Anxiety and The Soul

How brain science can help you leverage this connection to live a calmer life

What is the soul?
The soul is an immaterial and eternal essence that gives life to a living being. While some physician soul photographers have claimed to have captured images of the soul on their photographic plates (1), most people believe that the soul is formless and invisible (2).What is the connection between the soul and the brain?
While there is no definitive connection between the soul and the brain, several lines of thought merit consideration.Idea 1: People who believe in a soul intuit that it exists. Intuition can be detected in the brain (3). One key collection of neurons, the insula, has been implicated in intuition. When stimulated, this can lead to a mystical feeling of bliss and clarity (4), suggesting that “intuition” and “the soul” may be connected through the insula in the brain.
Idea 2: Descartes believed the pineal gland was the “Seat of the Soul.” (5) This may be due to its widespread connections in the brain (6).Idea 3: Ceylan and colleagues described the soul as “uninhibited brain activity” that is reduced into consciousness by the rules of quantum physics (7). This activity, initially invisible and beyond space and time, is gradually converted into “countable” measurable phenomena (e.g., brain activity while being intuitive).Idea 4: The precuneus and its connections, associated with the awareness that you are intimately connected with everything in the world, may reflect reuniting with the soul. Its connections are disrupted in several anxiety states (8,9) suggesting that restoring its function may activate non-dual awareness (10).These four perspectives suggest that you may connect with the soul when your brain’s capacity for intuition, internal connections, disinhibition, and connection with the world is enhanced.Implications for the treatment of anxiety
If “anxiety is the wound of the soul”, then this implies that we have hurt the soul by disconnecting from intuition, feeling stressed, denying other faculties besides logic, and seeing ourselves as separate from the world. This leads to preoccupation with the brain, body, and mind that can be seen in panic attacks, worry, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social anxiety and many other mental illnesses.Soul-based therapy for anxiety
While psychotherapies tend to focus on cognitive or emotional processes and psychopharmacology acts on the brain, their impact on anxiety is questionable. A recent field‐wide assessment of psychotherapies and pharmacotherapies for psychiatric disorders in adults from 102 meta‐analyses with 3,782 randomized controlled trials and 650,514 patients found only small benefits overall for both types of interventions. (11)
Contrary to contemporary methodologies that rely on brain changes to prove impact, a soul-based therapy would suggest that what could be helpful would be immeasurable, though because it unites the objective with the subjective, it may be possible to find some correlations between the brain and soul-based therapy.While earlier studies have implied that belief in a soul is like a seizure due to brain defects (12), more recent studies on psychedelics, for example, suggest that ego dissolution correlates with brain entropy (13), and can be therapeutic for anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (14). A non-egoic and non-dual experience may heal the “wound” of the soul.
How do you achieve this? Aside from meditation (15), yoga (16), breathing techniques (17), psychedelics (18), and virtual reality (19) experiences, you need to empty your mind of thoughts and feelings and ignore the representations (anxiety, fear, sadness) that block your access to non-dual awareness (20).Implications for self-care
While conventional psychotropic medications and psychotherapy can be helpful, consider non-dual therapies that reconnect your body with your soul. This is a state characterized by an experience of nonseparation, compassion, and love, and it also leads to enhanced well-being (10). All of the mechanisms above from meditaion to virtual reality, can be regarded as non-dual therapies. While there are no non-dual therapists per se, even in a traditional therapy, ask quesitons about your non-duality and explore them: What intuitions am I ignoring? What paradoxes live uncomfortably in you and how can you reconcile them? What are you inhibitnig? How can you feel mroe conencted to the outside world?This suggests that while your brain is likely involved in an experience of the soul, it is likely not the seat of it but part of a chain of collective consciousness that envelops us all (21). Being steeped in this form of awareness by harnessing your brain’s power for intuition, internal connection, integration, and external connection will likely heal the damaging wounds to the soul that anxiety signals (9).