Hey guys. Welcome to Not Another Anxiety Show. I'm your host, Kelly Walker, and today I'll be answering a question from one of our wonderful listeners.

So, one listener writes in, how do I keep falling for the same fear? I must be an Egypt.

I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, but apparently Egypt is slang for idiot.

I know because I had to Google it. Who invited the cool kid, right?

Well, I can assure you, and everyone else that feels like they're in the same boat, that you are in fact not an idiot. Fearful

memories are actually significantly easier to create and hang on to. According to one study

from a university in Germany that I'm not even going to try and pronounce

because I'll just butcher it, stress hormones like cortisol, which flood the body during

and immediately after a fearful experience, help our brains burn in memories of that scary event.

Keep in mind, there doesn't have to be an actual danger to burn in a memory of this scary event.

All it takes is the feeling of fear, which we know is often a false or misinterpreted alarm.

No doubt that frustrating tendency to remember fearful situations so vividly is helpful from an evolutionary biology perspective.

The more likely we are to remember scary and or dangerous situations, the better will be able to

avoid them or react faster to them in the future. However, this new research has shown that cortisol

and other stress hormones don't stop there.

No, no, those super helpful hormones are actually released again and again in the future

as we think back on particularly stressful or fearful events.

This feedback loop is partly responsible for why memories are so overwhelming for people struggling with PTSD,

or why fearful thinking is so repetitive for people struggling with generalized anxiety.

However, understanding how and why our bodies and brains are behaving this way

makes it easier for us to accept those fearful or anxious thoughts for what they really are,

a memory.

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