Tame Your Anxiety: Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness

161 Pages·2019·3.91 MB·English

by  Loretta Graziano Breuning

TAME YOUR ANXIETY

TAME YOUR ANXIETY
Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness
LORETTA GRAZIANO BREUNING
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
Published by Rowman & Littlefield
An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom
Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK
Copyright © 2019 by Loretta Graziano Breuning
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Breuning, Loretta Graziano, author.
Title: Tame your anxiety : rewiring your brain for happiness / Loretta
Graziano Breuning.
Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2019] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018047271 (print) | LCCN 2018047913 (ebook) | ISBN
9781538117774 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538117767 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Happiness—Physiological aspects. |
Neurotransmitters—Popular works. | Self-care, Health—Popular works.
Classification: LCC QP401 (ebook) | LCC QP401 .B75 2019 (print) | DDC
612.8/23342—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047271
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For my grandchild,
Josephine Lorraine Breuning Evans

CONTENTS
Introduction 1
1 What Is Tame? 7
2 What Is Anxiety? 13
3 A Taming Tool That Works 25
4 Your Power over Your Brain 43
5 Design the Tool That’s Right for You 57
6 Keeping It Tame in the Long Run 75
7 Stock Your Pantry with Anxiety Tamers 87
8 Avoid These Six Pitfalls 105
9 Food and Anxiety 119
10 Help Others Tame Anxiety 131
Epilogue 141
Bibliography 143
Index 145
Keep in Touch 147
vii

Introduction
MY CLOSE ENCOUNTER WITH
CORTISOL
I changed a powerless feeling to a powerful feeling by focusing on the
power I had.
A
nxiety can start from something small and spiral into something big.
This happened to me recently, and it helped me build new skills.
The spiral started when I tried to clean up a messy pile on my desk.
I had ignored the pile for months because I was busy with a project. Now
the project was finished and the pile started to bother me. I decided to
invest time cleaning it up. I picked up the paper on the top of the pile,
but it required a decision I wasn’t ready to make. So I pulled a sheet from
the middle of the stack. That one stymied me too. After a few minutes of
frustration, the pile didn’t get any smaller and I decided to do it “tomor-
row.” The next day, just looking at the pile gave me a bad feeling. Those
old papers held reminders of old frustrations, disappointments, and failures.
The same thing happened with my sock drawer. It jammed when I
tried to close it because it was too full. I ignored this when I was busy with
the project, but now that I had time, I stopped to fix it. I picked up a sock
that I rarely used and thought about where to put it. I wondered why my
life no longer required this sock, and whether that would change. I couldn’t
answer that question, so I moved on to another sock. A bad feeling turned
on that was curiously familiar. I grew up seeing my mother rage when she
tried to shut an overstuffed drawer. I felt powerless and scared when my
mother raged. Now my socks were triggering that feeling despite my good
intentions.
Decluttering became a fad around this time. Everyone seemed to be
reading a book about “tidying up.” I didn’t aspire to be “tidy,” but there
1