Unwind Your Anxious Mind

Are you just stressed, or really anxious? Today’s lesson introduces you to how your well-meaning brain goes from a natural fight or flight response, to developing chronic stress and anxiety. You’ll learn a simple way to tell the difference between stress and anxiety and how to put that information to good use to regain control over your life.

Starting with a self-diagnostic quiz, in today’s lesson you’ll map out how and where anxiety shows up for you and take a deeper dive into the physical feelings of anxiety. Then we’ll do a 30 second science experiment together to see how your experience lines up with activation in a brain region that my lab found to be correlated with meditation. As a bonus, you’ll get to hear what happened to Anderson Cooper’s brain when we measured his brain activity. You’ll finish with a short practice that will help you work with your stress and anxiety.

Now that you have a better sense of how anxiety shows up for you (and your brain), it’s time to dive into the science behind how our brains got hijacked from learning how to survive, to developing anxiety as a habit. Yes, you can learn to be anxious - even to the point where it becomes habitual. Thankfully, you can unlearn it as well. I’ll give you a method to begin mapping your mind, which is the critical first step in stepping out of habits you might have developed around stress, anxiety and other unhealthy behaviors.

Isn’t being “in the know” a good thing? Well it depends. Building on yesterday’s training, today you will learn the connection between setting up habits and how your brain tries to get as much information as possible (to help predict the future). Then I’ll teach you how in modern day, this can blow up in our face, thanks to social media and smartphones. You’ll also learn how to put this information to good use, so you can get back in control and use technology wisely, instead of getting triggered by it.

Today you’ll get a mid-course check-up to make sure your mind-mapping is going well. I’ll also give a short background on anxiety medications, and how they affect our brains – both positively and negatively. And I’ll link in some of the scientific history of how mindfulness training came onto the scene, both with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s groundbreaking work creating Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), and my own research on habit change (spoiler alert: it works pretty well for anxiety).

Do you ever get cravings? This lesson unveils the surprising similarities between the ancient and modern psychology of the mind, and how the overlap between the two are important for changing a range of behaviors from anxiety to overeating and addiction. Using examples from my own research, I will walk you through how both the old and new approaches provide insights into habits that we all may form around anxiety, and how building your awareness can help unwind those habits.

Building on yesterday’s exploration of how awareness can help us work with urges and cravings to work with unhealthy habits, today I’ll unpack the science behind how the power of observation can change behavior. Better yet, you’ll learn how to tap into curiosity to literally hack the very reward-based learning system that set up your anxiety habit loops, so that you can step out of the cycle. Curious?

Now that you’re learning to tap into your own brain’s mental curiosity muscle, I’ll teach you how to apply this to help you get a good night’s sleep. First, you’ll learn the pros and cons of sleep “aids” (including alcohol). Then, you can take a short self-quiz that will help you spot any links between anxiety and trouble sleeping, and finish with a short mindfulness training that has worked wonders for helping my clinic patients sleep.

Do you (or someone you know) feel like you are just a naturally anxious person? As in, it is so deeply ingrained that you can’t remember what it is like not to have anxiety on a daily basis? You are not alone. Using both ancient and modern psychology, today you will learn how this gets set up as a fundamental identity of who we think we are, and also how to work with this deep-seated mental pattern. Using examples from my own experiences with full-blown panic attacks, I will give you three simple ingredients to begin to unwind even the most entrenched habits.

Having learned how your mind works to form habits (and even identities) around stress and anxiety and how to hack your mind’s capacity to be curiously aware, you’re ready for one more tool that also taps into your brain’s learning mechanisms to help with stress and anxiety: kindness. I’ll teach you a little science from my lab’s brain studies of expert meditators practicing loving kindness, and then show you how to tap into this potential for yourself (and others).