The second commandment of Self-Brain Surgery is “I must believe that feelings are not facts, they are chemical events in my brain.”
Remember that here in the School of Self-Brain Surgery, we practice from a mind-down worldview, meaning we believe that you have tremendous control over your brain’s behavior when you learn to operate it with your mind. You don’t have to be a victim of brain activity, because you can use your mind to make your brain work in ways that help and do not hurt you anymore.
With that said, for the next two weeks here and on the podcast we are going to learn about anxiety, and how to stop letting it push us around. Today we’ll contemplate, and then we’ll get very tactical and start operating.
If you struggle with anxiety, these posts will help you reassign to its proper place in your life.
“But wait, Doc,” you might be thinking. “Don’t we want to GET RID of anxiety? What’s this business about reassigning it?”
The first thing to realize is that anxiety (or any feeling, for the most part) is not inherently bad. In fact, you NEED some anxiety in your life. As my friend Daniel Amen wrote in his bestseller, You: Happier, “Some anxiety is a good thing. When kept in balance, anxiety keeps you safe because your brain is doing its part to protect you from making silly or tragic mistakes.”
This is where it’s critical to remember the second commandment: feelings are not facts, they are chemical events in your brain. This is so important! Feelings are designed to alert us to something, but we LEARN over time to attach meaning to certain feelings in certain contexts.
Think about it: you’re holding a letter in your hands that you’ve just opened. Your heart begins to race, and you feel a tingling sensation at the back of your neck. Your breathing shallows and speeds up, and your mouth feels dry. You notice a tightness in your chest and your stomach feels knotted. Your hands begin to shake a little.
From that set of physiological reactions, what is the most likely type of letter you just read?
A certified letter from the IRS that might be an audit notice
Divorce papers that you don’t want to have to sign
A letter informing you that you’ve been accepted to law school or medical school
A love letter from that special someone
A notice that you’ve just won the lottery and are now a multi-millionaire
Even though the symptoms I just described are all consistent with anxiety, you can see that context determines how we interpret feelings/physiological reactions, right?
The point is that your body has a very narrow palette of chemicals that create all the things you can feel, and they feel the same to you, regardless of whether something good or bad, real or imagined, is happening. You’ve likely had the same feelings when you heard a noise at night, when you were thinking about a fight you had with your spouse, or when imagining a meeting that’s going to happen tomorrow, right?
One of the major things we have learned from recent neuroimaging and neuropsychology studies is that one reason some people struggle with anxiety is that they spend too much time thinking about their anxiety. In other words, they have forgotten the tenth commandment of Self-Brain Surgery, “I must believe that I’m getting better at what I’m doing.”
Too often, it happens like this: We feel a set of things we’ve learned to associate with anxiety, and then we begin to think about the feelings/symptoms we’re feeling, and we subconsciously associate those with other times we’ve felt similar things. This sets up a reverberating/ruminating circuit that reinforces the feelings, and we get better at feeling anxious in similar environments in the future. Then, we tend to behave in ways that we’ve taught ourselves to as we react to those feelings, or we choose numbing behaviors to stop feeling them (alcohol, medicine, shopping, etc.).
If we remember that we have top-down control of our mind-brain-body interface, and we diligently apply the practice of biopsying our thoughts and feelings before we assign meaning to or react to them, then we can recognize anxiety for what it is: a chemical signal that something is going on (again, real or imagined), and not necessarily something wrong.
We reassign anxiety from “Something is wrong” to “My body is sending me signals, but I am in charge of how I respond.”
That’s the starting place. Tomorrow on the podcast we will go deeper, and start operating on reassigning anxiety. Modern neuroscience and scripture actually complement each other nicely here, so be sure to check it out!
What are some ways you typically respond to anxiety? Do you find yourself reacting to the physiological symptoms of anxiety without actively thinking about those responses?
I re-released a podcast from season 9 called “An Operation for Anxiety” that will be helpful. Click the button below to listen.
Last week, we talked about the only two math equations you need to master Self-Brain Surgery (see last week’s lesson if you missed it). I’d love to hear from you if you’re finding this series helpful; drop a voicemail or reply to this email and let me know!
By the way, if you think these lessons are valuable, please consider sharing this with friends. If you share with three or more people and they sign up, you can get free access to my paid subscriber content!
Here at the School of Self-Brain Surgery, we’re all about the good news that you’re not stuck with the brain you have, and you are not JUST your brain. You can change your brain, but you have to change your mind first.
And the good news is, you can start today.
Lisa and I are praying for you.
Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),
Lee
Psalm 71:14 ("As for me, I will always have hope.")
From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA
Don’t forget that you can get the recent podcast archive with transcripts of all recent episodes by clicking the button below.
Love this! Need to listen closely for the next two weeks as the struggle with anxiety is real. Never thought about it this way, reassigning anxiety. Thank you Dr. Warren.
Thank you, Dr. Warren! You are doing a great work; God bless and guide you!