Anxiety Triggers

What triggers anxiety in your mind and how does it show up?

Pure and simple, anxiety (or its twin synonym, worry) is a form of fear. It is triggered when you are afraid that something bad will happen or that something good that you hope happens won’t. It is triggered by imaginary fears, which themselves can be prompted by scary movies. Anxiety never solves anything. It is like a rocking chair. It keeps you occupied and moving—but only in one place. You never really go anywhere. How does anxiety show up? In any number of ways with symptoms such as: Sleep disturbances, Restlessness or feeling on edge, Difficulty concentrating or your  mind going blank, Easily fatigued, Irritable, Nausea, Diarrhea, Sweating, Dizziness, Accelerated heartbeat or palpitations, Muscle tension, Headache, and more. The symptoms are not pleasant. Personally, I am uninterested in experiencing any of them, especially for imaginary fears. That has been a learning process for me since I was raised by a mother who basically lived within the encircling arms of anxiety. Perhaps the bigger issue is that a person can develop the habit of being anxious. Fear stimulates the release of adrenalin. As adrenalin rises, so does dopamine, the feel better chemical to counteract the fearful and anxious feelings. Anxiety can become a habit. It can even become an addiction to your own adrenalin and dopamine.

Rejection & Brain Chemicals

What chemicals are released in your brain when someone is mean to you, especially if it involves rejection?

What a great question! First – The brain may view social rejection with anger, pouring out adrenalin. As adrenalin levels go up, so does dopamine – the chemical to help you feel better. If the person was not aggressive, anger or fear may not be triggered. As far as rejection itself goes, fMRI studies showed that physical pain and social rejection pain activate the parts of the same brain areas because they tend to overlap somewhat. Social rejection appears to piggyback on physical pain pathways in the brain. This may explain the reason that neurologically speaking, social rejection pain hurts so much. A heart ache can be felt as physical pain. Pain signals arrive in the brain through two different pathways. A fast pathway passes through the thalamus where it is triaged and sent to sensory and motor sections of the cerebral cortex for additional processing. The slow pathway passes through the central nervous system to the amygdala, hypothalamus, and the prefrontal cortex. This pathway is linked with the emotional reactions that occur in response to a social-emotional hurt such as the pain of rejection 

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Trauma Recovery

You always “lose” something in a traumatic event.  It could be the loss of feeling safe; the loss of health at least temporarily; perhaps the loss of a brain function or of a body part or even a person you love. Identifying the loss, grieving it, and letting it go, helps heal the pain from the event. To refuse to go through the process means that you allow the person or persons involved with the traumatic event to live rent-free in your brain. It wouldn’t matter to them—but it can matter to you and your health for the rest of your life. Healing from the event involves choosing healthier and thankful replacement thoughts. When you give up something you always get something. Find it and your life can change for the better. It might be knowledge, or verification of something you have experienced previously, or the freedom from something or someone you were inappropriately hanging onto. It could bring an unexpected opportunity or unexpected relief. The possibilities are endless.

Recovery from Traumatic Events

How can you bounce back from traumatic events?

Experiencing a traumatic event is one thing. Reexperiencing it in living color for the next 50 years by endlessly rehearsing it to yourself and anyone else who will listen is quite another. The more emotive your presentation, the more the traumatic event is fixed in living memory. Some try to repress the memory, but the pain will leak out in other areas of your life. My brain’s opinion is it takes bravery to deal with past traumatic events in a healthy and functional manner. Tell your story to a competent trauma counselor and/or wise trusted friend. Be open to feed back about what you can learn from it or how to prevent a reoccurrence (if at all possible), and then let it go. It’s a done deal. You can’t go back and prevent it. You can’t pretend it didn’t happen. Acknowledge that the traumatic event happened, and then work through the grieving process.  More tomorrow.

Suicide & Brain Pain

The brain processes the emotional hurt of losing a person you love through suicide much as it processes physical pain. The term “a broken heart” is real—loss and perceived rejection is physically painful. In response, the brain releases its natural opiate, endorphins, to help you feel better and to manage the pain. Going through the grieving process for the loss also can help you deal with this social-emotional pain. The good news is that even though you do not have the individual with you in tangible, three-dimensional presence, you still carry them within you. When you have been close to another human being and love him or her very much, their memory is filed inside the nucleus of your cells. You carry the memory of your loved one within you for as long as those cells are alive—which is as long as you are alive. 

Suicide & the Brain

How does the trauma of losing a loved one to suicide affect the brain?

 Having a loved friend or relative committee suicide takes the brain on a rollercoaster of emotions. Anger, that they did it and left you; fear, that someone else you care about might do it; and sadness because you suffered a loss. A healthy brain in a balanced state does not kill itself. Period. Even when bad things happen the brain wants to live. It can tenaciously hang on to life—sometimes for years even after a negative diagnosis and terminal diagnosis or prognosis, so called. Suicide likely happens ONLY in a brain that is in an altered state. That can be due to substances, drugs, extreme depression, and so on. In a sense, suicide is both a loss and a social rejection and your brain hurts—much like a physical injury. More tomorrow. 

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Depression and Memory

When you are depressed, do you really lose some of your memory?

 Depression can change the brain. It can alter neuron pathways along which information travels, interrupting the clear transmission of messages—resembling an internet that keeps dropping. It can alter the synapses or spaces between neurons that can interfere with communication between thinking cells. It can shrink the size of the hippocampus, that moves information from short term into long term storage, and then retrieves it when you want to recall it--hopefully. The hippocampus is said to be the most susceptible brain organ to stress. If memories do not get moved into long term storage and you “lose the data,” there is no way to retrieve it. As the hippocampus shrinks with subsequent depressive episode, its search-engine function may falter, and it cannot locate even information that was moved into long term memory. Fortunately, the hippocampi—there are two of them—comprise one of the few parts of the brain that researchers have discovered can create new cells. That’s the reason getting treatment for depression is so critical—and the sooner the better. It is also important to learn effective stress management strategies as stress can trigger anxiety as well as depression.