Your
brain, in a manner of speaking, vibrates. It operates in frequencies
that we refer to as brain waves. There are four of these—delta,
theta, alpha and beta. Delta are the lowest frequency waves, at about
four pulses per second, and are active when you are asleep. Theta
waves, at four to seven pulses per second, are a sign of somnolence,
a fancy term for being half asleep. Alpha waves, at seven to thirteen
pulses per second, indicate that you are awake and alert, with your
mind open to your creative capacities. Beta waves are the
fastest—thirteen to sixteen pulses per second—and show that you
are completely alert or, at the upper end, anxious.
During
normal waking hours, alpha brainwaves represent your default mental
status. When you are emotionally upset—anxious, frightened,
angry—and your beta waves have been running the show for a while,
your brain will start producing extra amounts of a chemical known as
gamma-aminobutyric acid, GABA for short, which locks into the
neuroreceptor sites in your brain and calms things down.
If
you take your anxiety to a physician, you are likely to leave the
doctor’s office with a prescription for a tranquilizer. What
happens when you take that drug is that it fills up the same
neuroreceptor spaces that GABA would fill. Once again, you calm down,
but only until the drug wears off. So you take some more, and it
works for a while, then wears off again, so you take more. After a
period of time, as we know, your body habituates, and the drug is
less effective, so you need a larger dose. That starts a vicious
cycle that ends with the drug not working at all.
That
is only part of the bad news. Another problem is that, after you have
been taking anti-anxiety drugs for a while, your body begins to lose
the ability to produce its own natural, home-grown
tranquilizer—GABA—the same way people who depend on laxatives
lose the ability to have a normal bowel movement, and the way taking
testosterone supplements weakens a body’s ability to create its own
male hormone.
In
too many cases, when a tranquilizer loses its effectiveness, the
response is to go back to the physician, get a prescription for a
different tranquilizer drug, and start the same, sad trip all over
again.
There
is a better way. It’s called hypnosis. Our next blog will take a
look at why hypnosis and hypnotherapy offer a much more powerful, and
permanent, solution to the problem of anxiety.