The idea that anxiety is a matter of hyper-vigilance makes sense. Our son tends to be anxious, and also very attentive to input from the environment (sound and vision). Perhaps these are related? If so, I wonder if it’s possible to train a hyper-vigilant child to translate his perception of his anxious feelings from “fear” to “attention”. He’s also very keen to know more about how the brain works, so maybe I’ll just explain what this researcher says about the amygdala. It’s not so easy to just “turn off” your fears, even if they’re without any cause, but knowing what the mechanisms are might help – by teaching him to think about it, maybe that would be a small step toward retraining the prefrontal cortex away from an anxious response.
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