Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers

by Faith G. Harper

Our brain in resting state is when we story-tell.

A storytelling brain is an excellent fucking thing most of the time.

But clearly the storytelling brain has the capacity to be a serious fucking problem, too. We start telling ourselves (and believing) certain stories about ourselves and the world around us. Our brains are wired to crave certainty. We WANT to see patterns in what happens so we can make better decisions about the world and how we are supposed to keep ourselves safe in it.

Our ability to discriminate between real danger and perceived danger is an imperfect system. The brain is going to err on the side of caution, even if that means you shut down when you don’t actually need to.

Stimulus discrimination is a thinking thing, not an emotions thing. Which means it happens in the prefrontal cortex, and once the brainstem gets into freak-out mode, it’s really hard to get the prefrontal cortex up and running again. But we can do it. And we are going to talk about how we retrain our brain to respond in ways that better suit life as it is now instead of life as it was in the past. Our stimulus discrimination response is based on all of our past experiences and habits, and that response is even more ingrained if those experiences were traumatic ones.

If a stimulus is attached to a strong memory, the body starts shooting off hormones and neurotransmitters to prepare itself for response. Brains don’t really have new thoughts so much as different configurations and mash-ups of old thoughts.

A trauma is a “What the fuck was THAT?” situation.

diagnosable trauma although more recent studies have it at about 75%. And about 7 or 8 out of every 100 people will have PTSD at some point in their lives. And that’s only diagnosed traumas. The official “rules” for diagnosing a trauma reaction are pretty limited, which means I consider the number way higher than 8%. Having suffered abuse as a child is a trauma we all recognize, for example. But having dealt with horrific bullying isn’t necessarily a recognized trauma…even though many people have taken their own lives because they were bullied. So no list. Because trauma doesn’t operate by checking the right box in the right category. Instead? Please believe me when I say your experiences and reactions are valid and real and you are worthy of care and the opportunity to heal.

So not only do our genes influence our trauma reactions, our trauma reactions influence our genes.

Take Action: Name that Bastard Give your negative reactions an actual persona to inhabit. Name it after a heinous ex, a shitty grade school teacher, or Kim Jong-un. Create a whole character for that fucker. Emotions feel so huge and so nebulous that transforming them into an actual, defined entity that you can battle really helps. Then you can have convos with Donald Trump’s Epic Hair Swirl (or whomever, but personally

I think all things negative should be named after that hair) whenever it comes calling. Now you can focus on that entity the way you would on an actual person that was threatening you in a real-world situation. You can negotiate, you can yell back, you can lock it in a box. It’s now at a manageable size of your choosing, with the appropriate amount of ridiculousness in its presentation that you can laugh at it while you kick its ass.

Basically, we continue to feed that particular emotional response (anxiety, fear) and those particular thoughts (accidents happen on First Street) by continuing with the same adaptive behavior we originally used to keep ourselves safe

Rumination and avoidance are ways of trying to control our experience, rather than taking it as the information that it is meant to be and finding ways to process through our responses.

Both rumination and avoidance are ways our brain reacts in an attempt to get control back. If I fixate on it, I can figure out a way to keep it from happening again. If I avoid it, I can erase it from existence in the past, present, and future. It feels way safer than remembering something, recognizing it for the event that it was, and then letting it go. To get to a place where we just feel what we feel? To sit with it for that 90 seconds? To remember that it’s just information from our body, part of our feedback circuit? That it doesn’t define us? Change anything about the essence of who we are? That it may not even be ACCURATE information about the situation? REALLY FUCKING HARD.

Because our brains are hardwired to keep us alive, the instinctual part of our brain takes over when we feel threatened. But

you’re able to do the work now, you are far less likely to struggle with chronic mental illness as a result of your trauma, or at least it will be less severe/more manageable.

remember that the pain itself is based in memory,

All of these mental grounding activities are a way to remind your brain of where you are in the moment and that you have more control than you realize over what is going on inside you when your panic button has been tripped.

Remind yourself that suffering is part of humaning.

Reminding yourself that you were doing the best you could with the information and skills you had at the time is hugely important. And remembering that the people who have hurt us are also broken and fucked up is almost as important.

Alpha Stims are designed to increase alpha brain waves (which are the great combination of calm and alert that we all crave).

The adrenals (among others) may play the heavy, but it’s under complete control of the pituitary. They may give the pounding but they didn’t give the order for the pounding. And who does the pituitary take orders from? Boom, back to square one. The brain (specifically, the hypothalamus) is the actual master gland, the head coach. The head coach coordinates with the start quarterback, the pituitary gland, which then calls the plays for the whole rest of the team (hey there, body). The

Anxiety covers a lot of ground: It can be the experience of unease at its most chill. Distress at medium heat. Straight up panic at a full boil.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is totally an anxiety response.

Interested in figuring out which way you wire? You can take the Learned Optimism test at http://tinyurl.com/hpwls4m

Emotions are instinctive responses that are triggered by outside events and inside memories of past events. They function in the middle part of the brain, separate from the reasoning and cognitive processes in our pre-frontal cortex.

For anger, the specific activation triad is the amygdala, hypothalamus, and periaqueductal gray neural systems.

In Japan, you are taught how to handle negative emotions.

Anger is a secondary emotion.

ANGER is triggered by Hurt Expectations not met Needs not met

We need to feel secure and supported in our relationships with other people. We need to have a good idea of what to expect. We need to feel loved. This is more than some dickwad jacking our parking space. This is about our fundamental human need to feel supported by others in the world. We need to know that we are safe with the people we love, that they love us back, and that they are not going to hurt us, at least not intentionally. We need to get out of dark alleys at 2AM.

addiction is a function of cravings plus compulsive use.

you have had a trauma, if you have been hurt so badly in a way that you don’t trust the world, you are far, far, far more likely to be susceptible to addictive behavior.

“My partner broke up with me and that triggered all my struggles with abandonment. I’m

choosing to use because it’s coping skill that has worked best for me and trying something new feels overwhelming.”

Self-compassion is the opposite of self-esteem. It’s about your insides

Self-Compassion. Read the thing if you haven’t. Changed my life.

losses that cause understandable levels of grief (which is the topic of the next chapter). Grief and loss can absolutely be traumatic, and can absolutely lead to depression. But

Just like anxiety, depression is related to the biochemistry of stress.

Depression is the body’s way of saying nothing I do is going to help anyway, it all sucks ass

matter what. Depression is a biochemical learned helplessness response to stress.

People struggling with depression (or any mental illness) are ANYTHING but crazy. They are survivors, fighting back against brain chemistry that is entirely at odds with

Unresolved grief often acts as exactly that trigger. Not having the space to heal can create actual biochemical changes in our brains.

When we don’t allow or aren’t allowed our grief process, this can often lead to an experience of “traumatic grief.” That is a level of unresolved grief that turns into mental illness. Let’s work to stop that bullshit and focus on honoring grief.

number one fear experienced by human beings is the fear of abandonment. C.

“No one ever told me that grief is so much like fear.”

Grief is a realization of the certainty of abandonment. It is our worst fear made reality.

But grief is the experience of any kind of loss, any type of abandonment in our lives. Grief can come with the loss of a job, the loss of a relationship (through any means, not just death), or the loss of a way of life we have come to know

Our cultural expectation is to possess rather than release. Loss (abandonment) is a forced release for which we have few mechanisms to heal ourselves or support healing in others.

emotional pain lights up the brain the same way physical pain does. When we hurt, we LITERALLY hurt. It is just as much a bodily burden as a broken bone or serious physical illness.