Question:
When your physical body passes, does your energy simply return to the One Source, becoming everything, and nothing, as your own consciousness merges with Go, or do you continue your spiritual journey in the eternal here and now with the ability to consciously merge and separate your Spirit with the choice to merge with God or to experience life in the spiritual or physical realm?
Transcendental Meditation is an innovative technique for dealing with victims of the opioid epidemic. Transcendental Meditation and the Opioid Epidemic by Dr. Scott F. Terry and David Shapiro Comedian Russell Brand explains: “The reason I became a drug addict is that throughout my life I felt this sense of irritation, agitation, this emptiness. I found every progressive drug: cannabis, LSD, crack, heroin. Each of them is greeted as tiny little powdery prophets, solutions to the problem of my inner angst. None of them work.” Today we have a crisis in drug addiction care: less than one in five Americans with drug abuse problems receive any help. Little do they know, all the rest can get rapid, available, effective and affordable tools to escape these painful, costly and even life-threatening attachments. According to SAMHSA’s National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 20.1 million people (7.7 percent of the U.S. population) aged 12 or older needed treatment for an illicit drug or alcohol use problem in 2016. Only 3.8 million (19 percent of those who needed treatment) received any substance use treatment in the same year. According to US News in December 2016, the Surgeon General reported that in 2015 the United States had a staggering 442 billion dollar loss to its national economy from drug and alcohol abuse https://addiction.surgeongeneral.gov/executive-summary According to the National Institutes of Health, the average treatment (for veterans) for substance abuse costs $3,754 with a 75.0% chance of being effective. Some people start drugs for a new “high,” others to overcome pain or discomfort; some athletes use drugs to enhance performance; others take up drugs out of curiosity. For whatever reason one tries and becomes addicted to drugs, the addiction is considered a brain disorder that can change the structure of the brain and how…
If I had a dollar for every cat hair I had to edit out of these Brownie Crumb Donut pictures, I’d be a millionaire. I made these donuts for my cookbook, but I’m sharing them with you because it’s National Donut Day! Or do you spell it Doughnut? I feel like that’s fancier. Like when British people spell Flavour and Colour with an extra U. It’s just fancier. Kind of ridiculous, but definitely fancier. What donuts are your favorite?! I love Sidecar Doughnuts in the Los Angeles area, they always have a gluten-free flavor of the month (flavour) and some of them are super fancy! I wish they’d hire me to photograph their donuts, they are so gorgeous, I’d love every second of it. During the holidays they had an Eggnog one and I almost drove an hour and a half to get one, but then realized I left my wallet at work. Doh.
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I just got back from Paleofx in Austin and I hope you are following me on Instagram (@vanessabarajas) and Snapchat because I ate so much crazy food, trust me, you want to see it. I love Austin. The people are so welcoming and there’s so much to do. The weather was crazy humid though and there were crazy lightening and thunder storms all week. Which was kind of cool, until you actually spent time doing your hair, or wanted to sleep.
Austin also has the best kombucha ever and all the best brands are there, like Siete Foods, Buddha’s Brew, Tin Star Foods, and Blue Northern (Picnik’s brand!) Speaking of both Siete and Picnik, every time I’m in town, they are just so amazing. Siete hosted a dinner for us and it was one of the most amazing meals I’ve ever eaten and I loved every second of it! They had a chef cook a 5-course meal using their almond flour and cassava tortillas in each dish and every single thing had so much flavor. I died.
And then there is Naomi, who is literally my favorite ever and rules the butter coffee and butter blondie universe. Have you guys every seen that movie Girls Just Want to Have Fun? It’s that old 80’s movie with Sarah Jessica Parker pre Sex in the City, and Helen Hunt pre Mad About You and they are trying to get on D-TV and dance and then at the end when they win (spoiler alert) Helen Hunt rides in on a chariot, well that was Naomi at Paleofx, on a chariot passing out butter coffee to everyone. It was the best part of my day. Then she gave us a huge tray of butter blondies. I think I ate 8 blondies. Serious. They are also one of the best things I’ve ever eaten. I wish she’d just let me sign an NDA and give me the recipe so I could make them at home. Sigh.
If you’ve never been to Austin you need to go, and your first stop needs to be Picnik for the butter blondies and coffee. The Yeti is my favorite. Then you need to hit up The Salty Sow for the Duck Fat Fries, 24 Diner for the Sweet Potato Hash with pochies, Chilantro for the kimchi fries, Odd Duck for the Sweet Potatoes, Dolce Neve for grass-fed gelato, Whole Foods HQ for Topo-Chico and all the Tart Cherry Buddha’s Brew kombucha you can get your hands on. That was a huge tangent about food. Sorry. Sometimes that happens.
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One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace.
Heaven is right where you are standing
and that is the place to train.
Morihei Ueshiba, 1883 – 1969, founder of the Martial Art of aikido.
Are you happy with where you are? If not, follow these steps to transform your life! Transform Your Life By Sivarama Swami We all know nothing comes easy in life. Warren Buffet said, “We don’t have to be smarter than the rest. We have to be more disciplined than the rest.” And with so many distractions like the internet, social media, smartphones, fashion, and so on, discipline is usually the last thing on our minds. But self-discipline is the foundation upon which skills, professions, and life-choices are built. Think of where you would be now if you didn’t go through the discipline of driving lessons and learning the rules of the road. Probably six feet under. Similarly, self-discipline is necessary for all other aspects of life, whether it’s education, health, marriage, business, or raising children. The result of all activities depends on how committed we are to be practicing the disciplines that come with that activity. In other words, in any endeavor, the rule of thumb is that as much as you put into it, that much you get out of it. You can’t withdraw money from a bank account you haven’t put money into. But we often face obstacles to discipline like a lack of motivation or just plain procrastination. Here are 4 tips to help you on your path to transform your life – tips you can add to your life right now. 1. Wake up early! Benjamin Franklin said, “Early to bed, early to rise makes a person healthy, wealthy and wise!” As a practicing monk for 50 years, it is my habit to rise before 4 am. Rising early may require adjustments and rescheduling, but the benefits of being more focused and more “ready to go” are extraordinary. 2. Add a spiritual dimension…
I love S’mores. Like love love S’mores. And I really like food in jars, it’s cute, so I feel like it’s S’mores Jars for the win. In my cookbook I have like 27 S’mores recipes. Okay so that’s a bold faced lie, but seriously I think there’s like five, S’mores Pie, S’mores Bars, S’more Donuts, etc. Pretty much anything I can turn into S’mores, I’m gonna do it. I would say, “So sue me”, but then if you did, I wouldn’t have money to get more S’mores ingredients and then I couldn’t keep making you S’more recipes. So in the end you’d really only be hurting yourself.
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So my friend Diane from Balanced Bites is really a genius when it comes to all things business related, and also a genius when it comes to unwinding from all said business related things. She has a really good Snapchat too, you should check it out. Anyway, one day on her Snapchat story, she started talking about how
business projects are similar to breakups, in the fact that there is a common belief, it takes half the amount of time that you dated someone to get over them.
So say you dated someone for 4 years, it will take you 2 years to get completely over them, the same idea goes for business projects. You need to take a step back and not hustle for half of the amount of time that you worked your a$$ off on a project.
So for my cookbook I spent about a year and a half working 80 hours a week. 40 on the book and 40 at my full-time job. I have no assistants and no staff, so that ish was all me, all the time. When I was done, I didn’t want to look at my kitchen, let alone step in it and actually cook something, and then God forbid, photograph it. So by the old dating standard it should take me 9 months off from hustling before I’m like Stella and get my groove back. And wouldn’t you know, I’m exactly at the 9 month mark since my cookbook launched and I’m SO hungry (pun intended obviously) to get back to baking, blogging, and photographing!
I can’t say it’s all me though. I have to give credit where credit is due. Because if I don’t, I’m just as bad as the person who steals my Better Than Box Brownies recipe and changes the vanilla extract from 1 teaspoon to 2, and then passes it off as their own. You know who you are. Anyway this whole rush of inspiration and wanting to get back to the grind is due to all the absolutely amazing friends I stayed with in Austin during PaleoFx.
These people are doing the damn thing. And they are good at it. They are so incredibly great at running their own businesses (and lives for that matter) and it’s really inspiring. It makes me want to be as driven as they are to make my blog something and somehow turn it in to a business. I realize that this is what they do for a living, so they have uninterrupted time to focus on their business, whereas I’m trying to constantly juggle and divide my time between my full-time day job, blog, and social life. And that starts to wear me down. But then I think back to where I was before the cookbook and I was totally in a groove, I’d make and photograph one or two recipes over the weekend (like I did this last weekend) and still have time for a Saturday morning workout, date night and brunch the next morning. When I was working on my book I barely had time to use the bathroom and remember getting irritated that it was so far from the kitchen, and about just being human in general with the need to relieve myself…right in the middle of piping frosting. Ugh. The nerve.
In a weird way I feel like I survived something after writing my book. I’d never worked so hard on something in my entire life. I like to think it shows. Then I see bloggers like Tieghan from Half-Baked Harvest, who not only has a super cool name that’s spelled neat, but then she has her own barn to work in. A barn! If I were an emoji I’d be the one that looks like The Scream painting. She cooks in there, photographs in there and it’s a totally serene space for her to work in. #goals. You gotta aim high.
Was this post as cathartic for you as it was for me? I feel amazing! I guess I needed to just talk it out. Who knew?
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Apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur, the whole club was looking at her…yeah that’s how these Inside Out Peanut Butter Cups are, they are like that good. I also have that song stuck in my head because my boyfriend Brad has been obsessed with Pitch Perfect 2. Like obsessed. It’s both hilarious and annoying at the same time. I’ve been documenting it on Snapchat. These peanut butter cups are also kinda like that old Reese’s commercial where the panicked lady shouts, “You got chocolate in my peanut butter!” So like both of those things. And now these cups have me wanting to make everything inside out. Is that even a thing? Like could you do inside out cake with the frosting on the inside? (Writing that idea down) or like an ice cream cone, inside a scoop of ice cream? I feel like we could sit around and talk about this subject for hours, while we’re eating these Inside Out Peanut Butter Cups, of course.
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So while we’re on the subject, yes I made these with peanut butter. Actual real life peanut butter. All the Paleo people are probably losing their ish, but this is me not caring at all. I eat peanut butter every single day. Yes, you read that right, and *gasp* I’m still alive to tell the tale.
I think of food as fuel, not a moral dilemma.
Personally I have no issues whatsoever when it comes to eating peanut butter, I feel great in fact. I realize this may not be the case for everyone, so do you boo boo, do you. If you’re still on the almond butter train, party on Wayne. You can totally make this recipe with almond butter as well and it will come out quite delicious. Just not like peanut butter delicious. I know you feel me on that one.
I’ve followed a Paleo-ish template for about 3 years now. If I have to eat one more bite of almond butter I’m going to scream. I’m so sick of almond butter that I can’t see straight. Just the thought of it makes me want to gag. I’ve definitely done the 30-day super strict Paleo, and sugar detoxes, and loved them for what they were and used them as a learning tool to see how different foods affect me.
When I first started eating Paleo, I read a REALLY great article that has stuck with me all these years. It was written by this awesome chick, and it was basically about how to eat Paleo, and still enjoy life. I wish I could find that article, but I can’t because I’m a crappy blogger, so let me just paraphrase it for you. She basically said that there are certain things in life that she really enjoyed eating, so much so, that she just wasn’t willing to give them up. She felt that if she could just choose 3 things that were “Non-Negotiables”, then not only would it be easier to eat healthy and reach her goals, but it would also make life more enjoyable. Her 3 foods were: straight up legit flavored CoffeeMate, hydrogenated oil, artificial flavors, and all. Number 2 was peanut butter, and 3…3, well I forgot what 3 was for but (name that song), maybe hummus or wine, (see…worst blogger ever). The point is she was fine giving up all other foods, she just needed these 3 to survive.
This stuck with me because it hit so close to home. I could care less about CoffeeMate, but peanut butter?! Yes please. So my 3 I think would definitely have to be chocolate, peanut butter, and Canyon Bakehouse gluten-free bread. Honestly, wine would be tied with the chocolate and is pretty much “only on the weekends” type of thing, unless it’s a special occasion, but the peanut butter and gluten-free bread are daily, because I really, really enjoy them. I also don’t have any negative side effects when eating these foods. And I think I’m just happier in general knowing that I’m eating food that’s right for me, instead of not eating something just because a popular book or article says I shouldn’t. I’m not Paleo and I’m telling everyone.
Please note: this doesn’t work if your 3 foods are pizza, donuts, and Taco Bell. Mmm-kay. Just gonna leave that right here.
So when I decided to make this treat, I was this close (doing the little pinch thingy with my thumb and index finger) to using almond butter. The reason was two-fold: A. I wouldn’t eat any leftovers because I’m going through my “I despise almond butter” phase and B. It’s Paleo and I write a sort of Paleo-ish blog and stuff. Then I had an epiphany and I was like, no almond butter, bye Felicia. I’m going to use peanut butter and I’m going to enjoy every second of it. From the sticky sweet smell still left in my nostrils, to the remnants left underneath my fingernails. The first bite I took of these Inside Out Peanut Butter Cups was glorious. And the best part was, no almond butter. It tasted just like an inside out Reese’s. Perfect. One of the quotes I would always write in my cookbook during book signings was, “Life’s short. Eat dessert.” Maybe I should change it to, “Life’s short, eat peanut butter.” haha. I’m funny.
I’m so curious now, what are your 3 things? Do you even have 3 things? What are they!!?! tell me!!! So total side note, I deleted the Facebook app off my phone. I’m so irritated at Facebook right now. Maybe I should just go through and “hide” everyone’s posts. Is that mean? I guess I don’t really care. I find myself scrolling and getting so irritated at people. It’s all either clickbate, Facebook ads, humble bragging, or political stuff. I feel like Marty McFly in Back to the Future II when he first gets out of the Delorean and things are jumping out at him every two seconds, like the Jaws 19 movie ad, and he has no idea what’s going on. That’s literally what Facebook has become to me. Now granted, there are a select few people on there whom I truly enjoy following because they post great stuff or have really insightful things to say and I appreciate that. So I don’t want to delete it completely. Also, what’s up with the Facebook memories stuff? The only thing I’ve learned from it is that the Vanessa circa 2008-2010 was not very cool, but thought she was, and her status updates sucked. Ew. Ironically right after I deleted the app I wanted to update my Facebook status telling everyone about it…
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No person can experience inferior with out your concur Are you affected by very low self confidence or inferiority difficult? I must reveal some self help tips about the way to overcome that product create your self-confidence. Chances are you’ll have inferiority complex because he or she perceives that there is a ought to win…
If you’ve ever been depressed you may have wondered—is this the real me? And if anti-depressants work for you, do they get you back in touch with who you really are or make you feel more inauthentic? The findings from a University of Cambridge study suggest that how authentic you feel when being treated for depression may be relevant to your recovery.
It’s there when I wake up. Something’s wrong. I haven’t opened my eyes yet. A minute ago I was sleeping. But now I’m awake and it’s there, lurking: Something’s wrong. My breathing tightens. I stretch my legs beneath the sheets. I feel my heart beating. The sense of creeping fear is diffuse, elusive, hard to pin down. It’s like catching sight of something from the corner of my eye. Something’s wrong.
Only nothing is wrong. I know that. I’ve experienced these bouts of dread for as long as I can remember. It’s familiar, which does not help me hate it any less.
Explaining chronic anxiety to someone who doesn’t experience it is like trying to describe a color they’ve never seen. I have friends who are surprised I suffer from anxiety. After a lifetime of learning to compensate, to push myself beyond my six-year-old fear of joining the Girl Scouts, I do not come across as a nervous Nellie. I am outgoing, talkative, adventurous. Last spring, I planned a Class IV whitewater rafting trip with my husband for three days in the summer. I started dreading it the minute after I booked it.
I go for long periods when anxiety leaves me alone, and I forget the tightness of its grip. But when it comes back, triggered by stress or worry about an upcoming challenge, it sticks around, greeting me every morning like some noxious troll who won’t shut up. Something’s wrong, it insists, or more accurately, something is about to go terribly wrong. I know this thought is irrational, but that doesn’t stop the spiral of anxiety that ensues. Nerves twitch under my skin. I scroll my list of things to do and feel uneasy, even about the tasks I’m (supposedly) looking forward to. When days begin like this, happiness is not on my agenda.
Too Much of a Good Thing
All animals react when confronted with danger, and that’s a good thing. The so-called fight-or-flight response, also known as the stress response, helps animals either move away from a threat or fend it off. Anxiety—the ability to anticipate danger—is even more of a good thing. Anxious humans who avoided areas rife with predators or saved food in anticipation of crop failure had a better chance of staying alive to pass on their genes. And make no mistake, that’s all evolution cares about. It doesn’t care that we exquisitely anxious humans might survive but be miserable a lot of the time, massaging our worry beads down to nubs. Let’s face it, in the modern world, with far fewer real threats in our environment, many of us are suffering from too much of a good thing.
Too much anxiety robs you of your capacity for joy. When everyday worry becomes chronic, it can flip over into one of several flavors of debilitating emotional disorders. Some sufferers develop specific phobias—agoraphobia, claustrophobia, social anxiety. Others, like me, suffer from generalized anxiety disorder, a free-floating emotional malady. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that one in five Americans have had some kind of anxiety disorder in the past year. In turn, anxiety can lead to sleep disturbances, panic attacks, hypochondria, depression.
With so much misery at stake, it’s a relief to learn that lots of smart people have figured out how to ease anxiety. Whether you suffer from occasional worry or have a full-blown anxiety disorder, it’s possible to become fully engaged in life again. In the last three decades, scientists have decoded the spiral of reactions that, over time, build an anxious brain. Turns out, I’ve wired my own brain to be anxious. The good news is I’m learning to rewire it—and you can, too. The more we know about how anxiety actually works, the better we get at beating back the troll. Or at least making it behave.
Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself
To understand anxiety, you’ve got to start with fear, because anxiety is like fear run amok. Neuroscientists now know there are two distinct pathways in the brain that trigger the fight-or-flight response. Here’s the most direct one: You encounter something in your environment—a man running toward you with a knife, a car veering into your lane on the highway—and a part of your brain called the thalamus sends visual information directly to an almond-shaped structure called the amygdala. That’s the control center for the fight-or-flight response. When the amygdala detects a threat, it triggers a surge of adrenaline and an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, and muscle tension—to prepare you to act. A few weeks ago, as I rode my bike home, I suddenly braked, turned my handles sharply to the left, and barely avoided being hit by a car that had run a stop sign. I never saw it coming. But my amygdala did, and it may have saved my life.
To understand anxiety, you’ve got to start with fear, because anxiety is like fear run amok.
Here’s the modern glitch in that evolutionarily brilliant response: “We don’t go into fight or flight just when we’re being chased by a bear,” says Adrienne Taren, a neuroscientist and emergency-room physician at the University of Oklahoma. “We’re getting it every time our email pings or we’re sitting in traffic. Our amygdala is just going and going and going.” That constant barrage of low-level alarm is what we call stress.
So where does anxiety come in? Because we’re such imaginative creatures, we can get stressed out by simply thinking about something that may go wrong. The part of the brain that worries about a future event we’re anticipating is the prefrontal cortex, and that’s where the second pathway to anxiety starts—the one that creates that flurry of anxious thoughts you can’t seem to control. Worried thoughts in the cortex trigger a stress response in the amygdala, which explains why we can freak out about things that aren’t even happening. “I think of the amygdala as sitting there watching cortex television,” says Catherine Pittman, a clinical psychologist and coauthor of Rewire Your Anxious Brain. “You can be on your back porch, looking at the beautiful trees, but you’re thinking, ‘How am I going to pay my mortgage with these medical bills? They’re going to take my house away!’ Your anxiety spikes even though nothing around you is dangerous.”
It’s important to realize that the cortex can’t create anxiety on its own. It can only activate the stress response when it gets the amygdala involved. The amygdala, on the other hand, can bypass the cortex, detect threats in the environment, and react, quickly. When I swerved to avoid being hit by that car, my amygdala took over while my cortex was still figuring out what was happening. Similarly, when a veteran feels anxious at what sounds like gunfire, it’s because his amygdala has gone into overdrive. The amygdala is constantly sweeping the scene, comparing our current experiences with associations learned long ago and some that are probably hard-wired. When it finds a match, it compels us to react, even if the current situation really isn’t all that threatening.
The cortex is like a parent who intervenes to prevent a child from acting on his or her impulses. It acts as a check for when the amygdala overreacts, recognizing, for instance, that what sounded like gunfire was actually a car backfiring and promptly tamping down the anxiety. Sometimes, though, the amygdala’s response is so overpowering that it drowns out the voice of the cortex. That’s anxiety in overdrive.
The neuroscientist whose work led to the realization that anxiety arises from two distinct neural pathways is Joseph LeDoux, the director of the Emotional Brain Institute at New York University. His discovery of a direct neural pathway to the amygdala overturned the conventional wisdom that the cortex played the starring role in creating anxiety and instead placed the amygdala at center stage. This revolutionary development has enormous implications for why some anxiety treatments work better than others—and for why mindfulness approaches are now getting so much attention.
Getting to the Amygdala of the Problem
In the 1960s, people who suffered from anxiety would have been advised, taking a cue from Freud, that they needed to uncover the unconscious forces driving their fears. By the ’70s a more pragmatic approach had taken hold: Learn to change the thoughts and behaviors that lead to anxiety. Cognitive therapy has proven successful in helping people interrogate the negative thoughts underpinning their worries: Are people really judging me so harshly when I give a presentation? And what’s the worst that can happen if they are? Patients learn to question whether their thoughts are realistic or if they’re catastrophizing based on scant evidence.
We now know that cognitive therapy is effective at tackling anxiety that originates from thoughts in the cortex. But it does nothing to tackle anxiety that arises from reactions in the amygdala itself. “Your thoughts can’t change the way the amygdala reacts through using logic or reasoning with it,” says Pittman, who is also a professor at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana. “The amygdala only learns through experience.”
So where does anxiety come in? Because we’re such imaginative creatures, we can get stressed out by simply thinking about something that may go wrong.
So how do you target the amygdala directly? One way is through behavioral, or exposure therapy, which helps the amygdala “unlearn” associations it’s made between danger and particular experiences—like encountering strangers, loud voices, boarding a plane, or driving a car. Behavioral therapy uses the gradual, repeated exposure to whatever’s causing anxiety as a way to help the amygdala learn a more neutral association between the experience and our reaction to it.
Another way to treat amygdala-based anxiety is to simply calm down that part of the brain. Medications are one option. Xanax and its other incarnations are members of a class of drugs known as benzodiazepines. “They basically put the amygdala to sleep,” says Pittman. And that works. But if your goal is to lessen anxiety over the long haul, taking benzodiazepines will impede your progress. “What is learning?” asks Pittman. “It’s neurons firing repeatedly so that new connections form. Neurons have to fire to rewire. So if you give someone a medicine that prevents neurons from firing, how is the amygdala going to learn?” Alternatively, the reason that another class of drugs—the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors known as SSRIs—have proven helpful for anxiety is that they appear to help neurons form new connections. “SSRI’s promote more communication between neurons,” says Pittman. “People start to be able to think outside the box a little.”
But drugs aren’t the only—or the best—way to calm down the amygdala. There’s also the so-called relaxation response. It’s the “rest and digest” antidote to “fight or flight.” Using MRIs, scientists can now see how, just as the amygdala revs up during stress, it calms down when people employ the deep breathing exercises that prompt the relaxation response.
And that’s part of the reason that mindfulness shows so much promise for treating anxiety. Sitting quietly and focusing on the breath activates the relaxation response. But mindfulness-based meditation combines relaxation with something more: a nonjudgmental attitude toward emotions that arise, an acceptance of whatever happens. What the new brain research suggests is that, by combining the relaxation response with a cultivation of paying attention to our thoughts, we can address both of the pathways that lead to anxiety at the same time.
How Mindfulness Changes the Brain
Adrienne Taren began studying mindfulness because she was interested in stress. Studies have shown that mindfulness makes people less reactive to stress and better at regulating their emotions. But as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon back in 2012, Taren wanted to know what was happening in their brains. Her first study compared a group of people—not meditators—who exhibited mindfulness as a personality trait with another group with high stress levels. The results were striking. People who scored highly for mindfulness had smaller amygdalas than those who reported high stress. “The assumption is that a larger amygdala is more active,” she says. “If you have a smaller amygdala,you aren’t so stress reactive.”
The next question: Can people who aren’t mindful by disposition rewire their brains to become less reactive to stress? Taren enrolled high-stress, unemployed people in a three-day retreat, where half were taught relaxation strategies. The others were trained in a condensed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program. “We wanted to find out if there’s something specific about mindfulness that’s causing these effects,” says Taren, “not just that stressed-out people relaxed and felt better.” Taren measured the amygdala size of both groups, and after just three days of mindfulness training, the meditation group had smaller amygdalas. That suggested they’d actually made their brains more resistant to stress.
Perhaps even more significant, Taren found that the mindfulness training had weakened the connection between the amygdala and an area called the anterior cingulate cortex, a frontal region responsible for executive functions like decision making and paying attention. Decoupling the stress center from the logic center allowed people to feel more distance from their anxiety, which made it more manageable. “You’re able to just observe those emotions, which dampens the stress response that keeps the front of the brain from working,” she says.
Taren’s work echoes a growing body of research from neuroscience labs across the country suggesting that mindfulness causes brain changes in both the amygdala and the cortex. Neuroscientists are the first to say that they don’t completely understand the significance of these changes. But for now, they do know that breath-focused meditation seems to help people’s amygdalas become less reactive to their own self-critical beliefs. It also makes them less likely to see social encounters as threatening. When people with generalized anxiety disorder are shown pictures of emotional faces—happy, angry, or neutral—their amygdalas react to the neutral faces more fearfully than to the angry ones. “They perceive them as threatening because they don’t know what the person is thinking,” says Sara Lazar, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. “So they go on high alert.” Lazar found that, after mindfulness training, their amygdalas became less dense—the neurons were like trees that had been pruned—and no longer reacted to neutral faces as threatening.
Mindfulness training also changes the way the prefrontal cortex responds to anxiety. “Anxious people have that voice in their head 24/7, going: ‘What if? What if? What if?’” says Lazar. “Normally we completely identify with that voice, but mindfulness helps us step back and change our relationship to it.” Mindfulness works differently from cognitive therapy, which aims to change thought patterns to short-circuit worry. Instead of trying to eradicate anxiety, mindfulness gets you outside of it so it’s just an experience you’re having. That distance helps you endure experiences you find stressful or scary so your amygdala can learn a new way to react.
Adrienne Taren became interested in mindfulness from the perspective of a stress researcher. But when she saw the changes it evoked in the brain, she began a practice of her own. “I’m the Type A kind of overachiever who developed an anxious personality,” she says.
Mindfulness has helped her in the emergency room, where she needs to stay in the moment and make good decisions. It also helped after a painful bike accident. Taren is an off-road cyclist who rides on gravel for hundreds of miles, for fun. After healing from her extensive injury, she panicked when she tried to mount the bike for a competition. Her natural reaction was to suppress her anxiety. But her mindfulness training helped her see another way. “I started talking to my anxiety. I was like, ‘Hello, we’re going to be together for the next 20 miles.’ I was able to picture my anxiety as this little bubble of emotion floating along beside me,” she says. “It was almost comforting.”
A Little Fear Goes A Long Way
Around the same time my fear of joining the Girl Scouts was keeping me up at night, a little girl was born in a Midwestern town with a rare genetic disease. By the time she reached adulthood, the disease had entered her brain, destroying her amygdala. That woman, now known as Patient S.M., helped scientists discover the key role the amygdala plays in anxiety and fear. S.M. feels no fear from external threats.
To me, that sounded like a dream come true. When I first developed a mindfulness practice, I secretly hoped I could shrink my almond-shaped amygdala down to a peanut. To live fearlessly, able to take risks, pursue adventures, connect with other people without holding back out of worry that my body’s nervous system might betray my uncertainties? Sign me up.
But over the last year or so, my goal has shifted. Extinguishing anxiety is no longer what I’m after. Instead, when anxiety arises, I simply pay attention to its physical manifestations, and slowly—not because I’m wishing it away—my worry recedes. It sounds crazy, but having started on this journey to do everything I could to obliterate anxiety, I’ve learned to value the role it plays in my life. It helps me be more compassionate with myself. It reminds me to trust other people. And that leads us back to Patient S.M.
She has no fear, so her curiosity knows no bounds. She is aggressively social and wants to interact with every stranger she meets. “She has zero personal space,” says Justin Feinstein, a neuroscientist at Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, who’s studied her extensively. “There’s no bubble. She has no discomfort looking you in the eye even if you’re a total stranger.” When Feinstein took S.M. to an exotic pet store, she held a snake and closely examined it, rubbing its scales and stroking its flicking tongue. She wanted to touch a large dangerous snake—asking to do so 15 times—despite being told it might bite her.
S.M.’s story offers a lesson in the crucial balancing act between letting our curiosity lead us to new encounters and heeding the fear that makes us avoid them. She’s been the victim of assault many times—had a knife held to her throat, been held at gunpoint—because she is unable to recognize threatening situations. To be sure, living without an amygdala is dangerous. But for those of us with the opposite problem, whose amygdalas see threats all around us? We might benefit from paying more attention to our curiosity, the antithesis of fear.
In the weeks before our rafting trip, my greatest anxiety was of fear itself. I worried what I’d do if my body betrayed me, gasping for breath and panicking. I’d prepared for months, with daily meditation, but even so, my anxiety as we drove to the meet-up point was high. I used every tool in my box: I sang songs on the radio to distract me. I awoke at our campsite by the river the next morning and meditated. Then I took a half tablet of Xanax.
That first day on the river, I bonded with the four Hawaiian men in our boat. As we crashed over the rapids, I observed “me” in the boat, too busy to feel anxious as we paddled like crazy. My vantage point had shifted: Instead of feeling buffeted by each rapid, I just saw myself paddling down the river. I didn’t once panic…even on one particularly gnarly rapid when we crashed into a boulder and my husband somersaulted out of the boat. He was OK. And—I realized—I was too. For the next two days I meditated in the morning, but I didn’t reach for the Xanax. My amygdala was learning there was nothing to fear. My sensations of anxiety had changed to excitement. By the last day, I felt like I could paddle on whitewater every day.
I won’t lie: I’ve awoken anxious many days since that trip. But there’s a distance to my angst that wasn’t there before. I’ve noticed that the physical experience of anxiety doesn’t have to spiral out of control, that it can even make me feel more alive. I call this the Anxiety Paradox: By allowing myself to feel anxious, to not succumb to the desire to “just make it go away,” anxiety somehow lessens its grip on my psyche. And that opens up a space to let joy in.
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