In my last article, I explained what emotional memory is — how it doesn’t just store facts, but feelings. And how you can carry those feelings in your body long after the event has passed.
But what I want to explore here is something I see so often in therapy — and something I’ve lived myself:
How emotional memory can be the hidden engine behind anxiety.
You might feel anxious in certain situations and not understand why. You might find yourself bracing for things that aren’t actually happening — or reacting strongly to something small, even though your thinking brain is saying, this is fine, you’re fine.
And that’s where emotional memory steps in.
Your brain is designed to protect you. It remembers what hurt. It remembers what felt overwhelming, or unsafe, or lonely — and it stores that information deep in the emotional centres of the brain. Not as a story, but as a feeling state. And if something in the present even vaguely reminds your brain of that feeling, it reacts. Research shows that anxiety and depression can be linked to how your brain stores negative experiences — even without you realising.
The amygdala — the part of the brain responsible for emotional memory and threat detection — doesn’t wait for confirmation. It fires fast. It says: This feels familiar. I don’t like it. Get ready to run.
And so you feel anxious. Even if there’s no real threat.
That’s the painful part. The situation you’re in might be completely safe, but your body doesn’t feel that way. Because your brain isn’t responding to the situation — it’s responding to an old emotional imprint.
This is why anxiety so often feels out of proportion. It’s not that you’re imagining things. It’s that your brain is mixing present moment experience with past emotional data — and responding accordingly.
You might walk into a room and feel uneasy. Someone might use a certain tone and you flinch internally. You might dread going to bed, not because anything bad happens at night now, but because your brain still carries a memory that says, this is when it gets scary.
I experienced this myself when I started having panic attacks. They began at night, and for a long time, even after the panic stopped, my body still responded to the evenings with tension. There were no more attacks, but the emotional memory was still there — shaping how I felt in ways that didn’t match what was actually happening.
And this is exactly what I help people work through in my practice — and in my course, Retrain Your Brain. We don’t just look at thoughts. We look at what the body remembers. The hidden patterns. The emotional loops that keep you stuck even when life on the outside is okay.
That’s the power of emotional memory — and also the good news.
Because if your brain learned these patterns once, it can learn something new.
You can update emotional memory by creating new experiences of safety, and repeating them. Bit by bit. This isn’t about “positive thinking” or pretending everything’s fine. It’s about helping your brain actually feel safe again — not just think it should.
That’s what changes anxiety long-term. Not willpower. Not forcing calm. But giving your system a new emotional blueprint.
CBT helps with this too. Especially when it’s body-aware. When we work with thoughts, we also work with the behaviours that reinforce emotional memory — the avoiding, the checking, the bracing. When those start to change, your brain gets new data. And slowly, it starts to believe you.
You’re not weak for feeling anxious. You’re not irrational. You’re carrying a system that’s doing its best to protect you, based on what it’s been through. Emotional memory is part of that — and it can be updated, reshaped, softened.
If this resonates, and you haven’t read it yet, you might find it helpful to go back to the first part of this series — What Is Emotional Memory? — where I explain the science behind how and where these memories are stored.
And if you’re ready to start shifting your own patterns, you can learn more about the course here.
