Made a minor breakthrough just now -maybe?

[uru]

So I've been having interrupted sleep all night and I had quite a weird involved dream which was nothing to do with my anxiety.

As soon as I can to I thought the dream was quite amusing and my body kicked in with I can describe only as a kind of 'mental kick' which got me right back to worrying.

I noticed this kick because I've felt it a few times today. It happens at a very precise time. That is it happens exactly when I've stopped thinking about the perceived 'threat' for a few minutes.

So my body it seems is trying to remind me. 'Hey buddy, remember you have this very large dangerous thing to be worried about -get thinking about it until you come up with a solution! No time for fun'

This makes a lot of sense to me. Now all I have to do is try to convince my mind that the thing I'm worried about isn't that big a threat.

Does this make sense?

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yes, thats the typical fight or flight response.

You also found one of the ways to deal with anxiety but didn't quite see it. Anxiety triggers need a negative response to complete the cycle, and in CBT they will teach you how to spot your triggers (which you seem to be good at anyway) and how to react to them in a different way to prevent you adding to them and reinforcing the negative cycle. It's hard, but it's doable and over time it gets easier to do. It can be frustrating at first though as it seems like nothing is working.

Learning to react with neutral or even positive responses will prevent the area of the brain looking for feedback getting what it is looking for. Sadly, this area is looking for negative feedback and especially emotions, the stronger the better. Because if this, it won't see any neutral or positive as it can't process them in the fight or flight response. However, if you starve it enough, it will reduce what it is doing. This is easily seen with OCD when we have intrusive thoughts and I have dealt with mine through Mindfulness which taught me to act as an observer in those situations and to accept thoughts simply as thoughts, not their content.

[uru]

Can you tell me more about looking for negative feedback? I'm not sure I 100% follow.

[MyNameIsTerry]

Yeah, it's part of the anxiety/panic cycle they will show you in CBT. They are all over the net so you could have a look.

Basically you have a trigger which feeds the initial symptoms of panic/anxiety (from the subconscious) to your conscious mind where you are faced with the fight or flight decision. Since there is no need to do either, the process doesn't work as nature intended and we end up being anxious about our anxious feelings/thoughts or we panic over them. When we do this it sends feedback to one of the Amygdala in the limbic system of the brain. This one in particular is often refered to as the fear centre and it is only looking for the expected reactions from the conscious mind that confirm there is some form of fear in place and it uses that reaction in it's processes. So, one of the ideas of CBT is to address that conscious step to change how you react to a more positive/neutral one thus breaking that chain and encouraging new beliefs that the feared situation is not to be feared. The trouble is, it's not direct because of how that feedback works hence a positive/neutral reaction has less impact and needs to be done through repetition to make changes.

You've probably seen a whole lot of people talk about how acceptance works. Some say only acceptance works, but this isn't true as CBT has evidence it works. With acceptance you again tackle that reaction step in the process and learn to accept anxiety and the result is that again the area of the brain looking for that negative response is starved of it. The brain stops triggering processes it can't find a use for so the more you stop it completing it's cycle, the more it becomes a worthless process and the less is "fires".

It's all neurons & synapses. The neurons become associated to each other by connection through a synapse. It's like those old telephone exchanges in the movies where an operator takes a plug out and puts on in another hole to connect the call, only much more complex. These neurons are not fixed in place and can be associated (via synapses) to lots of other neurons. So, when you become afraid of a place, it's just a bunch of neurons storing information about that place, how you felt about it (thoughts, feelings, emotions, memory), even date/time info, etc. This is why avoidance is a bad thing because you are actually training your subconscious in the process and it's back to more neurons becoming associated with synapses about fear. Undoing them is very similiar, you build new "neural pathways", new associations.

It's all within neuroplasticity, how the brain learns. The same process means you learn to become anxious as the one that means you learn to no longer be anxious. It's only a question of influencing that change.

These connections of neurons are talked about in CBT as things like "core beliefs" which makes them easier to understand although this doesn't talk about the specific data involved that the brain uses, more about our beliefs and associations to that belief, hence the similarity.

There is a thread called "Riders" on the panic board by Davit. I would recommend reading this and his "Memory" on as it explains some important information about how negatives work. The "Riders" for instance can hijack your progress if you get them the wrong way around. His "Words" thread is useful to because we tend to use negative language and our subconscious notices this even if it is too subtle for us to notice with our conscious minds e.g. using "should" is negative as it implies a lack of choice whereas "could" implies choice and removes pressure.