Anxiety Symptoms, Types, Causes and Treatments

10 New Insights into Sleep: Discover What The Latest Psych Research Has Taught Us

How sleep enhances recall, why some can survive on 5 hours, a strange cure for a lack of sleep and more…

How sleep enhances recall, why some can survive on 5 hours, a strange cure for a lack of sleep and more…

1. How sleep after learning enhances memory

Sleep after learning encourages brain cells to make connections with other brain cells, new research has shown for the first time.

The connections, called dendritic spines, enable the flow of information across the synapses.

One of the study’s authors, Dr. Wen-Biao Gan, said:

“We’ve known for a long time that sleep plays an important role in learning and memory. If you don’t sleep well you won’t learn well.
But what’s the underlying physical mechanism responsible for this phenomenon?
Here we’ve shown how sleep helps neurons form very specific connections on dendritic branches that may facilitate long-term memory.”

• The full article: how sleep enhances memory.

2. Why some people only need five hours’ sleep a night

While most people can get by with less than six hours sleep, the majority will suffer physically and psychologically, especially if sleep deprived over the long-term.

However, a gene mutation which means a person can function normally with only five hours’ sleep a night has been identified by a new study of 100 pairs of twins.

Those carrying the target gene variant slept, on average, for five hours, which was one hour shorter than their twins without the gene.

When the twins were given cognitive tests after sleep deprivation, those with the gene variant did better, making 40% fewer errors.

Not only that, but the carriers recovered more quickly from sleep deprivation, only requiring 8 hours recovery sleep, compared with their twins who needed 9.5 hours.

• The full article: Why Some People Only Need Five Hours’ Sleep a Night

3. You can learn a new language while you sleep

Being able to learn a new language while you sleep sounds too good to be true, but there may be some truth to it.

A recent study examined whether students learning Dutch could enhance their memory by listening again to new words during their sleep.

At 10 o’clock at night they were given a series of Dutch and German word-pairs to learn (they were native German speakers).

Half the group then went off to bed, while the other half had to stay up.

Both the sleeping group and those kept awake then listened to a playback of some of the word-pairs they’d learned earlier.

At 2am both groups were given a test.

Surprisingly, the people who’d been asleep did better on the words they’d heard while asleep than those who’d been awake.

The study suggests that listening to words during sleep can help us learn, likely because it activates the subject matter in the brain again.

• The full article: Learn a new language while you sleep

4. A strange cure for lack of sleep

Just believing that you’ve slept better than you really have is enough to boost cognitive performance the next day.

The findings comes from a study of 164 people who were given a lecture on how important sleep quality is and told they would be given a new test of how well they had slept the previous night.

After the test, some were told they’d slept well the previous night, others that they’d slept badly.

This had no relationship to how they had actually slept and were just made up to try and convince one group they’d slept better than the other.

Those told they’d slept better scored higher on tests of attention and memory than those told they’d slept poorly.

How you slept last night isn’t just about how you actually slept, it’s also about how you think you slept.

This study suggests that tweaking your mindset a little could be enough to boost your performance.

• The full article: A strange cure of lack of sleep

5. Eight hours sleep with interruptions as bad as only 4 hours

A full night’s sleep which is interrupted can be as bad as getting only half a night.

In a recent study, participants were awakened four times during a normal 8-hour night.

Each time they had to complete a computer task that took 10-15 minutes before they went back to bed.

In the morning they took tests of alertness, attention and mood. These were compared with results from two other nights when they’d had either:

An uninterrupted 8 hours.
An artificially restricted 4 hours.

The effects on mood, attention and alertness for the interrupted 8 hours were as drastic as only getting 4 hours sleep.

In comparison to the uninterrupted 8 hours, people felt more depressed, fatigued, confused and lower in vigour.

And this was the effect of just one interrupted night.

• The full article: The dangers of interrupted sleep

6. Teens need more sleep than adults

Failing to get enough sleep causes low mood in teenagers, along with worse health and poor learning.

But it’s not all down to late night video gaming or TV: the part of the brain which regulates the sleep-wake cycle — the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus — changes in puberty.

Teenage brains also secrete less melatonin so their ‘sleep drive’ reduces.

As a result, being forced to rise the next day at 6am for school or college means teens find it hard to get the 8 to 10 hours sleep that they need.

Although hormonal changes are partly to blame for teenage angst, being short of sleep significantly contributes to lack of motivation and poor mood.

• The full article: Teens need more sleep than adults

7. Poor sleep can lead to false memories

We all know that lack of sleep affects our memory, along with other cognitive abilities.

But now new research shows that not getting enough sleep increases the chances your mind will actually create false memories.

In the study, one group of participants were allowed to get a full nights’ sleep, while another had to stay up all night.

In the morning they were given a load of information about a crime — some true, some false — that had been committed.

The results showed that those who’d missed out on their sleep were the most likely to regurgitate the false information, rather than remembering the ‘true’ crime-scene photos they’d been shown moments beforehand.

The lack of sleep had messed with their heads to the extent that all the evidence — right and wrong — had got mixed up.

• The full article: Poor sleep can lead to false memories

8. The long-suspected danger of sleeping drugs

A new study has found evidence for a long-suspected danger of sleeping pills: an increased risk of death.

The large study looked at data from over 100,000 patients who had been to their family doctors across seven years.

It found that taking sleeping pills, like zolpidem/Ambien, doubled the risk of death.

Professor Scott Weich, who led the study, said:

“That’s not to say that they cannot be effective.
But particularly due to their addictive potential we need to make sure that we help patients to spend as little time on them as possible and that we consider other options, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, to help them to overcome anxiety or sleep problems.”

• The full article: Sleeping drugs increase risk of death

9. Sleep drunkenness disorder affects one in seven

As many as one in seven people may be affected by ‘sleep drunkenness disorder’ soon after they’ve woken up or during the morning.

Sleep drunkenness disorder involves severe confusion upon wakening — way more than just the usual morning grogginess — and/or inappropriate behaviour: things like answering the phone instead of turning off the alarm.

Confused awakenings can happen to people when very short of sleep or jet-lagged, but are regular occurrences for those with the disorder.

Researchers have found that 15% of people had experienced at least one episode of sleep drunkenness in the last year.

Of those, over half had one episode every week.

• The full article: Sleep drunkenness disorder

10. The daytime benefits of lucid dreaming

People who realise they are in a dream while they are dreaming — a lucid dream — have better problem-solving abilities, new research finds.

This may be because the ability to step outside a dream after noticing it doesn’t make sense reflects a higher level of insight.

Around 82% of people are thought to have experienced a lucid dream in their life, while the number experiencing a lucid dream at least once a month may be as high as 37%.

Dr Patrick Bourke, who led the study, said:

“It is believed that for dreamers to become lucid while asleep, they must see past the overwhelming reality of their dream state, and recognise that they are dreaming.
The same cognitive ability was found to be demonstrated while awake by a person’s ability to think in a different way when it comes to solving problems.”

• The full article: Daytime benefits of lucid dreaming

Image credits: iamtheo & xioubin low & Dan Foy & Petras Gagilas & i k o

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