Monitor your thinking for any anxiety-igniting thoughts. Replace anxiety-igniting thoughts with coping thoughts. Determine your life goals and what interferes with those goals. Identify triggers of fear and anxiety that interfere with your goals. Design exposure exercises that can modify your amygdala’s response to these triggers. Practice exposure

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.

Another approach is to deliberately engage the right hemisphere in an activity that’s incompatible with negative mood states. Listening

To take charge of your life, identify triggers for anxiety in situations where anxiety or compulsions are blocking your goals, as discussed in chapter 7. Then target those triggers with exposure, as outlined in chapter 8, to reduce the limiting effects of anxiety.

Seek out activities that engage the left hemisphere, such as watching amusing programs, reading thought-provoking articles, playing games, and exercise.

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

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

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

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