Overcoming the Amygdala Part 63

If you’re struggling with bouts of anxiety, and have followed this series so far, you may have glimpsed that some relief can come from recognising what’s going on in your own mind and with your relationship with your own parasympathetic nervous system, which includes the amygdala.

Yes, there are meditation techniques, breathing techniques, cognitive techniques, all kind of techniques, which are aimed at addressing an anxiety overload, and they can all help — but getting right to the bottom of anxiety means understanding what is going on in our heads at an even more fundamental level than these techniques normally reach.

Last time, we looked at the possibility — indeed, probability — that as human beings we are projecting the entire contents of our inward world onto the outer one, mostly in complete ignorance, and suffering the feedback of anxiety as a result. Our innermost dreams and desires are meeting with frequently opposing and contrary realities and our amygdalas correspondingly are very active.

Escaping from our own projected realities, and starting to live life more as it actually is, is the beginning of sanity. This is done by recognising that, as owners of minds, we have been in the ‘export business’, shipping out our deepest desires to the world around us and expecting it to conform to them.