Talking to a qualified therapist is one way to deal with mental health challenges such as depression and anxiety. Also known as psychotherapy, talk therapy can help people identify and change harmful thinking and behaviors. But did you know that psychotherapy can actually produce changes in the brain? Those changes can be detected with imaging techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging or fMRI which measures brain activity. In people with depression, psychotherapy has been shown to reduce activity in areas of the brain linked to sadness and depression like the amygdala which controls fear and emotion, the hippocampus which regulates emotions and memory, and the medial prefrontal cortex which controls high level thinking and problem solving.
Therapy might even change the shape of your brain which is far more flexible than we once thought. In people with social anxiety, taking an online psychotherapy course was shown to result in fewer symptoms along with reduced volume in the amygdala, the part of the brain linked to fear. People with a larger amygdala tend to have more anxiety. Medications such as antidepressants also affect the brain but in a different way than psychotherapy. A combination of the two can be especially effective for certain conditions.
Think of psychotherapy like strength training for your brain. The more of it you do, the tougher and more resilient your brain will become and the better you’ll be able to work through your problems..