Calming Your Anxious Mind Read online

  The Intelligent Body

  Your body doesn’t forget its experience with fear. It is quite intelligent. It has the ability to learn and to remember so that when a similar situation arises in the future, it can return automatically to the learned postures, movements, and responses.

  This bodily intelligence is obvious when you think about such ordinary activities as walking, toothbrushing, or knitting. At some time (maybe years ago), you did not do the activity. Then you started it. At first it was not so smooth, but gradually your body learned how to move in that way, and it became “natural.”

  The body learns and remembers from every experience. For example, if you are in a traumatic or highly charged emotional situation and the fight-or-flight reaction is triggered, simply recalling the event at a later time is enough to arouse a similar physical experience in your body. Your body stores the memory of the situation, and remembering it activates the muscles into the particular patterns of tension they held and learned in the situation .

  According to current understanding, memory is the result of several different systems at work in the brain and body. There are in fact different types of memory. Emotional or fear memory is stored and retrieved through a different system than is conscious or declarative memory. LeDoux states that “in the case of the amygdala system, retrieval results in expression of bodily responses that prepare for danger . . .” (1996, 239). When the body is aroused through its fear system, the arousal is remembered.

  There is much yet to be learned about fear conditioning, body memory, and their relationship to anxiety. We do know that it is important to develop awareness of the body, to recognize thought and memory patterns, and to be patient in working with the deeply conditioned habits of the fear response, both physical and cognitive.

  Anxiety & Chronic Stress

  So the fear system is wired in, the brain may either override the emergency alarm triggered by the amygdala or sustain it, the override action depends upon processing activity in higher brain centers, the resulting fight-or-flight reaction is very intense and involves many body systems, and the body can remember its experience.

  All of this was built into us as human beings in order to survive immediate danger. As a way of dealing with immediate danger, the fight-or-flight response makes sense and works pretty well. But what happens when the system developed to be a short-term answer to an occasional emergency becomes a long-term way of living?

  Chronic stress is the persistent and repeated activation of the fear system over extended periods of time. In essence, the fight-or-flight response activates the body and readies it for vigorous physical action. But in the stressors that most of us encounter—the demands of daily life at work and in our family, for example—there is little relief or problem resolution from physical action. It literally doesn’t help to fight or to run.

  Medical research has shown some interesting and important effects of long-term arousal of the fear system. Shelley E. Taylor, a psychologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, has been a leader in understanding the effects of stress on health, and has done pioneering work in the different responses of men and women to stress. Taylor highlights the health effects of chronic stress in her 2002 book The Tending Instinct:

  Repeated fight-or-flight responses that increase heart rate and blood pressure contribute to the development of high blood pressure and heart disease.

  Repeated activation of stress hormones, especially the glucocorticoids ,can lead to immune deficiencies, cause or worsen depression, and disrupt memory and other thought processes.

  If chronic stress leads to chronically elevated glucocorticoid levels, insulin activity can be impaired, and the risk for diabetes increases.

  The risk of cancer increases with chronic stress because the immune system—which normally catches cells in the earliest stages of cancerous growth—becomes less efficient.

  Chronic stress can also be a major factor in the development of anxiety disorders. As Bourne states, if your weakest point “is the neuroendocrine and neurotransmitter systems of your brain, you will be more subject to developing a behavior disorder such as mood swings, generalized anxiety, or panic disorder” (2000, 34).

  Chronic stress means chronic hyperarousal of the body through its fear system. The price for this is high, both physically and emotionally. Fortunately, there is good news. You have a balancing response to fight-or-flight wired into you. There are different ways to activate it, and meditation is one of them.

  The Relaxation Response

  The mind-body connection is at work again in the relaxation response, only this time it serves to reverse the activation characteristic of fight-or-flight. In short, heart rate slows. Breathing slows. Blood pressure comes down. Muscles soften and relax. There is a growing sense of ease and calm in the body and mind .

  When the crisis or emergency has passed, the body restores balance through the action of the branch of the nervous system that controls calm, relaxation, and the resting body functions such as digestion and resting heart rate.

  Herbert Benson, working at Harvard Medical School, is a pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine. In the late 1960s, he began studying subjects who practiced transcendental meditation. In this practice, the people meditating would sit quietly and repeat a phrase to themselves for a period of time. Whenever their attention wandered, they were instructed to resume repeating the phrase. Benson and colleagues measured physiological functions while the subjects were meditating and while they were engaged in everyday thoughts.

  Benson (1993) summarized the remarkable results of this study: Breath rate, oxygen consumption, and levels of blood lactate (a chemical which in high levels has been associated with anxiety and in low levels with calm) all decreased markedly when the subjects were meditating. Also, brain waves associated with rest and relaxation (alpha, theta, and delta waves) increased in frequency, while beta waves (associated with normal waking activity) became fewer.

  Benson had measured and named something meditation practitioners had known for thousands of years. Human beings have the ability, by directing attention and awareness, to enter extraordinary states of calm and relaxation.

  Benson named this the relaxation response , and in the years since he coined that term, much has been learned about the body’s ability to calm and relax, and the mind’s power to activate this state.

  In Don’t Panic , R. Reid Wilson (1986) makes the point that many panic-prone people fear losing control if they relax or “let go.” Wilson prefers the phrase “calming response”to “relaxation response” for this reason.

  Whatever you choose to call it, the ability to calm and relax the mind and body is an important ally. By learning to calm and ease your mind and body, you can begin to balance the distortions of hyperarousal from chronic stress. This will bring many benefits.

  From the point of mindfulness, relaxation is not the ultimate goal. However, it is crucial to have a calm and relaxed attention in order to remain present and to be mindful. Learning to activate calm and ease in mind and body through concentrated attention will provide a strong foundation for the presence you will need to manage fear, anxiety, and panic .

  Keep in Mind

  The fear reaction is extremely powerful. It happens almost instantaneously. Yet each of us has the capacity to change how we react. Learning to meditate can give you the power you need to become more responsive and less reactive when fear happens.

  Chapter 4

  Anxiety & the Power of the Mind

  In the early 1600s, at the height of the Renaissance, French philosopher René Descartes proclaimed, “I think, therefore I am.” Living as he did in a time of intellectual awakening and the embrace of reason and knowledge, Descartes focused on the activity of thinking, especially questioning, and based identity there.

  Today, in the early years of the twenty-first century, and from the perspective of mind-body medicine, it might be more accurate to say “I am what I think,” or “I am not my thoug
hts,” or even “I am more than my thoughts.” These statements reflect more completely our emerging understanding of the connection of mind (the interior world of awareness that contains thoughts, feelings, memories, and more), through brain and body interrelationships and actions, to overall health.

  What has long been observed in common language and folk wisdom about the power of the mind (and heart) to impact the body and health is now being documented by medical researchers. What you think and feel, how you talk to yourself, and what view you take about what is happening to you and around you has a powerful impact on your health and well-being .

  The Power of Thought

  Anxiety and panic often arise from fear-provoking thoughts or attitudes rather than physical threats or danger. Indeed, the attitude or meaning in the mind is crucial to the perception of danger. In his 1986 book Don’t Panic , R. Reid Wilson points out that “people, places, and events are panic-provoking only after we apply meaning to them. A store is just a store, a speech is just a speech, a drive is just a drive, until the brain interprets them as ‘dangerous’ or ‘threatening.’ To conquer panic, then, you must intervene at the point of interpretation ” (133).

  We know that the mind and body are not separate. The links include the brain and the nervous system, the endocrine system, and the immune system. And, while there is still very little agreement or understanding about how crucial elements of mind such as consciousness actually happen in the brain and nervous system, much has been discovered about the connections and communications between brain and body.

  Through its connections with the sense organs and the body, the brain receives information from the body and from the surrounding environment. The higher brain centers process this extraordinary mass of incoming information, store it as memory, and generate directions for the body and its various systems based on this processed information.

  The body’s fear system includes specialized areas of the brain that process sensory information and add contextual meaning to it before sending messages back to the body that modify the fight-or-flight reactions.

  Other areas and systems of the brain provide familiar and crucial functions such as language, short- and long-term memory, attention, arousal, awareness, cognition, emotion, control of movement and activity, and social behavior.

  The underlying physical and chemical base for this brain-body function is astounding. According to some estimates, there are as many as ten billion neurons in the human nervous system, wired together in enormously complex ways. It is this amazing array of information-systems activity that helps to create for each of us the sense of self and the moment-by-moment consciousness of body and the world outside the body.

  So thoughts have power.

  And they have the connections—through the brain-body links—to exert their power!

  And what we call self , including our mind, is actually arising moment by moment (in ways that are not well understood by science) out of the interconnected activity of the brain and body interacting with the ever-changing environment. The thoughts that occur, the emotions—such as fear and anxiety—that flavor each moment, and the deeper attitudes and views each person holds have an immediate and profound impact on the actual experience arising in each moment. This is because the thoughts, emotions, and views have direct and ongoing feedback into the systems as they are processing all the incoming and outgoing information.

  From the standpoint of managing fear and anxiety, this is both good and bad news.

  The bad news is that fearful or anxious thoughts can continue to fuel and drive the body’s fear system, mediated largely through connections with the amygdala. The input to the amygdala includes sensory and modified sensory data, plus data from other related nonsensory higher centers such as those involving thinking and memory.

  All of this higher-level input is designed to enable an override of the amygdala’s emergency messages to the rest of the body once the higher centers have had time to assess the situation. If the higher input (thinking) does not override the amygdala but rather stimulates it, then more fear-system activity happens. In other words, if the higher brain centers decide that the situation is dangerous, they confirm the amygdala’s initial danger message rather than sending a reassuring message that everything is safe. This serves us well when the situation really is dangerous. But when our higher brain centers produce anxious thoughts about something threatening but vague—when we are in no real danger—our fear response stays turned on for no immediate reason.

  The good news is that the higher centers can override the fear system and turn it down .

  It is easy to see why becoming aware of your thoughts and learning to let them be instead of identifying with them might be very important in learning to manage fear and anxiety. Learning to recognize your thoughts and views, and to modify the ones that stimulate the fear system, is an incredibly powerful tool.

  So, can you change how your brain functions? Can you alter the “hardwired” response by practicing meditation? There is growing evidence that the brain is much more malleable or plastic than was formerly believed. And the answer is yes, maybe you can change how your brain functions by meditating.

  In a study cited in chapter 2 of this book, Dr. Richard Davidson, Jon Kabat-Zinn, and their colleagues (2003) studied brain function and mindfulness meditation in employees of a local business. The employees were taught mindfulness meditation by Jon Kabat-Zinn over an eight-week period. Brain function in the employees was measured using MRI scans and EEG measurements before they learned to meditate, after eight weeks, and again sixteen weeks later.

  The differences were clear. The results showed that activity in the frontal cortex in the meditators had shifted. There was an increased pattern of activity associated with feelings such as joy, happiness, and low levels of anxiety.

  While this is only one study, it adds weight to the thesis that the links between the brain’s thinking regions and feeling (emotional) regions are much more plastic than previously believed. This suggests that you can indeed learn to monitor moods and thoughts, learn to drop the disturbing ones, and enjoy less anxiety and more energy and joy as a result.

  The Impact of Thoughts & Emotions on Health

  Reflect on your own everyday experience for a moment. Have you noticed how holding a thought can lead to a body reaction? Are there particular stories or thought patterns that you have repeatedly? Have you recognized how they connect with feelings of fear, anxiety, or worry? Have you ever noticed how your own body is recruited into action by these thought patterns and stories?

  Common expressions demonstrate that many people have observed such mind-body connections.

  He was bursting with anger.

  She died of a broken heart.

  He worried himself sick.

  She was scared to death.

  These are but a few familiar examples of how we acknowledge in everyday language the powerful impact of thoughts and emotions on health. Medical researchers have made interesting discoveries in recent years about the link between thoughts, emotions, and health.

  Anger & Hostility

  Redford Williams of Duke University Medical Center is a pioneer in the field of behavioral medicine. His work has led to a much clearer understanding of the connection between hostility and illness, especially the effects of hostility on the human heart.

  In the 1960s, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman had identified behavioral characteristics that seemed to be present in most of their cardiology patients: constant hurriedness, intense competitiveness, and free-floating hostility. Friedman and Rosenman labeled people with this specific cluster of characteristics type A (Hafen et al. 1996).

  Williams and Williams (1993) focused on the hostility factor in type A people. In one study, they found that over 70 percent of patients with high hostility scores (measured by a widely used psychological test) also had severe blockages of their coronary arteries. In contrast, less than 50 percent of those with low hostility scor
es had significant blockages.

  We now know that hostility is an independent risk factor for coronary artery disease. In other words, reducing hostility and anger in your life will reduce your chances of coronary disease .

  Current health-psychology research links unskillful management of anger and hostility with a number of other health problems as well. Hafen and colleagues (1996) summarize these findings related to anger and illness in Mind/Body Health . They note that prolonged or chronic anger can impact almost any part of the body. In particular, chronic anger can have adverse effects on blood pressure, coronary artery disease, migraine headaches, skin disorders, and even the common cold.

  This is everyday anger. In Anger Kills , Redford and Virginia Williams (1993) point out the widespread and ordinary nature of this anger: “We’re speaking here not about the anger that drives people to shoot, stab, or otherwise wreak havoc on their fellow humans. We mean instead the everyday sort of anger, annoyance, and irritation that courses through the minds and bodies of many perfectly normal people” (xiii).

  Worry

  Worry is another way thoughts and feelings can affect health. We have seen how worry can be understood as the patterns of thinking driven by feelings of anxiety. Often, the content of the thoughts reflects a person’s attempt to cope with or eliminate the discomfort and ill ease present as part of their experience of anxiety.

  Hafen and colleagues (1996) report some interesting facts about worry and health:

  About two-thirds of Americans classify themselves as worriers.