Rewiring the Anxious Brain
Once upon a time, before I created my hypnotherapy practice, I was an isolated and lonely computer programmer. I didn’t have the knowledge I have now about rewiring your anxious brain. I suffered from chronic anxiety and panic attacks. Xanax and cannabis were the only things that allowed me to sleep. I would fall into horrible depression episodes that would last weekends. Paralyzing social anxiety kept me from functioning in a social group properly. My ability to have a relationship was almost non-existent. My life outside of work was World of Warcraft, YouTube, and marijuana.
I wanted more than what I had, but I had no way to escape a cage created by childhood trauma. A decade was spent on different psychiatric medicines, therapies, and psychology books. I got nowhere and things only got worse as I got older and older. Running out of options and not wanting my life to be spent in suffering, I decided to learn as much as I could about rewiring your anxious brain. Looking for an answer, I ventured into the world of the subconscious mind, hypnotherapy, and neuro-linguistic programming, searching for help.
Secrets to Rewiring Your Anxious Brain
I found a natural talent with my newfound skillsets and figured out how to internalize new narratives around my emotional responses. After a couple of years of learning from different coaches, hypnotherapist, and practitioners, I set off to see how far I could take this. Over the next two years, I began a self-transformation like something out of the movie “Limitless”. I resolved all of my anxiety and depression episodes, began to sleep 8 hours a night without meds, resolved my social anxiety, worked with social skill coaches to re-learn how to socialize, fought a bout in Muay Thai, increased my income by 40%, became popular with women in dating, completed a degree at a hypnotherapy college and became a board-certified hypnotherapist.
Now, I bring all my knowledge and skillsets to help others rewire their anxious brains. My purpose and goals in life are to help other people achieve the same results I have. I want to help people decide what their emotional state will be.
Rewiring Your Anxious Brain One Pattern At a Time
Rewiring your anxious brain means understanding your internal reality is a series of patterns. These patterns involve the association between a neurochemical state that we call emotion and a narrative. This narrative is represented by the memories and thoughts which play in our heads when we experience the emotion.
This narrative and emotion are intricately entwined. They represent a neurocircuit in the mind, with synapses firing off in response to the perception of a certain object or event. The narrative is, theoretically, part of the neurocircuit, representing a sort of code stored in memory that determines that the mind responds the way it does to the trigger. Therefore, the fact that the narrative exists is why the mind creates the emotional state that it does. Entering into the emotional state is what gives the conscious mind access to the narrative stored in the subconscious.
In hypnotherapy, we call this narrative a subconscious belief. It’s a belief in the mind that the mind uses to automatically fire off the nervous system to create different emotional states.
Someone who has a phobia of clowns has a subconscious belief stating that clowns are dangerous. Someone who has social anxiety has a belief that social situations are threatening. Someone who falls into unproductive depression and despair after rejection has a subconscious belief about rejection.
The important thing to understand about these narratives or subconscious beliefs is they are malleable and changeable. The fact that they are is at the heart of humanity’s ability to adapt.
Rewiring the Problem At the Cause
Many different cognitive therapies attempt to work with these subconscious beliefs or narratives through the conscious mind via talk. Rewiring your anxious brain this way, while successful in many cases, can be a slow and difficult process. This is because these narratives are stored unconsciously in memory. The conscious mind performs a filtering process that makes it slow to internalize new ideas. Cognitive therapists tend to work with the behavior the beliefs are creating in the present, not the past events which created the beliefs.
In my hypnotherapy practice, I take a much different approach. My goal is to guide people through the natural process of creating neuroplasticity. This involves taking people into a state of disassociation and high theta brain waves called hypnosis. In this state, the mind gains the ability to access different emotional states associated with different memories. Using this ability, I guide people back to the root event, the first event which created the narrative in their unconscious memory. Once at the root event, I guide them into reprocessing the event while using different techniques to keep their emotional state at a very low intensity. During this reprocessing, they adopt a new narrative which is internalized by the mind due to the neurochemical state they are in.
Real World Evidence the Subconscious Mind Can Change
Once upon a time, there was a couple who sailed on the open ocean for decades. They were fearless and loved being on the water. However, one day, they get caught in a hurricane. Their boat almost sinks and they come close to dying many times before making it to safety. Weeks later, after being safe on land, they attempt to go back out on the boat. As they approach the dock, they become paralyzing afraid.
This example highlights the power of the subconscious mind to achieve instant neuroplasticity. A rewiring of your anxious brain in a way that changes the emotional states it creates in response to the world. The above example has all the elements required to create this neuroplasticity. The sympathetic nervous system is engaged, creating an intense emotional experience while the mind analyzes and processes the environment, creating a narrative. This narrative and emotional state get bound together to replay when the body re-enters that environment. In the case of the couple, the narrative is that getting on a boat will result in their death which is bound to an intense neurochemical state of fear.
Neuroplasticity represents a one-time decision for the mind to take on a narrative on an unconscious level. And any decision made can be undone. This is the basis of human adaptability.
Rewiring Your Anxious Brain Is Safe
Many hypnotherapists and practitioners of my art like to portray themselves as powerful creators of change. This is simply not true. No one has the power to change the subconscious mind of another. I keep making a point to say “rewiring your anxious brain” because I am just a facilitator and a guide in the process of creating neuroplasticity. What narrative you internalize is ultimately your decision.
There is no magic trick or mind control. Rewiring your anxious brain does not involve mind control, drugs, or using a machine to recode your mind. It’s just using advanced hypnotherapy techniques to create the conditions needed for neuroplasticity to occur. Every person must choose to accept and internalize the new narrative. People reject narratives all the time. This is what we all “secondary gains”. These are other narratives in their mind telling them they still have something to gain by keeping the old narrative. Part of my work is serving as a coach to help people let go of these other narratives to create the change they desire.
If you found this post on rewiring your anxious brain helpful, learn more about anxiety in general by reading these posts on hypnotherapy for anxiety, waking up anxious and social anxiety.
