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

by Faith G. Harper

The prefrontal cortex (we’ll call it the PFC), essentially the front part of your brain, is the part that is in charge of executive functioning, which includes problem-solving, goal-oriented behaviors, and managing social interactions according to expectations of what is “appropriate.” Essentially, executive function is just straight up thinking.

In order to think more, we have to feel more. And then take both into account when making decisions. Emotions are just as important for our survival as thoughts.

Fight is BEAT THEIR ASS BEFORE YOUR ASS GETS BEAT. Flight is GET THE FUCK UP OUT OF HERE THIS ISN’T SAFE. And Freeze is IF YOU PLAY POSSUM AND DON’T RESPOND AT ALL MAYBE ALL THIS WILL GO AWAY.

Our brain in resting state is when we story-tell. You’ve totally caught yourself doing this. You’re driving home. Nothing you need to attend to, you know this route so well, you aren’t really engaged. Storytelling mode ACTIVATE. You’re telling yourself a story about what you are going to cook for dinner, or watch on TV, or the errands you have to run. These conversations aren’t bullet pointed reminder lists…you actually walk through a story of your plan.

Whether you find yourself defensive and combative as fuck, freaking out hardcore, or completely shut off and disassociated, it’s your survival mode that is responding. The problem is when this happens during situations that aren’t actually life threatening emergencies. The amygdala has hijacked your ability to manage the situation in a rational way using the prefrontal cortex. It is not a “Hey, let’s investigate this situation, have rational conversations, and then determine how we want to respond based on what will best benefit us in the long run” kind of thinking. Your amygdala screamed “DUCK AND COVER!” and all rational responses went out the window.

A trauma is an event that happens outside our understanding of how the world is supposed to work. A traumatic response is when our ability to cope with what happened goes to shit and it’s affecting other areas of our life.

Trauma is often complex and continuous. For example, people who are in abusive relationships well know that one-time offenses rarely happen. The violence is cyclical and ongoing.

If you serve in the military or work in a high risk profession, you experience terrible things regularly and know that they can occur at any minute of any day. Trauma puts us in survival mode for that first thirty days. And traumas may be coming so fast and furious that we don’t have a moment to stop and breathe. So our brains shut down the trauma-processing experience so we can continue to survive. The brain is actually being a protective motherfucker when it says “We are still in the foxhole and can’t deal with this shit right now!” Sometimes it isn’t a matter of continued trauma, but the demands of our everyday lives that cause this shutdown. Sometimes we don’t have the time and space to heal from our grief experience. Because we have to keep getting up in the morning, getting to work, feeding the dog, finding our kid’s missing left shoe. There is only so much work our overtaxed brain can handle. Taking care of OURSELVES often becomes a luxury we can’t afford, rather than a necessity we can’t ignore. And sometimes our brains just have no mechanism to make sense of the trauma. No matter how much time and space we give ourselves for healing, we can’t find a place for the traumatic experience that gives it the meaning we need to move on. That’s the storytelling brain again, stuck in telling the same story that just doesn’t work. Whatever the reason, the brain can shut down the healing process at a moment’s notice and our “new normal” becomes a trauma-informed experience ra...

Arousal – The amygdala is always wearing its crazy pants and you find yourself freaked out when you shouldn’t be or don’t want to be. You may or may not know why. But your brain may process something it considers a threat that you aren’t even cognizant of and all of a sudden you are falling apart in the middle of the grocery store. Avoidance – You find yourself avoiding things that trigger arousal. Grocery store was bad? I can order my groceries online. Really don’t need to leave the house for groceries, right? Intrusion – Thoughts, images, memories related to the trauma experience start shoving their way up.

What If I Love Someone With a Serious Trauma History? This is seriously tough, isn’t it? You have someone that you care about so much that is really struggling with their trauma recovery. You want to HELP. And feeling unable to do so is the worst feeling in the world. You’re at risk of serious burnout and secondary traumatization. Because yeah, watching someone live out their trauma can be a traumatic experience in and of itself. Two things to remember, here: This is not your battle. …but people do get better in supportive relationships.

The best thing to do is to ask your loved one how to best support them when they are struggling. This is the type of action plan you can create with a therapist (if either or both of you are seeing one) or ask them in a private conversation. Ask them. Ask if they want help grounding when they are triggered, if they need time alone, a hot bath, a mug of tea. Ask what you can do and do those things, if they are healthy things to provide. It may be helpful for them to have a formal safety plan for themselves (there are resources for sample safety plans at the end of this book), with what your specific role will be. This will help boundary your role, and keep you from setting up scenarios when you rescue or enable dangerous and/or self-sabotaging behavior. You may need to set hard limits. You may need to protect yourself. This isn’t just for your well-being, but will help you model the importance of doing so to your loved one.

Trauma is like a wound that has crusted over the top but hasn’t fully healed. It looks closed over, but the infection is still burrowed in under the skin. It festers even when we don’t realize it is there, or when we find ways to ignore it. But what happens if we don’t clean out that wound? Kids like this part. “It gushes out EVERYWHERE! Blood and pus and it HURTS and it’s SUPER GROSS!” Totally. We have to clean it out for it to heal. But what about the scar it leaves behind? Adults like this part. Scars are badges. They are a reminder that we healed.

Do you know how long an emotion is actually meant to last? 90 seconds. Seriously, just one and a half minutes for an emotion to run its course. But you are calling “bullshit” right now, I know. Because if that were really the case, why do our emotions last hours, days, or years? 90 seconds? Not so much. Emotions last longer than 90 seconds because we continue to fuel them with our thoughts. We do this by telling ourselves the same stories about the triggering situation over and over. This is when they stop being emotions and start becoming moods.

Holy shit

Rumination is a form of unwelcome, obsessive attention to our own thought patterns. It’s a stuck point. An error in the coding. We ruminate about the accident to the point of thinking we are losing our minds, because it feels like the rumination has taken control.

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 (don’t drive down First Street, bad things happen there!). So we keep the feedback circuit in a perpetual cycle.

Rumination is a way of insisting on making sense of an experience, but doing it in a nonsensical way.

But I have found that healing is way easier when we dig into it right away and don’t give our brains the opportunity to start mapping out bullshit signals that fuck us up. I also found that if 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.

It is amazing to realize you can feel something and not have it overwhelm you. That right there? That is what taking your power back really means.

emotions are meant to be a signal in the brain that something needs your attention. They are meant to only last long enough to actually get your attention, and they dissipate after you decide on your course of action.

Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery.

Read this.

Amateurs practice until they get it right, experts practice until they can’t get it wrong.

Proving you can do something once is easy, getting so good at it that it becomes your second nature is way harder. But that’s what rewires a trauma reaction. Do it so often it just becomes what you do. On Tuesdays we wear pink. And when we are triggered, we use our fucking coping skills.

Meditation is when you intentionally set aside time to do something that’s good for you. There are all kinds of meditations (prayer, exercise, art, etc.). Mindfulness is both a general awareness of the world (noticing your existence and the existence of everything else around you) AND formal meditation practice. It’s two things, not one.

Our minds are brilliant at creating endless amounts of chatter that we often talk back to without listening first. Meditation is the willingness to hear yourself before you speak.

Put your hand over your heart and voice your experience of suffering. Remind yourself that suffering is part of humaning. Tell yourself that you are allowed kindness and forgiveness, and that starts as an inside job.

When we are stressed we crave sugar like whoa. The brain needs glucose to maintain willpower and energy…which is why dieting is so hard. You are deprived of the glucose you need for willpower.

Anxiety is an internal response to stressors.

Optimistic people don’t dwell on bad events, and approach them as temporary setbacks. If they get neg’d on, they bounce back more quickly. They also believe that good things happen for reasons that are permanent. Essentially, the world is fundamentally in their favor. Pervasiveness: People who are happy monkeys tend to keep failure in its proper place. They recognize failure in one area as only belonging in THAT area, rather than meaning they are a failure at ALL THE THINGS ALL THE TIME. They also tend to let the things they are good at inform the rest of their lives, rather than keeping that in its own space.

Personalization: Our cheerful buds blame bad events on bad circumstances rather than bad selfhood, but take credit for good circumstances as indicating that they are good people. So basically failures are events, not people. But successes are people, not events. If you dig me?

Think about the last time you felt anxious and write down some notes for each of these five letters: In Seligman’s model the A stands for Adversity. What bullshit is going down that generally triggers your anxiety response? B stands for Belief. What are your beliefs about this event? Be honest, if your anxiety is triggered a lot, you are probably running a thought pattern in the direction of “THIS IS FUCKED!” C stands for Consequences, though really it should stand for Cookie. Seligman didn’t agree with me that once you think that shit’s fucked you should go have a cookie. Instead, he wants you to look at how you reacted to the situation and to your beliefs. D stands for Disputation. This is where you literally argue with the neg-gremlins your brain is throwing down and focus your attention on a new way of coping. Remember the storytelling brain? Create a new story to use instead. And finally, E stands for Energization. What was the outcome of focusing your attention on a different way of reacting? Even if you were still pretty anxious, did you handle the situation better than you may have in the past? Over time, with doing this, do you notice that your anxiety is starting to fizzle out FINALLY?

1. Adversity: Just the facts, baby. Describe what happened (who, what, where, when) being as precise and detailed as you can. 2. Beliefs: What were you thinking? Like, exactly. What was your self-talk? Don’t care if it was crude, ugly, or weird. Write it down. If it sparked a memory or flashback, that counts, too! 3. Consequences: How did these thoughts effect how you felt? How you behaved? What went on in your body? What emotions did you experience? How did you react? 4. Dispute: There are four different ways you can dispute these negative beliefs A. Evidence? Is there evidence that your belief was based in reality. If someone says “I hate you” then the belief that they hate you has some evidence behind it, right? But most beliefs really don’t. B. Alternatives? Is there another way you can look at this situation? What were the nonstatic circumstances (you don’t always bomb a test, you were overtired from being sick)? What are the specifics (sucking at basketball doesn’t make you a lame human being or even a lame athlete)? What did other’s contribute to the situation (is it really ALL your fault???)? C. Implications? Ok, so maybe you jacked up. Is it really a total catastrophe? What’s some perspective you can add to this (ok, so I failed in that job interview…does that mean no one will hire me from now to infinity)? D. Usefulness? Just because something is true, doesn’t make it useful. How can you frame the experience as one that gives meaning to your life? Do you have a b...

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.

At its core, anger is an instinctive response designed to protect us from harm by pushing us into concerted action.

Feeling some serious fucking anger is a normal part of being

When we lose our fucking minds on a regular basis, we are wiring our brains into a constantly heightened state that eventually fries our circuits (and pushes away everyone we love in the process). We program ourselves to always be on the alert. So we react with far greater speed than we used to, and perceive more situations as being dangerous, hostile, or threatening. We are constantly jumping at shadows.

Our brains never get to rest and recharge and we start struggling with many other conditions associated with this wiring change. Added up, those conditions are known as autonomic nervous system dysfunction. Many common health problems (heart disease, high blood pressure, food allergies) as well as many common mental health issues (depression, anxiety, PTSD) are related to a continued heightened response.

ANGER is triggered by Hurt Expectations not met Needs not met

“Addiction is any repeated behavior, substance-related or not, in which a person feels compelled to persist, regardless of its negative impact on his life and the lives of others. Addiction involves: 1. Compulsive engagement with the behavior, a preoccupation with it 2. Impaired control over the behavior 3. Persistence or relapse despite evidence of harm 4. Dissatisfaction, irritability, or intense craving when the object—whether it be a drug, activity, or other goal—is not immediately available.”

1. Consider addiction’s rightful place in your life as being a replacement relationship.

2. You’re in charge of yourself. You really are. Even if you feel that you aren’t. Even if you feel that you never have been.

3. It’s far easier to START doing something new than STOP doing something old.

4. Remember that sobriety and recovery are spectrums.

Trauma Proofing Your Kids by Peter Levine)

I really believe that understanding the biochemical roots of the problem is enormously helpful in feeling less trapped and crazy. You are not defined by your depression. You are not weak, and you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t deserve this. You are not being punished. You hit the perfect storm of genetics + trigger and you are now dodging and weaving while running your ass off toward getting better.

While there is no magic number associated with the time we need to heal, researchers have found that ninety days is the basic timeframe for reestablishing equilibrium. And the first thirty days are the most fragile and necessary part of that process.

Part of avoiding a trauma response is having the space to grieve. Grieving what hurt you. Grieving for what you lost. Grieving the life that you wanted that isn’t the same now.

It’s also not too late, you know. It doesn’t matter if it’s been thirty days or thirty years. For many people, healing an established trauma response may include going back and doing the grief work you were never allowed in the first place. Grief scares the fuck out of us, whether it is our own or someone else’s. It feels like a freefall that is completely dark and completely bottomless.

When we discuss grief, our first thought is always of death. 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 and expect. We can grieve changes even if they are happy ones. Getting married can be an amazing thing, but we may still grieve the loss of our single days. Becoming an adult is something we all looked forward to, until that moment we had to grieve the freedom of childhood and the ability to hand over decisions to someone else. 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. We don’t talk about the inevitable letting go of that which we think we possess.

Shit gets better. For serious it does. Not perfect, not pre-trauma innocence. But better. And sometimes richer and deeper for the experience of taking back your power on your own terms. Certain things will probably trigger you. Anniversaries, life circumstances. But your relationship with your trauma will change. It won’t be the beast that controls your every move, anymore.