You can do this by slowing down, taking deep breaths, and refocusing your thoughts. These steps allow your brain's frontal lobes to take over for the irrational amygdala. When this happens, you have control over your responses, and you won't be left feeling regret or embarrassment at your behavior.
Laughing Exercise
Laughter also produces endorphins, or “happy chemicals,” which trigger a positive feeling and change your mood to being happier, thus retraining the emotional feedback system in the amygdala.
It takes the chemicals that are released during the amygdala hijacking about 6 seconds to dissipate. Using this time to focus on something pleasant will prevent your amygdala from taking control and causing an emotional reaction.
The functions of the amygdala, hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex that are affected by emotional trauma can also be reversed. The brain is ever-changing and recovery is possible.
Magnesium, a calming mineral deficient in most diets, has the ability to “suppress hippocampal kindling” according to a study, and may be a guard against stress hormones entering the brain. The amygdala signals the entire body, creating tight muscles, increased sensitivities and insomnia.
Amygdala overgrowth has been linked to chronic stress in studies of other psychiatric conditions (e.g., depression and anxiety) and may provide a clue to understanding this observation in infants who later develop autism.
The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for this reaction. When a person feels stressed or afraid, the amygdala releases stress hormones that prepare the body to fight the threat or flee from the danger. Common emotions that trigger this response include fear, anger, anxiety, and aggression.
Several psychiatric illnesses are believed to involve pathology in the amygdala. For example, posttraumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, depression, anxiety disorders, and autism have all been linked to amygdala pathology (Aggleton, 1992, 2000).
You can do this by slowing down, taking deep breaths, and refocusing your thoughts. These steps allow your brain's frontal lobes to take over for the irrational amygdala. When this happens, you have control over your responses, and you won't be left feeling regret or embarrassment at your behavior.
Chronic stress can shrink the amygdala—that's the area of the brain that's responsible for processing emotions—which can lead to depression and anxiety. And not just that, but cortisol is toxic to the hippocampus, the area of the brain that's responsible for memory function.
Alterations in the amygdala's structure or function have been linked to various mental diseases, including PTSD, phobias, panic disorders, depression, schizophrenia, and autism. The symptoms of Kluver-Bucy syndrome are seen in patients with bilateral (both amygdalae affected) amygdala degeneration.
There is another area of the brain that is changed through meditation: the amygdala. But it doesn't get larger; it shrinks. The amygdala—that pesky corner of the brain that produces feelings of anxiety, fear and general stress—is physically smaller in the brains of expert meditators.
Luckily, the plasticity of the brain allows it to mold, change, and rebuild damaged areas as you practice new behaviors. So implementing healthy stress-relieving techniques can train your brain to handle stress more effectively and decrease the likelihood of ill effects from stress in the future.
the prefrontal cortex can shut down, allowing the amygdala, a locus for regulating emotional activity, to take over, inducing mental paralysis and panic.
The amygdala is critically involved in emotional processing, including fear responses, and shows hyperactivity in anxiety disorders. Previous research in healthy participants has indicated that amygdala activity is down-regulated by cognitively demanding tasks that engage the PFC.
Under long-lasting stress conditions, sustained hyperactivated HPA axis and the consequent high circulating glucocorticoids levels can lead to structural and functional disruption in amygdala via activating specific receptors (Gray and Bingaman, 1996).
Brain areas associated with anxiety include the amygdala, the hippocampus, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Abumaria et al., 2011). Under normal, healthy circumstances, magnesium “stands at the gate”, inhibiting stimulation of receptors in brain regions associated with anxiety (Lezhitsa et al., 2011).
Supplementation with magnesium, on the other hand, improves the nervous system's ability to recover. This mineral blocks the NMDA receptor, indicating it may have beneficial effects on the amygdala during and after a stressful event. Another mineral, chromium picolinate, may help conquer stress-related food cravings.
According to "Principles and Practice of Phytotherapy: Modern Herbal Medicine," adaptogenic herbs that can help to moderate activity in the amygdala and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression include rhodiola, Siberian ginseng, licorice and valerian root.