It’s like there’s a puppy in your brain. The puppy thinks it’s his/her job to keep you safe and protect you from dangers and things that are bad for you. It’s a puppy, and it’s still learning, so it has some wacky ideas about what could be dangerous.

Brains are like dogs – it takes weeks and months to train them, but they’re super good at learning to do what you want, and not do what you don’t want, just like dogs.

So first you need to decide what you want to train the dog in your brain to do, or not do.

What is anxiety, anyway?

Anxiety is when you feel scared, but nothing dangerous or life-threatening is actually happening.

For example, the safest mode of transport in our world is the AIRPLANE.

The mode of transport most people identify as scary: the AIRPLANE!!!

Why:  The sense organs we use to identify danger evolved in a very different environment from the one we’re living in now. Two million years ago, human beings evolved to react to changes in the environment that signaled potential danger, like: loud noises, bad smells, rapid movements, physical impacts, changes in heights and altitude, novel/surprising occurrences, darkness, etc.

Before we invented weapons, humans were prey animals, like bunnies.  On the savannahs of southern Africa, where we were evolving, the animals that wanted to eat us could out-run, out-see, out-hear, and out-smell us.  So to protect our bunnylike selves, we evolved to be acutely sensitive to startling stimuli.  By the time we invented weapons, in the stone/bronze/nuclear bomb ages, our self-protective systems for vigilance and watchfulness had already been robustly engineered to be triggered by all kinds of alarms.  Good news/bad news — because we are now living in a human-made environment that way outpaced the evolution of our nervous systems. Most of us are much physically safer than we feel.

Anxiety Algebra

Brain + X = SAFE.  Solve for X.