Category: Anxiety

Social anxiety disorder is thought to affect around 1 in 8 people, and is more than just being shy.

A combination of SSRI antidepressants and cognitive-behavioural therapy is the best treatment for social anxiety disorder, a new study concludes.

Brain scans showed that the combined therapy reduced the neural response in the amygdala — part of the brain central to processing fear and anxiety.

Social anxiety disorder is thought to affect around 1 in 8 people, and is more than just being shy.

The condition often strikes at important moments in people’s life and usually leads to a significant reduction in their quality of life.

The study compared people with social anxiety who received therapy plus antidepressants with those receiving therapy plus a placebo.

Nine weeks after treatment, those who had taken the antidepressant combined with the therapy were doing better.

They were even more improved compared with the other group 15 months later.

Dr Malin Gingnell, one of the study’s authors, said:

“We have now preliminary support to say that the SSRI escitalopram adds to the effect of CBT for social anxiety disorder and that clinical response is linked to reduced activation of the amygdala.”

Set against this study, a recent review of the research I reported found that:

“Social anxiety disorder is most commonly treated with antidepressants, but these are not the most effective treatment.

…cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is more effective and the benefits continue after the initial treatment has finished.

[…]

The researchers found that it was the psychological therapies that were the most effective.

As a result these should be the first choice treatment.

Antidepressants were also effective, but were associated with side-effects, and they don’t work for some people.

More importantly, the beneficial effects of medication tend to wear off after discontinuation.”

The study was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry (Gingnell et al., 2016).

Anxious woman image from Shutterstock

Research tests the aroma oils that can reduce anxiety and blood pressure.

Giving yourself a foot massage with aromatherapy helps reduce anxiety and blood pressure, new research finds.

People in the study gave themselves 45-minute foot massages three times a week for four weeks.

The researchers describe the essential oils they used:

“…we included lavender, ylang-ylang, marjoram, sandalwood, and chamomile in the aroma oil blend.

Lavender relaxes the autonomic nervous system, calms and relaxes the level of emotion, and alleviates insomnia, while ylang-ylang decreases BP and HR, and reduces depression and stress.”

Fifty-seven people took part in the study, which lasted 8 weeks, including four weeks of foot massages.

Half did the massages while the other half acted as a control group.

Those in the foot massage group showed lower blood pressure and anxiety after two months in comparison to the control group.

Those in the massage group also had better mental health afterwards.

It is not completely clear if the aromatherapy added anything to the foot massage, the study’s authors admit:

“[although] it was difficult to differentiate the effects of the aromatherapy from the effects of the massage therapy… [the combination] may be an effective way to increase mental health and improve blood pressure.”

Other studies, though, have suggested the benefits of particular aromas, the authors write:

“…studies have shown that ambient odors of lavender and orange decreased anxiety and lightened mood in a dental office, and massages with aroma oils promoted skin absorption of the oils stimulating blood and lymphatic circulation, improving the oxygen and nutrient supply, relaxing muscle tone, and relieving emotional stress.”

In comparison to other types of treatment for hypertension, though, self-administered foot massages looks like a good bet:

“Other non-medical treatments that prevent hypertension, such as changes to an unhealthy diet, reducing excessive energy intake, increasing physical activity, and decreasing tobacco use, are not easy to maintain.

In contrast, our trial suggested that performing self-administered aroma foot massages is easy and may improve BP more than other interventions that require participants to make a lifestyle change.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Eguchi et al., 2016).

Could the famous ‘10,000 hours’ rule be wrong?

For elite athletes, practice only accounts for 1% of the difference in how they perform, new research finds.

Outside sports, practice may have surprisingly little to do with performance.

It flies in the face of the old axiom that ‘practice makes perfect’.

The researchers also found that it didn’t matter how early in life the athletes started their sport.

Dr Brooke Macnamara, lead author of the study, said:

“While practice is necessary for elite athletes to reach a high level of competition, after a certain point, the amount of practice essentially stops differentiating who makes it far and who makes it to the very top.”

The results come from an analysis of 52 separate studies on the relationships between performance and practice.

Practice mattered more at levels below the elite, but still not as much as many might imagine.

Across all skill-levels studied, practice accounted for 18% of the difference in performance.

Dr Macnamara said:

“Human performance is incredibly complex.

Multiple factors need to be considered, only one of which is practice.”

The idea that 10,000 hours of practice is enough to create an expert or elite athlete could be mistaken, Dr Macnamara thinks:

“The concept of 10,000 hours taps into the American ideal of hard work and dedication leading naturally to excellence.

But it does not account for the inherent differences across people and across sports.”

Early specialisation in one particular sport was not an advantage, the researchers found.

“People and parents who buy into the 10,000-hour rule can push early specialization in a sport, leading to physical or mental burnout before it’s clear that a child even has a penchant for that sport.”

Other factors thought to be important over and above practice include:

• performance anxiety,
• working memory,
• confidence,
• fast-twitch muscles,
• and maximum blood-oxygenation.

Dr Macnamara said:

“As we look at multiple factors, I don’t think we’ll ever be able to–with 100 percent certainty–predict someone’s performance in any activity, not just sports.

But we can do better than we’re doing now.”

The study was published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science (Macnamara et al., 2016).

Image credit: Justin Smith

Workaholics are two or three times more likely to suffer these psychiatric disorders.

People who are workaholics are also more likely to experience other psychiatric disorders, new research finds.

Workaholism often co-occurs with OCD, ADHD, depression and anxiety.

The conclusions come from a very large study of 16,426 adults in Norway.

Dr Cecilie Schou Andreassen, the study’s first author, said:

“Workaholics scored higher on all the psychiatric symptoms than non-workaholics.

Thus, taking work to the extreme may be a sign of deeper psychological or emotional issues.

Whether this reflects overlapping genetic vulnerabilities, disorders leading to workaholism or, conversely, workaholism causing such disorders, remain uncertain.”

7 signs of workaholism

Rate of these on a scale of 1 (never) to 5 (always).

• You think of how you can free up more time to work.
• You spend much more time working than initially intended.
• You work in order to reduce feelings of guilt, anxiety, helplessness or depression.
• You have been told by others to cut down on work without listening to them.
• You become stressed if you are prohibited from working.
• You deprioritize hobbies, leisure activities, and/or exercise because of your work.
• You work so much that it has negatively influenced your health.

Scoring a 4 (often) or 5 (always) on four or more of these statements indicates a workaholic.

Some of the highlights of the findings include:

• 32.7 per cent met ADHD criteria (12.7 per cent among non-workaholics).
• 25.6 per cent OCD criteria (8.7 per cent among non-workaholics).
• 33.8 per cent met anxiety criteria (11.9 per cent among non-workaholics).
• 8.9 per cent met depression criteria (2.6 per cent among non-workaholics).

Dr Andreassen concluded:

“In wait for more research, physicians should not take for granted that a seemingly successful workaholic does not have ADHD-related or other clinical features.

Their considerations affect both the identification and treatment of these disorders.”

The study was published in the journal PLOS One (Andreassen et al., 2016).

It may be possible to stop the transmission from mother to child.

Anxiety, a heightened response to stress and other psychiatric problems can be passed by non-genetic means, new research finds.

For example, it is well known that Holocaust survivors pass on an increased vulnerability to stress to their children.

Professor Miklos Toth, a senior author of the study, said:

“Genetic and nongenetic inheritance are different but complementary mechanisms to pass information from one generation to the next.

It will be necessary to develop tools to determine if the familial occurrence of a disease is based on a nongenetic, as opposed to genetic, mechanism.

On a positive note, nongenetic, in contrast to genetic, inheritance of disease is not inevitable and, if recognized in time, may be prevented.”

The conclusions come from a study of mice, in which it is possible to separate out genetic influences from others.

Professor Toth said:

“Our study helps explain why individuals, even within the same family, can display various combinations of anxiety, depression, bipolar disease and schizophrenia symptoms.

We found that, at least in mice, each symptom can be passed on by a distinct mechanism.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Network brain image from Shutterstock

People do better when their environment fits their personality, study finds.

People prone to anxiety may recover from stress better in a busy urban environment.

The findings fly in the face of research finding that natural environments restore people’s cognitive abilities.

For more neurotic people, busy urban environments may beat quiet natural environments for helping them calm down.

Dr Kevin Newman, the study’s first author, said:

“Previous literature says that natural environments tend to restore cognitive abilities better than urban environments, but we questioned whether this one-sided perspective was accurate.”

For the research people were asked to perform tasks that exhausted them mentally.

For example, they had to write sentences without using the letters ‘A’ or ‘N’.

Afterwards they were given tasks that exposed them to words that either suggested an urban environment or a natural setting.

Surprisingly, those with more neurotic personalities did better when the test suggested a busy urban environment.

People lower on neuroticism, though, did better when peaceful natural settings were suggested.

Dr Newman said:

“People tended to do better in environments that fit with their personality.

Imagine someone with a neurotic personality like Woody Allen.

If you put him in a forest it could be very off-putting rather than rejuvenating.”

Neurotic people also showed better performance when exposed to words that were frenetic but related to nature, such as ‘cliff’ and ‘thunder’.

Similarly, non-neurotic people did better when exposed to calm words related to the city.

For the non-neurotic, seeking out a quiet place in the city like a library or bookstore could provide the required cognitive recovery.

The study was published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology (Newman & Brucks, 2016).