Neuroscience has shown that our brains have the ability to store information.1 For example, if you’ve never seen a tennis ball, you may be unable to identify one. However, after learning what a tennis ball is, you’ll be able to recognize tennis balls for the rest of your life.
Learning about tennis balls changed something inside of you. One way to understand this phenomenon is to look at the brain as a computer. A computer allows us to store and retrieve information. Our brain does the same thing. Learning what a tennis ball is, “installed” new information that enables you to identify and name tennis balls.
We use stored information in our brains to make sense of the world
The information stored in the brain is used to make sense of what we see, hear, taste, think, etc.2 This explains why when we see a tennis ball, we internally know, “This is a tennis ball.”
The connection between information in our brains and anxiety
There are times when two people witness the same event, but only one becomes anxious while the other feels no emotion. Why is that? Is the difference in emotional reaction not because each person processed the event with different brain information?
The anxious person processed the event with stored information that instructed the body to be anxious. In contrast, the non-anxious person processed the event with stored information that didn’t instruct the body to be anxious.
The significance of this insight is that, like a computer, we can eliminate anxiety over time if we delete programming (information in our brain) that instructs the body to be anxious.
You may be asking, “Why would I want to make myself anxious or store information that makes me anxious?” That’s covered in this short read on The Anxiety Paradox. You’ll see why we knowingly or unknowingly store information that makes us anxious. We often do this as a way to protect ourselves. Awareness of the anxiety paradox enables you to develop and use alternative strategies and tools instead of anxiety as a way to protect yourself.
How do you change the information in your brain and eliminate anxiety?
If you agree with this article, then I encourage you to look at the information in your brain as a collection of beliefs3. This short article explains why you can do this. With this understanding, eliminating anxiety, and thus changing the information in your brain, can be done by uncovering and discarding anxiety-triggering beliefs.
Feel free to leave us with any questions.
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Rüdiger J. Seitz, Hans-Ferdinand Angel, Belief formation – A driving force for brain evolution, Brain and Cognition, Volume 140, 2020, 105548, ISSN 0278-2626, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2020.105548. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278262619303860) ↩︎
- Trinity College Dublin. “How do we learn? Neuroscientists pinpoint how memories are likely to be stored in the brain.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 21 November 2023. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/11/231121175231.htm>. ↩︎ ↩︎
- Rüdiger J. Seitz, Hans-Ferdinand Angel, Belief formation – A driving force for brain evolution, Brain and Cognition, Volume 140, 2020, 105548, ISSN 0278-2626, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bandc.2020.105548. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278262619303860) ↩︎
- Same as 1 ↩︎
