n my 23 years as a life coach and clinical hypnotherapist specializing in anxiety confidence and self esteem, I found that understanding even just a little bit of the science behind an unwanted issue, like disordered anxiety, can have a very powerful effect on minimizing it.

When you understand the science, you start to understand that what you're experiencing is because you're human and not because you're broken or damaged or out of control.

So you can let go right now of any worry or anxiety that there's something wrong with you and focus on understanding and solutions.

Knowing this and combining it with the step by step knowledge of strategies and solutions that work gives you a feeling of control, focus, and confidence that, yes, you are the one in control, not disordered anxiety.

So, let's just get clear together on a little bit of the science and biology of anxiety and what happens when it gets out of order.
Disordered anxiety starts in a very primitive part of your brain.

It's called the amygdala.

It triggers what is called the sympathetic nervous system, which is the reactive nervous system, either directly or indirectly through thoughts or memories, perhaps old or buried followed by powerful emotions that subsequently trigger physical responses often painful or debilitating and even downright terrifying.

There are 2 pathways in your brain and body that disordered anxiety travel on.
And they both get better and better at creating disordered anxiety with repetition.
And that's why it feels like this ordered anxiety is controlling you instead of you controlling it.

Regardless of which pathway disordered anxiety travels on, it always triggers the sympathetic nervous system which triggers the fight flight or freeze response.

Let's understand these 2 different pathways now so we can use that understanding to reclaim our control.

Direct anxiety is the kind that seems to come from nowhere.

It seems that way but it's actually related to an unconscious or forgotten memory that the primitive part of your brain has stored and associated with something dangerous or unsafe.

And when this primitive part of your brain receives some kind of sensory input It that even vaguely resembles that old buried memory, it triggers your fight flight or freeze response.

Here's a story that sort of illustrates this kind of direct anxiety.

A little girl is holding her favorite stuffed animal.

Crossing the road on a rainy day with your mom and a big truck comes careening towards them and her mother grabs her and runs to the other side of the road to avoid being hit by the truck.

And as they're running, the little girl drops her favorite stuffed animal in the road and the truck runs over it and destroys it.
And later in life, whenever this now grown woman sees her hears a truck for It's raining.

She feels anxious and she doesn't remember the incident, but her brain has associated trucks and rain with the loss of something that she loved dearly and she feels anxiety that seemingly comes from nowhere, but it isn't from nowhere.

And by the way, Hypotherapy is a great way to get to the root cause of this kind of anxiety and rewire your brain who respond appropriately.

Appropriately, what's happening in the moment instead of something from the past.
Now indirect disordered anxiety also triggers the amygdala but it starts with a thought in the more modern part of your brain also called the neocortex and that's the part of your brain that does thinking in planning imagining and remember and remembering and it's often referred to as your conscious mind.

And this is where a lot of disordered anxiety begins in your thoughts.

This part of the brain thinks and plans imagines consciously recalls things, uses logic and worries.

The core text is where your thoughts come from.

And cortex driven anxiety comes from the kind of thoughts that person has internal dialogue mental movies, catastrophic thinking, interpreting information, and forming a distressing conclusion.

The brain processes sensory information and the cortex responds accordingly if the sensory information is actually life threatening your cortex and amygdala and your nervous system will respond appropriately appropriately to protect you and keep you safe.

However, our brains and our bodies don't make a distinction between real and imaginative threats and therefore, when you have habitually catastrophic threats, uh, could when you have habitually catastrophic thoughts.

However, our brains and bodies don't make a distinction between real and imagined threats.

And therefore when we habitually habitually have catastrophic thoughts, we can trigger chronic disordered anxiety.

And again, you can feel like it's coming from nowhere and controlling you, but it's really just a habit.

And we can rewire those habitual patterns so you can feel in control and calm and you can do that by using the strategies that we're providing you with in this course, and you can also do that on a deeper level through hypnotherapy and if something that you're interested in.

You can always set up a free consult with me to talk about doing that on a one on one basis or join one of my groups.

But hopefully now you understand the difference between direct anxiety, again, that comes from a thought or memory has been buried in your subconscious or unconscious mind or indirect anxiety that comes from your thoughts, both of which trigger the sympathetic nervous system and the fight or flight response and using the strategies that we're learning in this course, we're going to learn how to manage both of those pathways so that you can feel calm, relax, and most importantly, in control of that disordered anxiety, so it's not controlling you.