Sublime

What makes us each have his or her own individual anxiety level?

When the alarm bell of the emotional brain keeps signaling that you are in danger, no amount of insight will silence it.

Fear states occur when a threat is present or imminent; states of anxiety result when a threat is possible but its occurrence is uncertain.

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux calls the pathway to the amygdala “the low road,” which is extremely fast, and that to the frontal cortex the “high road,” which takes several milliseconds longer in the midst of an overwhelmingly threatening experience.

The neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues have shown that the only way we can consciously access the emotional brain is through self-awareness, i.e. by activating the medial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that notices what is going on inside us and thus allows us to feel what we’re feeling.5 (The technical term for this is “inte

A different level of brain activity is involved for each response: the mammalian fight-or-flight system, which is protective and keeps us from shutting down, and the reptilian brain, which produces the collapse response.

Although the sensory signals triggering neuroception are outside our awareness, we are frequently aware of the impact of neuroception as feelings in our body

In Freud’s view anxiety is born out of a need to keep impulses based on stressful thoughts and memories, mostly about childhood, out of consciousness.