Last Updated on May 11, 2021 by Kari
Rewire Your Anxious Brain has been sitting in my house for over three months to read. I’m not kidding. I picked it up when I decided I wanted to tackle some anxiety I was having around family and events, but I never took the time to read it. As I said in my Super Reading Quest review, I plan to read 52 books in 52 weeks, and I figured this would be a good book to start with because anxiety and worry suck. I didn’t have much anxiety or worry when I was younger, but for some reason over the past decade, I’ve been constantly worried and anxious about so many things. Worrying is one of my key emotions on a daily basis, and I know that I need to work on it. Rewire Your Anxious Brain has given me a ton of insight. Here’s my review.
Learn How And Why Anxiety Happens
There are two separate pathways to anxiety: through the cortex or the amygdala. This is discussed extensively in the book. You learn what cortex-based anxiety looks like and what amygdala-based anxiety looks like.
I learned so much about the cortex and amygdala when it comes to anxiety and worry that I’m constantly thinking about it. For instance, I will catch myself worrying about something and think, “This is coming from the cortex.” Or, I will tense up for no reason and think, “This is coming from the amygdala.”
Learning how and why these pathways create anxiety is important. Once you can identify where your anxiety or similar emotions are coming from, you can use tactics to help reduce the anxiety and work through it quicker.
One thing I found fascinating is that the amygdala in humans is similar to rats, dogs, and even fish. Unfortunately, upon a little online research, I’ve found that scientists have done tests where they removed the amygdala in monkeys and found that when they did so, all sense of fear disappeared. I can’t imagine what types of tests have been done on animals in order to test their sense of fear and then their lack of it. But, anyway, that’s for a different article.
In Rewire Your Anxious Brain, you learn things like:
- Why you sometimes can’t think when anxiety, fear, or panic take over.
- How your past affects your anxiety today.
- Why kids are scared of bugs but will walk in front of an oncoming car without a second thought.
- How any object, even a teddy bear, can end up producing fear in someone.
- How to get past a panic attack quicker.
- What triggers are and how they impact your anxiety, fear, worry, or panic.
- Why sleep is important for keeping negative emotions at bay.
And that’s just a small list of things Rewire Your Anxious Brain covers.
I learned why the doorbell causes me so much anxiety. I don’t just fear the doorbell when it rings… I fear the thought of it ringing. I learned that it has to do with my amygdala and some bad experiences I have had with people coming to the door.
I also learned that I don’t have a lot of amygdala-based anxiety. Most of my problems stem from my cortex, which is why courses like Rapid Transformational Hypnotherapy and software like Subliminal 360 is so beneficial to me. They help me tackle the root cause of my anxiety, fear, panic, and worry.
Fight Your Anxiety, Fear, Panic And Worry
You don’t just learn about how and why anxiety happens. You also get tools to work on your anxiety, fear, panic, and worry. You learn how to identify what path your anxiety is coming from and then how to tackle it with various exercises.
Rewire Your Anxious Brain will benefit you if:
- You feel yourself getting anxious often and don’t where it comes from.
- You have a hard time calming yourself down when anxiety strikes.
- Find yourself tense, unable to breathe, and wanting to escape in certain situations.
- You have weird fears and moments of anxiety that most people don’t have and want to understand how to get rid of them.
- Have obsessive thoughts.
- Catastrophize things in your mind.
- Feel a lot of guilt and shame over past experiences.
- You beat yourself up over not being perfect.
You get a lot of insight into why these things happen along with the exercises to help you overcome these issues.
One thing mentioned in Rewire Your Anxious Brain, that I also want to mention in this review, is that you should make mindfulness a part of your daily life as it is the best way to transform your anxiety. This makes sense once you understand where anxiety comes from and how it works in the brain. But, if you don’t read the book, keep this in mind as you try to stop any anxiety, fear, worry, or panic that comes up.
Rewire Your Anxious Brain May Not Be The Last Book You Will Need
This book is mostly about understanding why and how anxiety, fear, panic, and worry happen in the brain. It also teaches you exercises that you can implement right now to fight both amygdala-based anxiety and cortex-based anxiety.
But the authors say there are plenty of books out there dedicated to each therapy they mention in Rewire Your Anxious Brain. They even list a bunch of recommended books for further reading at the end of their book.
So, they don’t go into great detail on these therapies in this book as other books have already done so. Therefore, you may find yourself picking up another book on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (like I have) or on another subject that you want to delve further into.
That said, I think this book is a great place to start and, for some people, could be all you need to tackle the anxiety in your life.
Learning about the processes of anxiety has given me a ton of insight into what’s happening and why it’s happening. Anything I learn further about therapies that may help fight worry and anxiety will be easier to understand and implement with my new knowledge around how anxiety works.
The Bottom Line
If you want to understand the underlying cause of your anxiety, fear, panic, or worry, then Rewire Your Anxious Brain will help. Every time I feel one of those emotions, I’m trying to figure out where it is coming from and then how I can lessen the emotion or make it pass completely.
Rewire Your Anxious Brain helps you understand anxiety and deal with and reduce it. It gives you the ability to start taking charge of those unwanted emotions and focus on more positive things.
You can read more reviews about this book on Amazon. There are a lot of outstanding reviews for this book, which is why I picked it up in the first place!
