Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation
nature.com
nature.com
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.
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.
> 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.
The executive functions that highly anxious people need to engage are precisely the functions that high stress levels disrupt.
This is about low stress situations in anxious people.
Not high stress situations in non-anxious people.
It's not likely that we can extrapolate between the two. And it's likely under those scenarios a third or more mechanism comes into play (flight, fight, freeze).
Not to mention the control were all men so we do need better sample for replication before we consider extrapolation.
This reminded me of starting to ride a motorcycle (again) in 2021. Lots of anxiety and stress.
Two years later I’m not as stressed. But, each near-accident I’ve had was following not paying attention.
Thinking about this on a ride over the weekend, I mused about solo-jet fighter pilots and Olympians. I recalled breathing exercises are supposed to help.
Reading the abstract, I’m reminded of awkward social situations and inexperience in primary school. I’m thinking the biggest lesson was trying, and realizing failure is not life threatening. But it didn’t stop me from developing some bad habits for cheating on tests, and waiting until the last 48 hours to write my papers.
I think getting a job at 16 helped a lot. It was at a comic book shop. I held that job for seven years.
That doesn't hold true when it comes to riding a motorcycle though. Maybe the fear is warranted.
Yeah, people should have a healthy amount of fear for needlessly dangerous things.
?? There’s nothing unethical about riding a motorcycle.
I ride within 80% of my abilities. I wear full PPE all year round. My moto is maintained to a high standard. I drive defensively. I have taken safety courses, and continued my motorcycle safety training both in and out of the classroom. I am not careless about my life or the lives of others. I drive like everyone is out to kill me, and I’m a gentleman. Want to pass, go ahead.
Morally— I’m not needlessly risking my life or the lives of others. If it becomes necessary, god forbid, that I need life saving medical care, I trust I’m worthy of it, if, for no other reason than I take great care when I’m driving any motorized vehicle.
Shame on you.
I wonder if anyone has ever done a cross-check of the "fearlessness" lit authors for signs of toxoplasmosis.
It’s not a platitude to say PPE #1 is your mind.
Are you fit to ride? And not in a relative-manner (“I’m the least drunk here!”), but in your own objective sense. If you’re not, then don’t start. If you started, then you should stop—sort of thing.
If it wasn’t dysfunctional, it wouldn’t be a diagnosed with mental health condition to begin with.
I think this is a concept that is getting lost in mainstream mental health discourse: There is a big difference between anxiety the emotion and anxiety the mental health disorder. Similar story for depression and concentration struggles.
It’s normal to feel anxious at times. It’s not healthy when anxiety becomes so dominant as to interfere with normal activities of life, manifesting as the type of pervasive avoidance behavior described in this study.
This is becoming a huge problem among the young people I’ve mentored recently; They will go through phases where they become convinced, often by TikTok or Reddit, that they have ADHD, anxiety, and/or depression because they aren’t perfect robots who do marathon study sessions with a smile every day. I feel like I’m always explaining to them that it’s normal and healthy to feel some discomfort as they learn and grow. It’s not reasonable to expect everything in life to come easy. Of course, there are students who struggle with mental health issues as well, but the difference between someone struggling with lifelong ADHD and someone who just learned about ADHD through a serious of TikToks a few weeks ago and now thinks they have it is obvious when you’ve been working with them both for a long time.
> I take a more neutral approach on the finding and don’t yet assume this is something that is best medicated out of.
The study doesn’t say that this is “best medicated out of”. It specifically highlights exposure therapy as being effective in normalizing this in individuals who respond to it:
> and exposure therapy has been shown to restore frontopolar function in those PTSD patients that benefit from treatment.
I think this is another issue permeating pop culture discussion of mental health issues: The assumption that strong medications are the default response. Every medical professional I know prefers lifestyle interventions and therapy modalities to prescribing medications, but patients often arrive convinced that they need medication. If the provider recommends therapy or lifestyle interventions they often get angry that at the perception that the provider is being dismissive or not taking their problem seriously.
Moreover, these two aspects nearly always coincide: Every credible institution will require you to engage in therapy in tandem with commencing medication. Often, once your condition improves, the discourse shifts towards the possibility of gradually decreasing your medication (though this is obviously a conversation, not a mandate).
The side effects of meds for anxiety issues are far too downplayed imo. Benzos, ssri's etc. all have very detrimental side effects and are very difficult to get off of.
As I mentioned before, reputable establishments typically mandate concurrent therapy, particularly when dealing with conditions like depression and anxiety. Your therapist and psychiatrist will often work together and share notes to better treat you. Reputable psychiatrists will often ask if you want to try therapy alone first: The good ones have no lack of patients, so it’s not in their interest to even take you on immediately especially if you’re not committed to getting better through therapeutic means.
Sure: Just as you can unquestionably locate primary care physicians who readily prescribe large quantities of Vicodin, naturally, you can also come across psychiatrists and PCPs who readily prescribe SSRIs without much supervision.
But, this is objectively false. Are you trying to say a GD is not "reputable"? Like I said, you can go directly to a GD almost anywhere in this country and they will give you an SSRI with no requirement or mandate to get therapy at all. They will all mention it but there's nothing that requires you to attend therapy.
In the capacity of a psychiatrist? No, a primary care physician is not a trustworthy substitute for a psychiatrist. Mental health disorders should not be addressed by a PCP, even if they have the ability to prescribe you medication for it. You should seek treatment from mental health clinics that almost always have both psychiatrists and therapists on staff or work closely with other clinics that do.
Furthermore, once more: Numerous primary care physicians excessively prescribed opioids like candy. Acquiring a medical license does not automatically equate to being reputable in all fields.
Your point is moot. The system is not set up to push therapy, it's set up to push drugs first. You mentioning that "reputable" psychiatrists wouldn't do that is irrelevant. Your ignoring the issue by marking everyone disagree with as not reputable.
When my mental health took a turn for the worse a few years ago, I was strongly encouraged by my therapist to start taking medication. I was admittedly skeptical upon hearing. I had never taken psychiatric medications before as I held many misconceptions of their side effects, and besides, I figured therapy was supposed to "fix me," so why should I need meds?
When I inquired as to why they wanted me to become medicated, their response was that patients tend to only reach out for help AFTER their mental health becomes severe enough that "learning to cope without meds" is not an option. When a provider is faced with such a case, they are trained to treat it with as much aggression as reasonably possible in order to prevent the patient from becoming even more despondent. This means medication.
From the perspective of the patient, it appears that they're being funneled into taking meds, but from the perspective of the provider they recognize the trajectory the patient is on, and suggest taking drastic actions before things get worse.
Ironically, while I love my therapist still, my psych has been an absolute pill pusher. I've routinely told her that I'm not interested in _also_ being prescribed Xanax because I'm having some anxiety after a long, shitty breakup. That discomfort is part of the human experience. But she is SO eager to throw more Rx at me...it's been kind of eye opening how easy it could be to abuse prescription meds.
Are you on adderall, have you tested if it works for you?
If you are now medicated for ADHD which everyone with symptoms should at least experience. Knowing it even exists and that you can feel that way is extremely grounding.
If you are concerned with abuse, do some research and on the drugs they are recommending. I am hypersensitive to some drugs, so I tell anyone prescribing me the drug that I am going to ramp and if they have a problem with that. Most of the time they are and they like someone engaged in their own outcomes.
You probably need a combination of a lot of things, therapist, life changes, deliberate drug use, etc.
I've also taken plenty of steps backwards, but I'd like to hope that's part of the process...
It's just now there's a lot more of it, where there is a lot more awareness of disabilities, and empathy rightfully but also means more people are inclined to maybe take the easy way out through diagnoses or taking medication to cover for some emotional issues. If there is no other way, then you should seek out meds,etc. But it is part of being human, to understand and overcome some difficulties through perseverance, resilience, or emotional work.
I was struggling to put a name to this phenomenon but I recently learned about the term "semantic contagion" as coined by Ian Hacking. There is an article I found interesting that speculates the rise of a rare disorder with the proliferation of the Internet in the 1990s.
I think the idea that an influx of readily available information can confuse people with tempting theories or misinterpretation is more relevant than ever today.
Is it possible for an individual to do ET, or indeed other therapy in combination with medication, to study the change in this response? I tend to agree that we (collectively) should not look at these results and immediately look for a drug to change it; after all, that’s how we arrive at a popular culture that thinks depression is a chemical imbalance (it’s not), so it would be nice to be able to use these findings in conjunction with therapies that focus on a person’s ability to change their own mind.
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.
Apparently many of the survivors were quite content as they had somehow survived the destruction.
Prepare for the worst (as in planning), but never take it to heart or you’ll drown.
I don’t know if it’s always this way, but I create emergencies and catastrophes because I otherwise have no motivation to do anything. My back has to be against the wall to get me to act. It’s been a lifelong issue, I’ve tried to kill myself several times because of it, and I learned it was ADHD in the last month. 100% of my issues are explained by this. I never would have guessed.
Literally I've done thousands of workouts and have never regretted one, yet every time there's this negotiation to not do it. I am connecting that to your "reality is different 100% of the time" point.
1. Action
2. Results
3. Motivation
4. Repeat!
Anti-pattern:
1. Motivation
2. Action
3. Results
4. Does not work
When I notice myself using self-talk like "ugh, I just don't feel like it" I thing of A-R-M and it helps.
Either way, it's because of your actions.
Existence precedes essence?
https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380...
Also, there's motivation and there's (self-) discipline. You get up in the morning or do things either because you feel like it, or because you have to. Of course it feels better if you feel like it (you're motivated), but if you're not motivated then discipline has to take over.
Yes, if you are already 'self-actualized', you don't need to be thinking about behavior modification frameworks, your behaviors are already serving you.
Some people have circumstances and long-lived reactions and behaviors for those circumstances that make it very difficult to change course, even if they have a real desire to. This 'disconnectedness' between lived experience and personal goals and values can lead to a lot of anguish. In those cases, following a framework, even though it can feel 'weird', can lead to the positive sparks required for change.
>
> 1. Motivation
> 2. Action
> 3. Results
> 4. Does not work
Action and discipline (the habit of doing the same action) beat motivation everytime. And yet you will find people on HN that will fight to death that motivation is enough or that motivation is the moving force of discipline. Up to redefining words if needed. I think it's because of the warped guilt trip of the saying "you didn't do it/achieve it because you weren't motivated enough" and the "entrepreneuship" spirit of the audience who needs to believe that they can succeed no matter what and motivation is the main factor because it's something fuzzy enough they can say they had it or hadn't when they fail/succeed and ignore the hard unpleasant things like hard work, luck, skills, talent, etc.
Furthermore, I think what people are sometimes confronting when they discuss motivation is personal belief in markedly different goals than society promotes. In such cases they're not really expressing a lack of motivation generally, but rather frustration with a disconnect between the goals they actually believe in and the goals that they've been told to pursue (typically with according extrinsic reward/punishment). Telling such people that they just need to develop discipline is probably about as useful as telling atheists that they just need to go to church.
It’s just that temporarily things are going well - there are no famines, no lawlessness, and no wars. As soon as we return to chaos even a bit, all those thrifty genes and anxious genes won’t be so maladaptive.
There doesn’t even need to be a world-ending scenario. Just go live outside an urban center, among wild animals, and all these genes will help you.
Anxiety causes you to imagine how a scenario would play out, in detail. Flashes of things going wrong, something breaking apart and all the terrible things that a horror movie director could imagine.
Instead, I'm trying to focus on feeling good or bad based on my intentions, and seeing people's reactions as merely a feedback loop to better align my actions with my intentions. It has been difficult but I think it is slowly working.
This is the way. People might disagree, but I've noticed that our intentions really do influence the outcomes because our intentions affect the way we approach problems (Kinda like Wave function collapse). My world is a mere reflection of who I really am, what I really think and what I meditate upon.
For some folks, unfortunately, lying at times is a necessary survival mechanism.
One could be maladaptive (long term) and is the easy approach (or may be necessary to survive short term) - ‘oh, I need to be nicer or give more’, or ‘oh, I need to manipulate them or make them be okay with this’ which is the codependent approach.
The other is to step back, realize perhaps you’re already giving too much, and it’s time to leave (safely) or deal with more blowback at the moment to set a boundary even at the risk of real problems.
That takes courage and a wider view, exactly what is hard to do when in these situations though.
Yes. A thousand times this. It has taken me years to create a situational intuition around this. Another thing that I have had to learn is that people aren’t thinking about you nearly as much as you think they are. Like, take whatever amount of time that you think someone is thinking about you in any social situation, and divide that by 10. That’s still more than they are thinking about you.
I forecast a lot of doom, but try to bother only with the dooms I can prevent or mitigate. This is useful for going “I should replace that pipe before it bursts” or “I should fill up on gas here as it’s 300km to the next station”.
Where it goes wrong is doom we either cannot control at all, or cannot control without inflicting greater dooms - what someone else might think, whether the sun will rise tomorrow.
I feel we are trained (thanks, marketing. Thanks, social animals) to sensitise ourselves to a great many fears, most of which are beyond our control, and it does us little good.
Case in point: a little over a week ago I was having apoplectic paroxysms over the amount of stuff I have to do at home before winter - foundations to dig, brush to clear, firewood to gather. Then, a forest fire ripped through our land, which was somewhere in my mind as “definitely one day, probably not today, don’t sweat it, but have a plan”. The former anxiety I was letting grow out of all proportion - so fucking what if I don’t dig foundations this year? No deck. Boo hoo.
The latter, if I’m honest, occasionally kept me up at night, and occasionally hovered around the edge of my field of imaginary view, like a particularly irritating fly, but after I would reassure myself that we had go-bags packed, that we had the ability to run without hesitation, it would subside. It’s that whole agency thing - being able to take what actions you can to alleviate an anxiety. If there’s no meaningful action to be taken, it’s a useless anxiety, best forgotten.
If anything, more positives have emerged than negatives - the fire service fixed our road, which we’d been begging the council to do for years, the flammable brush is cleared, and we discovered we have a great many friends.
Sometimes it takes the manifestation of one of our anxieties to remind us what is and what isn’t worth worrying about. Watching a friend or family die also has the desired effect - but unfortunately from experience, it isn’t permanent, and we (I mean I) seem to need a slap in the face from time to time to remind us what matters.
I wish it comes easy like with the people I know for e.g no worries or issues at all with questioning a contractor regarding the price of remodelling a kitchen, sending back dishes due to some quality issues..etc
[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
That type of anxiety is easily beaten, the one where the worry is that ‘not the best thing ever happens’ is much harder to beat
Kinda like ‘if you ain’t first you’re last mentality’ and opportunity cost type thing
My anxiety stems from the fear that the interaction will be exhausting. And that fear is almost always realized.
The only thing I've found that reduces my anxiety is to ensure that I am feeling very energetic (e.g., getting a good night's sleep and giving myself an extra strong dose of caffeine), to make sure the interaction happens in an easier and less tiring format (e.g., face-to-face where I can read their face and body language, as opposed to something like a phone call where I have to work extra hard to process what they are saying), and to make sure my schedule is clear for the next few days for recovery. When I can do these things, I find myself actively looking forward to social interactions and enjoying them a great deal. I can even manage to be downright outgoing and charming.
So I'm not really sure what a good solution is here. Life requires more social interactions than I can properly prepare for, and assorted necessary interactions sap all my energy for more fulfilling interactions. It creates this conundrum where I crave more interactions with my friends, but I simultaneously avoid them; even receiving a text from a friend fills me with dread.
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.
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.
- 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.
Anxiety is a kind of fuzzy term because it encompasses an overall pattern and cycle as well as the associated feelings. But a useful distinction is that anxiety is driven by avoidance of fear of some uncertainty, and exposure and acclimation to that fear (without avoidance) is what extinguishes the anxiety.
Avoidance can take almost any form, but common examples include worry and rumination, procrastination, compulsive rituals like hand-washing or internet research, self-medicating, and superstitious behaviors. And of course, literal avoidance.
Also, since I’ve already been accused of hair-splitting, I might as well point out:
> can't avoid a panic attack
There’s no need to avoid a panic attack. In fact, trying to avoid a panic attack feeds the panic.
Which is pretty much the go-to advise for a lot of people with anxiety as far as I'm aware.
I gave this advice in the past, but I know people with social anxiety disorder for whom this approach does not work.
Reframing this as a challenge with concrete goals rather than a problem helps too.
I'm no expert though, and I advise you to talk to a professional that can help with this.
Don't forget that this is not a problem but just another part of you, and love yourself :)
20 years ago though yes, definitely, I learned to embraced the chaos (vs needing everything pre-planned) and put myself out there.
Right now mental health is a huge problem overall in society, and therapists and Psychiatrists are no except to the rule unfortunately.
It’s gotten very predatory out there.
In anxious people the FPI is unable to override the avoidance behaviours.
The key is not to limit overload you don't have much choice there, it's to use other mechanisms to make your seek exposure and not continue avoidance.
CBT is all about teaching those skills the paper mentions TMS.
I believe this is done in supervised fashion in Exposure and Response Prevention, and also CBT. Some say ERP violates the Hippocratic Oath part about 'do no harm'.
I found the mockery of it in GTA SA quite entertaining [1]. In my own experience, it's probably best to talk to a therapist before forcing yourself into doing things you are fearing.
Careful with that assumption. I can see it completely backfiring. Doing the thing repeatedly can end up increasing the anxiety. If this route is taken, then "the thing" must be introduced very gradually and from a place of security.
As an example, for an arachnophobe, it would starting with something like "draw a dot. Draw a line coming out of the dot. Keep drawing lines up until 8. Pay attention to your anxiety levels and remind yourself that this is not a real spider, only a drawing. You are in control, you are safe". Then progressing to pictures of cartoon spiders, then the first picture of the most cute realistic spider that one can find, and so forth. It would be a process that takes months and it's not guaranteed to work. For example, a realistic depiction of a spider might be too much to handle even with a gradual approach.
On the other hand, if you tell that person "Close your eyes and open your hand. There, I put a tarantula in your hand, you see, it's innocuous!" that person is going to be scared of spiders for life.
I'm exaggerating, but hopefully it sends the point across.
Graded exposure can be a more manageable way to get to the end result (fear extinction), but reminding yourself that the threat isn’t real is a fear-neutralizing behavior that will limit the effectiveness of the treatment. The point of exposure therapy is to feel the fear and to do nothing about it other than let the feeling (eventually) climax and dissipate. (In fact, “lean in harder” can be even better than “do nothing”.)
[Edit: I want to emphasize this point for others who may find this post: if you are doing exposure work or you’re supporting someone who is, please don’t reassure yourself/them that the exposure isn’t dangerous. At best it undermines the treatment; at worst it reinforces the fear. When you violate your anxiety by facing a feared situation or idea, it will and should feel like you are doing something bad and dangerous.]
Second, graded exposure isn’t always necessary - flooding (direct exposure to the high level fear situation) works too, and can work a lot faster.
But I think most people with anxiety disorders have a number of fears not just a single isolated phobia - and they’re connected in a network of sorts. It’s often helpful for the person to experience success in extinguishing a low-moderate grade fear first, to grok the process and build confidence to approach their worst fears successfully.
I’ve been there, and I get it. But if you’re on the path to extinguishing Big Fears, this is simply what the process entails. It’s really uncomfortable - until it isn’t.
> sometimes being trapped in a situation miles from safety with no way to get back
I’m not sure what you mean by this part. If you’re referring to the symptoms above (panic attacks, crying, dysregulation), I think you’d be better served to refrain from thinking of these symptoms as a loss of “safety”. They’re feelings of intense discomfort - but not danger. And they’re temporary.
> being traumatized for days afterwards and (very rationally) avoiding the situation in the future
Avoiding the situation post-exposure unfortunately “un-does” much of the benefit of the exposure: it reinforces the neural pathways that make you feel a sense of danger in the first place.
This is not the pattern you went to be in. If you’re finding it too difficult to resist this, it might be a good idea to begin with smaller steps. That means doing less intimidating exposures so that you can be more successful in sticking with it until the fear comes down.
> The people who want me to put myself into fearful situations are people who want to hurt me
This is absolutely not true. No one gets sadistic pleasure out of the temporary pain that anxiety treatment brings. It’s just the price of getting better: to conquer your fears, you have to go all the way through them. By analogy, you can’t get physically fit without first going though some soreness and discomfort.
Based on what you wrote, I’d highly recommend finding a therapist who has expertise in exposure with response prevention. They will know, from having treated many others in your situation, how to design a treatment program that meets your needs and that you can succeed in.
Growing up, my parents punished and traumatized me for not getting straight As in classes and cramming for extracurriculars, judged my worth based on academic performance and following their orders, fed me stories about how not getting into a top college would turn me into a burger-flipper, then forced me to the most difficult computer science program in the country, which together pushed me into burnout, dropping out, and a years-long CPTSD mental breakdown. They tried to force me to become their idea of a top student, ignoring the existential harm they caused.
Similarly, other people ignore the harm they cause (regardless if they want to hurt me or not) when they want me to put myself into unpleasant situations which have hurt me in the past for little gain (for example failing driving exams time and time again, the above-mentioned biking trip, rude and disrespectful doctors delaying care for an hour and then complaining when I asked questions and couldn't make decisions quickly enough, and psychiatrists who refuse care when I go nonverbal and want to communicate over text), and blame and accuse me of being "self-destructive" when I refuse to do as told.
> Avoiding the situation post-exposure unfortunately “un-does” much of the benefit of the exposure: it reinforces the neural pathways that make you feel a sense of danger in the first place.
It is perfectly rational for me to not harm myself further by seeking out situations which (promise benefits, cause substantial harm, and the benefits fail to materialize as expected), and for me to avoid people who pressure me to do so. If I find a route to doing things which benefits me more than it hurts, then I will start doing it.
I will say again that if you’re inclined, you might consider starting with something that seems like a small challenge. Even a small victory can really boost your confidence and motivation. Finally, you might consider working with a therapist. Telehealth is a nice option that works well for many people.
My anxiety devolves into panic attacks if I try to deal with it consciously - self talk, rumination, avoidance. But it goes into a dormant state when I don't engage with it consciously and just let it be.
Like you said, just let it be and stop caring about it. Anxiety can be a good thing, it's a normal emotion. Any attempt to stop it or control it will end in disaster. Let your body/mind do it's thing. Emotions are fleeting and they will always come and go. Over time you sort "re-wire" your brain to stop panicking every-time it feels a fleeting anxious feeling.
In my experience these confrontational situations need to strike a certain place between "too easy" and "too hard". It hardly helps to throw people into situations they can't handle again and again. A more gradual approach via small wins is the way to go IMHO, with a focus on avoiding the learned avoidance patterns, heh. There's also the aspect of the perception: one needs to be able to accept small victories and see them as the improvement that they are.
But all of this is way easier said than done, especially if you have to deal with it all by yourself.
So while I think that you are technically right, I think it's easy to misunderstand for people as "just toughen up" (not implying that's what you meant, but there is this to many people unknown middle part of it that I wrote about).
It’s not wrong per-se - just useless. If they could do that, they wouldn’t be in the situation! Like telling someone with PTSD to ‘just calm down’, or someone with an eating disorder to ‘eat normally’. If they could, they wouldn’t have the problem!
In a sense, anxiety is like a malignant cancer? That explains a lot.
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!
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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?
No, I think we need to go all the way and ban cars from inner city areas and replace them with zorbs.
here's some reference: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4820039/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4818733/ ...
Written by me and discussed on HN here:
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.)
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.
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.
"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.
Sounds a lot like burn out in ny experience.
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.
Our brains are physical object, and the connections it is composed of are also 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.
"The brain" is not physical like columns or iron. Those are simple objects. The kind physics likes to deal with. Things that are easily measured to describe its properties quantitatively and the relations of these properties as a placeholder for qualitative aspects (equations). Physics can't deal with the brain. No equation can be written.
If a bud's seeds were to sprout in place, instead of in the ground, you would have every single ancestor plant in a very long chain. Every brain is the result of this kind of structure. A mother buds and sprouts a new human. If the umbilical cords remain attached, we have a very similar kind of long chain of human brains. Not like any other physical object.
Physics is inadequate at studying "the brain". So, "the brain" is not a physical object.
There are many many many physics simulations out there that cannot be "written with an equation". Climate Modelling, for example. You cannot write a single equation to model all that. You need a big complex piece of software, made of many equations, a lot of hardware, and a lot of processing time. Any of those was simply inconceivable mere decades ago.
It's possible that it's as you say, and the brain is inscrutable if we attack the problem from the physics point of view alone.
I think that you may be right. With what we have now. But decades from now? I'm not so sure.
'''
Climate modeling is a multifaceted field rooted in physics that relies on a complex set of equations to describe various atmospheric, oceanic, and terrestrial processes. Here's an overview of the key equations that form the foundation of climate models:
Navier-Stokes Equations: Governing the flow of fluids like the atmosphere and oceans, these equations capture how the velocity of a fluid changes over time.
Radiative Transfer Equations: Essential for understanding how sunlight and other forms of radiation interact with the atmosphere, including scattering, absorption, and emission.
Energy Balance Models: These equations describe the balance between incoming solar energy and outgoing heat, fundamental for capturing the planet's energy dynamics.
Equations of State: Linking density, pressure, and temperature, these equations are critical for understanding the behavior of the atmosphere and ocean.
Continuity Equations: Representing the conservation of mass in the atmosphere and oceans.
Moist Processes Equations: Capturing phase changes between water vapor, liquid water, and ice, along with latent heat exchange.
Boundary Layer Equations: Describing the complex dynamics near Earth's surface where the atmosphere interacts with the land or ocean.
Chemical and Aerosol Equations: Governing the reactions and interactions between different chemical species and particles, which can affect both weather and climate.
Sea Ice and Glacial Equations: Modeling the flow and melting of ice, essential for understanding the cryosphere.
These equations are solved numerically using computer algorithms, often over a grid representing the Earth's surface and atmosphere. Together, they form an interconnected system that allows scientists to simulate and analyze the climate system's behavior. This intricate mathematical framework underscores how the study of climate is fundamentally rooted in mathematical and physical principles.
'''
There are no such equations for the brain.
In the context of human behavior, consciousness and neurology, what are the mathematical equations that are relevant in order to model how a human brain works? Please highlight any equation that involves Physics in particular
ChatGPT:
Modeling the human brain is an extremely complex task, and it involves various levels of abstraction and different mathematical and computational approaches. While there are no specific equations that fully capture the intricacies of the brain's function, several mathematical and physics-related principles can be applied at different levels of analysis. Here are some relevant equations and concepts:
Neuron Modeling:
Hodgkin-Huxley Equations: These equations describe the behavior of ion channels in neuron membranes and are fundamental to understanding how neurons generate action potentials. Integrate-and-Fire Models: Simpler models like the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire model can describe the basic firing behavior of neurons using differential equations. Neural Networks:
Backpropagation:
This is a fundamental algorithm for training artificial neural networks. It involves the chain rule from calculus to update weights during training. Activation Functions: Functions like the sigmoid, ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit), and softmax are used to model the activation of neurons in artificial neural networks. Synaptic Plasticity:
Hebbian Learning:
Often described as "cells that fire together wire together," it's a principle used to model how synaptic connections strengthen or weaken based on correlated firing patterns.
Diffusion Equations:
Fick's Law of Diffusion: Relevant for modeling the diffusion of neurotransmitters across synapses. Information Theory:
Shannon's Information Theory:
While not an equation per se, concepts like entropy and mutual information are used to quantify information flow and coding in neural systems.
Quantum Mechanics:
While not directly related to classical neuroscience, there's ongoing research into whether quantum effects play a role in brain function. This would involve quantum mechanics equations such as the Schrödinger equation and the equations describing quantum states. Connectome Modeling:
Graph Theory:
Modeling the brain as a network involves concepts from graph theory, like adjacency matrices and graph algorithms. While not a direct physics equation, it's relevant for understanding brain connectivity. Functional Imaging:
Techniques like Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) rely on physics equations related to magnetism and nuclear magnetic resonance to measure brain activity indirectly. Biomechanics:
Equations from mechanics can be used to model the physical properties of the brain, like deformation during injury or the propagation of mechanical waves in brain tissue.
Electroencephalography (EEG):
Maxwell's Equations: EEG measures electrical potentials on the scalp, and the interpretation of these signals relies on Maxwell's equations describing the behavior of electric fields. It's important to note that modeling the human brain is still an active area of research, and there's no single mathematical framework that fully explains all aspects of brain function. Instead, a multi-disciplinary approach is used, combining mathematics, physics, biology, and computer science to gain a better understanding of the brain's complexity at various scales, from individual neurons to large-scale brain networks.
That.
Thank you for staying engaged, it's helping me see my position more clearly.
The vortex appears and vanishes as conditions change. But is the vortex, the water? Is the water no longer water once the vortex dissipates?
Is the vortex the same as any physical object? Or it’s a form taken up by water?
What if the brain is just the form. And what if the water is itself just a river fed by ocean currents millions of miles away?
Standing by the river, you only experience the form, not the formwork, the substrate, or even the shaping force in time.
I may have made this a worse explanation… hard to tell.
Yes, exactly. The software lies in humanity collectively. Not inside us, but in between us.
Which is why it cannot lie entirely in the brain. At least not entirely in one brain.
A new node born into the network, learns the network. Individual nodes perish, and new ones replace them. But the network doesn't go down. Or it hasn't yet.
Much of conscious experience is the network. Isolation is painful because it deregulates the connection to the network.
But even on the "hardware" side, there must be so many kinds of developments that must occur simultaneously. Some of it is as you say, environment based child development. Others that we may not quite be aware of, say patterns of neural firing, or growth patterns. Such developments probably get passed on in shape (DNA or X) to the next generation.
Seems logical when I think about it that way.
[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
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.
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.
My understanding is that each SSRI type med has a roughly 30% chance of working for you, though the odds are slightly connected for SSRIs that are similar.
If only the ADHD was as easy.
Also: "Escitalopram was well tolerated and only 7% patients withdrew, due to adverse events in the escitalopram group, versus 8% in the placebo group" -- people with anxiety disorders have panic attacks when they start lexapro at about the same rate as people who think they're on lexapro but aren't!
Also I do recommend trying any/all of the others things I mentioned as an adjunct, they've all got some decent science behind them, and defense in depth seems like a good idea to me.
This with caffeine is amazing!
*Its whats in green tea that gives the calming effect