Man is a pre-eminently creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering — that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. – Notes from Underground (1866 )
Considering what was happening before beginning to experience anxiety, one can distinguish if it was cortex (Focus on images or thoughts) or amygdala-based ( Unexplained / Without awareness / out of blue/puzzling responses / Specific object, location or situation).
Muscle Relaxation
- Progressively focus attention and create tension, then completely relax
- First Step is to discover which areas of the body tend to tighten when anxious
- The most important goal is to achieve deep breathing with relaxed muscles
- Key to reducing Amygdala activation – Counter to amygdala-based Activation
- Tension is often experienced as a tight or strained feeling
- Relaxation is a loose and heavy feeling
Man Likes to make roads and to create, that is a fact beyond dispute. But why has he such a passionate love for destruction and chaos also? Tell me That! […] Because he is instinctively afraid of attaining his object and completing the edifice he is constructing? – Notes from Underground (1866 )
The lateral amygdala (LA) is regarded as the sensory input gateway, receiving information from both the thalamus and the cortical areas, including polysensory areas and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) -From: Neuroscience of Pain, Stress, and Emotion, 2016
Amygdala
- Language is based on associations
- Associations between events in close proximity in time
- Learn to focus on pairings
- Lateral Nucleus – Decision-making based on emotional memories
- Scan sensory information and determine if threatening
- Receives information from senses and forms emotional memories – Outside awareness and conscious knowledge
- Central Nuclues – Initiates stress response
Perhaps he only loves building it and does not want to live in it, but will leave it, when completed, such as ants, the sheep and so on. Now the ants have quite a different taste.[…] Perhaps the only goal on earth to which mankind is striving lies in this incessant process of attaining, in other words, life itself, and not in the thing to be attained, which must always be expressed as a formula, as positive as twice two makes four, and such positiveness is not life, gentlemen, but this is the beginning of death. – Notes from Underground (1866 )