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.