Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life

parties, you have made your anxiety about talking to strangers worse 
than it was at the start. 
You have to try to work against avoidance, even though it seems to 
make you feel better. I call this
challenging the paradox.
Challenging 
the paradox involves doing away with avoidance and replacing it 
with exposure 
.
Exposure means facing what makes you feel anxious. 
By exposing yourself to anxiety - provoking situations, you become 
habituated to them, and your anxiety will eventually diminish. 
Our earlier example of a war veteran with PTSD can illustrate 
this point. When the soldier comes back to civilian life, he avoids 
situations that make him anxious. Ironically, as he avoids those situ-
ations, his anxiety gets worse. His therapy involves exposing himself 
to situations that make him anxious so he can tame his amygdala. Its 
hypersensitivity dulls with each time he hears fi reworks and nothing 
bad happens. Soon he begins to see the explosion of colors instead 
of exploding buildings. He slowly begins to reassociate the sounds of 
the loud booms with entertainment. The taming process can go on 
even without his cortex (i.e., his thinking process) being involved. 
When he includes the thinking process by saying to himself, “ Wow, 
those are spectacular fi reworks. There ’ s nothing to get panicked 
about! ” the taming occurs more quickly. 
The following types of avoidance contribute to anxiety: 
•
Escape behavior
•
Avoidant behavior
•
Procrastination
•
Safety behavior
Escape behavior consists of the things you do in the heat of the 
moment in an anxiety - provoking situation. You essentially escape 
the situation to avoid feeling anxious. Suppose you are in a room 
with a crowd of people and you begin to feel anxious. Fleeing the 
room to avoid feeling anxious is an escape behavior. Your anxiety 
increases over time, however, because your tolerance of it decreases. 
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40 Rew i r e
Yo u r
B r a i n
If you escape instead of allowing yourself to adjust to even a little 
anxiety, you ’ ll eventually feel extremely sensitive to the slightest hint 
of anxiety. This is called
anxiety sensitivity.
Avoidant behavior includes the things you do to stay away from 
anxiety - provoking experiences. Let ’ s say that a friend invites you to 
meet her at the home of one of her other friends. You decide that 
going to the other friend ’ s home would make you anxious, so you 
don ’ t go. That ’ s an avoidant behavior. Consequently, your long - term 
anxiety will increase, because when you avoid situations that make 
you anxious, you never allow yourself to learn that those situations 
are really tolerable. 
Procrastination means that you put off things because you think 
(erroneously) that it ’ s easier on your stress level. For example, you 
put off going to the friend ’ s home, waiting until the very last moment 
to fi nally go. When you wait and wait until the last possible moment, 
you build up anxiety in all that time. You ’ re subtly teaching yourself 
that the situation
was
worth putting off until the last moment, 
because when you fi nally arrived, you were indeed nervous and 
tense. Holding yourself back from an anxiety - provoking situation 
builds up more anxiety than you experienced initially. 
Safety behavior involves doing or carrying things to distract your-
self or give yourself a sense of safety. Suppose you go the friend ’ s 
home and begin to feel anxious. To prevent yourself from becoming 
more anxious, you begin to fi ddle with your watchband to draw your 
focus away. That ’ s a safety behavior. Safety behavior allows you to 
hang in there and not escape, but eventually the behavior becomes 
a nervous habit, and by engaging in it you ’ re telling yourself that 
you ’ re too nervous to simply face whatever is causing your anxiety. 
All these forms of avoidance are ineffective methods of dealing 
with anxiety because they keep you from habituating to that which 
makes you anxious. Avoidance makes it next to impossible to learn 
to overcome the anxiety. 
Because avoidance results in a temporary reduction of fear, it 
serves as a powerful short - term reinforcer. It is therefore diffi cult 
to resist. The more you avoid what makes you anxious, the more 
elaborate the forms of avoidance can become. If avoidance is taken 
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Ta m i n g
Yo u r
A myg d a l a
41
to the extreme, you can even become agoraphobic, afraid to leave 
your home. Once you begin avoiding, it ’ s diffi cult to stop. 
Avoidance is diffi cult to avoid for the following reasons: 
•
It works to reduce fear for a short amount of time.
•
The more you engage in avoidance, the harder it is to resist 
engaging in it in the future because it becomes a habit.
•
There is a superfi cial logic to avoidance, such as, “ Why wouldn ’ t 
I avoid something that makes me anxious? ”
•
You get a secondary gain from it, like extra care, because people 
around you are sympathetic.
By engaging in avoidance you stir up the “ worry circuit ” in the 
brain. The worry circuit stirs up the amygdala, which increases your 
sense of fear, and the overactivity of the amygdala preoccupies the 
OFC, which tries to fi gure out why you feel anxious. The extreme 
version of the worry circuit occurs with people who suffer from 
OCD, a condition in which the worries become obsessive. 
Another way that you might try to avoid anxiety, but that actually 
increases it, is to try to rigidly control it. An obsession with being in 
control can lead to avoidance. By trying to control every experi ence 
in order to avoid anxiety, you put yourself in a mode of always trying 
to anticipate the future so that you can steer yourself away from the