50 Ways to Rewire Your Anxious Brain: Simple Skills to Soothe Anxiety and Create New Neural Pathways to Calm presents actionable advice to combat the distress and limitations caused by chronic worry and make lasting changes in the brain to make it more anxiety-resistant. Catherine M. Pittman (Rewire Your Anxious Brain) and Maya Zayed Hoffman, licensed clinical psychologists who have dedicated their careers to understanding and treating neurological disorders, describe what they call the "shape" of anxiety, and guide readers toward understanding the contours, textures, and triggers of their anxiety experiences, with the ultimate goal of helping them create individualized exercise plans for calming those areas of the brain where fear, dread, panic, and anxiety originate.
Over the course of 50 brisk chapters, readers will learn how to "change the channel" on anxious thoughts, reduce compulsions, reframe fears, practice exposure exercises, and learn to diffuse terrifying, unwanted thoughts. For example, the simple mood-enhancing act of practicing genuine gratitude can, over time, profoundly alter our response to anxiety triggers.
The authors share tried and tested techniques to rewire the part of the brain called the amygdala, and train it to respond differently to threats. Because the emotional and physical responses from the amygdala are activated by the cortex, they include exercises for resisting "the cortex traps," such as instructions on how to stop holding oneself to unrealistic standards of perfection. With immediate practical application, the exercises in this book can transform the quality of life for those struggling with chronic tensions. --Shahina Piyarali, reviewer