Do you ever wonder what is happening inside your brain when you feel anxious, panicked, and worried? In Rewire Your Anxious Brain, psychologist Catherine Pittman and author Elizabeth Karle offer a unique, evidence-based solution to overcoming anxiety based in cutting-edge neuroscience and research.
In the book, you will learn how the amygdala and cortex (both important parts of the brain) are essential players in the neuropsychology of anxiety. The amygdala acts as a primal response, and oftentimes, when this part of the brain processes fear, you may not even understand why you are afraid. By comparison, the cortex is the center of “worry.” That is, obsessing, ruminating, and dwelling on things that may or may not happen. In the book, Pittman and Karle make it simple by offering specific examples of how to manage fear by tapping into both of these pathways in the brain.
As you read, you’ll gain a greater understanding how anxiety is created in the brain, and as a result, you will feel empowered and motivated to overcome it. The brain is a powerful tool, and the more you work to change the way you respond to fear, the more resilient you will become. Using the practical self-assessments and proven-effective techniques in this book, you will learn to literally “rewire” the brain processes that lie at the root of your fears.
self-help steps that can help alleviate or eliminate anxiety throughout the book.
While some of the concepts were more difficult to understand, overall the book was written quite well and easy to understand considering the subject matter.
The first half explains these principles, while the second half covers practical techniques and exercises to apply this knowledge in trigger situations and learn to re-wire, re-remember, augment and overcome traumatic experiences that linger in the body and psyche. Memory is felt all over the body.
I recommend this book to everybody I talk with about anxiety. The audio book can be listened to in about 6 hours. Money very well spent!
Lots of helpful techniques to get over, around, and through anxiety
Also teaches you how to change it !!
Great book !!
Understand where anxiety starts from and giving me tools to incorporate when I’m anxious. Thank you for writing this book!
Equally important are the tools for addressing anxiety and the stress that comes along with panic and anxiety.
The effects of exercise was especially helpful as well as the information about the two pathways of anxiety.
This book is beneficial and also has a workbook for exercises. When I finished the book I had learned a lot about anxiety rewiring the brain.
Everybody can learn something from this book with the afterthought that the "conclusion" generates.
It may not be a replacement for other forms of treatment, but it helped me when medications couldn’t. I do recommend talking with your doctor or a psychologist, but certainly give this book a go. I think you’ll be impressed.
UPDATE:
6 years after reading this book, my anxiety remains greatly reduced, in part, due to the techniques found in this book. While I am not a fan of the tiny section on visualizing meditation, it was otherwise a great resource.
Possibly a chapter on how alternative therapies like Yoga and Acupressure work on anxiety will be useful.
The book also provides helpful evidence-based guidance on techniques to prevent or reduce the intensity of anxiety and related conditions. The key techniques are:
- Get good sleep, aerobically exercise daily, and eat a healthy diet.
- Breathe from the diaphragm/belly, which apparently activates the parasympathetic nervous system and thus counters activation of the sympathetic nervous system resulting from fear.
- Remind yourself that thoughts and images are not reality and may be mistaken.
- Disrupt problematic thoughts and images via distractions, play, music, and positive thoughts and images.
- Mindfully 'defuse' from problematic thoughts, images, and sensations, and instead just 'be' in the present moment, calmly observing all that is happening without any need to interpret or respond in any way.
- Meditate, including mindful meditation.
- Deliberately and repeatedly expose yourself to the situations which generate unwarranted fear, in order to rewire the amygdala to no longer subconsciously associate those situations with fear. This can be an uncomfortable experience, but accept the discomfort and know that it will pass, and absolutely do not flee from the situations, because doing so will strengthen the fear.
I highly recommend this book to anyone dealing with excessive worry, fear, anxiety, and related conditions.
I am really rewiring my brain!!!!!!!!!!!
Numerous types of stress are discussed in this book, including the reasons that these types of stress occur and what parts of the brain are responsible for your response. If you’re anything like me, you are constantly trying to make logical sense out of your worry, but I learned from this book that there may not always be a logical reason behind your anxiety. In fact, you may not ever really know why you certain situations, thoughts, sounds, smells, etc., can trigger an episode of panic. The good news is that you don’t have to know. The authors go into great detail to describe techniques that you can use to essentially “rewire” your brain to avoid having stress responses. The book mainly discusses the two different parts of the brain that deal with fear and stress, the amygdala and the cortex. The amygdala is basically your body’s natural fear response system. Your amygdala often works without your ever knowing it, such as when you are driving and instinctively swerve out of the way to avoid hitting another car. The cortex, on the other hand, deals with worry and obsessive thoughts. For example, your cortex is to blame when you are constantly worrying about a possible outcome that will likely not occur. You may have one or both of these types of stress, and the authors provide useful “exercises” that can be used to deal with both of these types of stress.
If you’re reading this review, I’m guessing that you probably don’t care about all of these details though, right? What you really want to know is if the methods in this book really work. I think they could certainly help many individuals who suffer from stress and anxiety. These authors give insightful strategies to help with different types of stress responses, all of which are based on years of research. Your stress isn’t going to go away overnight having read this book, but it certainly may help you learn to cope with your anxiety when it does occur.
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book through Netgalley.