Brain Training & Anxiety

Your brain has a remarkable ability to filter and remember important experiences while discarding the less significant ones. It does so by comparing new experiences with past ones and using emotional reactions to determine their importance.
Let's look at how we can train it!

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And hello to you, and welcome to the Richard Nicholls podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate, and motivate you to be the best you can be. I'm psychotherapist Richard Nicholls, and this episode is called Brain Training and Anxiety. And if you are ready, we'll start the show. Hello there you. Today I'm all about brain training and how our experiences change, not just how we feel about ourselves and the world, but actually physically changes our brain with every experience we have. And this is helpful if you want to understand anxiety a bit more. So if you do the maths by the time we're 16 years old, which is when we are sort of getting ready to learn more about ourselves, we've already had almost 11 years worth of waking experiences. Nearly 4,000 days, 96,000 hours or thereabouts, 6 million minutes of experiencing the world. And of course, we are not going to remember much of that, are we? 'cause our brain can't do that. So we only remember the important bits. Everything we experience gives our brain the chance to see if it's important or not. It compares it to previous experiences and chooses whether or not it needs to be deleted or stored, and our brain uses the meaning behind the experience to do that because the meaning behind everything gives us an emotional reaction. And that emotional reaction, whether good or bad, gives our brain the information it needs to say whether it needs to influence the next similar experience or not. Back in the day, we only needed to survive one tiger experience to then have an emotional reaction to every single rustle that we heard in the bushes that's behind us. 'cause our brain has latched onto the meaning behind the tiger. But also stuck it onto a small bird flapping its wings as it takes off from a bush behind us. Which is better to be safe than sorry, isn't it? Because at least now we're alive. But is it, is it really better to be safe than sorry? And I ask this because on the whole nowadays, probably not. Because the last time I looked there were no tigers wandering about. I live in a fairly rural area. There are a few woods around here. There's plenty of flapping birds, but I'm yet to see a tiger. But for somebody with anxiety, every time we survive the startling noise, Our brain reacts as if we've just survived yet another tiger experience. A behaviourist would say to overcome it you need to actually have some startling experiences and train the brain that you are safe. And yeah, that works. But, you need to feel safe when you do it. Otherwise, all the brain learns is that tigers are everywhere. And being on the lookout for danger is vital 'cause it's always the meaning behind the experience that makes it important to us. It's the same reason why people are desperate to show their friends pictures of their children and grandchildren and holidays. I love my friends. Hello, if any of you are listening. But let's be honest, we all politely smile at people's holiday photos, but the real emotional connection comes from our own experience of that moment. I might be interested in you, and you might be interested in me, but a huge majority of the things that you associate with feeling good. They won't make me feel anything at all. And vice versa. 'cause it wasn't, in that case, it wasn't me that had the experience, so I'm not gonna feel anything. But because we associate the pictures with the memories and the memories with the emotions, those pictures feel more important to you than they actually are to anybody else. Not just consciously. 'cause this is also going on in our unconscious mind as well, because your brain doesn't even start clearing away the unimportant stuff until we teenagers. Which is why teenagers need so much more sleep. Anybody who's a parent of a teenager recognises that. My son doesn't live with us anymore. He is at university, but when he was little, he'd get us outta bed every weekend as soon as the sun was up. Well get me up anyway, my wife's quite a good sleeper. Could be half six in the morning, but he's ready to bounce on a trampoline and that stopped as soon as he became a teenager. If you've got teenage kids, you're lucky to see them before 11 o'clock in the morning if it's left to their own devices. 'cause their brain is busy pruning away all the unimportant memories. The neurological matter that can be better used elsewhere within the brain. Now that it's got enough experiences to decide what is important and what's not, rightly or wrongly. 'cause it could have made mistakes in those 16 years and it holds onto all the neurological matter that it associates with emotion. Because memories aren't really like video recordings. It can't keep the details. It just keeps the general gist of it, if you know what I mean. Instead of our memories being like a film recording, a movie, it doesn't store the film itself. It doesn't store the story. It stores the genre. And for some people their memories are made up of comedies. But for others they're made up of dramas. Or even horror films. Now, the films might get deleted. Even the little experiences that we've had in our life, they get deleted even if they're unpleasant, but the genres don't. So we can get hardwired into certain feelings, even though the reasons behind them being created are long gone. It's why if somebody has some sort of brain damage through dementia or injury, and their memories are shot, the things that spark emotions in them like music, they give them better access to memories that weren't deleted because everyone's brain is triggered not by knowledge, not by facts, but by the meaning in our memories. And I think this is important for us all to understand. Not just in ourselves, but in everybody as well. 'cause it's why some people are gonna react differently to other people. Why the flapping of a bird could spoil one person's walk, but it might improve yours because you might associate the flapping of a bird's wings, the sound of it with nature and a sense of awe. But they associate it with adrenaline and a sense of panic. And one thing I think would be really useful to do to prevent our brain from holding onto the stuff that feeds anxiety and instead hold onto the good stuff, is related to sleep. Priming ourselves with some daydreams before we fall asleep, to encourage the brain to prune away the correct emotions. 'cause it's whilst we sleep that our brain is consolidating the memories. And deciding which neurological wiring to prune and which ones to strengthen. It's done during the REM stage of sleep, REM, sleep, dream sleep, which is why if we haven't slept well, it can make us on edge the next day or more sensitive to emotion. 'cause even the unimportant emotional reactions, the minor pokes and sadnesses, they weren't pruned and they're all connected to the big ones as well that probably never get pruned. So firing off the less significant feeling, also fires off the big ones as well, and sleeping pills will do this as well actually. 'cause they reduce REM State, unfortunately, like alcohol does. So we do need to tread carefully if we have emotional sensitivity and we're also trying to get more sleep. 'cause it can sometimes create more problems and it solves, you've gotta do what works for you. Now the best way of doing this is to do better things, quite simply, with our brain whilst we are awake. I have a phrase I use a lot. You might have heard me say it one or 2000 times. The brain doesn't know the difference between fact and fiction. And if we can focus more on the experiences we had in the day that are worth remembering, we stand a far better chance that the other stuff can get pruned whilst we sleep? It's called neuroplasticity. Which is not a new concept, the idea that the brain can rewire itself, but it completely revolutionised stroke rehabilitation. 'Cause years ago, if one side of your body was out of action 'cause of a stroke, the rehab was all about learning how to use the other side to compensate. But not anymore. 'cause nowadays you find the good arm, for example, would be strapped up for a while to stop you from using it. To force the brain to begin to reconnect up the neurons for using the damaged area. And these ideas have been kicking around since the mid nineties when Alvaro Pascual-Leone was studying how imagining playing the piano had a physical effect on which neurons ended up getting connected together. And this was just a daydream of playing the piano. It was a one handed five finger exercise on the piano that people had to practice for two hours a day for five days keeping to a metronomes 60 beats a minute. They already knew that the more that we do something, the more our brain devotes space to being able to do it. But using TMS, which is transcranial magnetic stimulation, you can see exactly by how much. Simple experiment really. As long as you've got a TMS machine, of course it's simple. If you don't, then of course it's not. But you just get some people to practice it in their imagination by listening to the music and only imagining moving their fingers. And that didn't have as much of an effect as those doing it for real, but it was significantly more than those that weren't practicing anything at all, and they just improvised on the piano for two hours. Literally, like with many things, it's the thought that counts. So if we want our brain to hold onto certain functions and make them effortless, automatic, unconscious, we need to give it some direction. And so before you go to bed, I want you to ask yourself this question. Out of all the things I've experienced today, what are the things I'd want to remember this time next week? What are the things I'd want to remember this time next year? Basic gratitude stuff, I guess, but simpler. Just go through your day looking for the things that are worth remembering, no matter how simple. What did you have for breakfast? Who was the first person in your day that you had a positive interaction with? Doesn't matter how small or seemingly ordinary the experiences were. If at the time you were using neurons in the brain for This is good, this is safe, then you want to remember how that feels, because your brain can prune away the other stuff whilst you sleep then you see. Just spend 10 minutes or so before you sleep, just going through your day. I say 10 minutes. 'Cause our brain does go off on tangents, and as long as those tangents are safe, then that's okay. When you notice that you've moved off the day and you're onto the theme tune to Ulysses 31 or something, just bring your attention back to your day. If you haven't fallen asleep. But if your attention has gone off onto something unpleasant, then you need to stop that as soon as you can. As soon as you notice that your mind has wandered off, use your imagination to freeze frame it. Pause it, shrink it down into the corner of your imagination, let it disappear with a little pop gone. And then you go back to some things worth remembering again. And I'll reiterate, it doesn't matter how simple. Like I say, it could be the different people you spoke with or saw or simply hovered over on social media. As long as it's worth remembering, then make a mental note of it. And then all the magic happens whilst you sleep. Even if you did need medication and you don't get much rapid eye movement sleep, you'll still get some. And this very simple exercise really is gonna help you make the most of it. And I know that some days are gonna be easier than other days. Some days there's a lot of things to be grateful for. And there might be other days where the only thing with remembering is that you had a shower. Well, replay the shower in your mind, but it's really important to avoid negativity. And I know that that seems obvious based on what I've just been saying for the last flipping 14 minutes. But it's really easy to make a simple, simple mistake, and that's in thinking that something good is the absence of something bad, and that's not quite the same thing. Because there is a big difference between, I felt calm when I walked through the park today and I didn't feel anxious when I went through the park today. This is neurological remember, and we don't want the brain to mark the existence of anxiety as something to hold onto. We want to weaken the neurological strings for danger and strengthen the ones for feeling safe. For feeling loved, for feeling valued and appreciated and worthy and all the good stuff. So you go and do that, and I'll leave you for another couple of days. I'll be back on Friday with my standard bonus episode, and I'm here on Patreon every single Monday. If you want to sign up, link is in the show notes, come and find me on Patreon and we'll see if we can get your mental health boosting even further. Have a good day. Speak to you soon.