If you're constantly afraid of your next panic attack, or you've been googling ways to stop disturbing thoughts, or if you're tired of living in fear of your own anxiety symptoms. This is going to challenge what you think you might know about rewiring an anxious brain. Your attempts to rewire your brain might actually be keeping you stuck, and here's why. Here's why, hey everybody, welcome back to the Anxious Truth. This is the podcast and YouTube channel where we talk about all things anxiety, anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery. I'm Drew Linsalata, creator and host of this channel, therapist practicing under supervision, specializing in anxiety disorders, author, an educator and an advocate on this topic and, yes, unfortunately a former anxiety sufferer myself for many, many years, but doing much better now. Today we need to talk about something that's everywhere in anxiety recovery circles right now this idea of rewiring an anxious brain, and if you're watching this, you've probably seen countless videos and articles that promise to sort of teach you how to rewire your brain and to stop being anxious, to finally be free of panic attack, to make those terrifying thoughts go away, and I kind of get it. Who wouldn't want that? I mean, who wouldn't want to just rewire their brain and make all this stuff just disappear. But here's the thing Almost everything you've been told about rewiring an anxious brain is mostly wrong, not just slightly wrong, but fundamentally backwards. And if you're trying to rewire your brain the wrong way, you might actually be reinforcing the very patterns that you're trying to break. So let's start the discussion with a little something that might blow your mind. Your brain doesn't have a delete button. That's right. It doesn't have a delete button. You can't erase pathways or sort of remove information that's already there. This is why, if you're trying to delete your anxious response or erase your fear, it never actually works, because the brain simply doesn't work that way. So think about that for a second. So many videos or articles or programs promise to help you eliminate anxiety, but that's fighting against basic brain function. Your brain is designed to learn and add information, not to delete information. Now, this is actually good news, even though it might not feel that way right now. So sort of, stick with me and we're going to walk through it.
Speaker 1:The first thing to remember is that your anxious brain isn't broken or damaged, which is something that anxious people often think, and that's not correct. It's actually just doing exactly what it's supposed to do. It's trying to keep you safe. We talk about this stuff all the time. The problem is that it's working too hard at that job. It's getting a little bit overzealous and overprotective. It's like having a helicopter parent that won't let you do anything because everything might be dangerous, and I think we can all sort of relate to that example.
Speaker 1:So think about what happens when you feel, for instance, your heart starts to race. If your anxiety presentation sort of includes that Right now, if your heart starts to speed up and pound, your brain probably has one primary pathway that represents a response and that would be racing heart means panic attack and panic attack means danger must prevent panic attack at all costs. Or maybe when you get that sort of floaty, disconnected, dpdr feeling that's depersonalization and derealization your brain immediately goes to this means I'm losing control or I'm losing my sanity or I'm slipping away. So I must make this stop right now. And for those dealing with maybe disturbing or intrusive thoughts, maybe your brain's only pathway for response is these thoughts mean something terrible about me. I have to stop them and make them go away or definitely prove them to be inaccurate.
Speaker 1:But before we dive deeper into this rewiring process of what it actually looks like, I kind of want to just remind you that the Anxious Truth is more than just this podcast episode or this YouTube video. If you head on over to theanxious truthcom, you'll find the other 300 and somewhat free podcast episodes and videos just like this one. They all provide a little bit more detailed information on the many aspects of anxiety disorders and recovery. You'll find the books that I've written that also break down these concepts in greater detail, and there's a bunch of very low cost, accessible workshops that focus on specific challenges like panic attacks or agoraphobia. We have one on worry slash rumination, which is a big problem in our community. Plus, you'll find the links to all of my socials, so feel free to follow along on the platform of your choice. I'm kind of on all of them. Check it all out. Most of it is free. Otherwise it's very low cost and it's all at theanxioustruthcom, so avail yourself of all the goodies when you get a chance.
Speaker 1:So let's talk for a minute about what rewiring your anxious brain actually does mean. And since we can't delete stuff from our brains remember there's no delete button what we're really doing is adding new information and creating new pathways. Remember, our brains are designed to add and learn, not delete. So one way you might consider thinking of this is like adding new roads to a city. We're not demolishing the old roads. While we do that, we're building new ones that give us more choices and options for getting where we want to go. And this is all about developing choices and options, because that's part of psychological flexibility, which you've heard me talk about before. But this is where we need to talk about something that might sound simple but is actually quite profound and often very difficult for people to put into practice.
Speaker 1:Recovery isn't just about building new neural pathways. It's also about developing sort of a fundamentally different attitude toward anxiety and really toward discomfort in general. Instead of seeing your anxiety as an enemy that has to be vanquished or prevented, we start to develop an attitude of openness and willingness toward it, and you've heard me and Josh Fletcher, my partner on Disorder, talk about willful tolerance. Now, as far as developing an attitude of openness and willingness toward your anxiety if you're new around here, admittedly, I understand that might sound a little bit ridiculous, but it is part of the rewiring and the building of new pathways. So you might be thinking right now like willing to experience anxiety or being open to panic attacks. That sounds patently absurd and you're right, it does sound backwards. There's so much paradox in this thing that we do together. It does go against, like survival instinct and everything that that is telling you to do. It contradicts years or maybe even decades of learned responses and beliefs about anxiety and about discomfort, and it certainly goes against a whole lot of the popular sort of anxiety management advice and information you're going to hear online, especially in 2024.
Speaker 1:So let's just take a look at some real examples because it might help you relate a little bit. Let's say you're somebody who panics when you feel dizzy or lightheaded, which is a lot of listeners at the Anxious Truth Right now. You probably immediately try to sit down or you grab onto something or you rush home, and anybody who's got an anxiety disorder that leans like hot death on the shopping cart as they force themselves through the supermarket understands what I'm talking about. The new pathway that we're building might say well, this is an uncomfortable experience, but I felt it before and I've always gotten through it. I can keep going. Even while I feel this way. Maybe I don't have to lean on the shopping cart, grab the wall or go home.
Speaker 1:Now for those of you say with health anxiety, maybe every like weird feeling in your heart, every palpitation or skip beat, sends you straight to checking your pulse or Googling your symptoms. Now remember, we can't delete that pathway. It's there because your brain is trying to keep you safe. It's just sort of lost its way in that task. But we can build a new pathway that says my heart does weird things sometimes, that I'm anxious, because that's what anxious hearts do. I've had this checked out. I've been told it's okay, I can handle this sensation.
Speaker 1:And to maybe bring an example into sort of the intrusive thoughts or OCD world maybe you're having thoughts about harm or relationship thoughts or whatever flavor your OCD might take Right now. Your only pathway might be I need to know for sure about this. I have to figure this out. I have to make these thoughts stop. I have to make them from coming, prevent them from coming true. The new pathway that we're building that lives alongside the old pathway says well, these thoughts make me feel really awful, because they do, but I can let them be there without engaging with them.
Speaker 1:So you notice that in each one of these examples we wind up with alternate options and choices for how you respond when you find yourself in a triggered state Right now, you may only see one possible response, and that, generally speaking, is avoidance or running, or preventing or resistance. Rewiring an anxious mind does leave that option intact, because, again, we cannot delete that, but it helps us see that it was never the only choice. The rewiring process will show us that we actually do have power and agency, and we do have a say in what happens after the initial sort of OMG, oh my God, moment when we're triggered. So this, though, is where the principles might be generalizable, but the application gets really personal and unique for each person that struggles with anxiety, and we got to talk about this because we never want to make it seem like one size fits all. It does, but the way you get into that one size is going to vary widely depending on your specific circumstances.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe you've been dealing with panic attacks for 20 years, or maybe you developed health anxiety after a genuine medical scare or some medical malpractice. That happens. You could be struggling with disturbing thoughts that feel completely at odds and against who you really are as a person and that terrifies you. I mean, add that to your own lived experiences, your own beliefs, your own fears and your own obstacles, this process can get really complicated and difficult. That's why, while it sounds like we're always saying just do it or just face your fears, simplifying it to that level isn't necessarily helpful, because this isn't just about knowing something intellectually we can talk about like the science of neural pathways all we want. We can talk about this until we're blue in the face.
Speaker 1:But it's not about just talking and listening and learning and understanding from an intellectual standpoint. It's about being willing to challenge sometimes some very deeply held beliefs and sort of longstanding patterns that feel like they're keeping you safe. You really think that this is the right way to be. That one option, the only pathway that your brain has right now, which is run, fight, resist, stay safe really feels correct to you. So if you're going to challenge that and open yourself up to other options to build those new pathways and do that rewiring air quotes it's often going to feel very wrong or risky or dangerous or even reckless. So when people in my social media comments section say things like easier said than done this is why they say that and, to be completely honest with you, they are right. If you've ever looked at some of this content that I produce and said well, sure, make it sound easy. I do make it sound easy, but I know that it is not right, so we always try and acknowledge that around here we have to. So to move on, I want to get a little bit more practical and maybe personal about the rewiring process.
Speaker 1:Building new pathways isn't about positive thinking or telling yourself everything is fine. It's about actual experiences. Your brain is not going to rewire itself simply because you tell it to. It rewires itself when you show it something new through experience. That's a raw deal, because that means that you have to take what feels like a risk to do different things in order to have different experiences, in order to feed those to your brain, in order to give yourself new options, write new pathways and rewire right. So that's the process. This goes on. We can't just tell our brains to rewire, no matter how much we read, listen to or watch videos. We have to actually have experiences, and this is where it gets so sticky.
Speaker 1:As I was saying before, the degree of difficulty in that process of having new experiences varies enormously from person to person. You know, maybe you're a person who's lived through some trauma or some really challenging events in your past. Or maybe for you, being willing to feel out of control, willing to do that, opening up your possibilities might feel out of the question right now, and understandably out of the question right now and understandably If you've had actual health scares, maybe being willing to experience physical symptoms without seeking reassurance and safety might feel completely irresponsible. Or, like if you're a parent, for instance, with intrusive thoughts about harm, being willing to let those thoughts be there might feel absolutely unthinkable. That's okay. Like listening to my words today might resonate at some level, but actually putting them into practice might take some time, and I say this all the time you get there, when you get there for your own reasons. Be patient with yourself and recognize the factors that might be unique obstacles in your sort of brain rewiring quest or journey. I hate the word journey, but I just used it anyway. That sucks.
Speaker 1:Anyway, what we're really talking about here is opening ourselves up to a learning approach to anxiety. So, instead of seeing each anxious moment as a threat to be eliminated which we now know isn't even possible on a consistent level we're trying to see it as an opportunity to learn something new about ourselves and our sense of self-efficacy and our strengths and our capabilities and what we can really do if we're pressed to do it, and then what we can learn from that. So, when you feel that wave of panic coming on, instead of immediately fighting it, you might wind up asking what can I learn if I let this be here? When those disturbing thoughts show up, instead of instantly trying to solve them? You might wonder to yourself well, what happens if I didn't engage with these, even though I can clearly hear them? What happens if I don't answer them or have a conversation with them? But here's the part that will start to trip people up, and I almost feel like I need to say this twice, but I will spare you that repetition.
Speaker 1:When you're building these new pathways, like I said before, the old ones do not disappear. You're not going to stop having anxious responses or scary thoughts. The goal is never to not feel anxiety again. The goal here in the rewiring is to build new pathways that give you options and choices when anxiety shows up. But the old pathways are still there. That's true, and this is why people often get really frustrated in recovery. They will say things like I'm doing everything right, but I still get those weird breathing sensations, for instance, or I'm having those terrible thoughts or my heart still races whenever I even think about getting in the car and driving away from my house, which might be my safe place Then they see that as a failure because they're expecting the rewiring process to happen, almost because they just wanted to before having experiences, and they're hoping that the rewiring process will eliminate those responses, or that resistant response or that anxious response or that fight or flight response. That's not the way this works right and that's not failure. If you feel the fear or you have doubt, or you have the thoughts or you have the symptoms, it's simply not. Having those things and working through them is part of the rewiring process.
Speaker 1:If we're talking about rewiring an anxious brain, we cannot rewire an anxious brain unless we are in the anxious state. There's just that part of the deal. We have to activate the anxiety, to feed new information into that model, and that's where the rewiring comes from building those new pathways. So remember we started with the idea that there's no delete button in your brain. Those sensations and thoughts will still show up. But when we do rewire and build new pathways which really what we're doing is not necessarily rewiring but adding wiring. Maybe that's a better way to say it where we're adding more wiring, more circuits. When we add those new pathways, when those scary things show up, you have different options for how to respond when they do, and that makes a big difference, because having options and how we respond is the thing that frees us from the restrictions or the conditions or the I can't, or I can only if I have my safe person or whatever it happens to be.
Speaker 1:But the reality is that recovery often looks like being more anxious in the short term. This is true, again, if we can only rewire by activating the anxiety. If we have to activate the fear, to write new information into that model and build new pathways and add that extra wiring, then you're doing the opposite of what your brain has been telling you to do. In the short term, you're choosing to not run away from a racing heart, for instance. You're choosing not to try to frantically and urgently solve your disturbing or intrusive thoughts. You're choosing to let that dizzy feeling be there while you continue your day, which is not easy. And that's where courage comes in. So this isn't like movie Hollywood kind of courage where you're just fearless and competent, looks like nothing bothers you. This is like the real kind of like actual, daily, real person coverage, where you are scared and unsure and uncertain and not quite convinced that you should be doing this, but you're willing to try it anyway, you're willing to learn. Maybe you're willing to be surprised about what you might discover about yourself Because, remember, in the context we're in right now, even though the thoughts trigger feelings about being in danger, even though everything feels very scary, even though it feels like something as bad as going to happen in our context disordered anxiety we feel afraid, but we are still safe.
Speaker 1:You have to live there. You got to start there first. So remember, there's no rewiring to be done, no new pathways, no new options to open up. If you stop at what it feels like Correct, it does feel unsafe, but it is not. That is a core component of everything we talk about here. So keep that in mind as we go, and I think the key here is sort of finding your starting point, wherever that might be. You start where you are right, being willing to learn from that experience, wherever it is at the moment. So maybe you're just not ready to have a full-blown panic attack without fighting it.
Speaker 1:Many people listening to this are at that point. I'm just not ready to do that, drew, and guess what? That's okay. Maybe you could start by willing to feel slightly elevated anxiety for a few minutes without running or fighting it. Or maybe you're not ready to completely ignore your disturbing thoughts. I get it Feels wrong to do that, feels too dangerous, that's fine. Perhaps you can sort of practice letting just one thought pass by without engaging with it, test it, experiment.
Speaker 1:We talked a couple episodes ago about the use of micro exposures. That counts too. That's an opportunity to start to do little experiments and test things out without going all the way in and diving completely off the cliff. To start to open yourself up to the possibility that like, oh, if I do have these other experiences, I do wind up okay, so I can start having trying these new things, trying different options, behaving differently, feed new information into the model, build new pathways on top of the old ones or next to the old ones, add more wiring and rewire, if you will. Rewire is probably the wrong word. Now that I think about it. Anyway, what do I want to talk about? Let's talk about again.
Speaker 1:This is not about just thinking your way into new beliefs or new pathways or rewiring or adding wiring just by talking or thinking or listening or discussing. It has nothing to do with positive thinking. It has nothing to do with telling yourself everything is fine over and over and over. That's never going to work. This is about having these actual experiences that teach your brain, through practice and repetition, that you actually can handle the things that you have been hellbent to avoid for maybe a very long time, which is really difficult. I get it. So, before we wrap up, I want to be clear about something, and I want to go back to this again because I think it's so important.
Speaker 1:More and more and more I see, especially as the audience grows, people that feel a little bit annoyed because they feel like I'm trying to just, oh, just do this, just do this. It's not just. None of this is just. This is not easy, it's not comfortable, it's not a quick fix, but my theoretical orientation toward anxiety disorders, which is based on just decades of data and a mountain of evidence we have a lot of data that tells us this is it. This is kind of the way forward, right, it is the path to recovery, not because it makes anxiety go away forever.
Speaker 1:Remember, that's not possible. There's no delete button in your brain, in your nervous system, but because it teaches you that you can live your life even when anxiety is present. I can have options. There are other alternatives other than declaring failure, running, getting my safe person, looking for help, restricting my life. There are other options. I can learn that through experience, taking risks and learning that I'm more capable than I've ever given myself credit for. That's really what rewiring an anxious brain means.
Speaker 1:It's not about learning to stay calm all the time. It's not about managing your symptoms. It's not about biohacking. It's not about regulating your nervous system. It's not about managing your symptoms. It's not about biohacking. It's not about regulating your nervous system. It's not about preventing panic attacks or disturbing thoughts. It's all about building those new pathways that give you options and alternatives when your anxiety shows up. It gives you your choice back. It helps you recognize that you do have choice and then exercise that choice. It's about learning experience that you can handle the very things you've been trying so, so hard to avoid. So there you go. That is episode 307 of the anxious truth in the books.
Speaker 1:I'm not going to do the music thing because I'm frankly tired of editing that, so I will just say if you found this video or this podcast episode helpful. If you're on YouTube, please consider liking the video and maybe subscribe to the channel. If you're watching on YouTube, drop a comment below. If you have questions. I do my best to respond when I can, even though lately I've been very pressed for time to do that, but I promise I'll get back in as soon as I can.
Speaker 1:If you're listening as a podcast episode and you're on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or some platform that lets you rate or review this and you dig it, maybe leave a five-star rating or even write a short review that tells the world why you dig it and it helps more people find the podcast, then it helps more people access this information if they need it, and that's kind of why I do this to begin with. So I appreciate you guys hanging out with me every other week Actually, that's what I do this now and supporting this thing that I do and those of you who listen to Disordered, which is the podcast I do with Josh Fletcher every week. Thank you for that as well. You find that at disorderedfm.
Speaker 1:And just a quick reminder every single time you choose to handle anxiety differently, respond to it differently, act differently and against that survival instinct, taking that risk. Every time you do that, even in small, the tiniest ways, you're actually helping to build those new pathways. That is the business of rewiring. Though it may take a lot of small steps and take a long time, be patient, keep at it and see you in two weeks. Take care, we'll see you next time.