Let’s go back around 50,000 years. Assume you’re a Neanderthal out for a stroll in the fields. Suddenly, you hear a tiger in the surrounding bushes. Your entire body begins to react in a millisecond. Your heart beats faster, your breathing becomes shallower, your eyes widen, and your body begins to produce adrenaline.
Everything in your body is in fine working order; you’re ready to face the tiger. There’s only one minor snag. It wasn’t a tiger, either. It was an ancient weasel of a small size. Your body is now ready for fight-or-flight mode, your heart is beating, and you’re high on adrenaline… yet there’s no threat.
This is how your body reacts to anxiety. With social media, traffic, politics, Covid-19, money, childcare, climate change, work stress, and family turmoil replacing the (nonexistent) tiger in the bushes, it’s easy to understand why anxiety is the most frequent mental disease in America, impacting over 20% of the population. Modern humans are simply a bunch of frightened Neanderthals who are always in fight-or-flight mode.
According to Elizabeth Stanley, PhD, author of Widen The Window: Training Your Body and Brain to Thrive During Stress and Recover from Trauma, anxiety is an impulse in our bodies that screams, “I’m not secure right now.” “It’s automatic, lightning fast, and completely unconscious.”
Your thinking brain vs. your survival brain
Stanley distinguishes between the thinking brain, which includes our neocortex and is responsible for decision-making, reasoning, ethics, conscious memory, and learning, and the survival brain, which includes our limbic system, brain stem, and cerebellum and is responsible for our basic survival, emotions, implicit memory, and stress arousal.
According to Stanley, neuroception, an unconscious process of swiftly monitoring the internal and external surroundings for safety and threat, is one of the survival brain’s most critical tasks. When danger is detected, your survival brain activates the sympathetic nervous system, causing the release of particular hormones that cause bodily feelings connected to our heart, breathing, and digestion. “Whatever is going on in the survival brain has massive reverberations throughout our body,” Stanley adds.
“These responses are not voluntary”, says Stephen Porges, PhD, a psychologist and the originator of the Polyvagal Theory, in an interview with PsychAlive. Our nervous system picks up information in the environment on a neurobiological level, not a cognitive level.”
Importantly, the thinking brain is the last to notice that something is wrong when we’re trapped in a defensive response.
“The thinking brain isn’t what determines whether we’re worried, intimidated, or challenged, whether we’ll turn stress on, or if we’ll turn emotions on,” Stanley adds. “The survival brain is responsible for stress arousal and emotions.”
So, if you want to track your anxiety, your body will be the most accurate map, not your thoughts.
The Trap of Talk Therapy
Unlike our prehistoric forefathers (who, according to Stanley, may have coped with anxiety by panting, trembling, or sprinting like a hound and letting the cortisol work its way through their system), modern anxiety sufferers resort to their trusted companion, the thinking brain. She says, “Most individuals identify worry by their ideas since most people connect with their thinking brain.”
The trouble is that our thinking brain is the very worst instrument for the job when it comes to controlling our nervous system following a stress response (read: anxiety). That’s because, according to Porges, we often don’t know what prompted a physical response even after becoming aware of it. This discovery was a watershed moment for Stanley, a soldier who had been diagnosed with PTSD.
“Stress and anxiety recovery is a survival brain job.”
We live in a cerebral culture, which means we’re better suited to deal with problems that need logic and reasoning — think moral dilemmas — and less ready to deal with problems where cognitive thinking might exacerbate them. Although it may appear like having a “fight or flight” response in response to being late for brunch is an overreaction, you are biologically experiencing it when stuck in traffic.
We try to convince our nervous system to comply by using our thinking brain to determine if the situation is “worth” being concerned about.
“In those instances, our consciousness becomes separated from our body”, Stanley adds.
Your thinking brain determines that you have nothing to be concerned about, so you go about your days assuring yourself that everything is OK despite experiencing anxiety-related physical sensations all throughout your body. Worse, even after your thinking brain has assured you that everything is alright, it may begin to blame and humiliate you for being concerned.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent decades (and the equivalent of a down payment) in talk therapy dissecting all the reasons you’re nervous. Not only did all that chatting do little to ease anxiety, but it may have even exacerbated it.
“Our survival brain tries to keep us safe, but when we ignore our bodies and their warnings because we’re so caught up in our thinking brain’s tales and thoughts”
Stanley explains, “the survival brain interprets that as even more threatening.” “Like a kid, it will tantrum louder and louder until its message is received. That’s why it turns into such a terrible cycle.”
Consider Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which is one of the most prevalent types of talk therapy.
“CBT helps you become aware of incorrect or negative thinking so you can perceive tough events more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way,”
According to the Mayo Clinic. Isn’t it fantastic? While this type of analysis can be extremely useful when dealing with family issues or figuring out an ethical dilemma, when it comes to anxiety, which doesn’t occur in your thinking brain, it focuses on the thought (“I thought there was a tiger!”) rather than the physical response that preceded, and even caused, the thought (“my heart is racing and I’m full of adrenaline and I need to go to the bathroom!”).
“We don’t want to be conscious of and experience the discomfort in our bodies because anxiety causes discomfort in our bodies. Instead, we’d want to try to solve it by giving it this external object,” Stanley explains. However, if the external object did not create the worry, then removing it will not make the fear go away.
Anxiety relief from the ground up
While talk therapy and medication are still the most common treatments for persistent anxiety, there are alternative approaches that focus on the body. While these modalities are still considered “alternative,” an increased interest in “brain science” and neurobiology, as well as ongoing research on mindfulness and mind-body connections, is shifting our psychological understanding away from focusing solely on the mind and toward seeing the brain and body as a unified unit.
According to Pat Ogden, PhD, the inventor of Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, closing the loop that was begun when your body initially went into a stress response is part of the difficulty.
Ogden gives the example of a Black client who is often stopped by the police for no reason. When this happened, the man became enraged and his body tightened up, indicating a “fight” reaction. Ogden assisted him in identifying and acting out the physical de-escalation his body required in order to return to a controlled state, in this case getting to lash out and protect himself in the privacy of a therapy session. “We want to finish that impulse in mindfulness so that his brain is integrated and it is no longer kept in his body,” Ogden adds.
Part of the limitation of talk therapy, according to Ogden, is that anxiety is frequently associated with a dysregulated reaction linked to an unconscious memory, which is then wrongly placed on a current event or idea.
“It has nothing to do with the present content,” Ogden adds.
Stanley focuses on mindfulness methods in his mental fitness training course to help people gain resilience.
While it’s become cliché to urge anybody suffering from anxiety to take ten deep breaths, her training has benefited thousands of individuals, including active-duty military personnel.
“The military has a lot of experience with difficult situations, and they’ve taught themselves to activate the survival brain, but they don’t always know how to turn it off,”
Stanley explains.
Stanley’s technique dramatically improved cognitive function during stress, decrease perceived stress levels, boost control, and encourage a faster return to baseline following stress arousal, according to studies supported by the Department of Defense.
When your body is under stress, the first thing you should do is become aware of items that make your survival brain feel comfortable, such as what you see and hear. “Bringing attention to where our body is in contact with our surroundings is one of the finest ways to help the survival brain feel grounded,” Stanley adds.
She recommends concentrating on the contact between your feet and the floor, or the contact between your torso and your chair. The survival brain initiates the healing process as soon as it senses groundedness and safety.
Obviously, attempting to breathe deeply or be attentive when you’re experiencing acute anxiety is nearly difficult. What you need to do in those situations is get the adrenaline and cortisol out of your system. Stanley recommends jumping rope or going up and down the stairs. Repeat the mindfulness practice after 10 minutes.
Is talk therapy or attempting to think rationally about your anxiety helpful? Absolutely. But only after your body has been stabilized, according to Stanley: “After we have made our survival brain feel comfortable and stable, we can work on our thoughts.”
“Otherwise, our stress and emotions continue to skew our cognitive response.”
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