How to Prevent and Release Needless Anxiety: Talk with Dr. Rick Hanson

I offer these every week along with a guided meditation just click the uh subscribe link below to be notified through YouTube when I post the latest recording or if you'd like to join us live which would be great uh just go into the description section below and follow the link along to be able to sign up for free well fear being afraid so let me just take a quick peek and what's come in the chat so far I see a lot of lovely wonderful things um exploring the sense in the present of being undisturbed undefended Unbound uncontracted gradually opening into unconditioned is a really good and deep meditation exploring what's real if there are times when we do feel contracted we are uh scared or angry and lashing out that's real but at the times like in meditation where you can observe that actually uh you can release fear in the present you can still function you might still be experiencing pain there might still be problems in in the future but in the present you can receive the moment without fear and as I was meditating I'll share with you and it's relevant to my talk that uh to be able to really uh be prepared to receive the arising moment without fear we have to deal with the ways in which the brain is a prediction machine it is designed to keep making predictions about what will come and then it matches what has come what's actually occurring with what it predicted to both improve those predictions and make sense of what has happened in light of the predictions the problem is we can get stuck in our predictions and if we are predicting by tendency such as in my case being I think biologically a little anxious by tendency than having things happen in life that seemed like problems well that continual prediction can um be tilted toward threat and can predict that somehow you you or I won't be able to manage what is occurring what is arriving in the next moment all right it's predicting it it's predicting a problem and I found myself during the meditation I was doing it with you being aware of this and gradually releasing that prediction of trouble and uh that I could not handle and more uh resting in a growing confidence that whatever appeared whatever arose uh could be managed in some way or I I could accept it fully even if it was ultimately devastating um I could still accept that and receive it without fear so that's an invitation for you to be aware of your own mind the subtleties of prediction and what you could gently uh exercise wives efforts with regard to inside your own mind so that you can receive the next moment without unnecessary fear okay so I want to open up this topic and I'm going to do it in a way I don't think I've I haven't done it a long long time I'm going to start with an article from a recent issue of Science magazine which if you like knowing about what's happening in the world of science is a lovely magazine to subscribe to the articles in the back tend to be really quite technical with graphs and other other crazy things but the articles on the front you know they're readable and you might enjoy them well this particular issue is the March 15 20 24 issue and in it is an article about a paper in this issue about how does it happen that we generalize unnecessarily generalized fear what actually is going on in the brain when that generalized fear is switched on so this is going to be a little bit of a kind of a exploration of some you know some of the hardware inside our nervous system and uh I'm going to relate that to how we actually acquire unnecessary fears and therefore what we can do both to prevent that and uh once we've acquired unnecessary generalized fear um what can we do to gradually pull those weeds in the garden of our mind and to the point of eventually actually even erasing them all right okay so first of all to bring it down to earth think of the ways in which the fear spectrum is useful it's useful it evolved in US biologically to be helpful to ourselves to our primate ancestors our mamalian ancestors um fish uh we have a pond in our backyard and um with some large goldfish and really large koi at this point in it uh and you know if I go out on to the edge of the pond and if I move too quickly the fish startle and zip away uh that fear responds you know there's a place for it it's not that fear is bad on the other hand it's very very helpful to appreciate that anxiety particularly chronic generalized anxiety is really uncomfortable that background sense of dread uh apprehensiveness or when we're around people or in certain situations we avoid them because we're scared of them we don't feel fear if we've successfully avoided them right so we hardly even notice that we''ve done that if avoid has become a habit but in those ways both in terms of creating unnecessary creating suffering and creating um leading us to play small avoid vulnerability with other people muzzle ourselves shrink behind the bars of our invisible cage fear is problematic in certain cases and it's also really useful as you approach what's problematic about anxiety to realize that we can deal with threats without feeling anxiety we can be strong we can be determined we can be alert our heart might be pounding but we're still mobilizing ourselves to deal with the threat without um being invaded and hijacked by fear the classic example of that for me that I've shared before uh is rock climbing where I'm in hazardous situ ations especially when I was doing it more often uh while still feeling really competent really solid and not particularly scared I mean the heart's beating a little bit and there's a sense of heights initially until I adapt to it but overall um managing threats managing challenges to safety managing discomfort and pain but without being invaded by anxiety so that's the opportunity and so you might be reflecting here about what are the way ways in which uh dread or fear or you know uneasiness um is playing a role in your life that you'd like to be Freer in relationship to so it's real for you this topic about fear and why it matters to you so here is I think some super cool science some of it might be already known to some of you and all of it might even be known to a few of you if you read the same stuff I do recently uh it goes like this so in your brain okay brain are 85 billion or so plus or minus neurons and another 100 billion or so support cells neurons are connected with each other on average at several thousand points per neuron which gives us in the human brain something on the order of several hundred trillion little microprocessors sparkling away this remarkable biological apparatus is the result of 600 million years of evolution of the nervous system and one of the ways that scientists are understanding what's going on in you under the hood is based on uh recognizing similarities between structures and processes in our own brains and those of simpler animals um of the sort that we have evolved from so there's a lot of information that can be gained about what's going on inside Us by examining the brains and the nervous systems of primates other mammals such as mice or rats and even going farther back in evolutionary time examining the Str structures in the brains of of fish and reptiles and even really simple creatures so there are a lot of similarities in particular between the underlying neurobiological Machinery of emotion and emotional learning like the acquisition of Fear The Learning of fear there are a lot of similarities between the Machinery of that apparatus inside you and me and inside the brain of a little mouse now I'm going to be talking here about uh research on non-human animals which is fraught with ethical complications fraud and one of the um processes for me in my life that's been very meaningful to me and Gathering momentum in in recent years is a sense of fellowship and kinship with really all of life you know um there's a line in the Buddha Dharma something like all beings tremble at punishment uh all beings um want to keep living uh I look at these little ants crawling around in our house especially after the rain and I I look at each one and I go wow at some level you want to keep living too so uh there a lot of implications here including having to do with things like what we eat and um do we use leather goods and things of that sort I'm not going to be getting into those ethical topics in this talk I just want to acknowledge them and in a and as part of this express my sorrow and my gratitude for the the mice um who were sacrificed they were killed in the process of the research that I'm about to describe little beings like you and me who wanted to keep on going so back to the nervous system um in your brain there are nuclei little nodes in the brain stem one is called the rafe ra a nucleus from the rafe nucleus neurons spread throughout your brain including into emotion Learning Centers of the brain emotion and motivation such as the hypothalamus the the amydala and the hippocampus these neurons from the rafe nucleus are serotonergic they release serotonin a neurochemical at these various intersections called synapses between millions and millions billions and billions of neurons in your brain okay so there's a physical process where by a little tiny cell body of a neuron you could put roughly five of them side by side in the width of a single hair that's how tiny the cell bodies of neurons are out of which shoot these little wires called axons that extend up into your brain and make connections with other neurons there at synapsis at a synapse when a neuron releases neurotransmitters they get received by and taken up by the downstream neuron it's a little bit like at uh tiny tiny gaps you could put several thousand gaps in the width of a single hair at these tiny tiny gaps little ttin little bubbles of molecules are released into the space between the transmitting neuron and the receiving neuron and then the receiving neuron takes up those little molecules U kind of that are docking in effect at the downstream neuron and then that initiates a whole bunch of chemical processes so what's being released at those synapses often multiple times a second makes a difference so now let's think about a single neuron okay uh coming out of the rafe nucleus in the brain stem uh and down this long tube leaving from the cell body different chemicals are manufactured and in the cell body they're manufactured and they're carried down this long tube to be released okay now here's here's all the how all this relates what was recently discovered is that there are um groups of neurons that when they fire they release two kinds of neurochemicals not just one at a particular synapse so there's a class of neurons that release serotonin at the synapse and they also release uh glutamate glutamic acid all right so Wow first of all you have a neuron releasing two kinds of neurotransmitters which defies what was previously believed to be dog in brain science that first neurons only release one kind of neurochemical and certainly only one kind at a particular synapse and second that whatever kind of neurochemical a neuron releases is fixed over the lifetime of the neuron there's a point here that I'm getting at well so here's what the studies showed and think about the comparison to human situations in which we um experience something scary in a particular situation maybe giving a little talk when we were in school or having an authority figure or being in an elevator when something scary happens like a loss of power or opening our heart and getting disappointed okay it's appropriate to learn um about that particular episode the problem comes when we overgeneralize from that single episode to many many similar kinds of things or to life in general um I was describing in my meditative experience a kind of overgeneralizing to the Future altogether so that at a certain visceral level I had to help myself not be afraid during the meditation of the next moment of the future arriving right people who experience trauma perhaps on a battlefield perhaps in other situations then uh the issue is that they overgeneralize to many other situations in which they feel afraid contracted triggered um and traumatized so what can we do about that so here's the what the scientist discovered they found out so imagine two different situations one situation is that a mouse is put into a particular kind of little cage or a little pen and it receives a very mild electrical shock in that pen okay then understandably it doesn't like that pen when it's brought back to it again it it does things that mice do and they're scared they kind of slump down like that rather than walk in sniffing away and feeling confident all right so mild discomfort mild pain that is not overwhelming teaches us lessons like okay don't go back into that weird little shaped pen but meanwhile the same little mouse who has received the the unpleasant experience in this pen is not afraid of these pens is not afraid of walking into these little places where there's food okay so far so good but take that same Mouse and instead of a single little unpleasant shock in one pen multiple unpleasant shocks are delivered to the mouse fairly briefly but still it's not at all nice it really doesn't like it and then what happens is that that Mouse is now afraid of all little pens and when it's brought into different pens it still shrinks and cowers in fear it has overgeneralized based on an intensely stressful experience and the marker of that a key mechanism of that in the brain is that the neurons that come from the mouses Rafe nuclei they have the same kind of nucleus in their brain stem it's more it's simpler and so forth it's different in some ways than ours but it still releases serotonin neurons right a switch gets flipped when the mouse is exposed to let's call it intense stress a switch is flipped inside a whole group of neurons so that instead of releasing serotonin and glutamic acid they switch to releasing serotonin and Gaba another key um neurochemical neurotransmitter and that switch uh is associated then with that Mouse generalizing fear unnecessarily to all kinds of other settings and a key to that switch is the release of cortisol if the metabolism of cortisol is disrupted for that little mouse then the switch doesn't flip and the mouse does not overgeneralized from you know the intense stress of multiple foot shocks five they deliver five um the the the mouse doesn't like it but it doesn't overlearn from that experience and overgeneralize and apply that same shrinking and avoidance and I'm sure suffering and discomfort um to other situations so let's have a quick little recap first of all just to me I totally geek out and I visualize um the amazingness of a single cell being affected by a surge of cortisol in a way that it flips a chemical switch and starts producing Gaba rather than glutamate uh as a neurochemical that it releases along with serotonin uh into the amydala and the hippocampus and other places in the brain and the hypothalamus I mean to say wow but what are we going to do about all this right I don't want to just get lost in the science of it but I want to really bring it down to earth now it's also True by the way I should add that while this is research on mice um humans like you and me who have PTSD they've had traumatic learning that kind of by definition um gets generalized to many situations other than the very specific situation in which the trauma occurred when their brains they're dead now are autopsy and neurons in the rafe nucleus are examined they too have had this switch flip so let's explore first what we can do to prevent the switch flipping in the first place and second let's explore what we can do if it is already flipped and in all this for me at least there's a there's a power in this in which you really get how mechanical it is it's about circuits changing what can we do to prevent a you know the circuit changing and what can we do to get it back to its original more peaceful resting state and how does this apply to your own life all right it's really helpful to reflect on um how we overgeneralize right something uncomfortable happens with a certain with a person then we overgeneralize to all people maybe something happens uh with a particular person so then you now overgeneralize to all future interactions with that person maybe something happened when you expressed yourself from the heart or tried to do something and it didn't go well that one time in that one particular situation with all the particular characteristics of it and then you generaliz to suppressing yourself ever after this is a really far-reaching mechanism it's Mother Nature's plan it promotes survival but it sure does create a lot of unnecessary suffering a lot of unnecessary unhappiness and contraction and this mechanism that I've described here and others like it um really keep us from being liberated they impair our freedom in moving out in this life so I want to uh name some headlines and then respond to questions in the chat okay so headline number one prevention if you are uh inoc situation and you want to help yourself not overgeneralize from it it is as uncomfortable as it is there is the first Dart of the situation whatever the situation is but do everything you can to prevent the second darts of stressful upset that releases a lot of cortisol in other words if if we grow go through situations that are unpleasant they're uncomfortable they're painful but we're not we're we're not adding a lot of cortisol a lot of stress hormone to it then the switch doesn't flip okay this has a lot of implications you might say yeah thanks Rick better easier said than done I know I know but still when we're in situations that feel scary keep reminding yourself keep dampening your cortisol levels not out of suppressing but out of nurturing yourself right keep reminding yourself like you're at the dentist office this pain will pass soon they're well intended they're trying to help me it's going to be better I can slow this down these are all feel your toes wiggle your toes these are all things I do it's because I've had a lot of dental work um you're there it's unpleasant but you're not adding cortisol to it which is the necessary ingredient in this switch flipping okay headline number one you may want to ask me about it okay headline number two let's suppose that the switch is flipped and to be clear the mechanism I've described is not the only way we acquire fear learning and overgeneralize um unnecessarily but it's a very specific one that's well specified and identified at this point and remember including in the brains of people with PTSD so let's suppose it's happened what can you do a major thing to do is to recognize the process of overgeneralizing and try to almost catch it before it is really sunk its teeth into you and become really believable or credible slow it down keep reminding yourself that was then this is now these people are nicer I also have more capabilities these days I can assert myself I can leave the room I can get an Uber and get out of here uh right so uh when you're in situations that are starting to trigger you try to keep reminding yourself about this process of overgeneralizing that it's a kind of delusion in effect uh it's making something like something else that's actually not exactly like something else also when you are experiencing uh as best you can that you're still basically okay hope you know as best you can that other people care about you they support you as best you can you're feeling resourced even while you're dealing with this anxiety um really really take it in really really try to let it land in you the counter learning the opposite learning in other words when you're actually okay in situations that you've been scared about and you can find a core inside you that's at peace and as calm and as strong really help that experience sink in and gradually over time you'll be in Effect planting flowers of confidence and courage and calm and fearlessness alongside the weed of that original circuit formation of overgeneralized fear learning okay that's really important third unfortunately the weed is still there h and uh it might be covered with flowers of new learning but research shows that we we if we haven't pulled the root of the weed it can come back and this gets that what I call the Eraser protocol because like the born identity you know the Eraser protocol here's what you can do not just at the time that you're you know really deliberately doing the second suggestion second headline of internalizing you know antidote experiences that are the antidote to what you're scared of including experiences of soothing yourself and being kind and compassionate toward yourself and um encouraging yourself all right in addition to that to pull the wheat for some minutes afterward maybe up to roughly an hour afterward during What's called the window of reconsolidation as the weed of the trauma and the over generalized upset tries to re-root itself in the physical Machinery of memory stores during that period up to an hour or so deliberately and repeatedly bring to mind the the neutral the truly neutral thing that you unfortunately learn to be afraid of bring it to mind while feeling perfectly okay right bring to mind the authority figure bring to mind the idea of being vulnerable while continuing to feel basically okay and that repeated pairing of basic all rightness with um the thought of or the image of that which you've been unnecessarily afraid of the repeated pairing of the two will disrupt reconsolidation of um the fear learning deep in the bowels of memory there's actually science for this and then last uh some I think pretty deep Buddha Dharma related to this the way that overgeneralization works is that it makes things like each other and yet in reality in which everything is impermanent and continually changing everything is new everything is different yes we might be able to categorize let's say all dogs as a category but each dog is unique you know let's say as a kid you acquired a fear of dogs because you had an episode in which something happened or you saw something happen and then that overgeneralizes to all dogs and you can apply that to people or uh opening yourself vulnerably or to trying things in general right it gets overgeneralized well what makes generalization work is that it shoves everything into a single category right the bad thing happened over here back then and the switch flipped and then anything else is shoved into the category of yeah same as and yet in reality nothing is the same as anything else everything has its own suchness and if you start giving yourself the freedom to rest increasingly in that sense of the uniqueness of every moment the uniqueness of every wave in the sea the uniqueness of every dog the uniquenesses uniqueness of every moment of the future arriving right the uniqueness of every moment of vulnerable uh openhearted expression that sense of kind of a struck recognition of the uniqueness of everything in a very far-reaching way blows up overgeneralizing and that can be a growing deepening in practice to abide in that sense sense of um the sparkling granularity of reality okay so science so let's take a look at comments or questions in the chat okay a quick recap you want to help yourself prevent the circuit flipping in the first place by allowing the first St Dart of things that are unpleasant while trying to minimize the cortisol saturated throwing of second darts and then if the circuit has developed um do what you can uh to help yourself uh grow the good inside of feeling calm and strong and basically okay while things are in in situations that you're afraid of third use the eraser protocol uh for a few minutes or few dozen minutes afterward to keep disrupting the reconsolidation of the weed uh in the ground of memory and then last as an exploration see what it's like to enter into life more and more like don't know it's all fresh it's all the sparkling unique immediacy of each moment in which general is ation which is this conceptual categorizing of the brain um just is categorically disrupted okay all right let's see what do you make of all this well a lot of comments I could see this um all right a few tangible examples I think I've given examples right of how to do this so let's say you're afraid dogs okay you've overgeneralized to all dogs from an experience with a particular dog I got it so now let's say you're walking down the street and someone walks towards you with a couple of dogs and let's say further that those couple dogs are not um on a leash so okay your heart starts to pound what can you do one you can uh really be mindful of the fact that you are generalizing to these dogs something that happened for you 30 years ago and you are presuming a kind of threat or attack coming at you even in the face of all kinds of evidence of walking past lots and lots of dogs that are just fine and well behaved and don't bother you be aware of overgeneralizing second remind yourself you're strong you're okay keep noticing that the dogs are not trying to attack you keep reminding yourself I can behave like a smart human around dogs and not do stuff that freaks them out a little bit um you know keep uh drawing on your inner strengths of communication you know making eye contact with the guardian of the dogs uh who's you know tracking that you're a little uneasy maybe you're resourcing yourself and as you experience these resources that help you cope in the present really really really let that sink in really help it sink in those are like flowers you're growing in the garden of your mind and then after you walk past the dogs you know if you can remember to do it over the next um half hour or so uh you know bring to mind dog you know establish yourself in calm and okayness and then just bring to mind dogs that's it just bring them to mind for a few seconds in a little bit and then let it go like maybe over the course of a single breath or even half a breath fine and you're starting to associate all rightness with the stimulus dogs in general and that's dis gradually disrupts the reconsolidation of the linkage between neutral stimulus of dogs in general and that emotional triggering of fear right and then uh last if you can do it while you're with the dog even afterward just kind of trip out on the uniqueness of everything you know and that disrupts generalization categorically okay as Char asked me um let's see what do you do if you're being constantly um triggered by exposed to the reason you are overgeneralizing well then you're you're going to keep learning it right what you might do if you're constantly exposed to that thing which is U threatening you know is to do what you can to gradually find a way to to be with it and cope with it so that you don't feel so threatened by it it's unpleasant but it need not threaten the core of your being this is really crucial can you deliberately strengthen and get in touch with a sense that in the core of your being you're still okay you're still intact right and you know that's a way that's that's a fundamental process of coping and obviously take the actions that you can take if you're constantly exposed to the reason you're overgeneralizing like a relationship or a situation what can you do to change that and sometimes we can't we're just stuck so then we can work in only inside ourselves very often there are things we can do outside of ourselves to change that situation it's just not good for us and we do we do what we can realistically okay um yes chrisy asked a question the technical question Gaba in general promotes easing and relaxation I find I found myself wondering about the same question why would it be that a switch from what is typically an excitatory neurotransmitter um to what is typically an inhibitory neurotransmitter would um excite fear I don't know I do know that it's complicated the brain's complicated and different neurochemicals have different functions when they're applied in different ways it may be and this is a speculation in the paper that these neurons project to the hippocampus which uh creates context and um the hippocampus regulates the hypothalamus and and the amydala and it may be that the inhibitory effect of the switch with gaban now into the hippocampus disrupts its regulation of the amydala and the hypothalamus so no longer is um the person able to put things in context and merp you know the fair Circ is established uh in an unregulated kind of way maybe okay let's keep it practical let's see um I'm seeing questions here uh well let's see here so Katherine I'm confounded about how to trust your gut when practicing overlooking and denying what it is telling you I I'm that's so if I'm following you right uh sometimes General generalizing makes sense if all dogs are threatening then it makes sense to generalized to all dogs if all speaking from the heart is threatening you know it makes sense right uh and there are certain situations where yeah uh it is really threatening and it's appropri to overgeneralize to it I'm thinking about people Mountaineers who go into Avalanche zones and need to be extremely careful and yeah it's appropriate there that's true the question is in those situations when reason tells you that you are overestimating the likelihood of a bad thing and you are also overestimating the consequences if the bad thing does happen and also underestimating how you would cope with it in the unlikely event that the bad thing does happen with significant consequences right so that might sound really rational but still we need to use reason in helping ourselves I'm speaking about situations where you like you know that other people can do public speaking or you know that other people uh can assert themselves and it goes okay or or you know that other people uh enjoy being with dogs let's say and you'd like to be able to grow into that yourself and you'd like to become Freer and not so controlled by those old fears that's the kind of thing I'm talking about which is widespread certainly it's been widespread in my life um and it's I think widespread in the lives of other people all right great um let's see with what terms well Sandra asked where can you look you know if you just use the phrase fear learning or if you also drop in amydala or um yeah I would you're GNA find a lot of stuff there because this is a very hot area of research okay great um all right so I'm going to finish up here I see what has come in as as you know I will read all the chat um after we finish here in a moment um the takeaway takeaway we're designed to be scared monkeys if you like me or a scared monkey you're normal how can we help ourselves we can help ourselves be in situations that feel threatening with as little cortisol as possible possible we can help ourselves by being aware if we've already acquired an overgeneralized fear of the process of overgeneralizing and start to challenge our perceptions about it you know uh I was driving home with my wife uh from from an appointment today and we drove past a line of cars stopped at the left turn at a stop light and the light was green for us so I just maintained my velocity you know driving under the speed limit but going you know 37 M an hour and she was really nervous because we were driving past a whole line of parked cars she had overgeneralized that somebody in that line of Park cars might dart out into our lane which is an extremely unlikely event at least where I live and you know for her it didn't seem like she was overgeneralizing you know she would have actually changed lanes which exposes her to other risks or really slowed down or grabbed my arm and started yelling at me all of which are bad um out of that overgeneralizing so recognizing over generalizing really helpful right and then engaging the other practices I've talked about uh fundamentally as I finish here enjoy what it feels like to be as the Buddha recommended to be Peaceable friendly and fearless can we move through life feeling fear when it's appropriate okay but more generally feeling Fearless Peaceable and friendly and fearless when life affords us that opportunity enjoy it enjoy that fearlessness for me it's just been wonderful to release unnecessary dread you know unnecessary background anxiety that becomes the new normal you hardly notice it but it's there you notice it when it's not there right wonderful to be Freer and Freer from those sources of suffering which then often lead us to create conflict and harms with other people right what's it like moment after moment when it's appropriate when it's earned or afforded or allowed what's it like Moment by moment to feel free of Fear Can you enjoy it can you extend those moments as it is appropriate in your own real life that's the invitation here

Channel: Rick Hanson

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Keywords: dr rick hanson, rick hanson phd, meditations, wednesday meditations, free meditations, meditate, free guided meditation, guided meditation, Meditation for positive energy, Meditation for anxiety, Inner peace meditation, Mindfulness meditation, Mindset meditation, Mindset therapy, Mental Health Resources, Wellness Meditation, Brain science and meditation, Positive brain change, Neuroplasticity and anxiety, Neuroplasticity healing, Rick Hanson Guided Meditation, dr rick

Id: w9H2UEe23LY

Length: 49min 25sec (2965 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024