Why Some People Are Always Agreeing — Despite What They Really Think (M)
Do you know someone who always agrees, no matter what they really think?
Category: Anxiety
This High-Dose Vitamin Reduces Depression And Anxiety
While the effects were weaker than antidepressant medication, there were also far fewer side-effects.
While the effects were weaker than antidepressant medication, there were also far fewer side-effects.
High doses of vitamin B6 supplements reduce feelings of depression and anxiety, a trial finds.
After taking the supplements every day for a month, people reported feeling their mental health improve.
While the effects were weaker than antidepressant medication, there were also far fewer side-effects.
The amount of vitamin B6 ingested in the study exceeds what can realistically be obtained from a normal diet, so supplements are required.
B6 and GABA
B6 supplements are thought to work by providing a calming effect on the brain.
B6 is known to have a role in how the body manufactures Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA).
GABA typically has a relaxing effect on the mind, hence higher levels of GABA in the brain are linked to lower levels of anxiety.
Dr David Field, the study’s first author, explained:
“The functioning of the brain relies on a delicate balance between the excitatory neurons that carry information around and inhibitory ones, which prevent runaway activity.
Recent theories have connected mood disorders and some other neuropsychiatric conditions with a disturbance of this balance, often in the direction of raised levels of brain activity.
Vitamin B6 helps the body produce a specific chemical messenger that inhibits impulses in the brain, and our study links this calming effect with reduced anxiety among the participants.”
50 times the recommended dose
The study included over 300 people, some of whom took vitamin B6, others vitamin B12 and the remainder a placebo.
Only vitamin B6 helped to reduce levels of anxiety and depression.
The amounts given were 50 times the recommended daily dose, which is why it would be hard to get these levels from a normal diet.
Dr Field explained:
“Many foods, including tuna, chickpeas and many fruits and vegetables, contain Vitamin B6.
However, the high doses used in this trial suggest that supplements would be necessary to have a positive effect on mood.
It is important to acknowledge that this research is at an early stage and the effect of Vitamin B6 on anxiety in our study was quite small compared to what you would expect from medication.
However, nutrition-based interventions produce far fewer unpleasant side effects than drugs, and so in the future people might prefer them as an intervention.
To make this a realistic choice, further research is needed to identify other nutrition-based interventions that benefit mental wellbeing, allowing different dietary interventions to be combined in future to provide greater results.
One potential option would be to combine Vitamin B6 supplements with talking therapies such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to boost their effect.”
→ Related: Intense exercise increases the levels of two common neurotransmitters that are linked to depression.
The study was published in the journal Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental (Field et al., 2022).
How Children Inherit Anxiety And Depression From Their Parents (M)
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The Reason Women Suffer More From Depression And Anxiety
How men and women’s brains react differently to negative stimuli.
How men and women’s brains react differently to negative stimuli.
Women react more strongly to negative stimuli than men, research finds.
Men, meanwhile tend to ‘rationalise’ away negative events.
The conclusions come from brain scans that have found critical differences in brain function in the emotional regions of men’s and women’s brains.
Dr Adrianna Mendrek, a study co-author, said:
“Greater emotional reactivity in women may explain many things, such as their being twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders compared to men.”
For the research men and women had their brains scanned while they looked at positive, negative and neutral pictures.
Women gave the negative pictures more negative ratings compared to men.
However, the more testosterone both men and women had, the less they reacted to the negative pictures.
In other words: more ‘feminine’ men processed the negative images in the same way as women (and more ‘masculine’ women were similar to men).
The key finding in the study, though, was the differences in the brain function.
Men showed a stronger connection between the amygdala and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC).
Dr Stéphane Potvin, study co-author, explained the significance:
“A stronger connection between these areas in men suggests they have a more analytical than emotional approach when dealing with negative emotions.
It is possible that women tend to focus more on the feelings generated by these stimuli, while men remain somewhat ‘passive’ toward negative emotions, trying to analyse the stimuli and their impact.”
Dr Mendrek concluded:
“So there are both biological and cultural factors that modulate our sensitivity to negative situations in terms of emotions.
We will now look at how the brains of men and women react depending on the type of negative emotion (e.g., fear, sadness, anger) and the role of the menstrual cycle in this reaction.”
The study was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology (Lungu et al., 2016).
A Daily Chore That Decreases Stress And Provides Inspiration (M)
When done properly, the chore decreased nervousness by 27 percent and increased mental inspiration by 25 percent.
Reduce Anxiety Instantly Using Only Words
People do not expect this trick for reducing anxiety to work – but it does.
People do not expect this trick for reducing anxiety to work – but it does.
Labelling anxiety — putting the feeling into words — can reduce the fear response, research finds.
In fact, the more fearful words people use to describe their anxiety, the more their anxiety reduces.
However, the study also found that people don’t expect that labelling their emotions will reduce anxiety.
But, recordings of their skin conductance show that it does.
The study compared labelling anxiety with other common methods of reducing anxiety, including distraction and reappraisal.
Reappraisal refers to thinking about anxiety in a different way.
For example, the study was carried out in people with a fear of spiders.
In the reappraisal condition they were asked to use neutral words to think about a spider.
Here is one:
“Looking at the little spider is not dangerous for me.”
In contrast, people in the labelling condition were given these instructions:
“Participants in the affect-labeling group were instructed to create and speak a sentence including a negative word to describe the spider and a negative word or two to describe their emotional response to the spider (e.g., “I feel anxious the disgusting tarantula will jump on me”).
All the groups were exposed to spiders over varying lengths of time and followed up a week later.
The study’s authors describe the results:
“…the affect-labeling group exhibited reduced skin conductance response relative to the other groups and marginally greater approach behavior than the distraction group…
[…]…greater use of anxiety and fear words during exposure was associated with greater reductions in fear responding.”
The lower skin conductance suggests that those who labelled their emotions were less fearful of spiders.
There are now many studies that show the benefits of verbalising emotions in all sorts of contexts:
“…experimental studies have found that when current emotional experience is verbalized, whether in spoken or written form, distress is reduced relative to conditions in which no verbalization or verbalization of nonaffective material occurs.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Kircanski et al., 2012).
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Anxiety and depression predicted by this common personality factor.
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The research could help explain why some people are more prone to anxiety.
