How Fear and Anxiety Affect Your Brain

Foreign.

You've talked about anxiety and aloneness and how much those go together. From a neuroscience perspective, how do these impact or affect our brains? And what does it look like to start healing if we recognize that anxiety and the fear of aloneness are driving a lot of our emotional responses to people in our world?

Well, I think there are a couple things that happen from a neurological standpoint. One is that when we are anxious, we naturally have a, an increase in certain hormones. You have acth, you have cortisol, that tends to increase. And these are things that when we are anxious, we actually need. They are protective for us, they help us, they help advance our brain's capacity to think more quickly. Our body gets ready to take action when it needs to take action. And to have increased doses, increased concentrations of those hormones in our brain for a certain short period of time is exactly what the body needs. But the body does not need that to continue for long periods of time because over time it then becomes toxic. It's kind of like, yeah, I like having my SWAT team come, you know, come into, you know, into the neighborhood when things are really bad. But like, I don't really want my SWAT team just to stay there then indefinitely because like every time I watch a guy with a, you know, with an automatic weapon, that's not my idea of like this. I don't, that's not the neighborhood that I want. And so what, I mean there's, that there's the toxicity that can happen. Like it makes it harder for cells to do their job, the hippocampus that is responsible for my short term memory, it makes it harder for me to remember things, it harder for me to encode things, harder for me to focus my intention on things because of, in some respects, because of the toxicity. Now by toxicity here, I don't like that's going to kill you. But it makes it harder for the brain to function when cells get, have, have too much exposure to these kinds of stress hormones for longer periods of time. And then the other thing that happens is that it makes it harder for when the brain is having a hard time with each part of the brain, each function sections of cells here and there to do their job. It equally makes it that much difficult, more difficult for them to communicate with and remain connected to other sets of neural networks in the brain. And so not only is each set having to work harder to do its job, but part of that energy is going to be given up that they would. Typically where the prefrontal cortex is down regulating the amygdala like, it's harder to do that. It's harder for my right brain and my left brain to talk to one another. I tend to become, if I need to, I tend to become more left brain focused where I'm going to analyze and solve the problem. Not really paying attention to my body, not really paying attention to what I, I feel in order to like get this job done. And if I'm not paying attention to that, it's going to want to ramp up and send even stronger signals, which I'm going to ramp up and pay even more attention to not getting, like, I don't want. And this becomes like a snowball effect. And so then we wonder why am I yawning so much? Why am I so tired at the end of the day? Why are all these kinds of things happening often? Because what I'm really trying to do is to regulate this either low grade or high grade anxiety that is making it really difficult for, for my brain to function. But it's also important for us to know this even when we ask this question, well, how does anxiety affect the brain? It's easy for us to think, oh, it's how my anxiety affects my brain because I'm anxious. How does that happen? I don't necessarily quickly think, oh, when I'm more anxious is the first thing that I do when I'm anxious. Say, am I going to call you all up and say, hey, can I just let you know I'm anxious? You're, you're on my, you're on my speed dial for texting, right? And you say like, dude, like I'm having an anxious day. Well, I'm, I'm actually like every day is anxious for me, but like it's a more anxious day, right? Like, like, am I, am I going to do. No, like, okay, all right, so I've been married for 38 and a half years and I like, I, I, I, I like I don't deserve my life in, in, in, you know, and, and, and let me just say, I don't deserve to be married to the woman that I'm married to and she doesn't deserve to be married to the man that she's married to, but for very different reasons, right? Like she does, she doesn't deserve to have to put up with me. I don't deserve to have had the opportunity to live with her. And you know, it would be fair to say if people were to, if 20 years ago, if they would have hung out with us for a certain period of time, I think it would be fair to say that people might easily say, if you were to ask, like, well, which of the two of them, Kurt or Phyllis, which one is more anxious? I think people would say, oh, Phyllis is definitely more anxious. And now what I would say is, well, the reason that that's apparent is because she just names what she's experiencing, says it. She's actually. She's actually not more anxious than me. She's actually just naming things. And nobody else in the room, like, people don't do this. Me, it turns out, like, I'm a really anxious dude. But I have been working since I was a child to make sure that nobody sees you sweat.

Yeah.

And if you're working that hard, like, you really don't know that you're anxious, but you're living like you are. And in the last several years, in working with my director and then my director, like, it turns out, like, yeah, I have these. These narratives, these undercurrents that are going on with me all the time. Like, I'm an anxious guy. And like, okay, is this good news for people to know that, you know, you're treating psychiatrists? Is this anxious? Like, I don't know. You can. You know, they can let me know on Monday. But the point being that we do all kinds of things to try to protect ourselves from ourselves, to keep ourselves out of our awareness. And so our anxiety is often very subtle. Right. If you look at all the sections in the Sermon on the Mount, no section gets more treatment in terms of his words beyond the Beatitudes than his Treatise on anxiety at the end of chapter six. And Mike, no wonder, because he's not. And what does he say? And does, you know, look at the. You know, look at the birds of the air, look at the lilies of the field. And does your Father not love you more than these? And when you. When you hear him at the end of 11 Matthew, when he says, come unto me, all you are, you know, weary and heavy laden. And what I need to recognize is that when I'm weary and heavy laden, what I'm not doing is coming unto him when I'm. When Jesus says, do you not know that your Father in heaven loves you so much more than the. You know, than these flowers and these birds? And I'm like, no, I don't actually know that. I know you can tell me that. I don't feel it in my chest because I've been practicing living as if I belong in it. Like, as if I'm in a different story altogether. And it's not until, you know, sometimes until our addictions become so prevalent and are so impairing do I find myself in a room with you two guys, right? In which for the very first time perhaps in my life, you're asking me questions I've never been asked before. They're not just about my anxiety. And the questions that you're asking are not just being asked for the purpose of gaining content or information from me, but in many respects, the questions that you're asking are really vehicles that enable you to be fully present with me with your tone of voice, with your eye contact, with your body language, with your messaging of I'm, I'm, I'm not worried about you. Well, you know, I, I don't know how you could not be worried about me. Like I'm, I'm, I have enough worry for 10 people for me. And you say like no, I'm, but you, you might say you're not worried, but what I'm going to feel is your felt unworried, non anxious presence. That will be perhaps the first time I've ever had an encounter with what it's like for me to be in the presence of someone who's completely at ease being in my presence. And that is the gospel.