 Depression can be an actual chemical imbalance in your brain anxiety only comes from your thoughts your anxiety can actually be fixed if you and i'm back to normal today we're going to be talking about how to rewire your anxious brain so if you're out there you feel like i deal with anxiety a little bit too much i'm actually going to teach you how to rewire the anxiety that you have in your brain by first off understanding where the anxiety comes from what anxiety is and then the two different parts of the brain that actually deal with your anxious thoughts and first off what i want to say is this anxiety comes from your thoughts so i always have to preface whenever i talk about anxiety is that anxiety and depression are two completely separate things depression can be an actual chemical imbalance in your brain anxiety only comes from your thoughts and so that means that your anxiety can actually be fixed if you fix your thoughts and anxiety is actually more prevalent than depression nowadays it is called basically the common cold of mental illnesses and we can fix it and so this episode is going to teach you exactly how to fix it anxiety just so you know though is usually fear of something happening in the future and so if we can process these fears of something happening in the future it'll help you know how to work through them whenever you go through them so one of the beautiful things about being a human is that we can imagine the future we have really really complex and beautiful imaginations but the problem with that is if we don't pay attention to them and when i have the control of them they can completely get out of hand by bringing in too much fear of imagining something bad happening inside of the future and so i'm going to talk about two major circuits inside of your brain so that we can dive into each one of them and know how anxiety works in both of them the first one is called your neocortex now your neocortex is the more advanced of the two that i'm going to talk about your neocortex is when you have anxiety in your neocortex it's the anticipation of something bad happening in the future you know like i said humans can imagine the future but if we don't pay attention those can get out of hand and so you have anxiety inducing thoughts so your thoughts of what could possibly happen in this future is going to make you anxious and so i'll give you an example let's say you're driving your car and it's a place that you typically drive your car and around a certain bend that's not even saying a bend let's say that you get to a stoplight and you go through the stoplight you're sitting there you're stopped and then it turns green for you and you decide to start going and you start going and then boom you're smacked somebody t-bones your car now you live through it you're fine no big deal but next time you're at that exact same stoplight you're going to think oh my god i should probably look both ways before i go because i don't want to be t-boned again that's the next time you're at that stoplight and you know what next time you're at each stoplight you might slowly take off and look right and look left and you might get anxiety about going through a stoplight and so with your neocortex it's able to look into the future and say this might happen i should be anxious about it i should be very cautious about this happening you know and i always give this example let's say you walk by a lake in one day you happen to see an alligator outside of that lake and you saw an alligator attack a bird well then if you have to go by that that lake every single day you're going to think about that alligator every single day and what you're doing is your the good thing about this anxiety and thinking into the future is that it kept our species alive because we were able to go okay something bad happened in this exact spot i need to think about that bad thing so that i can avoid it so that i don't you know have that bad thing happen to me whether it's a car accident getting t-boat at a stoplight or maybe it's walking by a lake because you saw something attack something else you're going to think about that now what does this have to do with your personal anxiety is you know you can have anxious thoughts about getting up and going on stage you can think what if people don't accept me what if they laugh me offstage what if i go and give this presentation for my boss and i look like a complete fool and what you can do is you can have anxiety thinking about a future event now you have to realize once again this kept our species alive that's a beautiful thing but if you let it run rampant it's going to completely control control your life now how do you get rid of it how do you get rid of it well the good thing about the neocortex and getting rid of it is that this is the thinking part of your brain so how do you get rid of it you think through it you think through these things a couple ways that you can do it number one is through meditation so if you for instance have the feeling of i'm going to give a presentation i don't want to be completely embarrassed and mess up or walk up there with my fly down you can sit and i should go okay this is my neocortex this is the thinking part of my brain i'm thinking about something happening in the future and it is right now giving me anxiety okay so what do i need to do i need to calm that part of my brain down what's the easiest way to calm myself down breathing visualization and meditation and so you can sit there and go okay i'm feeling anxiety okay feeling anxiety right now what am i feeling anxious about i'm feeling anxious about giving this presentation for my boss what am i afraid of i am afraid of being embarrassed walking up there with my fly down you know stumbling over my words whatever it is okay so i'm going to close my eyes i'm going to think through this i'm going to actually visualize and think and feel what it would feel like to get up there feel confident in myself give an amazing presentation and have my boss come up to me after and say you know what rob you did a really great job we want to give you a promotion whatever it is and you can literally instead of using your thinking mind to create a bad fearful event you can use your thinking mind to do the exact opposite to see and feel more specifically feel how successful that presentation that you're so afraid to give actually feels inside of you and so when you get up and give that presentation you've got a lot more confidence because the neocortex if you realize how this works inside of your brain you can go okay i'm just feeling anxious that's okay that's built inside of me being a human what am i feeling anxious about and then you can start to process it and think through it once again it is in the thinking part of your brain so how do you get rid of it you think through it one of the really um smart ways to deal with the brain is if it's in the thinking part of the brain you can show your brain how illogical that fear is for instance you're afraid to go give this presentation for your boss and you have all of this fear you can go do you remember you know you gave your last presentation and you knocked it out of park and you gave another presentation and you knocked it out of the park and you're not going to be fired for giving a bad presentation and you can literally make it seem illogical to your brain so your brain's like this is ridiculous i don't need to hold on to this fear anymore so that's the neocortex side of anxiety hey if you're enjoying this video do me a favor and hit that like button down below it helps with the youtube algorithm so that more people can see this message because it helps us get it out organically so hit that like button and i appreciate you so you could have an anxiety coming up because of the neocortex side or you can have it because of the amygdala which is the other major circuit of the brain that has to deal with anxiety the amygdala is where fear comes from it is in the back of your brain it's in the reptilian part of your brain the oldest part of your brain that gives you fears that sometimes are completely ridiculous and so the amygdala creates the fears and so for instance what happens is some you see something or hear something or feel something your body reacts and thinks later that's what the amygdala does so let's say you're walking in your house at night i've done this probably a million times you've got to go out you turn the light on because you've got to you know go to the kitchen to get a glass of water and oh my god you see something and you react to it because you think someone's inside of your house and then you realize it's just your jacket that's you know on the coat rack and you're like oh my god okay that's the amygdala reacting to something immediately or you're walking outside and you're like oh my god snake and your body just reacts and then you realize it's a curled up hose and it's not a noise or i'm sorry it's not a snake but it looked like a snake your body reacted the same way that your body reacted to the coat thinking that the coat with someone that broke into your house is the same way that your body reacts to the hose thinking that it might be a snake it's there to protect you you know you could be sitting it could be peaceful perfectly fine boom loud noise outside your body's going to react to it that is the reptilian part of your brain that just reacts so how do you deal with the amygdala and also just so you know it responds quick and then ask questions later and so it's the reason why you can't really talk yourself out of a panic attack because literally your body is responding exactly like this it is doing what it's supposed to do this is where you know the part of the brain where PTSD usually works is they can hear it someone has PTSD let's say they're PTSD for more and there's PTSD you don't have to just go to war to have PTSD you can have bad relationships you could have trauma there's a lot of different things but let's just say someone goes off to war and when they come back home they hear a lot of noise it could set their PTSD off and their anxiety and their panic attack comes up and the reason why is because that part of the brain has literally been trained to be on alert for sometimes six months a year two years while people are overseas then they come back where that threat doesn't exist and that part of their brain they just can't turn off and that's when they have to seek medical advice and attention for that so how do we work through now that we know how to work through the neocortex side of it how do we work through the amygdala side of anxiety you can't use your thinking mind you have to bypass your thinking mind and literally directly affect your nervous system because your nervous system will react how do you do it a couple different ways that you can do it number one is deep breathing right the the actual nervous system you have to calm your nervous system down through deep breathing so if you feel anxious and anxiety attack coming up something happens your body just reacts to it and it's not you fearing something in the future it just pops up sometimes when people have anxiety attacks there's nothing that really set it off it's just their body reacting to something and so you can breathe through it and deep breathing would be you breathe in for four seconds hold for four seconds breathe out for seven seconds so it's like this and you do that until you feel your nervous system start to calm down again and you can start I mean it's it's like the phrase is perfect when a motion is high logic is low when your emotions are high you can't really think through these types of things so you've got to breathe through it calm your body down calm your brain down calm your nervous system down to realize there is no immediate fear that needs to be in front of you there's no immediate attack you're not about to die you're in a safe place what just happened loud noise or something that sets you off there's no immediate something there's no immediate danger that's in front of you so you can do it through deep breathing another thing that that supposedly works really well is working out now that your body is in a heightened state is to go and actually exert physical like actually and here's the interesting thing is that if you ever watch a this is super interesting what you'll notice is if you watch a chase on national geographic of an animal an animal gets chased by you know let's say a little tiny rabbit gets chased by a cheetah right and the cheetah loses them very quick a lot of animals what they'll do is they'll actually shake they'll do a quick shake right after the chase is over and the reason why is because there's so much adrenaline and cortisol going through their body that they're actually trying to shake it out of their body and so they have pent up energy that they need to get out so sometimes when people have really anxious thoughts or something coming up to be able to get rid of that helps a lot in the way to do that is to exert yourself physically and that usually helps another way that i've actually never tried with an anxiety attack but i've tried it whenever i'm stressed out or something comes up is wim Hof who is considered the ice man he does breathing techniques and teaches you how to breathe he does something where he does 30 deep breaths so it's 30 deep breaths like this does 30 of them and then on the 30th breath breathe all the way in all the way out and on the 30th breath you sit there and you do as many push ups as you possibly can and what it does is it actually supposedly resets your nervous system and so for me i've done this before and i'm super stressed out i've got a lot of my plate my brain's all over the place and i just can't seem to focus on what it is i need to focus on is what i will do is i will do 30 deep breaths exhale as deep as i possibly can so there's nothing inside of my body and then i'll do as many push ups as i possibly can what's really crazy is that when i do this i can do more push ups than when i am actually breathing because you might sit there and think well if i'm going to be doing push ups i need to breathe or i'm going to pass out right well of course you need to breathe eventually but for me whenever whenever i've done this i have so much oxygen inside of my body i'm over oxygenated in my body and my muscles in my blood that i can actually do more push ups than if i just do normal breathing while i'm doing it and what i realized is after 40 50 push ups which sometimes i can get to about 45 50 push ups before i need to breathe again it's like my nervous system has gotten rid of all of the anxious feelings and the cortisol and the adrenaline's worked all of it out and i'm back to normal and i feel normal again so you know what you can do is you can use these two different techniques depending on what it is that you feel like you're working for so if you feel anxiety coming through ask yourself what type of anxiety is it is it the neocortex thinking brain side of it or is it the amygdala automatically reptilian just react fight or flight mechanism inside of your brain that's working towards it and you can work through it if it's a neocortex remember it's the thinking part of your brain you can think through it you can use meditation you can show your brain how ridiculous the sphere of the future whatever it is and you can work through it with your thinking part of your brain if it's the amygdala you've got to bypass the thinking part of your brain you've got to do deep breathing you've got to do the workout or you've got to try the whim whim Hof breathing technique with the push ups and both of those can help you another thing that supposedly really helps that i forgot about with the amygdala side is cold showers take a really really cold shower your body will react and because it sees that as a threat and something that it needs to work through but you know we could do a whole other episode on on cold showers and cold baths because i love those as well but figure out your with yourself is it the the neocortex thinking side or is it the amygdala just reaction side and depending on which one it is you can listen to this episode and you can figure out a way to work through it to help yourself get past the anxiety that you feel inside of your brain if you do this enough it will actually start to rewire your brain so that you don't have these thoughts you don't have these feelings and you can go on without having to worry about your anxiety hey thanks so much for watching this video if you want to learn even more about mastering your mind click right here and watch this video as well 97% of the that you're worrying about means nothing so why are you focusing on it