What happens in the brain and body when experiencing Anxiety?

As humans we are hardwired for survival. This is a blessing and serves a necessary purpose when we encounter danger or threatening situations in our environment. However, this hard wiring can become problematic if we begin to perceive everyday interactions as threatening. We call it the flight or fight syndrome. We perceive something in our environment to be a threat, which triggers the release of adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol to be released into the body, triggering a visceral response involving the heart, gut and lungs. This may be experienced as increased heart rate, difficulty catching our breath, lump in the throat, muscle tension, and flushing or feeling hot.

We can think of our brain as existing in 3 layers. The bottom being the brain stem, responsible for automatic bodily activities such as breathing, heart rate, digestion and perspiration; the middle, limbic brain, being where we perceive our environment and register emotion, and the top, the neocortex as being where our thinking and planning occurs. When our middle layer perceives a threat in our environment, it immediately sends signaling to the brain stem below and the cortex above. However, the signaling reaches the lower brain stem slightly faster than it reaches our thinking and planning region. This is why our reaction feels so automatic, because our automatic bodily processes are being triggered before we have had the chance to think through and plan. So how can we train ourselves to delay automatically reacting when feeling fearful of giving a speech, meeting a new person, or trying to learn a new skill, which are clearly not life threatening situations? We can practice top down or bottom up approaches on a daily basis to train our brain how to react to these perceived threatening situations. Top down approaches would be cognitive behavioral training, where we engage our thinking/planing brain to learn to reframe how we perceive our environment so we don't perceive normal daily interactions to be a threat. Bottom up approaches include addressing our senses first allowing the results to filter up towards or thinking/planning region by practicing mindfulness. Examples include, positive visualization, connecting socially with family and friends, physical touch, deep breathing, exercise, and meditation. The key is being mindful/presently focused in the moment and observing the world around us as we percieve it through our 5 senses.