Rewiring Anxiety: How Neuroplasticity Shapes Our Response to Modern Stress

For decades science believed that neuroplasticity ended at around age 25. Science believed we didn’t adapt our brain or its programming after that age.

Today’s neuroscience has proven how wrong that early science was.?

Our minds are incredibly adaptable, constantly reshaping and responding to new information—the phenomenon known as neuroplasticity. ?Its continuing adaptability helps us learn new things, shift our behaviors as warranted, and build resilience. ?That neuroplasticity is retained throughout our lives, making us dynamic, ever learning, and adapting beings.

In today’s high-stress world, neuroplasticity can also work against us.

When stress is persistent, we can get stuck in fight or flight mode as our brains and bodies attempt to protect us from perceived external threats causing said stress.

Our brains adapt in ways that serve to reinforce anxiety, essentially training our nervous systems to stay on high alert.

The good news? We can also use neuroplasticity to rewire those stress-based responses and find a path to a healthier, calmer state of mind.

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What is Neuroplasticity?

Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections, aka new learnings, beliefs and behaviors. You can thank neuroplasticity for our ability to learn to read, write, dance, play tag, eat with a spoon, and so much more in childhood.

?There are certain inherent programs in our minds that tend to freeze in their adaptability around the age of 7 or 8. I call these programs preferences. We all have them, they determine our preferences for things as simple as how we use language (e.g., short one word responses vs paragraphs,) how we prefer to work (solo or always surrounded by a team), and even why we do or don’t choose to follow the herd.?

While it’s especially active in childhood, we’ve now learned that neuroplasticity stays active throughout our lives. Whether we’re learning a new skill, forming a habit, creating a new belief about something in our world, or responding to stress, our brain creates and strengthens pathways based on repeated thoughts, behaviors, and experiences.?

Dr. Richard Davidson, a leading neuroscientist and founder of the Center for Healthy Minds, explains that neuroplasticity allows our brain to adapt to our environments and experiences—both positive and negative. Davidson’s research shows that by consciously redirecting our attention and responses, we can essentially “reprogram” the brain toward healthier, more resilient patterns. [i)

Does Neuroplasticity Impact Our Daily Lives?

Neuroplasticity isn’t just a brain function; it’s something we live and experience every day. Every thought, action, and emotion we engage with builds pathways in our brains. For example, if you practice gratitude consistently, your brain strengthens the pathways that foster positive thinking, making it easier to experience gratitude automatically.

Think of neuroplasticity as the brain’s survival mechanism. It helps us adapt, making our responses efficient and automatic.

That said, if we’re repeatedly focused on stress or fear, our brain wires those responses more deeply, making us more likely to react anxiously in future situations.

With today’s constant pressures—from fast-paced work environments to nonstop digital over-sensationalized news, social and more—our brains constantly react to high-stress external events as threats.?

This rewires our brain to make stress our default response. Over time, we find ourselves in a cycle where even relatively calm situations trigger feelings of tension or anxiety.

Chronic Stress Conditions Our Brains

Chronic stress essentially “teaches” our brains to stay on high alert, constantly preparing for potential threats. Our minds, in turn, adapt to this pressure by making anxiety a natural, even automatic response. A recent study published in Neurobiology of Stress found that persistent stress changes brain circuits related to emotion regulation, making it harder to switch out of stress-based patterns, even when the threat is gone. [ii]

Through neuroplasticity, our brain “learns” to treat stress and anxiety as baseline states, reinforcing cycles of hypervigilance and worry.

Essentially, stress conditions our minds and bodies to expect more stress. The more frequently we experience these anxious reactions, the easier it is for our brain to return to them.

We get stuck in a cycle of hypervigilance, constantly waiting for the next attack.

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Stress and Our Autonomic Nervous System (ANS)

Chronic stress has a profound effect on the autonomic nervous system (ANS), the network responsible for regulating automatic functions like heartbeat and breathing. This further impacts our limbic system, which handles emotion and memory.

The ANS has two primary states: “fight or flight” (sympathetic) and “rest and digest” (parasympathetic). When we’re under constant stress, neuroplasticity reinforces a sympathetic, or “on guard” state, reducing our ability to relax.

The limbic system, which includes structures like the amygdala, can also become dis-regulated under chronic stress. This state of limbic impairment keeps us in heightened emotional reactivity, even to small triggers. Studies show that over time, increased amygdala activity impairs the prefrontal cortex’s ability to regulate emotions, creating a loop that makes it hard to break out of anxiety cycles[iii]

Over time, this combination of ANS hyperactivity and limbic dysregulation creates a loop that reinforces anxiety. Anxiety, illness, overwhelm and even panic become our natural state of being and living.

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My Personal Story of Hypervigilance

I’ve lived a stressful life, even though it’s also been filled with unbelievable and amazing experiences.?

Hypervigilance is caused by a variety of experiences including childhood trauma, long term stress, and long-term chronic illness. Turns out I have all three to thank for mine.

·????? I was abused as a child for over ten years, nasty, ugly stuff. Those memories came up for me about 12 years ago - that was a shock.?

·????? I’ve also worked in high tech as a consultant, working 80+ hour weeks for over 3 decades. I helped create and launch new advanced technology businesses, not exactly the peaceful calm life.

·????? For the last decade I’ve fought advanced Lyme disease with all its physical impacts. Most recently, I was diagnosed with black mold toxicity inside my body. That took me down hard - it’s violent, and constant.

Those experiences made me a prime target for hypervigilance, and I never ever knew it.

I am blessed to have an amazing functional medicine doctor who diagnosed me and started me on the protocol for black mold. But there was a big challenge. Even a drop of any of the binders needed to release the mold made me so sick I was in bed for days, violently ill.

That’s when my doctor suggested I explore the impact of stress and chronic illness (aka stress) on our minds. Specifically, our neuroplasticity.? What an eye opener that was.

I rewire PTSD and trauma, anxiety and overwhelm all the time in my clients’ minds.? I understand neuroplasticity and how to use it to the advantage of my clients. Yet I’d never really explored the physical power of those same negative programs over our bodies.

Sure, I knew that our minds impacted our bodies and our health. What I didn’t know was the impact that ongoing threat stimulus can have on our autonomic nervous systems, which impact every single organ in our body.

Once I understood what was going on, I could literally feel my body “spike” in response to so many stimuli in my environment.? Simple things that I would never have suspected sent a jolt through my system. For example:

·????? I got an unexpected email from a very unpleasant person I don’t even know about a topic that was unpleasant. I immediately felt my body tense, my fast inhale and my heart begin to race.

·????? I refuse to read the sensationalized US news media, but I do skim headlines from offshore, more balanced sources. I was skimming those headlines when it hit me. My entire body was growing tense, my hands were clenching, and my heart tightened in my chest.

·????? I was doing chores in my home, when I dropped something on the floor. I inhaled so quickly and held my breath, heart began to race and I literally jumped to try to correct my mistake - as if it was life threatening.

Those are just a few tiny examples.? There are so many more. Over a period of a few weeks, I’ve noticed a vast and wide array of triggers across every aspect of my life. I was literally on high alert, expecting disaster at any minute, and I didn’t even know it.

Today, I’m using the same mind methods that released the PTSD and trauma from my own and my clients’ anxiety… to yet again heal my mind. To rewire it from threat mode to a calm, peaceful state that allows my body to heal.

In just two weeks I’m already feeling the healing.

·????? I’m better physically…I was even able to take the mold binders 3 times in the last 2 weeks and not feel like I was going to die.

·????? I’m up and more energized for longer periods of time than in the past year or more.

·????? My mind is clearer. I’m finally motivated again after over a year of just plain exhaustion and total brain fog.? I had weeks when I couldn’t remember what day it was, what I did the day before, and worse.? I’d read what I wrote and didn’t understand it, or it would be total garbage. That’s truly scary if you’ve never experienced it.? NO MORE.? My brain is firing again and focused on something other than threat, threat, threat.

I am on my path back into my life and into healing. What a gift.?

Yet I had to wonder, how many of us are experiencing the same things in this insane world of ours??

Which is why I wrote this newsletter.

For now, I know more than ever that the power of my attention, combined with my mind methods, can and will ease the flinch to heal myself.

If you'd like to learn some ideas to reduce the stress impact on your mind, read the September newsletter, Survival Mind in Our Modern World.

To learn more about The Power Of Your Attention, download my free ebook, with no email required!

Endnotes

[i] https://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Life-Your-Brain-Live/dp/0452298881 Davidson, R. J. (2021).

[ii] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5843978/ Holmes, A., & Singewald, N. (2020). Mechanisms of chronic stress-induced prefrontal cortical dysfunction: Implications for anxiety and resilience. Neurobiology of Stress, 12, 100234.

[iii] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4561403/ Kim, J. J., Song, E. Y., & Kosten, T. A. (2018).