But for us socially anxious types, our prefrontal cortex isn’t as adept as our non-anxious friends’ at shutting off the alarms. For starters, our brains take a little longer. Let’s pretend a friend hasn’t texted you back. In a non-anxious brain, immediately after the amygdala screams, She hates me! the prefrontal cortex is recruited to calmly propose that she was probably just busy and will get back to you soon. The socially anxious brain can do this, too, but it takes longer—only three or so seconds longer, but those seconds add up to a major difference in how we interpret the world and the
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