Anxiety Symptoms, Types, Causes and Treatments

Higher Wisdom Is Correlated With A Form Of Dance And Ancient Traditional Practices

Higher wisdom is correlated with these diverse activities.

Higher wisdom is correlated with these diverse activities.

Classical ballet has been linked to increased wisdom by a new study.

The research also confirmed that many varieties of meditation are linked to greater wisdom.

The link, the researcher shows, is down to how meditation reduces anxiety.

Dr Patrick B. Williams, the study’s first author, said:

“We are the first to show an association between wisdom, on the one hand, and mental and somatic practice, on the other.
We’re also the first to suggest that meditation’s ability to reduce everyday anxiety might partially explain this relationship.”

The meditators in the study performed different types of meditation, including:

Mindfulness
Buddhist
Vipassana

Those who practised classical ballet were included in the study almost on a whim.

The results showed that people performing all the different forms of meditation had greater wisdom.

Those practising ballet did not have as high levels as the meditators.

Still, the more ballet they did, the higher their levels of wisdom.

Dr Monika Ardelt, a wisdom researcher who was not involved with the project, said:

“That meditation is associated with wisdom is good to confirm, but the finding that the practice of ballet is associated with increased wisdom is fascinating.
I’m not going to rush out and sign up for ballet, but I think this study will lead to more research on this question.”

Professor Howard Nusbaum, one of the study’s authors, said:

“As we learn more about the kinds of experiences that are related to wisdom, we can gain insight into ways of studying the mechanisms that mediate wisdom.
This also lets us shift from thinking about wisdom as something like a talent to thinking about it as something more like a skill.
And if we think about wisdom as a skill, it is something we can always get better at, if we know how to practice.”

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

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How Virtual Reality Could Treat Depression

People experiencing depression had just 8 minutes of this innovative therapy three times.

People experiencing depression had just 8 minutes of this innovative therapy three times.

Immersive virtual reality therapy could soon be helping people with depression, a new study suggests.

The virtual reality therapy helped people to be less critical and more compassionate towards themselves.

This helped reduce their depression symptoms.

The study used an intriguing method to encourage people to be more compassionate towards themselves.

While wearing virtual reality headsets, people in the study comforted a virtual child who was crying.

As they did so, it appeared to respond positively to the compassion.

Then the virtual reality system gave them the impression they were in the position of the child.

They saw themselves comforting the child, except now they were on the receiving end.

Professor Chris Brewin, who led the study, said:

“People who struggle with anxiety and depression can be excessively self-critical when things go wrong in their lives.
In this study, by comforting the child and then hearing their own words back, patients are indirectly giving themselves compassion.
The aim was to teach patients to be more compassionate towards themselves and less self-critical, and we saw promising results.
A month after the study, several patients described how their experience had changed their response to real-life situations in which they would previously have been self-critical.”

The 15 depressed people who took part in the study repeated the 8-minute scenario three times, at weekly intervals.

Nine reported experiencing fewer depressive symptoms one month later.

Professor Mel Slater, who co-authored the study, said:

“We now hope to develop the technique further to conduct a larger controlled trial, so that we can confidently determine any clinical benefit.
If a substantial benefit is seen, then this therapy could have huge potential.
The recent marketing of low-cost home virtual reality systems means that methods such as this could potentially be part of every home and be used on a widespread basis.”

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

Image credit: Brandon Warren

The Online Anxiety Therapy That Changes People’s Brains In 9 Weeks

The amygdala is an area of the brain vital to the processing of the emotions.

The amygdala is an area of the brain vital to the processing of the emotions.

After nine weeks of online therapy, people experiencing social anxiety disorder show distinct changes in their brains, new research finds.

Online cognitive behavioural therapy can reduce anxiety and change brain volumes in critical areas.

The study recruited people with social anxiety disorder — one of the most common mental health problems.

Brain scans compared their brains before and after the online treatment.

Activity in the amygdala and anxiety reduced after the online cognitive behavioural therapy in comparison to a control group.

Mr Kristoffer NT Månsson, one of the study’s authors, said:

“The greater the improvement we saw in the patients, the smaller the size of their amygdalae.
The study also suggests that the reduction in volume drives the reduction in brain activity.”

The amygdala is an area of the brain vital to the processing of the emotions.

Mr Månsson said:

“Although we didn’t look at that many patients, this work provides some important knowledge — especially for all the sufferers.
Several studies have reported that certain areas of the brain differ between patients with and without anxiety disorders.
We’ve shown that the patients can improve in nine weeks — and that this leads to structural differences in their brains,”

The study was published in the journal Translational Psychiatry (Boraxbekk et al., 2016).

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Anxiety Is Linked To These Common Mental Health Problems By Neurocircuitry

Anxiety is a normal part of everyday life, but when anxiety starts to interfere with everyday life it can become a more serious problem.

Anxiety is a normal part of everyday life, but when anxiety starts to interfere with everyday life it can become a more serious problem.

Stress and anxiety have been linked to the same neurocircuitry in the brain as depression and dementia.

The new study suggests people need to find ways to reduce chronic stress or they could be putting themselves at increased risk of mental health problems.

Neuroscientists have found there is an extensive overlap between neurocircuitry for anxiety, depression and dementia.

Dr. Linda Mah, who led the study, said:

“Pathological anxiety and chronic stress are associated with structural degeneration and impaired functioning of the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which may account for the increased risk of developing neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression and dementia.”

Experiencing anxiety is a normal part of everyday life.

But, when anxiety starts to interfere with everyday life, it can become a more serious problem.

Chronic anxiety has also been linked to problems with memory and other health difficulties such as metabolic and immune disorders.

A previous study by Dr Mah and colleagues found that anxiety doubled the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease:

“Canadian researchers examined 376 people between the ages of 55 and 91 with ‘mild cognitive impairment’, and their chances of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease
[…]
The results showed that for people with mild anxiety symptoms, the chances of developing Alzheimer’s increased by 33%, for those with moderate anxiety it was 78% and for those with severe anxiety, the risk increased by 135%.
While depression has already been identified as a risk factor for developing Alzheimer’s, this is the first study to implicate anxiety separately.”

Dr. Mah said:

“Looking to the future, we need to do more work to determine whether interventions, such as exercise, mindfulness training and cognitive behavioural therapy, can not only reduce stress but decrease the risk of developing neuropsychiatric disorders.”

The study was published in the journal Current Opinion in Psychiatry (Mah et al., 2016).

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The Brain Training That Could Reduce Sadness and Anxiety

Brain scans showed that people who practised a difficult version of this task coped better with negative emotions.

Brain scans showed that people who practised a difficult version of this task coped better with negative emotions.

Computer training can change how the brain regulates emotional reactions, a new study finds.

Researchers have found that a simple attentional training task encourages the brain to ignore irrelevant information.

The task involves identifying whether arrows on the screen are pointing left or right.

At the same time people were asked to ignore other arrows on the screen placed there to distract them.

Brain scans showed that people who practised a difficult version of this task later coped better with negative emotions.

Dr Noga Cohen, the study’s first author, said:

“These findings are the first to demonstrate that non-emotional training that improves the ability to ignore irrelevant information can result in reduced brain reactions to emotional events and alter brain connections.
These changes were accompanied by strengthened neural connections between brain regions involved in inhibiting emotional reactions.”

Dr Cohen explained the results:

“As expected, participants who completed the more intense version of the training (but not the other participants) showed reduced activation in their amygdala — a brain region involved in negative emotions, including sadness and anxiety.
In addition, the intense training resulted in increased connectivity between participants’ amygdala and a region in the frontal cortex shown to be involved in emotion regulation.”

The researchers hope this could lead to new treatments, said Dr Cohen:

“It is our hope that the current work would lead to further testing and potentially the development of effective intervention for individuals suffering from maladaptive emotional behavior.
While acknowledging the limitations of this study, which was based on a relatively small number of healthy participants and focused on short-term effects of the training, this may prove effective for individuals suffering from emotion dysregulation.”

The study was published in the journal Neuroimage (Cohen et al., 2015).

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Being Anxious Has An Upside, New Psychology Study Finds

Social threats are detected by the brain in just 200 milliseconds.

Social threats are detected by the brain in just 200 milliseconds.

The brains of highly anxious people process social threats differently than those who are more laid back, a new study finds.

Anxious people process social threats with the part of the brain responsible for taking action.

This could indicate that anxiety does not lead to ‘oversensitivity’ or paralysis.

Rather, it could help anxious people to take action sooner.

Naturally, in most people the brain devotes more processing to social threats than it does to benign occurrences, the research confirmed.

Social threats are detected by the brain in just 200 milliseconds.

Less anxious people use areas of the brain involved in face recognition.

The most threatening facial expressions, the researchers found, were an angry face making direct eye contact.

Dr Marwa El Zein, the study’s first author, said:

“In a crowd, you will be most sensitive to an angry face looking towards you, and will be less alert to an angry person looking somewhere else.

In contrast to previous work, our findings demonstrate that the brain devotes more processing resources to negative emotions that signal threat, rather than to any display of negative emotion.”

The study was published in the journal eLife (El Zein et al., 2015).

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The Anxiety And Sleeping Drugs Linked to Dementia And Death

Drugs prescribed for anxiety, OCD, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions linked to dementia.

Drugs prescribed for anxiety, OCD, insomnia, post-traumatic stress disorder and other conditions linked to dementia.

Benzodiazepines carry an increased risk of dementia and even death.

Benzodiazepines include drugs marketed under the names Valium, Ativan, Klonopin and Xanax.

These drugs are often prescribed for anxiety and other mental health issues such as OCD, insomnia and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Research has now repeatedly linked these drugs to dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Dr Helene Alphonso, a psychiatrist and Director of Osteopathic Medical Education at Texas University, said:

“Current research is extremely clear and physicians need to partner with their patients to move them into therapies, like anti-depressants, that are proven to be safer and more effective.
Due to a shortage of mental health professionals in rural and underserved areas, we see primary care physicians using this class of drugs to give relief to their patients with psychiatric symptoms.
While compassionate, it’s important to understand that a better long-term strategy is needed.”

A recent study found that taking benzodiazepines for three to six months increased the Alzheimer’s risk by 32%.

Taking the drug for more than six months increased the risk by 84%.

Other studies have found comparable results.

Benzodiazepines may be particularly dangerous for older patients.

Older patients are more susceptible to injuries such as falls or accidental overdoses when taking the drug.

Dr Alphonso said:

“It’s imperative to transition older patients because we’re seeing a very strong correlation between use of benzodiazepines and development of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
While correlation certainly isn’t causation, there’s ample reason to avoid this class of drugs as a first-line therapy.”

Image credit: cora alvarez

Beat Dementia: 8 Changes Your Brain Will Thank You For

The everyday changes that could save you from dementia.

The everyday changes that could save you from dementia.

1. Follow the MIND diet

A new diet could lower the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by over 50%, a study finds.

It is known as the ‘MIND diet’, which stands for Mediterranean-DASH Intervention for Neurodegenerative Delay.

It is a combination of a Mediterranean diet and a diet developed for cardiovascular health (DASH: Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension).

Here are the ten “brain-healthy food groups”:

Green leafy vegetables,
other vegetables,
nuts,
berries,
beans,
whole grains,
fish,
poultry,
olive oil
and wine.

More details of the diet are here.

2. Avoid air pollution

Living further away from major roadways has been linked to better brain health by new research.

Long-term exposure to even moderate levels of air pollution, the study found, is bad for the brain.

Air pollution may cause poor cognitive function and ‘silent strokes’, which have been linked to dementia.

The study also found that people exposed to more air pollution had smaller brains.

3. Drink some alcohol…but not too much

For people over 60, light or moderate alcohol intake is associated with better recall of past events, according to a recent study.

Links were also found between increased size of the hippocampus — the area of the brain crucial to memory — and moderate alcohol consumption.

4. Get enough vitamin D

Low levels of Vitamin D are substantially associated with developing Alzheimer’s and dementia in older people, according to the best study conducted so far.

An international team of scientists used data from 1,685 elderly Americans who were followed for around five years (Littlejohns et al., 2014).

Those low in Vitamin D were 53% more likely to develop dementia.

Amongst those who were severely deficient, the risk increased by 125%.

Similar increases in risk were seen for Alzheimer’s disease: low levels of vitamin D increased risk by 69% and severe deficiency by 122%.

5. Remain calm

Anxiety, jealousy and moodiness in middle age are associated with doubling the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, a recent study found.

The study followed 800 women for 38 years and looked at the effects of their neuroticism on the chance of developing dementia.

Neuroticism is a personality trait that includes moodiness, worrying and anxiety.

In general, people who are neurotic are more likely to be anxious, depressed, jealous or envious.

More neurotic women who were under high levels of stress were more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

6. Sleep well…

Poor sleep is a channel through which Alzheimer’s disease can be triggered, a new study finds.

Professor Matthew Walker, one of the neuroscientist who authored the study, said:

“Sleep is helping wash away toxic proteins at night, preventing them from building up and from potentially destroying brain cells.
It’s providing a power cleanse for the brain.
[…]
This discovery offers hope.
Sleep could be a novel therapeutic target for fighting back against memory impairment in older adults and even those with dementia.”

7. …and get slow-wave sleep

Spending less time in slow-wave or deep sleep is linked to the loss of brain cells that can lead to dementia, a new study finds.

Slow-wave sleep, which occurs mostly in the first three hours of the night, is when the brain processes thoughts and memories.

The results also showed that those who got the most slow-wave or deep sleep performed better on tests of both thinking and memory.

8. Small amount of exercise

A relatively small increase in exercise is enough to boost brain function in older adults, a new study finds.

The amount of exercise that’s beneficial is equivalent to a brisk 25-minute walk several times a week.

Healthy over-65s who exercised more had better attention and ability to focus, the research found.

Professor Jeffrey Burns, co-director of the Kansas University Alzheimer’s Disease Center, said:

“Basically, the more exercise you did, the more benefit to the brain you saw.
Any aerobic exercise was good, and more is better.”

Brain image from Shutterstock

Stop Children ‘Catching’ Your Anxiety Before It’s Too Late

Anxious parents tend to pass on their anxiety to their children — but this doesn’t have to be the case.

Anxious parents tend to pass on their anxiety to their children — but this doesn’t have to be the case.

A new study finds that a family therapy intervention can help break the cycle of anxiety from parent to child.

The study included 136 families where at least one parent struggled with anxiety.

They were split into three groups, which received either:

a year’s therapist-directed family therapy,
or written instructions,
or nothing.

After just one year, 31% of children of parents with anxiety who did not go to therapy or get instructions had developed anxiety.

Dr Golda Ginsburg, a psychiatrist and first author of the study, said:

“The finding underscores the vulnerability of offspring of anxious parents.
If we can identify kids at risk, let’s try and prevent this.”

However, in the group that received therapy the number of children that developed anxiety in one year was just 9%.

In the instruction group, 21% developed anxiety.

Families in the therapy group were taught to identify the signs of anxiety and how to deal with them.

One is called ‘the reality check’.

It’s all about deciding which anxieties are worth paying attention to, explained Dr Ginsburg:

“We taught the kids how to identify scary thoughts, and how to change them.
For example, if a child is afraid of cats and encounters one in the street, the child can first identify the scary thought: “That cat is going to hurt me.”
Then the child can test that thought — is it likely that the cat will hurt me?
No, the cat doesn’t look angry.
It isn’t baring its teeth or hissing, it’s just sitting there.
OK, I can walk past that cat and it won’t do anything.”

The family therapy consisted of eight one-hour sessions, but Dr Ginsburg wonders if this is enough.

Just as you might go for a medical check-up, there could be value in having a psychological check-up from time-to-time.

Dr Ginsburg said:

“I’d say we need to change our model of mental health to a checkup method.
Like going to the dentist every six months.”

The research was published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (Ginsburg et al., 2015).

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This Outlook On Life Lowers Anxiety And Expands The Brain

Anxiety is reduced and the brain grows with this type of thinking.

Anxiety is reduced and the brain grows with this type of thinking.

Optimistic thinking could change areas of the brain related to anxiety, a new study finds.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is an area of the brain important in anxiety and optimism.

Now researchers have found that people who are more optimistic have larger OFCs.

The neuroscientists were inspired by studies that suggested a smaller OFC was linked to anxiety.

Dr Sanda Dolcos, who led the research, said:

“We wanted to go in the opposite direction.
If there can be shrinkage of the orbitofrontal cortex and that shrinkage is associated with anxiety disorders, what does it mean in healthy populations that have larger OFCs?
Could that have a protective role?”

Brain scans of 61 people identified the size of the OFC and levels of optimism, anxiety, depression and emotional states.

The results suggested that it’s optimism that links OFC size with anxiety.

Dr Dolcos said:

“You can say, ‘OK, there is a relationship between the orbitofrontal cortex and anxiety. What do I do to reduce anxiety?’
And our model is saying, this is working partially through optimism.
So optimism is one of the factors that can be targeted.”

Ms Yifan Hu, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Optimism has been investigated in social psychology for years.
But somehow only recently did we start to look at functional and structural associations of this trait in the brain.
We wanted to know: If we are consistently optimistic about life, would that leave a mark in the brain?”

Professor Florin Dolcos added:

“If you can train people’s responses, the theory is that over longer periods, their ability to control their responses on a moment-by-moment basis will eventually be embedded in their brain structure.”

The research was published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Dolcos et al., 2015).

Brain image from Shutterstock