And hello to you and welcome to the Richard Nichols podcast, the personal development podcast series that's here to help inspire, educate and motivate you to be the best you can be.

I'm psychotherapist Richard Nichols, and this episode is called brain training and anxiety.

And if you're ready, we'll start the show.

Hello there you. Today, I'm all about brain training and how our experiences change, not just how we feel about ourselves

and the world, but actually physically changes our brain with every experience we have. And this is

helpful if you want to understand anxiety a bit more. So, if you do the maths, by the time we're 16 years old,

which is when we're sort of getting ready to learn more about ourselves,

we've already had almost 11 years worth of waking experiences.

Nearly 4,000 days, 96,000 hours or thereabouts, 6 million minutes of experiencing

the world. And of course, we're not going to remember much of that, are we? Because our brain

can't do that. So we only remember the important bits. Everything we experience gives our brain the chance to see if it's important or not.

It compares it to previous experiences and chooses whether or not it needs to be deleted or stored.

And our brain uses the meaning behind the experience to do that because the meaning behind everything gives us

an emotional reaction. And that emotional reaction, whether good or bad, gives our brain the

information it needs to say whether it needs to influence the next similar experience or not. Back in the day, we only

needed to survive one tiger experience to then have an emotional reaction to every single rustle

that we heard in the bushes that's behind us. Because our brain has latched onto the meaning behind the tiger, but also

stuck it onto a small bird flapping its wings as it takes off from a bush behind us.

Which is better to be safe than sorry, isn't it? Because at least now we're alive.

But is it? Is it really better to be safe than sorry? And I ask this because, on the whole, nowadays, probably not. Because the last time I looked. There were no tigers wandering about. I live in a fairly rural area. There are a few woods around here. There's plenty of flapping birds, but I'm yet to see a tiger.

But for somebody with anxiety, every time we survive the startling noise, our brain reacts as if we've just survived yet another tiger experience.

And behaviourists would say, to overcome it, you need to actually have some startling experiences

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