There’s More to the Brain Than You Think

People often get very frustrated at their inability to talk themselves out of worrisome thoughts. “I know better than this,” they’ll say, “but it doesn’t help!” They think the reason it doesn’t help is that there’s something wrong with them. However, the real reason is that a different part of the brain gets involved when you’re afraid.
Most people, when they think about their brain, think about the part that’s called the cerebral cortex. This is where conscious thought takes place, and it’s where we use language and logic. There’s a lot more to the brain, different parts that function differently. One of the other parts is called the amygdala. The amygdala has numerous functions, but one of its primary jobs is regulating the fear responses of fight and flight.

Meet Your Amygdala

I want to tell you a few things about the amygdala that will help you understand why you’ve been having so much trouble with chronic worry.

The amygdala handles fight and flight responses because it’s capable of much faster action than the cerebral cortex. It has direct connections to our eyes and ears, getting information from the outside world before any other part of the brain. This rapid flow of information from the outside enables the amygdala to quickly answer the question, “Is it safe?”¹
The amygdala doesn’t use language. It learns by association, and that’s how it remembers. So if you had a first panic attack in an Italian restaurant, you might thereafter have anxious thoughts and feel uneasy whenever you see a checkered tablecloth, or smell spaghetti sauce, and you might not know why. That’s your amygdala at work, trying to keep you safe as it best knows how.
Your cerebral cortex can observe that there’s no danger, just antipasto and garlic bread. At the movies, it can observe there’s no monster, just a movie about monsters. Why doesn’t the cerebral cortex tell the amygdala to stand down? Because the nervous connections between the amygdala and the cerebral cortex only allow for one-way communication. The amygdala can send signals to the cortex, but not the other way around.
This is a good thing because the amygdala is responsible for making rapid responses to dangerous circumstances. When a bus runs a red light and heads your way as you cross the street, your amygdala takes charge, and you find yourself darting out of the way without consciously identifying the problem and thinking of a solution. Whatever you happened to be thinking when the bus lurched in your direction is gone, because your cortex has been effectively silenced. You don’t need thought with a runaway bus, you need quick action! We don’t have time for all the conscious, deliberate thought of the cortex at that moment. Compared to the amygdala, the cortex is like a committee of old guys, sitting around reminiscing, arguing, and using more words than necessary to describe bus trips they’ve taken. It’s too slow for emergencies!
This is why you can’t calm down by telling yourself the worries are irrational. The amygdala isn’t listening. It doesn’t have time for all the yammering of your cerebral cortex. It’s too busy watching for signs of trouble and responding, trying to protect you the only way it knows how—goading you into action by making you anxious.
Maybe you’re thinking now that you’d like to tell your amygdala a thing or two. You can’t! It doesn’t use language! So how can you retrain your amygdala so it doesn’t push the panic button when you’re not really in danger?
Final fact you need about the amygdala: it only “learns,” or creates new memories, when it’s activated. Know what I mean by activated? I mean when you become afraid. When everything seems routine, and you’re just going along with business as usual, your amygdala is on standby and not making any new memories. It’s only when your amygdala detects what it takes as a sign of danger that it activates your sympathetic nervous system, enabling fight and flight responses, and then it will make memories.
Your opportunity to retrain your amygdala, and change your relationship with chronic worry, comes when you feel frightened or upset by your thoughts. If you had a dog phobia, you would retrain your amygdala by spending time with a dog, getting afraid, and hanging out with the dog long enough for the fear to subside. Then the amygdala would make some new observations about dogs, and as you repeatedly spent time with dogs, your chronic fear reaction would subside. You can’t “tell” your amygdala that dogs are okay, but you can create the opportunities for it to discover that.
And if you’re a person with chronic worry, the worrisome thoughts are your dogs. You can make progress the same way the person with a dog phobia makes progress—by working with your thoughts, rather than against them.

“Getting Through It” Misses the Point

When people get more fear than they bargained for in a scary movie, they often employ a variety of techniques to “get through it.” They could leave the theater—some people do—but most want to stay if possible, usually because they came to the theater with a friend who wants to stay. So they do some things in an effort to hold the fear at bay while they remain in the theater.
Maybe they distract themselves by retying their shoelaces, or checking for text messages. Maybe they try some cognitive restructuring, reminding themselves “It’s only a movie!” although they already knew that. Maybe they cover their ears or close their eyes, trying to take in less of the scary material. Maybe they grab onto the person next to them. (That works best if you came in with that person!)
The techniques people use to get through a scary movie resemble the techniques people often use with chronic worry. The safety behaviors you reviewed in chapter 3—involving efforts such as distraction, changing or correcting your thoughts, and reducing the cues or information coming to your attention—all work like these scary movie techniques. It’s important to see that these techniques don’t do much to relieve the worrying. Rather, they lock it in place, because they require constant repetition and monitoring, like plugging a leak with your finger. They establish an uneasy stalemate, like two equally matched people competing in a tug of war. And while these natural responses to the movie may help you stay in the theater, they probably won’t help you become less afraid of the movie itself. If you were to see that movie again, you would probably have anticipatory thoughts about how scary it was and would be motivated to use the same avoidant techniques (closing eyes, distracting, and so on) you used the first time.
Since you probably don’t plan to see it again, that’s not a problem. However, when you use the same kind of techniques to respond to your worrisome thoughts, this is a big problem. While you probably won’t see the movie again, you’re going to reexperience those thoughts, again and again, because they’re a naturally occurring part of life. If you handle your thoughts the same way you handle a one-time experience of a scary movie, you are locking in this unfortunate mental struggle, rather than relieving it. You’re not changing how you relate to the worry. You’re putting in more effort and struggle, which will maintain, rather than change, the unpleasant way you relate to the worry.

All Worry Means the Same Thing

We have a variety of ways of experiencing anxiety. For instance, we experience anxiety in the form of physical sensations. This might include such obvious symptoms as heart racing, muscular tension, labored breathing, stomach upset, sweating, trembling, and so on.

We also experience anxiety in the form of behaviors. Examples of behavioral anxiety would include some instances of nail biting, hair pulling, and other compulsive behaviors. Also included would be various forms of avoidance and escape—such as shopping for groceries at odd hours or in small stores, for fear of having to wait in a long line; driving on a local road rather than a highway even though it takes twice as long; taking a long trip by car rather than airplane, for fear of flying; eating lunch at your desk rather than the cafeteria because you experience social anxiety; and so on. Foot tapping, leg jiggling, fidgeting and shifting in one’s seat, all kinds of restless movements of the body without apparent goal are also examples of behavioral expressions of anxiety.
We also experience anxiety in the form of thoughts.
These different types of symptoms all have the same essential meaning: I’m nervous. Over time, we come to learn what our nervous symptoms mean. The first few times people experience the sensations of a nervous stomach, they’re likely to think those symptoms mean illness, maybe even vomiting. However, as they gain experience with these symptoms, people can come to recognize that the sensations are about being nervous, not ill.
The physical symptoms of a panic attack may fool a person over a longer period of time. It’s not at all uncommon for people experiencing panic attacks to continue to believe, for an extended period, that the physical symptoms of a panic attack are warnings of death or loss of control. However, as people make progress with panic disorder, they come to recognize that the symptoms don’t mean that at all. The symptoms simply mean they’re feeling panicky.

How Your Thoughts Are Fooling You

Thoughts are trickier. With physical sensations and behaviors that are signs of anxiety, people naturally learn to interpret the symptoms accurately. If you see a person in a meeting, constantly jiggling his leg, how likely are you to think that this person really wants to play soccer, or to kick you? If you see someone biting a fingernail, how likely are you to think that this person is so hungry as to be reduced to eating fingernails? Probably not so likely! You would probably recognize that these symptoms have to be interpreted. It’s overly simplistic to take the appearance of a symptom as its complete meaning.
But with thoughts (especially our own thoughts), it’s easy to get fooled into taking the apparent content of the thought as the precise meaning of the thought. No interpretation appears necessary. If I experience a thought such as What if I have cancer? in an anxious frame of mind, I might very well respond as though the thought about cancer is itself a sign of cancer, when in fact the thought is simply an expression of nervousness which happens to be focused on the idea of cancer. In the same way, heart racing is a sign of nervousness that happens to be focused on the heart, and nail biting is a sign of nervousness that happens to be focused on the teeth and fingernails.
Ultimately, the real meaning of the worrisome thoughts of chronic worry generally has little to do with the apparent content and subject matter of the thoughts. We’ll return to this topic in chapter 6, when we diagram the worry thoughts. The real meaning of these worrisome thoughts is the same as the meaning of the heart racing in someone experiencing a panic attack, the sweating and dry mouth experienced by someone preparing to give a presentation, or the jiggling of a leg as someone waits, idly, for a meeting to start or an airplane to take off.
What’s that meaning? I’m nervous. Plain and simple—I’m nervous.
Yet, because these symptoms are expressed in words, or pictures, we tend to treat them differently than other symptoms. We have thoughts about thoughts. We have certain ideas about thoughts—what they mean, how we should respond to them—that often get in our way.
Finding a solution to the problem of chronic worry is going to involve new ways of responding to it, not efforts to abolish it.
Let’s suppose that, instead of simply wanting to “get through” a scary movie, a movie that you previously found very upsetting, you wanted to get to a point where you could watch it without feeling any strong emotion. I don’t know why you’d want that, but if that were your ambition, how could you get to the point where the movie didn’t bother you so much?
The answer won’t involve anything like those steps that people take to “get through” a scary movie. Those steps maintain the fear by struggling to keep it at bay. That’s okay with a scary movie. It’s okay to “get through” a scary movie because it’s a very small, incidental part of your life, one you can leave behind when the show is over. However, worry can become a big part of life, and struggling to simply “get through” life itself is not a strategy, it’s a tragedy.
The answer that occurs to me is that the most reliable way to drain a scary movie of the fear, to make it kind of tedious rather than fearsome, would be to watch that movie again and again. You could rent the DVD (or whatever technology is now current!) and view it over and over—not skipping the scary parts, not turning off the scary sound, but rather immersing yourself in it, again and again.
You’d need to have a strong motive to do this, because you’d feel unpleasantly afraid during the first several viewings. But do you have any doubt, if you watched it this way often enough, that it would gradually lose its ability to scare you?
After all, this is what naturally happens even to people who are fans of scary movies. A new scary movie will come out, and an aficionado will discover his new “favorite” scary movie. He’ll go see that movie several times. And, after a number of viewings, he no longer derives as much scary “pleasure” as he used to, and sooner or later a new scary movie becomes his favorite. The old favorite becomes boring with repetition. That’s what we want to do with chronic worry, make it more boring and less upsetting.
How can you start doing that? The next two chapters will show you.

Thinking It Over

All too often, people take their chronic worry about unlikely events and exaggerated consequences to be a sign that there’s something wrong with them. This leads them to blame and shame themselves, as if they had some terrible self-inflicted flaw, and to struggle against the worry in ways that maintain rather than remove it. I hope this chapter has helped you see how worry is a natural part of life, the side effect of an ability that has helped the human species survive and flourish, and that chronic worry is the result of trying to suppress that which can’t—and needn’t—be suppressed. The more you can cultivate an accepting attitude toward the thoughts of chronic worry, the easier your task will be.

What’s a good way to do that?