Anxiety Symptoms, Types, Causes and Treatments

How Cannabis Causes Paranoia

Cannabis study provides insight into how to treat serious mental disorders.

Cannabis causes short-term paranoia and it’s not related to memory problems, a comprehensive new study has found.

The researchers discovered that after being given the main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, THC (Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol), participants became anxious, developed low self-esteem and experienced unsettling changes to their perceptions (Freeman et al., 2014).

The study’s lead author, Professor Daniel Freeman, said:

“The study very convincingly shows that cannabis can cause short-term paranoia in some people.
But more importantly it shines a light on the way our mind encourages paranoia.
Paranoia is likely to occur when we are worried, think negatively about ourselves, and experience unsettling changes in our perceptions.”

There were 121 people taking part in the study, none of whom were suffering from mental illness, but who had used cannabis before.

Two-thirds of them were injected with THC, while the remainder were injected with a placebo.

The amount was equivalent to a strong joint.

Half the people who were given the drug experienced paranoid thoughts, compared with 30% in the control group.

On top of this there were a variety of other psychological effects of the THC:

thoughts echoing,
altered perception of time,
anxiety,
various changes in perception such as sounds being louder than normal and colours brighter,
lowered mood,
negative thoughts about the self,
and poorer short-term memory.

When they looked at the results statistically, they were able to estimate what was causing the paranoia.

It turned out that it wasn’t a poorer memory:

“The increase in negative affect and in anomalous experiences fully accounted for the increase in paranoia.
Working memory changes did not lead to paranoia.
Making participants aware of the effects of THC had little impact.”

The scientists think the study of how cannabis causes paranoia will help the treatment of mental disorders which included delusional states, like schizophrenia:

“The clear clinical implication is that reducing negative emotion in patients with delusions, eg, by reducing the tendency to worry, testing out anxious fears, and increasing self-confidence, will lead to improvements in paranoia.
Also, the identification, normalization, and reduction of subtle anomalies of experience (eg, by reducing triggers and learning to tolerate the confusing sensory experiences) are clinically warranted.” (Freeman et al., 2014).

Fascinatingly, some people in the control group who were given a placebo also acted stoned, and it was difficult to tell the difference Freeman explained:

“…the placebo produced extraordinary effects in certain individuals.
They were convinced they were stoned, and acted accordingly.
Because at the time we didn’t know who had been given the drug, we assumed they were high too.”

Image credit: Alistair Holmes

Brain Changes Associated With Casual Marijuana Use

Brain region involved in reward, learning, pleasure and impulsivity may be affected by light marijuana use.

Young adults who smoked marijuana at least once a week showed changes in two brain regions associated with motivation and emotion, a new study finds.

The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, compared the density, size and shape of the amygdala and nucleus accumbens in 20 marijuana users with 20 non-users.

The 18-25-year old marijuana users smoked the drug at least once a week, but were not dependent on it.

The comparisons between the two groups showed that the nucleus accumbens — an area involved in reward processing — was larger and a different shape in marijuana users.

Dr Carl Lupica, who studies drug addiction, commented:

“This study suggests that even light to moderate recreational marijuana use can cause changes in brain anatomy.
These observations are particularly interesting because previous studies have focused primarily on the brains of heavy marijuana smokers, and have largely ignored the brains of casual users.”

This study builds on previous research on animals showing that even relatively low doses of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) — marijuana’s main psychoactive component — can cause structural changes in the brain.

This study comes soon after research which reviewed 120 studies on the effect of marijuana use on the teenage brain.

The conclusions of that report were that for those with particular vulnerabilities, like neuroticism and anxiety, marijuana is not as harmless as many assume.

Findings about the connection between marijuana use and very serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, have been unclear, with some saying it can be a causative factor in those who are vulnerable while others find little or no evidence.

Unfortunately, what we currently know about the effects of marijuana on the brain is mostly from heavy users of the drug.

This study hints, however, that even relatively causal use of marijuana may cause changes in the brain.

We don’t yet know what the implications of these changes are, but they certainly warrant further investigation.

→ The effects of regular cannabis use on creativity.

Image credit: Peter Briones

Chronic Stress Early in Life Causes Anxiety and Aggression in Adulthood

Early exposure to a hostile environment causes long-standing behavioural problems in mice.

Neuroscientists have found that social stress early in life can cause long-term problems with anxiety and aggression.

The conclusion comes from experiments on mice which were exposed to chronic levels of stress at a young age (Kovalenko et al., 2014).

The mouse equivalents of adolescents were placed in a cage with an aggressive mouse for two weeks.

Although the mice were separated from each other, the adolescent was exposed to repeated short attacks from the aggressive adult mouse.

After their experience, the mice’s behaviour was tested.

The stressed mice showed high degrees of social defeatism, a lack of enthusiasm for social interaction and a lower ability to communicate with others.

Their brains also showed less growth in an area of the hippocampus that is affected in depression.

Abnormal aggression

Another group of mice were given a rest period after the exposure to the aggressive adult mice.

During the rest period, these mice recovered in terms of their brain cells and their behaviour.

However, they were still abnormally anxious and aggressive.

One of the study’s authors, Dr Dr. Enikolopov, explained:

“The exposure to a hostile environment during their adolescence had profound consequences in terms of emotional state and the ability to interact with peers.”

Image credit: PixCat

Fear of Math: How Much is Genetic?

A new study finds two ways that genetic factors are important in the fear of math.

The fear of math has a genetic component, according to a new study to be published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (Wang et al., 2014).

The avoidance of mathematical problems and equations by children and adults isn’t just down to bad early experiences with math or poor teaching.

To reach this conclusion, the study looked at the math anxiety of twins to tease out the genetic component.

Zhe Wang, lead author of the study, explained the results:

“We found that math anxiety taps into genetic predispositions in two ways: people’s cognitive performance on math and their tendency toward anxiety.”

In other words people are anxious about math not just because they are generally anxious people and they’re anxious about everything, but also because of genetically poor math/thinking skills.

But anxiety can mean people find it difficult to develop what math skills they do have. Wang continued:

“If you’re anxious, it is often harder to solve problems. The anxiety response actually inhibits some people’s ability. We have to help children learn to regulate their emotions so that the anxiety doesn’t keep them from achieving their best in math.”

The research found that around 40% of math anxiety came down to genetic factors: both generalised anxiety and cognitive ability combined.

The remaining 60% was related to differences in the home environment, at school and elsewhere.

Why twins?

These findings are based on tests of 216 identical twins and 298 same-sex fraternal twins.

Twins are often used in this sort of research because they share similar environmental factors, like parents, family income, neighbourhood and so on.

Identical twins, though, have the same genetic code on top of similar environmental factors, whereas fraternal twins just happen to be born at the same time.

This allows researchers to compare fraternal with identical twins to examine the effects of genes, while keeping environmental effects (parents, siblings, socioeconomic factors etc.) much the same.

One of the study’s authors, Professor Stephen Petrill, said:

“Genetic factors may exacerbate or reduce the risk of doing poorly at math.
If you have these genetic risk factors for math anxiety and then you have negative experiences in math classes, it may make learning that much harder.
It is something we need to account for when we’re considering interventions for those who need help in math.”

Image credit: Brittney Bush Bollay

Can Having Sex Make You Smarter?

Recent studies suggest that sexual activity causes neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

In some ways it’s a mystery why exercise is so good for the brain.

That’s because exercise is stressful and stress is, broadly speaking, bad for the brain.

Nevertheless exercise produces a host of benefits, it:

enhancing structural plasticity,
reduces anxiety,
improves learning and memory function,
increases blood flow to the brain…and all the rest…

But perhaps there’s something special about stressful, but rewarding activities, like exercise or, say, sex?

Growing neurons

It’s this connection between sex and brain function that’s been investigated in a series of intriguing studies.

In one, conducted at Princeton University, young adults rats were either allowed to have sex only once in a two-week period, or every day (Leuner et al., 2010).

What they found was that sex was stressful–the rats had elevated levels of stress hormones–but sex also promoted brain cell growth.

The rats that had been having sex for two weeks displayed neurogenesis: the process by which neurons are generated from stem cells in the brain.

The neurogenesis was found in part of the hippocampus, a structure that is thought to contribute to memory formation and other important cognitive functions.

The more sexually active rats also displayed less anxiety.

Middle aged rats

All very well for the younger rat, you might say, but what about the poor, downtrodden middle-aged rat?

He’s losing his looks, his fur and…well…he’s a rat.

When the same research group carried out a similar experiment on older rats, they reached the same conclusions (Glasper & Gould, 2013).

If older rats continued to have sex, neurogenesis in the hippocampus was enhanced.

So there’s hope for the older rats amongst us as well.

The effect did not, however, persist after the rats stopped having sex: they had to keep at it.

Improved memory and learning

Researchers at Princeton are not the only ones to be examining the link between sex and neurogenesis.

In South Korea they’ve been carrying out similar experiments on mice, except they’ve taken them one step further.

If the hippocampus is involved in memory and learning, and sex makes cells there grow, then surely sex should improve memory and learning?

To test this out, Kim et al. (2013) had some male mice locked up with horny females while others sat like monks in their cells.

Once again, sex proved beneficial for the hippocampus. But the mice were also given tests of their memory and learning ability.

The results of this showed that mice that had been having sex aced the task in comparison to their monkish counterparts.

Sex and the brain

Perhaps these studies start to explain why stressful activities like exercise are also so good for the brain, despite being stressful: they encourage the growth of new brain cells.

So, not all stress is bad stress: the right kind can do wonders–even for the older rat.

Image credit: Hannah Kate

Falling in Love Takes One-Fifth of a Second

Love is…like a hit of cocaine.

It takes a fifth-of-a-second for the euphoria-inducing chemicals to start acting on the brain when you are looking at that special someone.

That’s one of the conclusions of Stephanie Ortigue, who has co-authored a review of neuroscience research on love.

The brain imaging studies of love they covered also suggested that 12 different areas of the brain are involved (Ortigue et al., 2010).

When looking or thinking about a loved one, these areas release a cocktail of neurotransmitters across the brain, including oxytocin, dopamine, vasopressin and adrenaline.

The brain gets a similar ‘hit’ from love as it does from a small dose of cocaine.

Types of love

Of course love comes in many varieties.

One common distinction is between passionate love and the companionate kind, with the latter growing between couples over time.

This review of the research found that passionate love activates the areas of the brain involved in reward–after all we have to be motivated to overcome all the obstacles that can get in the way of love.

But it’s not just about motivation: passionate love also makes us think about our body image, about how we appear socially to the other person and it makes us focus our attention.

Passionate love also had the effect of dampening down activity in areas of the brain associated with grieving, fear and anxiety.

The authors conclude:

“Together, these results show that love is more than a basic emotion. Love is also a complex function including appraisals, goal-directed motivation, reward, self-representation, and body-image. Interestingly different types of love call for different brain networks that carry a broad variety of basic and complex mechanisms…”

Falling in love may feel as easy as falling off a log, but your brain is working overtime.

Image credit: Brandon Warren

Loving Touch is Critical for Premature Infants

The psychological benefits to premature babies of receiving loving touch can be measured 10 years later.

Like many mammals, human babies need maternal contact from birth to help both their physical and mental development.

Usually, though, when infants are born prematurely, they are mostly kept in an incubator, away from this vital human contact.

A new study, published in Biological Psychiatry, has followed 73 premature infants who were given a ‘kangaroo care’ intervention (Feldman et al., 2014).

This simply involves the mother holding her baby close to her skin for one hour a day over two weeks. As long as the infant is medically stable, this is perfectly safe.

Better cognitive development

The infants receiving kangaroo care were compared with 73 matched infants who followed the usual procedure of being mostly kept in incubators.

The results of the study showed that the benefits for both mothers and children from such a simple intervention were remarkable:

Mothers showed more sensitivity and more maternal behaviour towards their children.
Mothers had reduced anxiety.
Children had stronger cognitive and executive skills.
Children slept better.
Children had a lower stress response.

The effects on the child were still evident ten years later.

Profound implications

This is the first ever study to show the long-term benefits of skin-to-skin contact for infants born prematurely.

John Krystal, Biological Psychiatry’s editor said:

“This study reminds us once again of the profound long-term consequences of maternal contact. The enhanced level of stimulation provided by this contact seems to positively influence the development of the brain and to deepen the relationship between mother and child.”

The study’s first author, Ruth Feldman, added:

“Kangaroo Care is an easy-to-apply intervention with minimal cost and its multi-dimensional long-term impact on child development calls to integrate this intervention in the care-practices of premature infants across the world.”

Kangaroo care was developed in Bogota, Colombia were the shortage of incubators forced doctors to improvise.

It seems that sometimes it takes a deprived environment to remind us of a fundamental truth: a baby needs its mother, a premature baby even more so.

Image credit: Jim Lynch.

Meditation is an Effective Treatment for Depression, Anxiety and Pain

Data from 47 different clinical trials finds meditation is as effective as antidepressants.

A medical journal review has found that just 30 minutes daily meditation can improve the symptoms of depression, anxiety and pain.

The research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, included studies with a total of 3,515 participants (Goyal et al., 2014).

All of the research involved active control groups so it was possible to discount the placebo effect.

The placebo effect occurs when people expect to get better–sometimes simply as a result of being in a study–and so they do.

Studies with active control groups, though, can help discount the placebo effect as the treatment can be compared with a group who have similar expectations.

Meditation is more than relaxation

Participants in this review had had at least 4 hours of instruction in a form of meditation, such as mindfulness or mantra-based programs.

Typically, though, participants were given 2.5 hours instruction per week over 8 weeks.

Many of the participants also had physical problems, like lower back pain, heart disease and insomnia, which were likely heavily involved in their depression and/or anxiety.

The control groups contained matched participants who did things that were similar to meditation, but without actually being meditation.

For example, people in the control group in some of the studies performed progressive muscle relaxation. This has some of the physical requirements of meditation–i.e. you’re relaxed–but doesn’t involve the cognitive aspect.

Madhav Goyal M.D. explained:

“A lot of people have this idea that meditation means sitting down and doing nothing. But that’s not true. Meditation is an active training of the mind to increase awareness, and different meditation programs approach this in different ways.”

The meditation conditions, though, consistently outperformed the control conditions, suggesting meditation is effective.

And, when the researchers compared the magnitude of the gains with those taking medications, the effectiveness was similar.

No side-effects

On top of these findings for depression and anxiety, the review also found that meditation was an effective treatment for those experiencing pain.

When you consider that meditation has no side-effects in comparison to many medications, it starts to look even better.

→ Read on: Meditation Benefits: 10 Ways It Helps Your Mind

→ 10 Signs of Anxiety Everyone Should Know.

Image credit: c_liecht

High Emotional Intelligence Dramatically Improves Decision-Making

High emotional intelligence is about knowing which emotions are relevant.

A new study finds that people with high emotional intelligence make smarter decisions because they aren’t swayed by their current emotional state.

The emotions can provide very useful information, but sometimes they are not related to the decisions we are trying to make.

Being able to tell one from the other is part of what constitutes emotional intelligence.

Stéphane Côté, the co-author of a new article published in Psychological Science explained:

“People are driving and it’s frustrating. They get to work and the emotions they felt in their car influences what they do in their offices. Or they invest money based on emotions that stem from things unrelated to their investments.”

Yip and Côté (2013) ran two experiments to test how different people deal with spurious emotional states that are not related to the decision at hand.

In one, participants were made to feel anxious by being asked to prepare an impromptu speech. Then they were asked whether they wanted to sign up to a flu clinic.

The results showed that people with higher emotional intelligence were more aware that the experimentally-induced anxiety they felt was not related to the decision about the flu clinic.

While only 7% of those of low emotional intelligence signed up for the flu clinic, fully 66% of those with higher emotional intelligence did so.

This was in comparison to around a 50% take-up rate for the flu clinic in both groups who hadn’t been made anxious.

A second experiment confirmed these findings.

Crucially, great decision-making is not about eliminating all emotions: they are a vital source of information.

Those with high levels of emotional intelligence are more likely to ignore those emotions that have nothing to do with their decision.

For those who find it problematic making sense of their emotions, the easiest solution is simply stated (although not always easy to execute): wait until later.

Image credit: Saad Faruque

Fearful ‘Memories’ Passed Between Generations Through Genetic Code

New study on mice suggests parents’ fears can be passed on to their grandchildren.

A frankly mind-blowing new study suggests traumatic events that happen to a parent could be passed down through their genes onto their children.

The research, published in Nature Neuroscience, was carried out on mice, which were conditioned to become afraid of a particular smell: in fact a smell not unlike cherry blossom (Dias & Ressler, 2013).

Soon the mice began to shudder in its presence.

When their offspring were born and tested, they were also shown to be afraid of the cherry blossom smell, despite never having been exposed to it before.

Even the grandchildren showed the fearful response. So the fearful response towards this smell was passed down two generations.

Epigenetics

The reason this study is so potentially exciting is that evolution is thought to occur mostly through random genetic mutations across many generations.

However, if behaviour could be inherited in this way, it might suggest another route by which creatures could have changed and adapted.

The mechanism for the transmission of this response across generations appears to be through the mice’s sperm.

Although the mice’s DNA sequence remained unchanged, a process is thought to have occurred that changes the way these genes are expressed (DNA methylation).

This is a highly controversial idea and many scientists are skeptical about whether these results can really be true.

But, if they did hold in humans, it could help explain how conditions like phobias, alcoholism or anxiety could affect later generations.

A geneticist at UCL, Professor Marcus Pembrey, commented:

“It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously. I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach.”

→ Continue reading: Memory and Recall: 10 Amazing Facts You Should Know

Image credit: DeeAshley