Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry Paperback – January 2, 2015

Rewire Your Anxious Brain by Catherine Pittman and Elizabeth Karle offers an enlightening exploration into the neuropsychology behind anxiety. If you've ever wondered why you feel anxious, panicked, or overwhelmed without understanding why, this book provides the answers through a science-backed, approachable explanation. What sets this book apart is how it explains the roles of two key brain areas: the amygdala, responsible for primal fear responses, and the cortex, which fuels worry and overthinking. By understanding how these pathways contribute to anxiety, the authors empower you to take control of your emotional responses with practical, easy-to-apply strategies. I found the examples and exercises particularly helpful in offering real-world solutions to manage anxiety. This book doesn’t just offer theory; it gives you actionable steps to rewire how your brain reacts to fear and stress, promoting long-term resilience. If you're looking for a deeper understanding of anxiety from a scientific perspective and want practical tools to help manage it, this is a must-read.

I suffer from Anxiety. I found this book and decided to buy it base on the review. Hope it can helps me to understand anxiety better. Is not a joke to suffer from this and try to live a normal life. I would rate it once I finish it.

There are books that go into much more detail on specific strategies for dealing with anxiety and panic attacks or avoiding them altogether. They would be a great supplement to this book. What this book does is lay out clearly, in layperson terms, the neuroscience behind anxiety and panic attacks. Once you understand better what's happening biologically, you can find better strategies for dealing with it. They give you a good place to start by covering the basics of exercise, sleep, mindfulness, and CBT strategies, and they include in the resources section other books that go deeper into those topics which is very helpful. This book helped give me perspective and some goals, and I thought it was pretty unique. I cannot recommend enough.

Decent read..Not only for health care professionals but for regular people who may not access professional help due to personal reasons. Doctor Pittman gives you practicalself-help steps that can help alleviate or eliminate anxiety throughout the book.

Though somewhat repetitive, this book is easy to read and clearly explains the basic neurobiology of fear, worry, anxiety, panic, and related conditions such as PTSD and OCD. Drawing on research by Joseph Ledoux and others, the book highlights the central role of the amygdala (the brain's primitive and subconscious 'fear center'), which receives surprisingly scant attention in many other books on this topic. In my opinion, understanding the underlying biology is very helpful, if not essential.The book also provides helpful evidence-based guidance on techniques to prevent or reduce the intensity of anxiety and related conditions. The key techniques are:- Get good sleep, aerobically exercise daily, and eat a healthy diet.- Breathe from the diaphragm/belly, which apparently activates the parasympathetic nervous system and thus counters activation of the sympathetic nervous system resulting from fear.- Remind yourself that thoughts and images are not reality and may be mistaken.- Disrupt problematic thoughts and images via distractions, play, music, and positive thoughts and images.- Mindfully 'defuse' from problematic thoughts, images, and sensations, and instead just 'be' in the present moment, calmly observing all that is happening without any need to interpret or respond in any way.- Meditate, including mindful meditation.- Deliberately and repeatedly expose yourself to the situations which generate unwarranted fear, in order to rewire the amygdala to no longer subconsciously associate those situations with fear. This can be an uncomfortable experience, but accept the discomfort and know that it will pass, and absolutely do not flee from the situations, because doing so will strengthen the fear.I highly recommend this book to anyone dealing with excessive worry, fear, anxiety, and related conditions.

In May of this year I began having panic attacks due to a traumatic event. At the time, I thought I was dying. I experienced these attacks over the next few weeks, and found out it was anxiety. A friend recommended this book and I began to devour it. A couple of weeks later I experienced the worst week of my life and was having panic attacks that would last multiple days in a row. Because of this book I was able to understand what was happening in my body, why it was happening and how to counteract it. Through practicing meditation, muscle relaxation and understanding that my thoughts were triggering the attacks, I am now feeling back to normal. I would not have known what to do if it wasn’t for this book.I didn’t realize anxiety could affect people to this level and this has given me an entirely new perspective on human suffering, as well as given me a great deal of compassion for people with anxiety disorders. If you are suffering with anxiety or having panic attacks, this book will help you tremendously (but be careful of triggers if you are sensitive to thinking about your anxiety). If you are really struggling and need help fast, I would skip to the last chapter because it lays out a step by step strategy with links back to the chapters.Most importantly: anxiety is treatable. You will get through this. This will pass. Let this be an opportunity for personal growth. Get therapy and don’t be ashamed. Also, know that there are emergency anxiety hotlines that you can call. I understand myself so much better and have a new sense of internal strength and confidence after having this experience and, honestly, I wouldn’t change anything about it, even though this has been the hardest time of my life.