Your pupils dilate. Your heart beats quickly; thump-thump-thump-thump. You feel like you’re suffocating, and your breath becomes short and quick to the point of hyperventilating. You feel a knot in your stomach, and an impending sense of doom takes over you. Your body becomes tense all over, and your blood pressure sharply increases. This is the manifestation of a panic attack. It’s when fear takes over our mind and consumes our entire conscious experience, even disturbing our biological balance.

As more people start recognizing the importance of mental health, anxiety is important to talk about as one of the biggest and most intense inner turmoils that we face as humans. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the US, affecting 40 million individuals. Although they are highly treatable, only 36.9% of those suffering receive treatment.

Anxiety can also open the door to other mental illness, including depression, phobias, and panic disorders. It is absolutely important that we fight this mental illness at all costs, because it robs us of our inner peace and freedom. With this post, I hope to provide you with more tools to combat any anxiety you may be experiencing, as well as to identify it if you are struggling with it.

At its root, anxiety stems from a multitude of factors, such as genetics, brain chemistry, personality, and experience. We cannot change our genetics, so I will focus on the three other factors – brain chemistry, personality, and experience – to combat anxiety from a completely mental and spiritual perspective.

The Origin Of Feelings

You walk into a room, and out of nowhere, your friend jumps out from behind the door. “BOO!” How did you react? You recoiled or jumped, didn’t you? Your body also probably felt a rush. What’s nice is that the scare immediately subsides after you realize it’s just your friend on the floor laughing their butt off.

How does your body produce emotions before you’ve even become aware of what’s going on? These emotions are called unconscious emotions.

There are two ways your brain produces emotions. The graphic below highlights both pathways, which differ by the time they take to travel, and the areas of the brain that they touch. They are described as follows:

1. The fast path – connecting through the amygdala and the hypothalamus – is what produces unconscious emotion.
2. The slow path, which passes through higher levels of consciousness, creates conscious emotion once you’ve assessed the circumstances of the situation.

The fast path is what produces our “fight or flight” response that is important for survival. It’s what allows instant action to evade danger or death without us needing to think. When the thalamus receives signals from your sense organs, it relays that information to the amygdala, which creates a quick assessment of the situation based on hard-wired habits and experiences. It then instructs the hypothalamus to secrete the hormones that elevate our blood pressure, create the knot in our stomach, or cause our heart to pump quickly. This happens in less than 100 ms.

As the signals move along the fast path, the thalamus also sends the same signals to various parts of the frontal cortex (the outer portion of the brain that is pink and wrinkly), to get a conscious interpretation of the events that have unfolded. Based on your memory of events, your beliefs, your opinions, your values, and your habits, you create an interpretation of the event that is sent to your amygdala, which then reassess the situation and either intensifies the emotion or quells it. This happens in about 350 ms.

Isn’t that wild? From initial scare to laughter, our emotions can change 180 degrees in 1/4 of a second. This suggests the fragility and transience of emotions, as well as our control over them. Emotions can last fractions of a second or an entire day, what produces this difference is our interpretations and opinions of the experience. This explains why we all have different fears, of varying intensities, that are unique to each of us. Emotional reactions are subjective for a reason.

The Spiral Of Anxiety

Anything that happens in the fast path is primarily subconscious, where we don’t have much control. However, the fear it produces is not necessarily unhealthy. If we are being chased by a dog, that fear would help us escape. It could also bring our attention to something we weren’t aware of before. This type of awareness is needed for our own well-being and survival, and to suggest these are unhealthy would be really wrong. At what point does it become unhealthy, though? Let’s ask the Dalai Lama, who answers in his book, Beyond Religion:

“Fear is not destructive in every situation…But when fear is obsessive, it can paralyze us and become a very destructive mental condition. Furthermore, excessive fear gives rise to a persistent state of anxiety, which is harmful to our health. I therefore distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable fear. Unreasonable fear occurs when the source of threat is largely our own mental projection.”

– The Dalai Lama, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World

Everyday, our brain unconsciously reacts to the world around us. For the most part, the emotions are fleeting and no real danger ever occurs. What becomes a problem is when we create a habit out of consciously feeling fear. When we continuously exercise fear, the fear grows until it becomes unreasonable. That is, the emotional part of our brains win out every time we make a decision, overpowering logic and reason. It can create situations where you start avoiding whole experiences altogether because of the possibility of a threat. The emotional part of our brain creates fear by imagining the possibility of a future threat and making the emotion present right now. Do you see how this robs you of your freedom? It paralyzes you in the present even though these thoughts are projected in the future.

How does anxiety of this intensity develop?

When we consciously feel fear, the amygdala uses your beliefs, thoughts, memory, and judgement of the situation and determines that you are afraid. It orders the hypothalamus to create fear in you. What is tricky here is that the amygdala will register this encounter with the “threat” as a negative experience. Next time you come across the same “threat”, your fear will be greater so you are more likely to avoid it.

Every time we see the same threat, our brain continuously gauges our interpretation or beliefs of the threat and sends that information to the amygdala to create an emotional response based on those thoughts and beliefs. If your brain continues to experience fear to the same threat, it may associate it as life-threatening – even if the threat can’t harm us. Your thoughts and beliefs drive the emotional responses that you experience.

If we habitually exercise this fear on the same threat, it cripples us. Your amygdala will begin to pick up patterns that happen before a threat occurs, and cause you to avoid them altogether. For example, if you are always consciously aware of how awkward you are in social situations, the fear of self-humiliation from social interactions could cause you to avoid social interactions altogether.

This is what’s called the fear of being afraid. The unconscious fear that was healthy was reinforced by negative and fearful thoughts that caused it to spiral out of control and overwhelm our entire conscious experience. Your amygdala has associated so many negative experiences to a perceived “threat” that the default response is intense fear to anything that can produce the possibility of that “threat”. The emotional circuit in your head has been exercised so much that it overpowers the logical one in you – every single time.

It’s important to note that all it takes is one very intense emotional experience for your amygdala to develop an unhealthy fear of something. Over the course of a lifetime though, it’s the small recurring “threats” we perceive on a daily-basis that can create anxiety if we don’t change our mindset or overcome them. This is why a great deal of our anxiety stems not from other animals or real dangers, but from relationships, personal struggles, or work/school. As a result, it is absolutely imperative to combat fear in our lives. It’s important to not ignore them, or surrender to them, as this strengthens fear’s hold on us. We must rationalize them, seek outside advice and support, and exhibit courage to keep our peace of mind.

Winning against Fear

Just as there are positive and negative forces in the universe that neutralize themselves (like electrons and protons), the same thing can be applied to the inner mind. When we experience thoughts of fear, we must fight them with positive thoughts. The only way to overcome fear is to be courageous and to desire a different outcome.

What’s important is to not let our fear become a routine, hiding from the “threats” that plague our lives. The more we exercise fear, the further down the spiral of anxiety we go until it becomes unreasonable and irrational. At first, the fear is an emotion we experience that can pass within seconds. As we do not confront the constant “threat” in our lives, this feeling picks at our minds and our time. If this fear persists, it can turn into a mood, lasting weeks to months. Once you make it a habit to be anxious and worried, it becomes a personality trait, and even a part of your character. By this time it becomes extraordinarily hard to change. It’s important to catch yourself as soon as possible and seek help.

If you are struggling with anxiety, please check out some of these resources and know you are not alone.

How can you use your mind to combat anxiety?

Grounding

When you are experiencing intense anxiety, one way to calm down is to “ground” yourself in reality by finding 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, and 1 thing you can taste, naming every object or sensory experience. By doing this, you can bring perception to non-threatening things, and change your emotional state by tricking your amygdala to produce emotional reactions based on plain and simple experiences.

Thinking Logically

Just as anxiety is triggered by an emotional circuit in the brain, the first step to disarm yourself of fear is to get outside perspectives (whether from a friend, mentor, loved one) of the situation to reframe your mind to not see fear. By flexing the logical circuit in our brains, we make it slightly stronger. Over time, it’ll become easier to remove fear from a situation by considering different angles, perspectives, and information.

Displaying Courage

Lastly, the ultimate antidote for fear is to have courage. This is the tenacity to act in spite of fear, not the absence of it. Just like thinking logically, courage is a mental muscle that must be exercised to grow over time. Whenever we are afraid, by utilizing courage to ignore or overcome a threat, we are assigning a different conscious experience to our unconscious fear. Typically, by displaying courage, we realize that what we were afraid of wasn’t as bad as it seemed, or even better, that it was enjoyable. This trains the amygdala to subdue its overwhelming reaction of fear every time we face the threat.

We all experience fear. It is one of the most fundamental living traits of all conscious animals, not just humans. For each of us, it can take many different shapes and forms. Some are superficial, while some fears are deeply rooted within us since childhood. It is something we must all tackle in our lives, even if it’s not simple or easy. Regardless, those experiencing anxiety are never alone. Every person experiences fear which makes each and every one of us capable of understanding how fear can prevent us from growing, from living, and even doing something as basic as eating and sleeping.

I hope this post could bring some awareness to the inner struggle we all face, and provide some tools and resources to inspire, and ultimately, conquer the fear inside of you. If someone you know is experiencing fear, please pass this information along.

Share