Mindful Wellness: Managing Anxiety and Stress

Anxiety, Stress, and the Brain.

The brain helps us think and react to everything that happens around us; The prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, and the hippocampus. Let’s discuss a how these parts work together to become a healthier, happier, and sharper you.

1. The Amygdala – Our strong emotions such as fear or anger. The amygdala regulates and blocks information from going to the prefrontal cortex, so you react in a snap of a moment. It is the part of your brain that processed fearful or threatening stimuli (fight, flight, freeze). The amygdala’s is also involved in connecting emotional meaning to our memories. When you feel safe and calm, the amygdala passes information to your prefrontal cortex so you think with reason.

2. The Hippocampus –creates stores and processes all important facts and memories the prefrontal cortex passes to it. Helps with learning and memory (we use to tell small children to think of it as a storage cabinet – the messages from the storage are hard to retrieve when the amygdala is blocking the way). It is connected to your amygdala.

3. The Pre-Frontal Cortex – Uses information to focus, decide, compute, analyze, and reason. The tricky part about the prefrontal cortex is that it gets information when the amygdala is calm. Then it passes the information to the hippocampus to store away when worth remembering.

Frontal Lobe

• Suppresses socially inappropriate behavior.

• Predicts consequences of actions.

• Plays a role in the choice between helpful and harmful actions.

What is anxiety

1. Anxiety or feeling anxious is a mood that we could experience daily. It comes from a concern stemming from the lack of control around circumstances. In some instances, being anxious or worried over a dilemma may bring about a solution or motivation toward a solution. However, in some instances, being anxious can create negative thought patterns that do not serve you well. When it seems to appear from nowhere, is excessive, or consistent over long periods of time without letting up, interferes with your daily life, it may not be a mood within normal limits. This could be pointing to needing an assessment for illness.

Signs and symptoms of anxiety include but are not limited to

• Shortness of breath

• Shakiness

• Muscle aches and tension

• Feelings of unreality

• Irritability

• Insomnia

• Restlessness

• Sweating and nausea

• Racing heart

• Numbness or tingling

• Abdominal distress

Where does anxiety come from? (insert research source) – research indicates there is no one place to assign the cause of anxiety. It may include the following

• inherited tendency

• shy temperament (socially induced)

• unpredictable lifestyle

• stressful experience

• anxious parents

Knowing there are many factors that can potentially influence the development of anxiety because some are biological factors and others are external, it is important to know what our brain is doing when we have anxiety. Chemical messages known as neurotransmitters and hormones are with the internal factors that impact mood and anxiety. They work to send signals from the brain that regulate our physical, mental, and emotional health. If there is imbalance in chemicals it can shift our mood and interfere with our ability to cope with anxiety and stress.

What is stress

Stress is used frequently in our daily language in anxiety to describe an emotion that we will all feel at some point in our life. Stress touches all people. It can be defined as a mental, physical, or emotional strain or tension caused by incidences or occurrences in our lives. When we are presented with an occurrence that we don’t feel we can handle, our stress begins to build. Stress is subjective to each person, something that may seem like a very stressful event to you may not have the same weight to another person. So when we think about stress, stress is not necessarily just about the event itself but how you as an individual process the situation and move through it. When we are humans are struggling to cope, negativity can creep in and cause a stress response to a situation or dilemma. Stress is and will be a part of life, however, high levels of consistent dress can impact a person’s health and emotional regulation, possibility reducing productivity, and quality of life.

Cortisol and Stress

Cortisol is the primary stress hormone. This surges when your brain believes you are in danger and causes all the symptoms we associate with fight and flight. Low levels of cortisol on the brain are not dangerous to us BUT too much cortisol has been compared to pouring too much bleach on your clothing, it can cause damage to the hippocampus in brain and prohibits new neurons in the brain and burns through the connections that are already in place, this is especially concerning when you are consistently stressed. Results?

• Poor impulse control

• Poor focus

• Poor social skills

• Can shrink the prefrontal cortex of your brain

Identifying your anxiety rating / stress rating

Not all anxiety is harmful, small amounts or the “sweet spot” can be motivating and helpful. Knowing where you are with your own self rating can assist you in knowing that the symptoms of your anxiety are reducing. The same is true of stress, knowing where you are gives you a better idea of when things are getting better physically and emotionally.

Trigger tracking (give yourself 7-14 days of tracking)

Reduction ideas, coping skills, and additional workbook strategies.