18 ms·

Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

491 points by conse_lad 3y ago

fud101 3y ago
so we should be avoiding avoiding?
- NayamAmarshe 3y ago
  Basically, yes.
bloopernova 3y ago
Fascinating study. For those who didn't read any of it: anxious people's brains use a different area when regulating emotions. Unfortunately the connection to this area may be more easily saturated during high emotional states. So, over stressed/anxious brains appear to have a different routing setup than everyone else. Very interesting find!
- bytefactory 3y ago
  I'm hoping this will lead to more effective medical or non-medical interventions. Seems like major progress in our understanding.
- dathinab 3y ago
  I'm not surprised tbh. This fits very well with what you can see in anxious people, especially when combined with depression. Through I guess the meat of the paper is in all the subtle biological details they found, which I just honestly do not understand at all.
- nyanpasu64 3y ago
  In my reading: > Unfortunately the connection to (*the usual area = FPl, that's a L not an i) may be more easily saturated during high emotional states. I do wonder if the FPl is overactive and needs to be slowed down like the article suggests (which hurts behavior in non-anxious people), or if the amygdala is jamming the FPl with excessive signalling (and needs to be slowed down).
  - bloopernova 3y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking about the treatment possibilities while reading. My wife has very high anxiety, which cannabis edibles mitigates pretty well, so I wonder if the pot is affecting those areas.
ericfrazier 3y ago
Dealing with stuff is dumb. Thank you, non_fpi secondary system, the round file of my brain.
NayamAmarshe 3y ago
It's always fear, isn't it? We're afraid to approach people, afraid to ask for help, afraid that someone might react in the worst possible way or something really bad might happen. But obviously, it never happens the way we imagine. Reality is 100% of the time, different from our imagination and yet, many of us still fail to remember that. Every good opportunity that I ever got, was from me coming out of my comfort zone and avoiding to avoid situations. It's important to remember, anxiety is a useful defense mechanism, but not 99% of the time.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- voisin 3y ago
  “I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” - Mark Twain
  - Obscurity4340 3y ago
    I've weirdly noticed a type of analagous mechanism in relation to anxiety where I castastrophize or engage in worst-outcome thinking and when things inevitably turn out ok, the relief from the incongruity has a somewhat "euphoric" and calming effect. I feel like it might be somewhat maladaptive and "addictive"
    - LouisSayers 3y ago
      I remember reading something similar about people who survived bombings in London during the war. Apparently many of the survivors were quite content as they had somehow survived the destruction.
      - Obscurity4340 3y ago
        I think "meaning" plays a huge role and when you can get yourself to buy into a productive/growth mindset-type narrative, it does seem to help immunize against trauma or at the very least, to help integrate it to the point the negative effect is attenuated
ajani 3y ago
This is just tedious. The electro-chemical map of the brain that is built and used to study it, is so primitive. Almost certainly, "the brain" tunes itself to its environment and inner states from a preformed inner structure through evolution. A lot of what is in the brain, is not actually to be found in the brain, or by studying it materially. The "formwork" that formed it, is lost in evolutionary time. Unfortunately there is no way to impute the formwork from the form, like say it would be possible to (mostly accurately) impute what formwork created a square column or cast a piece of iron. "The brain" is not in any way shaped like a physical object, and the formwork that formed it is infinitely complex.
- meesterdude 3y ago
  > "The brain" is not in any way shaped like a physical object Our brains are physical object, and the connections it is composed of are also physical.
- otikik 3y ago
  The brain is absolutely physical. > A lot of what is in the brain, is not actually to be found in the brain, or by studying it materially. You are talking about consciousness (and perhaps the non-conscious processing that the brain does as well). That is indeed a non-physical phenomenon, but it still has physical underpinnings. > The "formwork" that formed it, is lost in evolutionary time. You can't lose something that you never had in the first place :). It will take that as a figure of speech. The good news are: we are very familiar with some things that "exist" but don't have a physical presence. On this forum, "software" is the most obvious one. "Math" is probably the second. There's many others, like all the emotions, entropy, and so forth. We can, to a certain degree, reverse-engineer some of these processes by looking at the physical imprint that they leave. It's true that we never get a full picture - the same way that just looking at the source code might not give you a good idea of how the RAM will look like when the program is executing. But it can give you some insight. And then, if you are lucky, you may be able to fill in the gaps. The bad news: this is the most imbricated and complex piece of "code" that the humanity has ever faced. Our brains might simply not be capable of understanding their own complexity by themselves. Most of us have a "cache" of 7 items, after all. Barely good enough to swing to the next tree branch. But then again some good news: the complexity is definitely not infinite- just very big. And we keep improving our tools. The same way some of them expand the limits of what we can physically do with our bodies, some of them expand what we can mentally do with our brains. Wether or not that will be enough for us to understand ourselves, to a certain definition of "understand", is still up in the air as far as I'm concerned. I'm agnostic about it.
impulser_ 3y ago
So from my understanding. Anxious people are so anxious that they overload the part of the brain that typical deals with anxiety so the brain routes it to another part of the brain to deal with it and that part of the brain isn't what you want dealing with it so it cause problems. So the key is too limit overloading the part of the brain that deals with anxiety, which probably means doing things you are fearing to do so that you no longer fear doing it. I could be wrong, but that my understanding of it.
- jjallen 3y ago
  What if there are things we are fearing to do but shouldn’t be doing also?
  - lionkor 3y ago
    Then usually you shouldnt have a need to do them, and if you feel like you do, that might be the problem to address.
  - weird-eye-issue 3y ago
    Fear and anxiety are very different
    - nottrobin 3y ago
      How so?
      - poszlem 3y ago
        Fear is an immediate, emotional response to a known or definite threat. Anxiety is a more prolonged emotion that arises from an anticipated or potential threat or a situation that's uncertain. Unlike fear, the source of anxiety might not be real or immediate.
        lloeki 3y ago
        From my experience, the way I'd describe it is: - fear is transient, you feel it in the moment and then it goes away. You can then remember "boy I was scared" and feel the memory of fear but not fear itself. You can project and imagine a situation where you'd be scared. - anxiety is a persistent state of stressful anguish. There are peaks and troughs. During peaks it can be overwhelming and look like, trigger, or mix with fear. During troughs anxiety is still there somewhere deep, it merely takes a backseat to other emotions. In every moment it biases every process your mind undertakes.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
abarkasxa 3y ago
have agoraphobia pretty bad. I've spent so much time trying to work on exposure, but then I'll have a huge panic attack, I don't have access to my frontal cortex to reason through it, during this time I'm feeling the immensity of the universe, I feel electricity running through my body, at the end of it all when I get somewhere "safe" I'm not able to think straight or sleep well for months. So yeah the impulse to avoid those feelings is pretty strong. I'll push myself once again in the future but the risk reward ratio is pretty bad. Thanks brain wiring!
- throwing_away 3y ago
  > Agoraphobia involves fearing and avoiding places or situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed. You may fear an actual or upcoming situation. For example, you may fear using public transportation, being in open or enclosed spaces, standing in line, or being in a crowd. Wait, do I have agoraphobia now? I thought we were still supposed to be avoiding indoor spaces and crowds on account of the highly infectious disease propagating the globe. We're supposed to be comfortable sharing air with others again?
  - soulofmischief 3y ago
    > We're supposed to be comfortable sharing air with others again? No, I think we need to go all the way and ban cars from inner city areas and replace them with zorbs. https://www.zorbs.us/ https://www.zorbs.us/
  - dag11 3y ago
    I wouldn't say avoiding others during a pandemic is agoraphobia, it's a rational response. But after a society has largely resumed dense public activities, it's only possibly a phobia if you've formed a personal preference to partake based on your own risk/reward tolerance yet find yourself anxious to do so.
- jaynetics 3y ago
  Not a psychologist, but you might need to build exposure more slowly, and maybe check for other issues (such as generalized anxiety disorder, avoidant personality disorder, hypochondria) because a panic attack should not take months to recover from.
tukantje 3y ago
So can we fix it?
- psychphysic 3y ago
  Avoid avoidance. This is a study on the structural appearance of anxiety driven behaviours. Treatment remains the same, CBT +/- SSRI which facilitates relearning behaviours via Dopamine actions. Paper speculates TMS might be used to disrupt some brain regions.
- dathinab 3y ago
  yesn't the results of this study can, in combination with other studies over time, potentially, lead to better treatment methods. Weather that's better assistant medication, better ways to apply treatments or a better understanding of some of the unusual treatment methods. But what is described in the paper seems to me to be a fundamental mechanism of the brain to cope with anxiety overload. And that we can't fix, because it isn't really broken. I mean compare it to a bit far fetched example: Water spill ways. Especially on a larger scale they always come with drawbacks and you can't fix that. What you can change is stuff like how you wire up the spill way (e.g. when and which gates opens when) or e.g. how likely they need to be engaged (by upstream changing things), or how well you (as a city) cope with whatever drawbacks the specific water spill way has. For all of this properly understanding the underlying mechanics is important. And this is what the paper is about, properly understanding the mechanics so that we can provide better treatment.
Tistron 3y ago
The language of this is challenging for me to read and understand. Is there any clarity on whether high anxiety leads to this different routing, or whether there has been some event in the past leading to this routing which then leads to high anxiety? And is there any indication whether exposure to feared situations will lessen anxiety after this difference in routing is in place?
- psychphysic 3y ago
  According to the paper avoidance begets avoidance. Avoidance and success in anxiety inducing situations both lead to relief. Most of us have plenty of experience of both leading to balanced future responses.
sergioisidoro 3y ago
I wonder if this shift of processing areas is behind the the "detachment" or "depersonalisation" (feeling like you're in autopilot, or not being you) that seems to be a common response to high anxiety.
DoreenMichele 3y ago
If you suffer from serious anxiety, I highly recommend you work on any health issues you have. Low blood sugar in particular is known to promote anxiety by increasing the amount of adrenaline in your system. I used to suffer a lot of anxiety. Getting physically healthier helped mitigate that enormously. Proviso: n=1, "anecdata" and the usual dismissals that random internet strangers desperately try to apply as if I somehow misrepresented myself and claimed it was from a large scale study.
- dathinab 3y ago
  There is nothing to dismiss health issues can both directly and indirectly make your psychological issues worse (or even be the direct cause of it) and also the other way around I think many of the "dismissal" (assuming non troll) comments come from with health issues people being feed up with getting the force feed the same advice they long time now every time their health comes up without the person giving their advice understanding their health issues. (e.g. not you because you just wrote what helped you in a neutral way). For example some absurd examples I have seen repeatedly: - a person with serve enough clinical depression to just be a step away from getting suicidal getting told "just do sports it will help" for the thousands time in a situation where they frequently have issues to even eat because their brain just stopped caring about being hungry - or a person with motion sickness from certain games being again and again told the same set of well known and years ago tried advice, potentially combined with "you must never try VR" even through they did try VR and depending on the title it's not an issue as long as movement in VR is done through motion tracking - or a person which had to stop their masters degree because of sever depression and anxiety being told "oh it's you could have done the masters because I was able to do so" when that other person just had a mild depressive phase due to overwork - or people which had Vitamin-D deficit (which is really good at making other health issues worse) now insisting that every time they meat a "sick" person they should take Vitamin D supplements because sure their trauma induced psychological issues are just a Vitamin D deficiency. Just to be clear I appreciate your your post, this is not trying to dismiss it in any way. In different to many of the examples I listed you bothered to formulate it neutral in a "this helped me, fixing health issues can help, here is why it helped me if you thing this could apply to you why not try it" way instead of a "this helped me so it 'must' help you too way". Through the line between both formulation is thin, and not seldom a matter of tone which is often lost in writing.
rejectfinite 3y ago
I just want benzos and lay in bed and watch Netflix all my life pleeeease please please its my dream life
- mooch3k 3y ago
  [flagged]
protoman3000 3y ago
Window of tolerance.
FailMore 3y ago
The authors/others interested in anxiety, may be interested in the paper: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz Written by me and discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 There is a coherent argument to be made that the problem of misplaced anxiety is so prevalent/fundamental to the species, that dreaming is a built in mechanism for diagnosing it. A summary of the paper is: Anxious states involve: The default mode ("imagination") network, high levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and an active amygdala. REM dreaming states involve: The default mode ("imagination") network, extremely low levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine (80% below base levels), and (surprisingly) an inactive amygdala. The content of dreams can be viewed as inverse anxious mind wandering, where situations we find ourselves in actually encourage confrontational behaviour, however we are able to observe our avoidant behaviour with clarity that is not so present in waking life. (This also indicates that anxious structures are not really associated to the neurological state, as in we still seem to follow our anxious patterns even when norepinephrine levels are low, implying that the structures that represent them in our brain are not affected by different levels of norepinephrine/must exist outside of something so variable.)
riazrizvi 3y ago
So, heightened anxiety triggers alternate emotional regulation, with traits like pro-avoidance behavior. To me this is not necessarily dysfunctional. It may also go hand-in-hand with motivating heightened deliberation. I can see how one can fall into regressive patterns like distracting ourselves away from critical path actions, especially if a particular person only uses one of two strategies, 1) try going on as before or 2) try forgetting we need to go this way. I take a more neutral approach on the finding and don’t yet assume this is something that is best medicated out of. They show that even mild emotional challenges can saturate FPl neural range, which to me is simply a greater sensitivity that can be easily overloaded (like when you put the voltmeter on a more sensitive setting). Exposure Therapy is a methodical, deliberate, routine heavy strategy. ET doesn’t simply get us to re-engage, it gets us to re-engage with new and different behavior, which may be essential to success.
- psychphysic 3y ago
  The paper suggests rTMS to disrupt the disruptive activities. The emotional challenge in this study was that you had a joystick and sometimes you pulled that joystick towards you when you saw an unhappy face. That's what was paralysing emotional challenge was for highly anxious people. Meaning it's unlikely their PFl could have any control in real life scenarios. It's important to note that in both anxious and non-anxious people the PFl was highly excitable. It's the pattern of its activity that makes a difference. Cognition is hard work and the truth is you can't reason about your entire life and expect much success. Like driving a car as a learner your whole life, I remember the first driving lesson I had, I couldn't even focus with the radio on. Imagine if every time you got in you had less intuition about how to drive. Think of the absence of fpi as a lack of intuition you get once you learn to drive. CBT +/- an SSRI for 6months is a small price to pay to regain intuition.
  - riazrizvi 3y ago
    I think we might each be talking to different ends of the extreme here. > recruitment of FPl when controlling emotional behavior fails in patients with emotional disorders I won’t comment on people who have emotional disorders, or who have operated in this modality for very long periods of time. I’m more interested in it as a transient mechanism in people without disorders.
petesergeant 3y ago
If you suffer from anxiety, and haven't tried any of the following yet, worth giving a go: escitalopram (with medical supervision, also 10mg did nothing for me, 20mg was life changing), ingesting silexan / lavendar oil, L-Theanine with your coffee, less coffee, less alcohol, propanalol (see a dr) instead of benzos for break-through anxiety, ashwagandha.
- riazrizvi 3y ago
  I personally have tried and agree with L-Theanine to reduce coffee anxiety without killing its alertness power, and anxiety certainly spikes a day after a night out drinking. But I think we are missing here the most important levers; 1) a steady regimen of well-scheduled exercises and injury-preventing recovery work, 2) a well-scheduled nutritionally balanced diet free of inflammatory products. Julia Ross’s The Mood Cure goes into specifics for the latter, for example sufficient L-Tryptophan is important for a feeling of well-being. I think scheduling is key because stress increases with energy unpredictability.
  - petesergeant 3y ago
    I think I'm not qualified to talk about other people's mental health, but I haven't noticed much of a difference between periods when I exercise consistently and those where I don't. I'd always recommend people throw everything they can at chronic anxiety though, and consistent exercise is a win in its own right.
    - riazrizvi 3y ago
      The devil is in the details with exercise, just as it is for nutrition. There are so many ways to do exercise that ultimately increase anxiety; over the years I've had exercise regimens that made sleep difficult, or created increased inflammation (through oxidation, brief injuries or by being more careless with food/drink), or by increased muscle tightness, or lead to me not getting ahead at work because of time spent exercising. I find I have to be very clear on my exercise objective. Six Ironmen and many marathons later, I see I easily get caught up in athletic targets that are not helpful to my life goals.
protoman3000 3y ago
It's a great study. I would welcome if they did the same experiment and analysis on groups of people who had an anxiety disorder diagnosed and got healed, preferrably with CBT or other non-pharmacological methods alone, and a healthy population. It would be interesting to see the effects of therapy on this mechanism and whether an higher excitable FPI stays activated in the healed cohort or it's exitability is less, or the amygdala activation is again the root of all of this. It's notable that some healthy individuals had high FPI excitability but were not anxious.
judiisis 3y ago
how to get over this and get over tendency to avoid? Please someone help I am struggling and procrastinating and destroying my life
- SentinelLdnma 3y ago
  Wish I could give you an npm package for that, but best I can do is a process: [0] keep a log / journal [1] make a change [2] observe the result [3] iterate [0] is to raise awareness and detect cause and effect. Keep it minimalist. I once went overboard with a whole spreadsheet. Plain text turned out better. What to track? Inputs (food, media, activities) and outputs (physical and psychological state). [1] Try eating better, exercise, changing media exposure, time outside. If you go down the supplement rabbit hole, start with simple things like magnesium. Attach new, better habits to your existing routine. [2] Watch out for delayed reactions. For instance, what I ate 48 hours ago has significance. [3] while(true) Random bonus: if there is something that negatively affects you, seek out its polar positive opposite. I'm very easy bothered by sounds. Leaf blowers shall die. But this also means sounds have a strong positive leverage on my mental state: https://youtu.be/gKdFbdrk-58 https://youtu.be/gKdFbdrk-58
rob_galvan 3y ago
I relate to this. Also that excessive caffeine exacerbates my anxiety and makes avoidance more likely.
- rejectfinite 3y ago
  But I need that!
dboreham 3y ago
My understanding of this is illuminated by (stay with me here...) blockchains. Most blockchains use a kind of time-traveling/holographic data structure where a given tree root can be used to lookup state values in a big trie, for some block in the past. Different root, potentially different value for the state you're interested in. The brain seems to be operating a similar data structure where the answer to your query depends on some sort of "neural net root" value. This value seems to come from primitive structures (HPA?) and depends on basic things like fight/flight anxious/relaxed. The upshot is that people can believe/think/know different things depending on their current emotional state.
- rcbdev 3y ago
  I doubt this is what they meant by "disrupting healthcare with blockchain"
giantg2 3y ago
"Anxious individuals consistently fail in controlling emotional behavior, leading to excessive avoidance, a trait that prevents learning through exposure." Sounds a lot like burn out in ny experience.
- coder-3 3y ago
  No, burnout is too much exposure to certain stressors
byteknight 3y ago
In my head, what this says is that the brain is a muscle that will use pathways and otherwise more used areas, more frequently. Seems logical when I think about it that way.
rejectfinite 3y ago
I have 0 motivation. I havent cleaned in 2-3 years. I sit in trash next to my PC. lol Atleast I have you guys
javier_e06 3y ago
2 days ago my wife and I hopped on 737 MAX plane for the first time. "This is it" I told my wife giddy when I saw the MAX 738-8 bold letters on the emergency pamphlet. "This are the planes that came down due to the..." "Stop it!" Shouted her because I was about to start one of my long engineering diatribes. My anxious brain had acceptance on putting my life on the hands of well meaning people. Other's anxious brains rather not.

491 points by conse_lad 3y ago

fud101 3y ago

so we should be avoiding avoiding?

NayamAmarshe 3y ago
Basically, yes.

bloopernova 3y ago

Fascinating study. For those who didn't read any of it: anxious people's brains use a different area when regulating emotions. Unfortunately the connection to this area may be more easily saturated during high emotional states. So, over stressed/anxious brains appear to have a different routing setup than everyone else. Very interesting find!

bytefactory 3y ago
I'm hoping this will lead to more effective medical or non-medical interventions. Seems like major progress in our understanding.
dathinab 3y ago
I'm not surprised tbh. This fits very well with what you can see in anxious people, especially when combined with depression. Through I guess the meat of the paper is in all the subtle biological details they found, which I just honestly do not understand at all.
nyanpasu64 3y ago
In my reading: > Unfortunately the connection to (*the usual area = FPl, that's a L not an i) may be more easily saturated during high emotional states. I do wonder if the FPl is overactive and needs to be slowed down like the article suggests (which hurts behavior in non-anxious people), or if the amygdala is jamming the FPl with excessive signalling (and needs to be slowed down).
- bloopernova 3y ago
  Yeah, I was thinking about the treatment possibilities while reading. My wife has very high anxiety, which cannabis edibles mitigates pretty well, so I wonder if the pot is affecting those areas.

ericfrazier 3y ago

Dealing with stuff is dumb. Thank you, non_fpi secondary system, the round file of my brain.

NayamAmarshe 3y ago

It's always fear, isn't it? We're afraid to approach people, afraid to ask for help, afraid that someone might react in the worst possible way or something really bad might happen. But obviously, it never happens the way we imagine. Reality is 100% of the time, different from our imagination and yet, many of us still fail to remember that. Every good opportunity that I ever got, was from me coming out of my comfort zone and avoiding to avoid situations. It's important to remember, anxiety is a useful defense mechanism, but not 99% of the time.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
voisin 3y ago
“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.” - Mark Twain
- Obscurity4340 3y ago
  I've weirdly noticed a type of analagous mechanism in relation to anxiety where I castastrophize or engage in worst-outcome thinking and when things inevitably turn out ok, the relief from the incongruity has a somewhat "euphoric" and calming effect. I feel like it might be somewhat maladaptive and "addictive"
  - LouisSayers 3y ago
    I remember reading something similar about people who survived bombings in London during the war. Apparently many of the survivors were quite content as they had somehow survived the destruction.
    - Obscurity4340 3y ago
      I think "meaning" plays a huge role and when you can get yourself to buy into a productive/growth mindset-type narrative, it does seem to help immunize against trauma or at the very least, to help integrate it to the point the negative effect is attenuated

ajani 3y ago

This is just tedious. The electro-chemical map of the brain that is built and used to study it, is so primitive. Almost certainly, "the brain" tunes itself to its environment and inner states from a preformed inner structure through evolution. A lot of what is in the brain, is not actually to be found in the brain, or by studying it materially. The "formwork" that formed it, is lost in evolutionary time. Unfortunately there is no way to impute the formwork from the form, like say it would be possible to (mostly accurately) impute what formwork created a square column or cast a piece of iron. "The brain" is not in any way shaped like a physical object, and the formwork that formed it is infinitely complex.

meesterdude 3y ago
> "The brain" is not in any way shaped like a physical object Our brains are physical object, and the connections it is composed of are also physical.
otikik 3y ago
The brain is absolutely physical. > A lot of what is in the brain, is not actually to be found in the brain, or by studying it materially. You are talking about consciousness (and perhaps the non-conscious processing that the brain does as well). That is indeed a non-physical phenomenon, but it still has physical underpinnings. > The "formwork" that formed it, is lost in evolutionary time. You can't lose something that you never had in the first place :). It will take that as a figure of speech. The good news are: we are very familiar with some things that "exist" but don't have a physical presence. On this forum, "software" is the most obvious one. "Math" is probably the second. There's many others, like all the emotions, entropy, and so forth. We can, to a certain degree, reverse-engineer some of these processes by looking at the physical imprint that they leave. It's true that we never get a full picture - the same way that just looking at the source code might not give you a good idea of how the RAM will look like when the program is executing. But it can give you some insight. And then, if you are lucky, you may be able to fill in the gaps. The bad news: this is the most imbricated and complex piece of "code" that the humanity has ever faced. Our brains might simply not be capable of understanding their own complexity by themselves. Most of us have a "cache" of 7 items, after all. Barely good enough to swing to the next tree branch. But then again some good news: the complexity is definitely not infinite- just very big. And we keep improving our tools. The same way some of them expand the limits of what we can physically do with our bodies, some of them expand what we can mentally do with our brains. Wether or not that will be enough for us to understand ourselves, to a certain definition of "understand", is still up in the air as far as I'm concerned. I'm agnostic about it.

impulser_ 3y ago

So from my understanding. Anxious people are so anxious that they overload the part of the brain that typical deals with anxiety so the brain routes it to another part of the brain to deal with it and that part of the brain isn't what you want dealing with it so it cause problems. So the key is too limit overloading the part of the brain that deals with anxiety, which probably means doing things you are fearing to do so that you no longer fear doing it. I could be wrong, but that my understanding of it.

jjallen 3y ago
What if there are things we are fearing to do but shouldn’t be doing also?
- lionkor 3y ago
  Then usually you shouldnt have a need to do them, and if you feel like you do, that might be the problem to address.
- weird-eye-issue 3y ago
  Fear and anxiety are very different
  - nottrobin 3y ago
    How so?
    - poszlem 3y ago
      Fear is an immediate, emotional response to a known or definite threat. Anxiety is a more prolonged emotion that arises from an anticipated or potential threat or a situation that's uncertain. Unlike fear, the source of anxiety might not be real or immediate.
      - lloeki 3y ago
        From my experience, the way I'd describe it is: - fear is transient, you feel it in the moment and then it goes away. You can then remember "boy I was scared" and feel the memory of fear but not fear itself. You can project and imagine a situation where you'd be scared. - anxiety is a persistent state of stressful anguish. There are peaks and troughs. During peaks it can be overwhelming and look like, trigger, or mix with fear. During troughs anxiety is still there somewhere deep, it merely takes a backseat to other emotions. In every moment it biases every process your mind undertakes.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

abarkasxa 3y ago

have agoraphobia pretty bad. I've spent so much time trying to work on exposure, but then I'll have a huge panic attack, I don't have access to my frontal cortex to reason through it, during this time I'm feeling the immensity of the universe, I feel electricity running through my body, at the end of it all when I get somewhere "safe" I'm not able to think straight or sleep well for months. So yeah the impulse to avoid those feelings is pretty strong. I'll push myself once again in the future but the risk reward ratio is pretty bad. Thanks brain wiring!

throwing_away 3y ago
> Agoraphobia involves fearing and avoiding places or situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed. You may fear an actual or upcoming situation. For example, you may fear using public transportation, being in open or enclosed spaces, standing in line, or being in a crowd. Wait, do I have agoraphobia now? I thought we were still supposed to be avoiding indoor spaces and crowds on account of the highly infectious disease propagating the globe. We're supposed to be comfortable sharing air with others again?
- soulofmischief 3y ago
  > We're supposed to be comfortable sharing air with others again? No, I think we need to go all the way and ban cars from inner city areas and replace them with zorbs. https://www.zorbs.us/ https://www.zorbs.us/
- dag11 3y ago
  I wouldn't say avoiding others during a pandemic is agoraphobia, it's a rational response. But after a society has largely resumed dense public activities, it's only possibly a phobia if you've formed a personal preference to partake based on your own risk/reward tolerance yet find yourself anxious to do so.
jaynetics 3y ago
Not a psychologist, but you might need to build exposure more slowly, and maybe check for other issues (such as generalized anxiety disorder, avoidant personality disorder, hypochondria) because a panic attack should not take months to recover from.

tukantje 3y ago

So can we fix it?

psychphysic 3y ago
Avoid avoidance. This is a study on the structural appearance of anxiety driven behaviours. Treatment remains the same, CBT +/- SSRI which facilitates relearning behaviours via Dopamine actions. Paper speculates TMS might be used to disrupt some brain regions.
dathinab 3y ago
yesn't the results of this study can, in combination with other studies over time, potentially, lead to better treatment methods. Weather that's better assistant medication, better ways to apply treatments or a better understanding of some of the unusual treatment methods. But what is described in the paper seems to me to be a fundamental mechanism of the brain to cope with anxiety overload. And that we can't fix, because it isn't really broken. I mean compare it to a bit far fetched example: Water spill ways. Especially on a larger scale they always come with drawbacks and you can't fix that. What you can change is stuff like how you wire up the spill way (e.g. when and which gates opens when) or e.g. how likely they need to be engaged (by upstream changing things), or how well you (as a city) cope with whatever drawbacks the specific water spill way has. For all of this properly understanding the underlying mechanics is important. And this is what the paper is about, properly understanding the mechanics so that we can provide better treatment.

Tistron 3y ago

The language of this is challenging for me to read and understand. Is there any clarity on whether high anxiety leads to this different routing, or whether there has been some event in the past leading to this routing which then leads to high anxiety? And is there any indication whether exposure to feared situations will lessen anxiety after this difference in routing is in place?

psychphysic 3y ago
According to the paper avoidance begets avoidance. Avoidance and success in anxiety inducing situations both lead to relief. Most of us have plenty of experience of both leading to balanced future responses.

sergioisidoro 3y ago

I wonder if this shift of processing areas is behind the the "detachment" or "depersonalisation" (feeling like you're in autopilot, or not being you) that seems to be a common response to high anxiety.

DoreenMichele 3y ago

If you suffer from serious anxiety, I highly recommend you work on any health issues you have. Low blood sugar in particular is known to promote anxiety by increasing the amount of adrenaline in your system. I used to suffer a lot of anxiety. Getting physically healthier helped mitigate that enormously. Proviso: n=1, "anecdata" and the usual dismissals that random internet strangers desperately try to apply as if I somehow misrepresented myself and claimed it was from a large scale study.

dathinab 3y ago
There is nothing to dismiss health issues can both directly and indirectly make your psychological issues worse (or even be the direct cause of it) and also the other way around I think many of the "dismissal" (assuming non troll) comments come from with health issues people being feed up with getting the force feed the same advice they long time now every time their health comes up without the person giving their advice understanding their health issues. (e.g. not you because you just wrote what helped you in a neutral way). For example some absurd examples I have seen repeatedly: - a person with serve enough clinical depression to just be a step away from getting suicidal getting told "just do sports it will help" for the thousands time in a situation where they frequently have issues to even eat because their brain just stopped caring about being hungry - or a person with motion sickness from certain games being again and again told the same set of well known and years ago tried advice, potentially combined with "you must never try VR" even through they did try VR and depending on the title it's not an issue as long as movement in VR is done through motion tracking - or a person which had to stop their masters degree because of sever depression and anxiety being told "oh it's you could have done the masters because I was able to do so" when that other person just had a mild depressive phase due to overwork - or people which had Vitamin-D deficit (which is really good at making other health issues worse) now insisting that every time they meat a "sick" person they should take Vitamin D supplements because sure their trauma induced psychological issues are just a Vitamin D deficiency. Just to be clear I appreciate your your post, this is not trying to dismiss it in any way. In different to many of the examples I listed you bothered to formulate it neutral in a "this helped me, fixing health issues can help, here is why it helped me if you thing this could apply to you why not try it" way instead of a "this helped me so it 'must' help you too way". Through the line between both formulation is thin, and not seldom a matter of tone which is often lost in writing.

rejectfinite 3y ago

I just want benzos and lay in bed and watch Netflix all my life pleeeease please please its my dream life

mooch3k 3y ago
[flagged]

protoman3000 3y ago

Window of tolerance.

FailMore 3y ago

The authors/others interested in anxiety, may be interested in the paper: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz Written by me and discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 There is a coherent argument to be made that the problem of misplaced anxiety is so prevalent/fundamental to the species, that dreaming is a built in mechanism for diagnosing it. A summary of the paper is: Anxious states involve: The default mode ("imagination") network, high levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and an active amygdala. REM dreaming states involve: The default mode ("imagination") network, extremely low levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine (80% below base levels), and (surprisingly) an inactive amygdala. The content of dreams can be viewed as inverse anxious mind wandering, where situations we find ourselves in actually encourage confrontational behaviour, however we are able to observe our avoidant behaviour with clarity that is not so present in waking life. (This also indicates that anxious structures are not really associated to the neurological state, as in we still seem to follow our anxious patterns even when norepinephrine levels are low, implying that the structures that represent them in our brain are not affected by different levels of norepinephrine/must exist outside of something so variable.)

riazrizvi 3y ago

So, heightened anxiety triggers alternate emotional regulation, with traits like pro-avoidance behavior. To me this is not necessarily dysfunctional. It may also go hand-in-hand with motivating heightened deliberation. I can see how one can fall into regressive patterns like distracting ourselves away from critical path actions, especially if a particular person only uses one of two strategies, 1) try going on as before or 2) try forgetting we need to go this way. I take a more neutral approach on the finding and don’t yet assume this is something that is best medicated out of. They show that even mild emotional challenges can saturate FPl neural range, which to me is simply a greater sensitivity that can be easily overloaded (like when you put the voltmeter on a more sensitive setting). Exposure Therapy is a methodical, deliberate, routine heavy strategy. ET doesn’t simply get us to re-engage, it gets us to re-engage with new and different behavior, which may be essential to success.

psychphysic 3y ago
The paper suggests rTMS to disrupt the disruptive activities. The emotional challenge in this study was that you had a joystick and sometimes you pulled that joystick towards you when you saw an unhappy face. That's what was paralysing emotional challenge was for highly anxious people. Meaning it's unlikely their PFl could have any control in real life scenarios. It's important to note that in both anxious and non-anxious people the PFl was highly excitable. It's the pattern of its activity that makes a difference. Cognition is hard work and the truth is you can't reason about your entire life and expect much success. Like driving a car as a learner your whole life, I remember the first driving lesson I had, I couldn't even focus with the radio on. Imagine if every time you got in you had less intuition about how to drive. Think of the absence of fpi as a lack of intuition you get once you learn to drive. CBT +/- an SSRI for 6months is a small price to pay to regain intuition.
- riazrizvi 3y ago
  I think we might each be talking to different ends of the extreme here. > recruitment of FPl when controlling emotional behavior fails in patients with emotional disorders I won’t comment on people who have emotional disorders, or who have operated in this modality for very long periods of time. I’m more interested in it as a transient mechanism in people without disorders.

petesergeant 3y ago

If you suffer from anxiety, and haven't tried any of the following yet, worth giving a go: escitalopram (with medical supervision, also 10mg did nothing for me, 20mg was life changing), ingesting silexan / lavendar oil, L-Theanine with your coffee, less coffee, less alcohol, propanalol (see a dr) instead of benzos for break-through anxiety, ashwagandha.

riazrizvi 3y ago
I personally have tried and agree with L-Theanine to reduce coffee anxiety without killing its alertness power, and anxiety certainly spikes a day after a night out drinking. But I think we are missing here the most important levers; 1) a steady regimen of well-scheduled exercises and injury-preventing recovery work, 2) a well-scheduled nutritionally balanced diet free of inflammatory products. Julia Ross’s The Mood Cure goes into specifics for the latter, for example sufficient L-Tryptophan is important for a feeling of well-being. I think scheduling is key because stress increases with energy unpredictability.
- petesergeant 3y ago
  I think I'm not qualified to talk about other people's mental health, but I haven't noticed much of a difference between periods when I exercise consistently and those where I don't. I'd always recommend people throw everything they can at chronic anxiety though, and consistent exercise is a win in its own right.
  - riazrizvi 3y ago
    The devil is in the details with exercise, just as it is for nutrition. There are so many ways to do exercise that ultimately increase anxiety; over the years I've had exercise regimens that made sleep difficult, or created increased inflammation (through oxidation, brief injuries or by being more careless with food/drink), or by increased muscle tightness, or lead to me not getting ahead at work because of time spent exercising. I find I have to be very clear on my exercise objective. Six Ironmen and many marathons later, I see I easily get caught up in athletic targets that are not helpful to my life goals.

protoman3000 3y ago

It's a great study. I would welcome if they did the same experiment and analysis on groups of people who had an anxiety disorder diagnosed and got healed, preferrably with CBT or other non-pharmacological methods alone, and a healthy population. It would be interesting to see the effects of therapy on this mechanism and whether an higher excitable FPI stays activated in the healed cohort or it's exitability is less, or the amygdala activation is again the root of all of this. It's notable that some healthy individuals had high FPI excitability but were not anxious.

judiisis 3y ago

how to get over this and get over tendency to avoid? Please someone help I am struggling and procrastinating and destroying my life

SentinelLdnma 3y ago
Wish I could give you an npm package for that, but best I can do is a process: [0] keep a log / journal [1] make a change [2] observe the result [3] iterate [0] is to raise awareness and detect cause and effect. Keep it minimalist. I once went overboard with a whole spreadsheet. Plain text turned out better. What to track? Inputs (food, media, activities) and outputs (physical and psychological state). [1] Try eating better, exercise, changing media exposure, time outside. If you go down the supplement rabbit hole, start with simple things like magnesium. Attach new, better habits to your existing routine. [2] Watch out for delayed reactions. For instance, what I ate 48 hours ago has significance. [3] while(true) Random bonus: if there is something that negatively affects you, seek out its polar positive opposite. I'm very easy bothered by sounds. Leaf blowers shall die. But this also means sounds have a strong positive leverage on my mental state: https://youtu.be/gKdFbdrk-58 https://youtu.be/gKdFbdrk-58

rob_galvan 3y ago

I relate to this. Also that excessive caffeine exacerbates my anxiety and makes avoidance more likely.

rejectfinite 3y ago
But I need that!

dboreham 3y ago

My understanding of this is illuminated by (stay with me here...) blockchains. Most blockchains use a kind of time-traveling/holographic data structure where a given tree root can be used to lookup state values in a big trie, for some block in the past. Different root, potentially different value for the state you're interested in. The brain seems to be operating a similar data structure where the answer to your query depends on some sort of "neural net root" value. This value seems to come from primitive structures (HPA?) and depends on basic things like fight/flight anxious/relaxed. The upshot is that people can believe/think/know different things depending on their current emotional state.

rcbdev 3y ago
I doubt this is what they meant by "disrupting healthcare with blockchain"

giantg2 3y ago

"Anxious individuals consistently fail in controlling emotional behavior, leading to excessive avoidance, a trait that prevents learning through exposure." Sounds a lot like burn out in ny experience.

coder-3 3y ago
No, burnout is too much exposure to certain stressors

byteknight 3y ago

In my head, what this says is that the brain is a muscle that will use pathways and otherwise more used areas, more frequently. Seems logical when I think about it that way.

rejectfinite 3y ago

I have 0 motivation. I havent cleaned in 2-3 years. I sit in trash next to my PC. lol Atleast I have you guys

javier_e06 3y ago

2 days ago my wife and I hopped on 737 MAX plane for the first time. "This is it" I told my wife giddy when I saw the MAX 738-8 bold letters on the emergency pamphlet. "This are the planes that came down due to the..." "Stop it!" Shouted her because I was about to start one of my long engineering diatribes. My anxious brain had acceptance on putting my life on the hands of well meaning people. Other's anxious brains rather not.