The Operation: Anxiety Ablation
What It’s For: A quick procedure to handle times when we feel anxious or worried
Disclaimer: This letter is not intended to dispense medical advice, or to replace the advise of your doctor or mental health professional. The advice here is meant to give you tools, but if you’re struggling, please see your doctor or therapist.
There’s something you have to know and believe at the deepest levels if you want to get anxiety under control: What you’re doing, you’re getting better at.
To make it personal, say it like this, out loud, to yourself:
What I’m doing, I’m getting better at.
Let’s put your name in it to reinforce: What ______ is doing, _____ is getting better at.
Again: What I’m doing, I’m getting better at.
That’s the ninth commandment of Self-Brain Surgery, and it’s one of the keys to operating on anxiety.
Last week, we covered the contemplating stage of dealing with anxiety on the podcast. Click the button below to listen.
Now it’s time to fix it. And doing that requires self-brain surgery.
There’s a famous diagram of the so-called “Maintenance Cycle of Anxiety,” which is often used in psychotherapy to explain to people how anxiety can become a perpetual problem.
This is a perfect example of how someone can stay constantly worried or anxious, because unless you direct your thoughts, feelings, physiology, and behavior in a mind-down way, then your brain and body will automate this cycle and you’ll get better and better at feeling anxious.
I won’t take the space here to repeat the Mind-Down vs. Brain-Out operating systems, but you can read this letter I wrote if you aren’t familiar with my work there or haven’t committed to the Mind-Down paradigm yet. Here is a one-minute synopsis of the Mind-Down paradigm to remind you.
Remember that anxiety is not inherently bad. People need some anxiety to keep us from doing stupid things and getting killed, for example. And it’s also a set of physiological and neurochemical signals that are designed to alert us to potential threats or issues we need to address.
Last week, we covered the things we need to know about anxiety on the contemplating side (see last week’s lesson if you missed it). And we learned that one powerful tool is to understand and reassign anxiety to its proper place.
But it’s time to stop contemplating, and start operating. Here’s an operation you can learn and practice to get the ninth commandment working for you instead of against you (so you’ll get better at getting better).
When you feel anxious:
Break the cycle of feeling-physiological response-reactive behaviors-increased anxious thinking/worry by remembering you have Mind-Down control if you’ll decide to use it. You’re not stuck inside the maintenance cycle, you’re outside of it and can make it stop if you want to. (See disclaimer above if you’re unable to make this switch on your own)
Stop Time Traveling: Tell yourself, “I can’t be THEN, so whatever happened in the past that I’m worrying about is out of my control and it does not help me to feel these anxious feelings about it. I can’t be WHEN, either, so anything in the future that is not in my direct control or that I don’t have to think about right now is creating anxiety and is not helpful to me in this moment. I need to be in NOW.”
Take a moment to be grateful that you have this ability. Say to yourself, “I’m glad that I’m not just my brain, and that I can think about these feelings and this situation to make my brain and body learn a new way to respond.”
Smash faith and science together: Your hippocampus is involved in regulating emotion and creating resilience by calling on your frontal lobes (the cerebral CEO) to help you make better decisions that are based in fact and not in feelings. This allows you to test your anxious thoughts (Psalm 139:23). instead of automatically reacting to them. Even a brief move towards gratitude switches neuronal firing in the hippocampus away from your limbic fear response and begins to engage the resilient frontal lobe response. You can’t be anxious and grateful at the same time, so choose wisely. A key point here is that in a really bad situation you can believe there’s nothing to be grateful FOR, but that’s not what I mean- I’m not saying you have to be thankful for the circumstance (that’s unrealistic and silly). Rather, be grateful that you are not obligated to be anxious, and that you can choose instead to think about the situation from the more in-control frontal lobe perspective. That is self-brain surgery in action!
Be patient with yourself. You’ve had a lifetime of being in this cycle before you knew the truth that you could control it, so the ninth commandment has been working against you for a long time (you’ve gotten good at feeling anxious). Now it’s time to make it work FOR you. Practice the technique of biopsying/taking command of your thoughts and feelings before reacting to them. If you’re feeling short of breath or having other physiological symptoms of anxiety, engage your mind-down control and prove to yourself that you can regain the high ground of your own body. This will build confidence. Try something practical like the 5-4-3-2-1 Method we discussed on the podcast if you need help.
Commit yourself to both desiring to feel better and to believing that you are designed to feel better. If you’re not a believer or don’t think much about spiritual things, then take the quantum physics to heart that your decisions and intentions make a difference in the outcome of your life and the lives of those around you, so how you think and feel matters a lot in how your life plays out. If you’re a Christian, remember that the Bible tells us that our minds can be transformed in ways that help us feel less anxious and more able to communicate with God (Romans 12:1-3, Philippians 4:6-8).
You are not simply the product of purposeless evolution or neuronal activity. Your emotions and automatic thinking are not evidence that you’re genetically fated to be a certain way, and no trauma or tragedy can break you in irreparable ways either, because you are not your brain.
Your brain is not the boss of you, and it will reliably come under the control of your intentional mental force when you decide to become a self-brain surgeon.
It’s time to stop feeling so anxious.
It’s time to stop contemplating and start operating.
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.
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!
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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.
Good word. I’d love to hear more about the physiology and behavior aspects.