Panic Attacks and Anxiety Healing: Let's Talk Neuroplasticity

The brain performs countless miracles every second of each and every day. I’d like to discuss one such miracle that brings so much hope for those suffering from mental and emotional disorders. It’s an amazing compensatory process of the brain known as neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is all about the brain reorganizing its neuron-to-neuron connections in response to new circumstances and environments. Though it performs its magic primarily during infant, toddler, and pre-pubescent brain development; the adult brain can be amazingly “plastic.” Neuroplasticity also comes into play within the context of disease and injury, explaining, let’s say, how a stroke victim regains a particular function even though the area of the brain responsible for that function has been badly damaged. Neuroplasticity occurs, shall we say, automatically as a process of development. But it can also occur by choice – willfully - giving us conscious management of the dynamic. And therein lies the hope.

A very, very wise man, Dr. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., and his colleagues at UCLA, discovered that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) can positively impact the brain machinations involved in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in a manner similar to psychotropic medications. Briefly, CBT, a psychotherapeutic intervention, is grounded in the pivotal role of thought as it applies to our feelings and behavior. If we’re experiencing distress, the mission of CBT is to identify the faulty thinking (cognitive distortions) causing the problems and teaching us how to swap these misguided thoughts with material that’s based in reason. Then it’s a matter of taking this enlightened thinking to the world and enjoying our more desirable responses and behaviors.

Well, the story goes that Dr. Schwartz revisited an interest in the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, a clear-minded, in-the-present-moment, self-observational technique that emphasizes viewing self without criticism or judgment. Schwartz discovered that when OCD patients practiced mindfulness meditation (as a CBT technique) upon experiencing distressful symptoms, a significant number of patients reported measurable improvement and relief. Wanting to understand why, Schwartz and his team examined PET scans administered before and after a course of CBT and found activity in the core of the brain’s OCD circuit, the orbital frontal cortex, decreased significantly. Furthermore, the observed decrease was about the same as what would be noted after meds therapy.

Schwartz needed no further evidence that choice, will, and neuroplasticity can alter the brain’s functioning, holding the potential to bring a whole lot of relief to a whole lot of people. Incidentally, I wanted to share this neat description of mindfulness before we move on. It’s from Buddhist nun and Tibetan Buddhism teacher and author, Pema Chodron. It fits perfectly here. “The root (of mindfulness practice) is experiencing the itch as well as the urge to scratch, nand then not acting it out.”

Neuroplasticity is all about neurons having the ability to establish new connections throughout our brains, facilitating all sorts of new functioning. So it’s a matter of the potential for the brain to be rewired. But it’s also about how specific neural circuits got wired in the first place, resulting in current patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior.

It’s pretty clear that neurons consistently interacting together form long-lasting functional relationships, just as neurons that no longer dance together lose their connections. And these dynamics are foundational in our hope for incredibly positive and powerful change throughout the lifespan, as our brains physically change - adapt - based upon the dynamics of neuroplasticity. If we acknowledge this capability and learn how to bring it to reality, all sorts of mental and emotional healing will be right at our fingertips.

If you want to learn more about neuroplasticity, check-out the work of Jeffrey M.Schwartz, M.D., Michael Merzenich, Ph.D., and V.S. Ramachandran, M.D., Ph.D. Amazing minds, and incredibly fascinating and useful information.