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