I Have an Anxiety Disorder. How Should I Think So My Emotions Work Logically Instead?

Think Big; Think Small; then Try Your Best to Think Nothing at All

Think Big – the Whole Emotional Process

It is your logical thinking brain that asks the question ‘How can I make my emotions work logically’.  Let us take a look at a few facts about your logical thinking brain.

A Few Things to Know About Your Logical Left Thinking Neo-Cortex

Thinking – the process whereby electrical signals strung together in our brains create the illusion there is coordinated speech going on in our heads – exists in two small areas of your left cortex; here we will focus on the main one – your left frontal neo-cortex.

The purpose of your left frontal neo-cortex is to act as a well organised naming and indexing system which files away quick reference representations linked to imagery in our right neo-cortex.

For example we can think the word ‘church’ in our left neo-cortex and this can link up to a picture of a church in our right neo-cortex (our picture/pattern brain) and then we can take that further by remembering our own personal experience of a church and the people we knew there and then the conversations we had and the emotional experiences and it goes on … all starting from the word ‘church’ in the left neo-cortex.

Our thinking left neo-cortex is full of these kinds of well organised representations.

The Ego – our thinking protection and control system

The ego is a mechanism designed to protect our current representational structure - we regard this structure as ‘the truth’ for us as individuals.

Without our version of ‘the truth’ and the establishing of belief systems related to these representations we would have no ability to control our behaviours.

Our left neo-cortex creates stepped memories and instructional patterns which it then expects us to follow behaviourally.  Because of this controlling function it is only natural that when an emotional disorder presents itself the thinking mind assumes it is a problem caused by incorrect thinking to be found and changed in the thinking neo-cortex..

Your left neo-cortex, however, has certain characteristics that make it unsuitable for processing your emotions:

Characteristics of Your Left Neo-Cortex

Primarily, It is the emotional blocking brain part. In order for you to be able to think consciously at all your ARAS – your Ascending Reticular Activation System – blocks the the flow of emotional and visual signals coming up from your lower Reptilian Brain.  If this blocking did not occur you would never be able to wake up.  By doing this it ‘activates’ your conscious neo-cortex (both left and right) to pay conscious attention to the outside world.

If we took away your ability to block your emotions you would be unable to develop anxiety disorders because anxiety disorders are caused by habitual emotional blocking using the ARAS.  Without this blocking ability you would repeatedly have to surrender to the emotional responses as they left your body whenever you produced them.  Your thinking would be forever being closed down whenever this happened.

So, asking your thinking brain to resolve an anxiety disorder problem is a bit like asking the owner of a restaurant full of vermin to organise their own health and safety inspection and give themselves a clean bill of health.

Your thinking brain has a vested interest in not doing what needs to be done and is trying to convince you not to do so because it gets shut down for long periods when you do and it hates this – and it hurts.

During sleep both your Reptilian Brain and your right neo-cortex (your conscious pattern making brain) are active in releasing emotional energy through ‘dreaming’,  but when you are consciously awake and thinking most of this activity is suppressed.  Day-dreaming is the act of partially opening up the relationship between your right neo-cortex and your Reptilian and Limbic brains so they share imagery while you remain conscious.

Just pay attention to any self-critical comments that come up when you start thinking about your emotional states and what you are hearing is your ego fighting against  the truth it knows it is going to have to face eventually.  It tends to regard anything that does not follow its own rigid organising process as silly.  You can retrain it to think differently by showing it the logic inherent in your emotional process as a whole rather than the emotional content of the process.

A few more things about your left neo-cortex:

Your left neo-cortex is:

• judgemental and expects incoming information to link to information already stored.  It resists what it believes not ‘right’ as it attempts to match new information with old


• unable to work with a piece of information it has not named – any unnamed thing we are unsure of will keep grabbing at our attention until it is fully named, understood and then indexed as a representation


• impatient – it is time conscious and processes information at the speed of speech  (it hates emotional work because it is time consuming)


• concerned with Convergent Goal Setting – that is, with condensing and closing things down (you cannot get more condensed and closed down than a name)


• concerned with communicating with the outside world, rather than the inside world.  It adopts quite a lot of belief systems from the outside world and attempts to impose them on your inner world in the form of shoulds


• biologically designed to store the information it records in straight linear patterns with memories based on past experiences.

So when we ask the question ‘how do I make my emotions work more logically’ what we are really asking is how do I make the rest of me work the same way as my left neo-cortex?

You cannot achieve this directly, ever.  But there is a way to do it indirectly.

Just to repeat - although the content of your emotional system is not logical; your emotional system itself is.  Once your left neo-cortex has worked with your right neo-cortex (your pattern mind) long enough to see what really needs to be done it will be more willing to get out of the way of the process and allow itself to be temporarily shut down so the right neo-cortex can be allowed to do its job of processing emotional energy.

Following on from satisfactory emotional release the thinking left neo-cortex finds itself working much more effectively and sees the logic in the new way of doing things.

A Few Things to Know About Your Right Pattern-Making Neo-Cortex

Your right neo-cortex has an advantage over your left in that it never really sleeps.  During sleep your left gets switched off but your right neo-cortex communicates with the other visual parts of your brain, mainly your lower Reptilian Brain, all the time.

These two brains together discharge most of your emotional baggage collected during the day.  However, this process does not discharge the intense emotional charge attached to anxiety disorders such as obsessions and phobias.  This is probably because the imagery involved is stored in the Limbic Brain, and not in the Reptilian Brain, but also these areas of the brain are classed as ‘genuine things to be afraid of’.

Primarily, your right neo-cortex is the emotional releasing brain. It does not think with words – it thinks in patterns; in imagery – both internally generated imagery created by the imagination and in memories of external imagery from external life.

The right neo-cortex works in ‘reflections’ – reflections are similar to the scenes of a movie – they contain meaningful dialogue; action and emotional energy.  If the right neo-cortex is allowed to work with a reflection for long enough it will strip and release the emotional energy attached to the reflection and transfer the unemotional data contained over to the left neo-cortex for naming and indexing.

This is why in most cases looking in our current thinking for the solution to an emotional disorder issue is the wrong place to look – our current thinking is a record of the data stripped from past experiences.  The answers to our emotional issues are found in our right neo-cortex most of the time.

Your right neo-cortex:

• works with experiential information (imagery with feelings attached) to explore patterns and the connections between them


• is able to link up seemingly separate pieces of information and create meaning out of them – identifying connections and rhythms


• processes this information very slowly – when it comes to processing blocked emotional energy the right neo-cortex can take a long time because first the energy must be unblocked; then sometimes it completely floods the brain and then the information contained in the blocked feelings – such as the issue which caused them – takes some time to emerge as an insight


• shows us things we do not want to see because the messages do not fit in with our ‘logical’ plans – for example that the partner we love does not love us


• is divergent in thinking – it likes to open and connect one pattern with other patterns – it is concerned with the future, not the past


• communicates mostly with our internal world


• is biologically designed to store the information it records in clusters – I think of these clusters as ‘lands of the mind’.

One other thing to say here is your right neo-cortex sees, but it does not think.  It experiences and sees the experience and communicates to your lower brains what it sees in pictures.

Your left thinking neo-cortex cannot communicate with your lower brain parts directly – they do not understand the language.  But what it can do is use words linked to pictures in the right neo-cortex and then the right communicates those images downwards.

That is the Think Big part of the equation – the overall model of why the right neo-cortex, your picture mind, is the mind you need to start working with.

Think Small – to heal an emotional issue focus on as few things as possible as intensely as possible

When you decide to heal using systematic exposure therapy (or just plain unsystematic exposure therapy by just facing the triggering issue and the emotions attached come what may) there are only a few things you need to focus on – and concentrated focus is the most crucial but difficult thing to do.  You need to turn your focus inwards and go towards:

• the feelings (you will sense there is a place inside, or even maybe to one side of your body – I know that sounds weird but that is how it sometimes feels) coupled with


• the  image or issue.

If you have an obsession you have no other option but to take this approach when applying exposure therapy but with a phobia you can go into the feeling as you approach either the external trigger or an imagined inner version - most phobia sufferers I have spoken to can practice self-therapy using just their imaginations.

As always, I would recommend if you have a serious anxiety disorder you seek professional support from your doctor first.

What if I just have feelings I want to get rid of and there is no attached imagery or trigger?

Think small again and go just into the feelings repeatedly – this will be very difficult.  What you find eventually is that imagery starts being generated and you should then focus on that.

Sometimes the imagery generated is not related to the issue that triggered the emotional response but is an image designed to help you in the release process..

The closer to the central core of the feeling you move the faster you dissipate the energy driving it.

Trying to Think Nothing at All

The simple truth is that an anxiety disorder is nothing more than an intense emotional charge stored in the body displaying the fact by flashing imagery at you through one of your right neo-cortex pattern-brain clusters.

It is quite natural to suspect there are all kinds of hidden issues, thoughts and feelings going on inside yourself when suffering with this kind of condition but if you take that kind of self-mistrust as a given side-affect of the condition itself there will come a day when you master your emotional system and logically remove any emotional problems you have.

Regards - Carl