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The best way to overcome anxiety

There are basically 3 main treatment approaches and a few anxiety reduction methods, you can:

1. Boosting GABA and serotonin with drugs or natural remedies.
2. Rewire and change brain structures with meditation brain training exercises.
3. Changing and reprogramming anxious psychology.

There are also some techniques such as exercise, diet and psychological practices that further reduce anxiety

I absolutely believe it’s possible to fully overcome anxiety or at least reduce it to sub- clinical levels but that the single or monotherapy approach is not best way to maximise your chances of success. I encourage you to stop looking for the one single root cause and but instead start straightaway dismantling the biochemical, anatomical, and psychological elements that conspired together to create a state of anxiety.

There’s an art to choosing where to start the treatment process, which type of meditation, combination of remedies you and psychological intervention to make, for anxiety originating more in the amygdala for example exposure therapy and graduated desensitisation of the most effective; for anxiety originating more in the cortex cognitive-based therapies are likely to be more effective.

Mindfulness using the nondirected open focus technique may be the most effective at strengthening the anterior cingulate cortex involved in social anxiety however you may not be able to perform this type of mindfulness until you’ve completed a course of directed closed focus mindfulness to switch off overactivity in the default mode network. It’s complicated! We are talking about brains. I’ll explain each of these techniques in terms elsewhere.

Rewiring and changing overactive anxiety circuits.

If you still think that anxiety is just a chemical imbalance, a lack of GABA in your brain then you need to update your understanding; unfortunately boosting GABA and serotonin whether with drugs or natural remedy rarely leads to fully overcoming anxiety.

In just the last decade brain scanning techniques have been able to look inside the anxious brain and discovered that there is overactivity in the structures and wiring (neuro-circuits) of the brain involved in perceiving danger and inducing a state of fear.

Our brains are naturally hardwired to detect potential threats and be afraid of them, when these innate systems work properly they only become active when we are really in danger and keep us safe; but when these systems become hyperactive repeatedly and excessively triggering intense states of fear and anxiety it’s horrible.

A breakthrough in treating anxiety

Also in the last decade, there’s been an explosion in our understanding in the (neuroplastic) ability of the brain to change itself.

The understanding that bra how in structures grow and shrink according to how much they are used or exercised has been around for a very long time but just how extraordinarily malleable and open to change the brain needs is only really emerged in the last decade

this has led to the exciting breakthrough that we can use brain training exercises to force or direct rewiring in the fundamental structures of the brain that cause anxiety producing effective and permanent treatment effects.

Despite there having been some research dating back decades that meditation could help anxiety and depression it is only recently that we been able to show that meditation can change the specific regions of the brain involved in anxiety, and moreover that specific meditations should be used to target specific regions of the brain. It’s a mistake to think that all meditations are the same that would be like thinking that if you specifically had to rehabilitate your shoulder muscles any exercise say running will do the job.

I know when you have anxiety and depression that it’s hard to believe that something is gentle as meditation brain training could have a powerful medicinal effect on severe anxiety but it turns out if you do enough of it with sufficient intensity and regularity and you choose the right type it can.

Just to be clear I’ve never seen anybody cure their anxiety a hundred percent with meditation brain training exercises alone, but then I’ve hardly ever seen anybody cure their anxiety a hundred percent with just drugs or natural remedies alone either; stand-alone psychological therapies claim to have success rates of 60-90%, a 90% success rate from any treatment is somewhat implausible. Each of these therapies on their own can claim to work in some cases but they all leave a lot of people unhealed.

If you’ve already tried the biochemical approach of boosting GABA with benzos or gabapentin or natural remedies, or alternatives such as beta blockers and this hasn’t given you the results you hoped for I recommend you consider rewiring the brain with meditation brain training and targeted psychological techniques.

With meditation brain training we can:-

• Dampen down overactivity in the amygdala, which in this context like a hypersensitive burglar or car alarm triggering danger when there isn’t any.
• Dampen down overactivity over the default mode network which when overactive ends up bombarding our thinking cortex with distressing and anxious thoughts and memories.
• Strengthen the ability of the cortex to be more resilient to stress hijacking from the amygdala.
• Strengthen and enhance the function of the anterior singular cortex involved in processing emotional and social situations to combat social anxiety.

2. Boosting GABA and Rebalancing Neurotransmitters

The primary inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain is GABA. There are several things that can inhibit GABA production and these should be eliminated first (posts coming soon).

Restoring GABA sensitivity after benzo withdrawal

The brain can become desensitised to GABA following discontinuation of benzo drugs. The neuro plastic ability of the brain should gradually recover GABA sensitivity over time however for some poor individuals this process takes ages and involves horrendous increased levels of anxiety and suffering. I regularly treat people for benzo withdrawal, my approach is to boost neuro plasticity to speed up the innate healing process your brain is already attempting to do.

Restoring GABA sensitivity after prolonged stress

The brain specifically the amygdala can become desensitised to GABA following a period of prolonged intensive stress; because GABA has an inhibitory effect any part of the brain that becomes less sensitive to GABA becomes overactive. There are some remedies we can use to reduce stress responses but absolutely none of them as good as a course of brain training specifically focused on hardwiring into the brain an improved ability to switch off stress responses. If you’d like to receive instructions including free MP3 recording how to do this sign up for my mental health newsletter.

Boosting GABA with natural remedies

There are lots of natural remedies with GABA boosting effects, the natural remedies don’t have the side-effects of the GABA boosting drugs, nor do they desensitise the brain to GABA and create dependence. The downside to the natural remedies is that they are nothing like as strong as the drugs and in order to get a GABA boosting effect that is powerful enough you have to take a lot of them combined into a stack.

To learn more see Boosting GABA with Natural Remedies (coming soon).

3. Reprogramming anxious psychology

Amygdala Based Anxiety

The amygdala is part of the subconscious systems of the brain, it doesn’t have consciousness, or think so cognitive-based therapies don’t change amygdala programming. The amygdala learns to make connections through experience and exposure, whatever your amygdala was programmed to be afraid of you have to expose yourself to that thing in a safe therapeutic way without running away and through this process it’s remarkable how quickly the amygdala recognises that you can in contact with that thing nothing terrible happens and so, therefore, that thing is not dangerous. If you think that your amygdala can’t be reprogrammed that’s your anxiety telling you that; the amygdala (and yours is no exception) has the neuro plastic ability to make new connections, it can be updated to not be triggered by things that were previously triggering.

Reprogramming the amygdala is done through exposure therapy or aggressive graduated desensitisation. In my practice I’m experimenting with a new cutting-edge technique of preloading the brain with natural antianxiety meds shortly before performing the exposure desensitisation. Some research is showing that if you chemically induce a state of calm in the brain and then exposed the brain to the things afraid of it enhances the amygdala’s ability to learn that you can be exposed to that thing and be safe at the same time.

To learn more see (post coming soon)

Cortex Based Anxiety

When anxiety originates more in the thinking cortex of the brain you should choose cognitive-based therapies that engage the way you consciously construct your anxious psychology and challenge it.

Reprogramming traumatic and anxious memories

traumatic and anxious memories stored in the hippocampus can play significant role in creating and perpetuating anxiety. Obviously you can’t change the past but believe it or not you can significantly change how your memories of the past affect you. When you re-access those memories you can change the interpretation your mind makes of the memories, furthermore you can change how often you stressful and traumatic memories.

There are some great psychotherapy techniques to enable us to safely access distressing memories and rewrite how we interpret them. In my practice I use cognitive hypnotherapy and time-line NLP techniques with clients that want to pursue this line of work.

I hope you found this information helpful and that despite having anxiety you find the courage to try some or all these techniques. I believe passionately in natural self-help techniques to overcome mental health problems and would be very happy to help you if I can. I’m available for private consultations, you can also find a lot of free information elsewhere on my site, my YouTube channel, Facebook and Instagram pages.

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