own.
And knowing these strategies or having these strategies teaches us how to play the same game that our anxiety is playing back our anxiety or it's teaching us how to learn the quirks and patterns and kind of idiosyncrasies of our anxiety and to emulate them ourselves and kind of play them back like it's definitely like a bit of a psyop.
Obviously there are so many things that we didn't mention here, and there are so many ways or there's so many factors contributing to our anxiety that have nothing to to do with neuroscience and that have no neuroscientific basis at all.
But I think if your main focus right now is gaining more of a scientific explanation and understanding of your anxiety, this is a really great place to start.
Understanding the neurotransmitters, understanding your brain's attentional regulation systems, understanding the different parts of your brain that are involved in basically creating anxiety creates distance.
I know some people will be like, well, that's just over-intellectualizing.
I know that some people think that this is an excuse for not feeling your feelings.
I still think that it's good to feel anxious.
And like I said, it's a dangerous game to suppress or avoid your anxiety.
But I still think it's very, very valuable.
But, at the end of the day, being able to say this feeling is not one that I have complete ownership over.
Being able to reapply logic to our anxiety, when anxiety likes to remove all logic, is so, so helpful.
And I think it's why, yeah, I don't know.
I just think that teaching the neuroscience of anxiety is something that we should be doing more, rather than just obsessing and only focusing on the emotional side of it, only focusing on the physical side of it, only focusing on the social side of it.
Like you cannot understand why you behave the way you do in certain social situations, why you behave the way you do in work situations or any number of situations, if you don't understand, like the framework and the pillars and the systems along which your anxiety is kind of running and influencing your behavior.
So I hope that you enjoyed this episode.
I know it was a little bit ranty at times and kind of all over the place, but when I get into the science I get so into it.
But again, I really do hope that you enjoyed this episode.
I hope that you learned something from it and that it just helped you understand you and your brain a little bit better as you go through anxious moment or kind of a more anxious period of life.
So with that being said, I think we're done for the day.
Be safe, be kind, be gentle to yourself.
We will talk very, very soon.
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy.
Not quite.
On Humor Me with Robert Smigel and Friends.
Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier.
This week my guests SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel, help an acapella band with their between songs banter.
Where does your group perform?
We do some retirement homes.
Those people are starving for banter.
Listen to Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
My mother-in-law spent years sabotaging our relationship until karma made her pay for it.
All right, Sophia, tell me about how we started this story.
She moved in for two weeks, lasted five days, left a mess and then pressed her ear against their bedroom door and burst in screaming.
When, kicked out to a hotel, she called her son-in-law's workplace, pretending his partner had been rushed to the hospital by ambulance, faked a medical emergency and spoiler, that was just the beginning.
To find out how it ends, listen to the okay story time podcast on the iheart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts on the look back at it podcast.
That was a big moment for me.
84 was big to me.
I'm Sam Jay.
And I'm Alex English.
Each episode we pick a year, unpack what went down and try to make sense of how we survived it with our friends, fellow comedians and favorite authors like Mark Lamont Hill on the 80s.
84 was a wild year.
It was a wild year.
I don't think there's a more important year for Black people.
Listen to Look Back at It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, what's good, y'all?
You're listening to Learn the Hard Way with your favorite therapist and host, Kier Gaines.
This space is about black men's experiences having honest conversations that it's really not safe to have anywhere, but you're having them with a licensed professional who knows what he's doing.
How many men carry a suit of armor.
It signals to the world that you not to be played with and just because you have the capability, that does not mean that you need to listen to learn the hard way on the iHeartRadio app, apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi everyone, I'm Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things.
I'm excited to share that I have a new podcast called Mind Over Mountain.
In each episode, I interview athletes, adventurers and adrenaline seekers to discuss the inner landscapes that informed and inspired their extraordinary feat.
So we too can better understand how to face our own seemingly insurmountable challenges.
Listen to Mind Over Mountain every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
