The Science Behind Amygdalas

Learn how your nervous system works and how to manage anxiety effectively.

1. Neurobiology and Anxiety

Your nervous system generally operates without too much interference from you, but understanding its structure helps you better manage emotions like anxiety. It consists of:

• The Central Nervous System (brain and spinal cord) and
• The Peripheral Nervous System, which contains both voluntary (muscular control) and involuntary (autonomic) divisions.

The autonomic nervous system itself is divided into two critical branches:

• The Parasympathetic (known as the rest and digest system) – restores balance and promotes health, and
• The Sympathetic (often referred to as the fight, flight, or freeze system) – activates in response to danger. This component of the autonomic nervous system is what gets turned on by the amygdalas.

Problematic anxiety stems from overactivation of the primitive brain structures that link stimuli to danger: your amygdalas. While your amygdalas’ response is designed to protect you, overreaction or overactivation can lead to excessive anxiety and worry. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) helps you regulate these responses, improving your emotional resilience and increasing your quality of life - free from unnecessary anxiety.

2. Monkeys at a Watering Hole: A Lesson in Fear and Adaptation

Imagine a group of monkeys who rely on a single watering hole. One day at the watering hole, a pack of hungry jungle cats attack and kill many monkeys. Survivors of the attack are left terrified of returning to their previously comfortable watering hole. Even after the imminent danger is gone, the monkeys’ amygdalas continue to associate the watering hole with danger and stimulate anxiety and fear in the monkeys.

Eventually, thirst overcomes this conditioned response and the monkeys cautiously return. With repeated visits and no signs of ongoing threat, the monkeys’ fear diminishes. This is precisely how humans can adapt to our anxiety: through exposure, as well as cognitive reframing.

Dr. Gisis' Expected Danger Model helps measure actual risk by factoring in both the likelihood and severity of danger.

Applying Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles, you can train your amygdalas to react appropriately, helping with social fears, phobias or any type of unhelpful anxiety you may be experiencing.

3. CBT & Anxiety: How Thoughts Influence Feelings

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is one of the most effective methods for managing anxiety. It divides experiences into five interacting components:

1. Feelings – Rooted in survival instincts, emotions and habit (hunger, fear, joy, etc.)
2. Thoughts – Can be rational or irrational (as when influenced by overactive amygdalas)
3. Behavior – Anxiety encourages avoidant behaviors
4. Physiological Reactions – Involuntary body responses (sweating, regulating heart rate, muscle tension, etc.)
5. Situational Experience – External events

While we can't directly control our emotions, situations or physiology, we can control our thoughts and behaviors — the core of CBT. Changing these factors influences our feelings, situations and physiological experiences, allowing us to reshape our amygdalas' functioning; thereby, reducing our anxiety.

4. Amygdalas: Adapting to Anxiety with Technology

Unhelpful anxiety arises when the amygdalas trigger an excessive alarm – like a car alarm going off due to a large truck passing by. While our cognitive, rational brain can recognize and, in many cases, understand and name these alarms as false, our amygdalas cannot.

Using a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)-based model combined with neuroscience and AI technology, the Amygdalas app provides a way to interact with your nervous system in real-time by:

• helping you to track anxiety responses
• guiding you to reshape reactions
• applying CBT strategies and expected danger calculations in order to correct overactive fear responses

Amygdalas allows users to – for the first time – actively engage with their nervous system, addressing anxiety at its source using science-backed methods and the assistance of the latest in AI technology.

Download Amygdalas and take control of your anxiety today.