The Neuroscience of Anxiety

Few things are as unpleasant as anxiety. With the explosion of interest in mindfulness meditation and books like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, I’m hardly alone in wanting to worry less.

Recently, I read Anxious by NYU neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux is an expert on a lot of the neural processes behind fear and anxiety, and this book offers fascinating insights into the underlying mechanisms that make miserable.

At the same time, however, Anxious isn’t an easy read. Many sections involved deciphering neural circuit diagrams, trying to keep track of countless acronyms for minuscule brain regions. This essay is my attempt to summarize some of the main insights of the book to help my own understanding of anxiety and for anyone else who wants to worry less.

Fear and Consciousness

A huge chunk of the opening of the book is devoted to what, at first glance, seems to be a rather abstract problem: do the parts of the brain that are active when we observe fearful behavior really make us feel fear?

If you’ve followed any pop-sci articles on neuroscience, you’ve probably heard that the amygdala, an almond-shaped chunk of brain beneath the cortex, is the brain’s “fear center.” Scare someone (or a mouse in a laboratory) and the amygdala gets activated.