Hi, I'm Dr John Kemwell, and welcome to the short tutorial on your brain on anxiety and stress. It is essential to know how our brain responds to the stimuli which trigger an anxiety response so that you are equipped to deal appropriately with anxiety. Let me highlight the key areas of your brain that are involved, and then I will explain what happened inside the brain. The phallamous is the central hub for sites and sound. The phallamous breaks down incoming visual cues by size, shape and colour, and auditory cues by volume and dissonance, and then signals the cortex. The cortex then gives raw sites and sounds, meaning enabling you to be conscious of what you are seeing and hearing. And I mention here that the prefrontal cortex is vital to turning off the anxiety response once the threat is positive. The amygdala is the emotional core of the brain, and primary role is to trigger the fear response. Information passing through the amygdala is associated with an emotional significance. The bed nucleus of the striatermals is particularly interesting when we discuss anxiety. While the amygdala sets off on immediate burst of fear, the BST perpetuates the fear response, causing longer term unease, typical of anxiety. The locus ceruleus receives signals from the amygdala and initiates the classic anxiety response, like a heartbeat increase blood pressure, sweating and pupil dilation. The hippocampus is your memory centre, storing raw information from the senses, along with emotional baggage attached to the data by the amygdala. Now we know these keep arms, what happens when we are anxious, stressed or fearful. Anxiety, stress and of course fear are triggered primarily through your senses. The frightened sound are first processed by the thalabas, filtering incoming cues and sent directly to the amygdala or to the cortex. Smell and touch go directly to the amygdala, bypassing the thalabas altogether. This is why they smell as often evoked very powerful memories or things. Anx cues from your incoming senses that are associated with a threat in the amygdala, whether that threat is real or not, current or not, are immediately processed to trigger the fear response. This is the expressway, it happens before you consciously feel the fear. The hippothalmus, a pituitary gland, cause the adrenal glands to pump out high levels of the stress hormone cortisone. Too much cortisone, short circuits, the cells of the amygdala, making it difficult to organise the memory of a trauma or a stressful experience, memories lose context and become fragment. The body's sympathetic nervous system shifts into overdrive, causing the heart to beat first, blood pressure to rise and lungs to hyperventilate, perspiration increases and the skin's nerve endings tingle causing the goose bumps. Your senses become hyper alert, freezing you momentarily as you drink in every detail, adrenaline flutters to the muscles, preparing you to fight or run away. The brain shifts focus from digestion to focus on the potential dangers, sometimes causing evacuation of the digestive traps through urination, defecation or vomit. If you're about to be eaten as someone else's dinner, why bother digesting your own? Only after the fear response has been activated does the conscious mind kick in. Some sensory information takes a more thoughtful route from the thalmus to the cortex. The cortex decides whether the sensory information warrants a fear response. If the fear is a genuine threat in space and time, the cortex signals the amygdala to continue being on alert. Fear is a good, useful response essential to survive. However, anxiety is a fear of something that cannot be located in space and time. Most often it is that indefinable something, triggered initially by something real that you sense, but that in itself is not threat, but it is associated with a fearful memory. And the bed nucleus of the striatum perpetuate that fear response. Anxiety is a real fear response for the individual feeling anxious and anxiety can be debilitating for the sufferer. Now that you know how anxiety happens in your brain, we compare tension to how we can deliberately use three frontal cortex to turn off an inappropriate anxiety response once is ready to pass.