Hear your favourite song from when you were fifteen, and you’re suddenly back there. The room, the people, the feelings. You didn’t decide to go; your brain just took you.
That’s a handy way into how anxiety works, and why it can change.
Your brain is full of rivers
I like to picture the brain as a set of rivers. Water takes the path of least resistance, and so does electricity, and your brain runs on electricity. Something happens (a sight, a smell, a sound, a touch) and your brain sends it down a well-worn channel. Input, then a learned response, then an output: a feeling, an action, or more thoughts going round and round.
Think of Pavlov’s dogs. Ring a bell every time you feed them and soon the bell alone gets them drooling. We’re all a bit like that. We’ve been learning what to expect from the world since the day we were born.
Kids are brilliant observers and terrible interpreters
Children soak up everything like a sponge, but they don’t have the context to make sense of it. A kid gets told off for asking a question at a bad moment, and decides that questions are dangerous. Wrong connection, but it can stick around for decades.
The channels we dig early, and the dramatic ones, run deepest. Think of the Grand Canyon: years and years of the same river taking the same path. That’s why an old worry can feel so automatic when it shows up in adult life.
The good news: rivers can move
Here’s the bit I love. The brain can change and adapt, and the word for that is neuroplasticity. Every time you learn something new, you’re building a new connection. You’re not stuck.
It’s harder when you’re older, I won’t pretend otherwise. You can shift a river, but the bigger the river, the more work it takes, and the more sandbags you need.
That’s what CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) is built on, and it’s one of the best-researched approaches there is.
Your sandbags
Anything that helps redirect your thinking is a sandbag. A few good ones:
- journaling some alternative, and more helpful thoughts
- talking with a friend you trust
- humour (a good laugh helps the brain make fresh connections)
- the support of a counsellor
- watching videos, listening to audio, reading
No single sandbag does it. They work as a team, and each one nudges the water a little further from the old channel.
Try this today
Pick one worry that keeps going round. Write down three things: what happened (the input), what you told yourself (the learned response), and what you felt or did next (the output). Then ask: is that story actually true now, or is it an old one from way back? Just seeing the channel is the first sandbag.
My free Thought Tracker has a page for exactly this. And my Find Your Calm anxiety course walks you through the rest, one small step at a time.
One step at a time.
Joel