How to find the off switch of anxiety?

The human brain is good at generating anxiety. The good news is that when you know how anxious you are, you can eliminate it instead of blaming external forces. These four steps can help you find the switch to turn off anxiety, whether you expect positive or negative things:

1. Anxiety is just a chemical substance.

Cortisol is a chemical that makes you feel uncomfortable. Your body will get rid of it in a few hours, so as long as you don't trigger more actions during this time, you should feel good soon. Unfortunately, this is hard to do: cortisol creates a sense of threat and makes your brain search for threats urgently. However, when you know how the brain defines "threat", you can find the "off" switch.

2. Threats are just neural circuits.

Things that were bad for you in the past have established a pathway in your brain. When you see something related to this bad feeling, you turn on cortisol. The pathway you established before you were eight years old and adolescence became the super expressway of the brain, so anything you felt uncomfortable in those years caused trouble to the alarm system of the brain. In the end, all of us will receive more alerts than we really need, because we feel threatened by tiny clues related long ago. Many of these suggestions are valuable: they can protect you from falling off a cliff or attracting strangers. But they provide a flawed guide to life.

3. You can establish a new neural circuit for self-consolation.

Self-consolation is also a set of neural circuits established a long time ago. Humans are born helpless and fragile. The first circuit in the brain (laying the foundation for future experience) is a sense of urgency that you can't meet your own needs. You will learn to get a little help from the world around you to comfort yourself whenever you need it. At the end of adolescence, each brain has a sample of self-comforting cycle. Many of them are valuable, but they also have consequences. Moreover, if you continue to repeat the old habit of comforting yourself, you will get the same result. You can get into the new habit of comforting yourself, but it's hard, because your old expressway is so comfortable. It is an arduous task to open up a new footprint in the jungle of neurons. Footprints will soon disappear unless they pass by every day. If you repeat this new behavior trouble-free for 45 days in a row, a new circuit will be established. So, choose a new way to deal with anxiety, and then put the 45-day cycle in. You'll like the result.

Don't wait too long, don't expect the world to fix it for you.

We often blame our anxiety on society and think that the world must change before we can calm down. When the world enters your brain and comforts you, life will pass. Remember, monkeys are as anxious as they were 50 million years ago. Men ... Social anxiety is a part of mammals. When you are not physically threatened, your mammalian brain will focus on social threats. This has always been the case, so don't expect the world to change in a way that suits you.