Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry

Optimism is more associated with left hemisphere activation, whereas pessimism is associated with the right hemisphere (Hecht 2013).

Use relaxation, sleep, and exercise to reduce sympathetic nervous system activation.

You might be successful in interrupting a thought by specifically telling yourself “Stop!” This technique is called thought stopping.

Using distraction to change the channel can immediately reduce anxiety in a given situation.

Next, spend some time brainstorming alternative interpretations for each anxiety-igniting interpretation you identified. If you play with this a bit, you can probably see how different interpretations could lead to a wide range of emotional responses.

scientist John Lubbock (2004, 188) noted, “A day of worry is more exhausting than a week of work.”

Also use positive imagery, exercise, sleep, and music to calm your amygdala, as outlined in chapters 6, 9, and 11.

But beyond that, the more you deliberately direct your attention to other topics when you notice you’re focused on anxiety-igniting thoughts, the more you increase activity in new circuits and reduce activity in circuits focused on anxiety-producing topics or images.

When you listen to music you enjoy, you directly engage your right hemisphere in positive emotional responding.