anxiety, depression, OCD and the power of the mind

I have been reading various forums and groups etc and I see recurring themes that people post about. Namely that many people see themselves as victims, they are helpless and at the whim of their brain chemistry, the only option seemingly to take medication and if this does not work then to change or increase the dosage.

I see some potential faults in the logic of this way of thinking when referring to anxiety, panic attacks, mild to moderate depression and OCD.

Firstly, one of the most common themes is that the person is a victim of their brain chemistry. Imagine your favourite food, imagine its smell, taste, look, feel, imagine it as vividly as you can. Do you notice anything? chances are your mouth is watering, your stomach may even make an anticipatory rumble. There is no food present, except for in your mind. what you have just demonstrated to yourself that just by thinking about something you have created a physical and chemical response in your body!

If just by thinking of your favourite food can create real chemical and physical responses in your body, then what chemical and physical responses could other thoughts do?  What about if the thoughts were subconscious and you didn't even realise you were thinking them? What if some of your thoughts were subconscious and habituated?  Just like riding a bike or walking or writing or reading. With all of these activities you actually think about what you are doing as you do them, they just happen. Through learning, the activity has become habituated and all the thought processes that go with the activity are committed to memory and most of the brain power associated with it is dealt with on the subconscious level!

Two Steps Forward, and 1.9 steps back

This anxiety habit, mindset, condition, call it what you will, is a tricky thing. Just when you think you are making good progress something comes up and seems to set you right back.

For me it was having to get up at 3.30am for a one off job that set me back. It was the worry of not getting enough sleep which of course became a self fulfilling prophecy, which triggered anxiety which led to yet more sleepless nights which led to more waking up up early in a state of high anxiety.

It's crazy really, my intellectual brain knows I should not worry about sleep, or most other things for that matter, especially when in bed trying to sleep. But try telling that to my primitive limbic brain when it's running riot in my head, releasing cortisol and adrenalin at the drop of a hat.

A life time of the bad habit of letting my limbic brain be in control is not going to change as quickly as i would like!

For me, when i am in suffering anxiety and panic and ultimately depression, I want to reach for the pill cabinet for some magic pill that will make it all better. unfortunately that has not been invented yet. so in the mean time I guess we are stuck with the slow process of retraining our brains , to un-learn those bad ways of processing information, and to slowly, learn that we are in fact ok!

Practicing Anxiety calming techniques

It's difficult to change a deep seated habit, which is what anxiety is. It's a learned response to worry and stress.

I know what I am supposed to do and to think, and how to react on the onset of anxious thoughts but actually implementing the these strategies is not as easy as one would hope.

The anxious habit has a strong, deep, hold and to expect it to immediately disappear because you know how you are supposed to deal with it is probably wishful thinking to some extent.

Those of us who have issues with anxiety are usually the sort of people who wish that problems can be sorted right here and right now. However learning something, anything new takes times, breaking a habit takes time. You don't just get on a bike for the first time and be able to instantly ride it.

So what about the 'I was ok and dealing with life until .... happened, and since that day I have had anxiety and panic attacks'
well chances if you look back you were a worrier, and you 'worry cup' was filling up, you were able to empty it a little but over time more worry was going into the 'cup' than was leaving it. This eventually results in a situation where your 'worry cup' is almost always full and even the smallest events or triggers can cause it to overflow. And without begin able to empty it it will be in a constant state of full to the brim or overflowing. To empty that cup so it is not overflowing takes time and practice

An Anxiety self help iPhone app

whilst looking through the itunes store for relaxation and self help apps I found one called SmarTherapy  (clickable link)written by Australian psychotherapist Sallee McLaren (clickable link). at £1.99 i think it is really quite interesting and could potentially help. The technique Sallee uses is similar to Neuro Linguistic Programing (NLP) whereby your attention is shifted away from your anxiety and refocused on positive things. The theory is basically to reprogram your brain, overwriting the old negative habits with positive new ones.

It is definitely worth trying it out if you are looking at other angles to combat anxiety, stress and depression.

I have tested quite a few self hypnosis apps, and the quality is quite variable. I may review some of the ones I have tested out.

Anxiety and panic using techniques to help stop them

well, knowing what your supposed to do to control and alleviate anxiety and panic and actually doing those things while your are in a the midst freaking out can be poles apart. When you mind is convincing you are losing control or out of control and it is backed up with the nasty physical feelings you have. At those times it is very difficult to be reasonable. I hope in time i will be able to let go, let those anxiety feelings and physical sensations float on by, not focusing on them, seeing them for what they really are, just a learned behavior, a habit i need to break by learning new habits, by not giving the thoughts and feelings permission to take over, not by fighting them but by not paying them any attention, by just letting them go. then, in time the ancient. primitive limbic system in my brain will learn that there is nothing to 'fight or flee' from that releasing all these chemicals into my body is not of any use, that it can relax, that i can relax. that I am OK and you are OK

Dealing with Anxiety and Panic Attacks - theory versus practice

Some of the strategies you should try to adopt when you are becoming or have become anxious and panicky;

STOP!

BREATHE-in-pause- out slowly through the mouth, breathing lower down from the abdomen rather than the upper chest if possible

POSITIVE SELF TALK - telling yourself it is just a lowered threshold to events causing your primitive brain to release chemicals into to your body, and LET IT ALL GO, I AM OK, YOU ARE OK

YOU ARE OK - you just need to teach your primitive brain to stand down by letting all the feelings and sensations flow over and past you without dwelling on any of it, despite how much your primitive brain wants you to dwell on it, Your primitive brain is not in charge, you are in charge!

IT'S ALL OK - 'there is nothing to get freaked out about primitive brain so just LET IT ALL GO, I AM OK, YOU ARE OK'

IT WILL PASS - I have felt good before and I WILL feel good again.

FOCUS - not on the feelings and sensations, but on something constructive even if it is just a maths problem in your head or maybe trying to think of a funny poem about what you are going through, exercise, reading, crossword, Sudoku, something that can fully occupy your mind in a constructive way. Don't give yourself permission to dwell on the feelings and sensations of anxiety, its just your primitive brain having a tantrum, freaking out about things LET IT GO. By focusing on other things we can, in time teach our primitive brain that it really is OK and you are OK and over time, through practice, which means facings fears rather than avoiding them, but facing them to deal with anxiety  such as those mentioned above.

If the anxiety seems to come on randomly and without a trigger then you just deal with it in the same way, LET IT GO, YOU ARE OK

DON'T FIGHT IT, you would be just fighting with yourself, just LET IT GO, try to be almost bored with the anxious feeling and sensations. and focus on other things.

Remember that you are normal, it is just your primitive brain has got into the bad habit of being in control. All bad habits can be broken, and replaced with good habits. it takes time and practice and patience but by not giving your anxiety and panic permission to take over, by letting it go, flowing past you with disinterest, you will be giving your primitive brain signals that it can be calm and it's all OK.

Breaking the chains of worry

I have read and listened to a lot of material relating to what anxiety is, how it manifests, and how you are supposed to deal with it.

The root of anxiety appears to be worry combined with imagination. Worrying about the future, what if'ing about all manner of scenarios, real and imagined, what will happen to us, how will we cope. Worrying about the past, where we went wrong, how we failed, what we could have done better, who we let down. Worrying about the present, how we feel right now, how the physical effects of corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) and adrenalin is affecting our ability to function properly and just wishing we could be like everyone else and get on with living a normal happy life.

For some reason, some stressful event or series of events has lowered our threshold making us release these chemicals at the slightest provocation, and once released we are not able to shake off the psychological and physical effects of them. Rather than just having the chemical release and the associated physical response come and go, as happens to everyone once in a while, those of us with anxiety worry about the feelings, and because our threshold is lowered our worrying about it actually causes more chemicals to be released creating a viscous cycle. 

Another thing about the chemicals released is that they are from a very ancient, primitive part of our brain, within the limbic system. These chemicals were designed to help save our life under extreme situations where we had to either run for our lives or fight for our lives. This means the chemicals are very powerful and cause us to think and to feel in extreme ways. hence the extreme dire feelings we experience when they are released into our body.

Understanding this is all very well, and it can go some way to help. If you know that it is just your lowered threshold to stress and worry that is causing the chemical releases and the subsequent anxiety and nasty awful physical and mental responses, then with training it should be possible to teach our ancient, primitive brain that it is not necessary to release the chemicals at the slightest provocation, and that it is much better if this part of the brain to remains calm and quiet.

Actually retraining, relearning takes time and practice and like learning to ride a bike some falling off and some pain and discomfort is inevitable before you can ride a bike so well you don't even have to think about it and you can ride non handed,  and talk and do other tasks whist doing it. This is the state we need to achieve regarding our anxiety.

Anxiety -The battle within

Sleep, the luxury of it, the necessity of it, the feelings you get when you are deprived of it. 

This anxiety trip I am on is having an effect on my sleep, in that I sleep very lightly when I do get to sleep and the wake up really early. And then the fun starts. The thought that I have woken up really early having not had a great sleep sets off an anxiety bomb just when I least need it. The net result is no more sleep and a body full of anxiety.

Whilst the concept of understanding the causes of anxiety are not too hard to grasp, the practical application of strategies to combat it are really difficult, especially at 5am!

I understand it is the ancient limbic system in my Brain running wild and releasing nasty chemicals to ward off some  perceived terror which has been a learned behaviour, wired into my synapses  from an early age through real or imaginary scary events, and reinforced over the years by subsequent events real or imagined. I understand my anxiety is a learned behaviour that has gotten out of focus, out of control from my pre-frontal cortex, which should be making the executive decisions about what and how to react to real and imagined scenarios. But getting your limbic system to listen to your pre-frontal cortex while it is doing a war dance in your ancient brain is easy said than done.

Attention shifting appears to be an interesting way. By not paying attention to the anxiety thoughts and by shifting your attention to constructive, engaging thoughts such as exercise, concentrated reading or mental maths etc. will theoretically 'starve' the anxious thoughts and degrade the memory synapses built up around those thoughts. This also teaches your brain that everything is in fact ok and that all the war dancing and drum beating and freaking out that your ancient limbic system is doing is actually not necessary.

That's the theory anyway. Like learning anything though it takes time, and that is the hard part as you have to experience the anxiety and then try to control and calm your ancient brain in order to teach it that what it had learned and had done in the past was although well intentioned,   Not the way you wanted it do do things from now on.

It is difficult to learn anything new. And like learning to ride a bike some falling off and pain seems inevitable, and training wheels in the form of Medicine may well be needed. Although to ride or overly and freely the training wheels may have to come off at some point

Imagination anxiety and creativity

Everyone has one, even though who say they don't. The old chestnut of 'what side of the front door is your lock on and what colour is your front door?' you know because because you can automatically see a mental picture of of your door when you think about it. that'll be your imagination conjuring up the mental images.

Imagination can be a great thing, it can also be a pain, literally. Your nervous system doesn't know the difference between whats really happening and whats happening only in your head. Your can make you mouth salivate at the thought of yummy food and you can become aroused at the thought of your partner etc. The other side of the imaginary coin is that you can trigger all sorts of unpleasant chemical and hormone releases just by thinking of something stressful or of something you fear.
To make it even more interesting you may not even be consciously thinking of it. It could well be all going on in your subconscious, and before you know it your body is releasing chemicals and hormones left right and centre, causing major upsets to your nervous system and to your conscious mind.

So whats the answer to stopping your subconscious going AWOL and freaking you out? Well it seems that as thinking of certain food causes salivation is a learned behavior, we know what food we like and the thought of it causes our yummy reaction. So, at some point in our lives we 'learned' things that made our body react negatively. This may have at one point been  the result of a real event or a perceived real event. Whichever it is the result is the same, we have 'programmed' our subconscious to react in a certain way in certain conditions.

Getting back to imagination, those certain conditions in which cause a negative reaction in our body no longer has to have any basis in reality. Our amazing imagination can create beautiful scenarios to trigger very real physical reactions, and it can even do it automatically within our subconscious so that we are not even aware of what is about to be unleashed until it happens!

So what can we do? well it would appear that we need to relearn, to overwrite the existing 'software' in our brain that causes us hassle with new software that does not. As with any learning it takes some time, you don't just get on a bike and ride off into the sunset if you have never ridden a bike before. You get on it and fall off, lots, then you ride around for a bit like your about to fall off and eventually you get the hang of it and you do it without thinking, your subconscious has full control, leaving your conscious to chat ot eat an ice cream or whatever as you ride along merrily.

To replace subconscious negative thoughts you have to recognize when it is happening, such as the onset of the physical reaction, tell yourself the reaction is due to subconscious reactions to an event either real or imaginary, control your breathing, count slowly 2 in through the nose and 4 out through the mouth for example, tell yourself that it is ok to feel like this and it is nothing to fear, this will, after practice stop the chemicals from being released that are causing the physical reactions.

The trick is not to run away from your fears but to confront them in a prepared way and push through the initial freak out that your body will have.

With time and some 'falling off the bike' your subconscious will learn that it doesn't have to freak out at real or imagined events, then you can eat your ice cream and have fun!

Anxiety - whats that all about then

Anxiety is a strange thing, I guess it has its place and that most people are able to keep it in perspective. But for some of us as some point in our lives anxiety hits hit like running into a brick wall. Whatever it was that caused our initial anxiety, the external influence such as money worries or feelings of low self worth most often brought on by our societies view that in order to be someone you have to be a fully functioning cog in its great machine.  Whatever perceived external event or feeling or thought can become so intense that it forces our body to think we are in physical danger and releases lots of chemicals into our blood stream, a throw back to when frequent physical danger was a reality.

In our modern society all these chemicals released into our bloodstream at times of high anxiety only serve to make feel ill, shaky hands, dizzy, racing heart, feeling nauseous, IBS to name but a few. And the really terrible thing is when we start to focus on these feelings that we initially brought about by some external or internal trigger. That's when it all goes up a gear, the initial trigger is no longer the issue, the issue now is the feelings brought on by the chemicals we released into our body, and to make it worse the more we focus on these awful feelings the more chemicals are released.

For some it passes relatively quickly and then can return to a normal-ish existence, until the next trigger event. For others it can be a daily nightmare that stops you from functioning, afraid to to anything that may possibly trigger and attack.

It seems the only way to really and truly get on top of this terrible condition to first of all recognize the feelings for what they really are, a construct of your mind. Fear of the feelings brought on by the trigger event. Even if we cannot identify the trigger event as it may be a subconscious thought process, a bad thought habit learned over a long period of time, we can recognize the symptoms. And, with practice and patience we can disarm these feelings, we can nullify the effects they have on our body so that eventually when we have an anxiety trigger event we can automatically respond in a calm way that stops it ever getting out of hand.

So, know that the feelings will pass, they have before and will again

Know that it is just your body releasing crazy chemicals and if you accept this and let it do its thing without you freaking out about how the chemicals are making you feel, if you can just let yourself  go with it, it will eventually stop releasing the chemicals  your body thinks there is no longer anything to freak out about.

Know that your nervous system does not know the difference between reality (external events) and imaginary events. This is a powerful concept, fully understanding this greatly empowers you, as you know it is just your thoughts and fears causing the anxiety and panic and all the out of control feelings

Know that to feel how you do means you are an intelligent, sensitive and thoughtful person, it's just that somewhere along the way some wires in your subconscious have become crossed. It will take a little time and patience to re-wire your subconscious so that it understands that the feelings are anxiety and worry and stress are actually normal human feelings, not something to dwell on or be afraid of, just something that passes over you and that you can let go of without obsessing about how the feelings make you feel.

Don't dwell on how your feelings are making you feel

Don't dwell on the past it is gone, done, over, regrets serve no purpose other than to make you feel bad.

Don't dwell on the future, on what may or may not happen. Sure, make plans, have ideas, but don't obsess with what if thinking. it serves no purpose other than to get those anxiety chemical flowing in your body.

Be Positive, look at the here and now. Be grateful for even the smallest of things, a flower, the sun, the pattern of the clouds.

Really try to live in the moment, meditate, read books listen to meditation guides.

Your a special person, so full of emotion and intelligence and passion, you just need to reprogram/re-wire your subconscious a little, to know that you have nothing to fear.

You have the brain power to make your nervous system release chemicals that make you feel bad, therefor you have the brain power  to make yourself feel good.

You are safe within yourself.