Sunday, January 29, 2012
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Your Brain (and body) on Anxiety
“The presence of unpredictability, uncertainty and uncontrollability all provoke anxiety pretty automatically,” says Sally Winston, co-director of the Anxiety & Stress Disorders Institute of Maryland (ASDI). “It’s a signal of either an internal or an external threat.”
Anxiety disorders which include generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), phobias, panic disorder, social anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—are the most common mental illnesses in the U.S., affecting about 18%—40 million—of adult Americans. And adults aren’t the only sufferers. Phobias and other clinical conditions can strike in childhood, and students applying to college, preparing for finals or entering a brutally tough job market have as many reasons to be anxious as their parents and grandparents do.
Excess stress hormones wear on the body, nipping away at the DNA that keeps cells dividing and long- lived, constricting the blood vessels and causing blood pressure to rise. Even the immune system is affected, as white blood cells that normally patrol for bacteria and viruses aren’t produced at normal, disease-fighting levels. It’s for these reasons that anxiety and stress have been linked to heart attacks, strokes, immune disorders, obesity, infertility and more.
There are effective psychotherapies for anxiety and plenty of meds that can help take the edge off. But if a share of Americans equivalent to the entire population of Argentina is still suffering, there’s clearly a gap in our medical knowledge. The good news is, science is filling that gap. New scanning technology is revealing how anxiety plays out in the brain—the neurological byways that distinguish one kind of anxious reaction from another and the possible ways each can be stopped. Blood studies are exploring how the chemistry of anxiety drives the nature and severity of the condition. Gene mapping is telling the complex story of where anxiety sits on the genome, providing clues to who may be at greatest risk, which in turn could mean early intervention that could prevent misery later in life.
That’s not to say all anxiety should be battled. Sometimes it should be embraced—even celebrated. In just the right amounts, the hormones that drive anxiety can be powerful stimulants, arousing the senses to function at their sharpest. Psychologists are familiar with a curve—which appears in most of their textbooks— that elegantly captures the relationship between stress and performance. It’s a bell-shaped line that steadily climbs as the tension and worry that accompany a performance rise in lockstep with the quality of that performance. The peak of that arc—where the systems are clicking, the senses are alert and we recall with perfect clarity everything we’ve learned— —is precisely where seasoned performers learn to hop off.
The key isn’t not to feel anxious; it’s to learn ways to manage that experience. “Anxiety itself is neither helpful nor hurtful,” says ASDI’s Winston. “It’s your response to your anxiety that is helpful or hurtful.”
Psychologists refer to this very straightforward idea as the difference between a challenge stress, which can light our competitive lire, and a threat stress, which can douse it fast. Most of the time, it feels as if our brain makes that choice by itself, without ever consulting us. What we want to learn-—- need to learn to stay calm and well—is how we can take charge.
Anxiety disorders which include generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), phobias, panic disorder, social anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—are the most common mental illnesses in the U.S., affecting about 18%—40 million—of adult Americans. And adults aren’t the only sufferers. Phobias and other clinical conditions can strike in childhood, and students applying to college, preparing for finals or entering a brutally tough job market have as many reasons to be anxious as their parents and grandparents do.
Excess stress hormones wear on the body, nipping away at the DNA that keeps cells dividing and long- lived, constricting the blood vessels and causing blood pressure to rise. Even the immune system is affected, as white blood cells that normally patrol for bacteria and viruses aren’t produced at normal, disease-fighting levels. It’s for these reasons that anxiety and stress have been linked to heart attacks, strokes, immune disorders, obesity, infertility and more.
There are effective psychotherapies for anxiety and plenty of meds that can help take the edge off. But if a share of Americans equivalent to the entire population of Argentina is still suffering, there’s clearly a gap in our medical knowledge. The good news is, science is filling that gap. New scanning technology is revealing how anxiety plays out in the brain—the neurological byways that distinguish one kind of anxious reaction from another and the possible ways each can be stopped. Blood studies are exploring how the chemistry of anxiety drives the nature and severity of the condition. Gene mapping is telling the complex story of where anxiety sits on the genome, providing clues to who may be at greatest risk, which in turn could mean early intervention that could prevent misery later in life.
That’s not to say all anxiety should be battled. Sometimes it should be embraced—even celebrated. In just the right amounts, the hormones that drive anxiety can be powerful stimulants, arousing the senses to function at their sharpest. Psychologists are familiar with a curve—which appears in most of their textbooks— that elegantly captures the relationship between stress and performance. It’s a bell-shaped line that steadily climbs as the tension and worry that accompany a performance rise in lockstep with the quality of that performance. The peak of that arc—where the systems are clicking, the senses are alert and we recall with perfect clarity everything we’ve learned— —is precisely where seasoned performers learn to hop off.
The key isn’t not to feel anxious; it’s to learn ways to manage that experience. “Anxiety itself is neither helpful nor hurtful,” says ASDI’s Winston. “It’s your response to your anxiety that is helpful or hurtful.”
Psychologists refer to this very straightforward idea as the difference between a challenge stress, which can light our competitive lire, and a threat stress, which can douse it fast. Most of the time, it feels as if our brain makes that choice by itself, without ever consulting us. What we want to learn-—- need to learn to stay calm and well—is how we can take charge.
The Balancing Act
FOR ALL THE SUFFERING ANXIETY CAUSES, THE FACT IS, the species would not be better off without it—and we might not be here at all. At its core, anxiety is a reaction, an arousal to a stimulus that we perceive as dangerous or threatening. The fabled saber-toothed tiger springs at the primitive human, and the human reacts with a biological red alert, bypassing the relatively time- consuming thinking centers in the brain in favor of a shortcut directly to the deeper-seated hypothalamus. This awakens the nervous system to release hormones that instantly rev up heart rate and respiration, feeding fresh blood and oxygen to the muscles, which need the boost to carry the human as quickly and as far away from the danger as possible.
Even the mere possibility that the tiger may be out there gets the system going, as the senses become more acute, picking up on every smell, every sound, every change in the air. It’s a nifty response, one that produced a lot of people who would live to see another day and, more important, sire new generations of babies who would inherit their hair-trigger reflexes.
In fact, it’s this dual face of anxiety that has made it such a permanent part of the evolutionary recipe for the human species. Richard Lewis, the famously neurotic comedian, delivers his stand-up without a fixed script—the comedic equivalent of driving with your eyes closed—yet surfs the performance curve deftly, insisting that he needs his anxiety to make it through his time onstage.
“Before I go on, I’m a nervous wreck,” he says. “But ultimately I feel more comfortable being uncomfortable. I feel I’m a better artist without a set list, so I never had one and never will” The actress Sarah Bernhardt once told a young protégée who claimed not to have stage fright, “Don’t worry. It comes with talent.”
Non-performance-related anxiety can have a certain buzz at first too. “The adrenaline rush I get is extremely powerful,” says Nathan (not his real name), 55, an artist who suffers from paralyzing panic attacks that strike in the night. “It’s this feeling where I’m wide awake and I can see things behind me, in front of me and all around me, and it’s a really cool feeling. But if it stays at that high level and I can’t calm myself down, I feel like I might explode.”
The metabolic jujitsu that Lewis has learned— turning anxiety back on itself—is a skill that we all possess but are not all adept at using. Professional performers, by contrast, learn to call on this trick almost at will watching how they work is what revealed to Psychologists the dichotomy of challenge and threat stress, and they’ve worked since to define the precise characteristics of the two states. “Challenge stress be curs when you feel like you can cope with the situation, that despite its high demands, you have the resources to handle it,” says Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California San Francico. “With threat stress you feel less capable of handling the situation, and that can lead to a more unhealthy response.”
FOR ALL THE SUFFERING ANXIETY CAUSES, THE FACT IS, the species would not be better off without it—and we might not be here at all. At its core, anxiety is a reaction, an arousal to a stimulus that we perceive as dangerous or threatening. The fabled saber-toothed tiger springs at the primitive human, and the human reacts with a biological red alert, bypassing the relatively time- consuming thinking centers in the brain in favor of a shortcut directly to the deeper-seated hypothalamus. This awakens the nervous system to release hormones that instantly rev up heart rate and respiration, feeding fresh blood and oxygen to the muscles, which need the boost to carry the human as quickly and as far away from the danger as possible.
Even the mere possibility that the tiger may be out there gets the system going, as the senses become more acute, picking up on every smell, every sound, every change in the air. It’s a nifty response, one that produced a lot of people who would live to see another day and, more important, sire new generations of babies who would inherit their hair-trigger reflexes.
In fact, it’s this dual face of anxiety that has made it such a permanent part of the evolutionary recipe for the human species. Richard Lewis, the famously neurotic comedian, delivers his stand-up without a fixed script—the comedic equivalent of driving with your eyes closed—yet surfs the performance curve deftly, insisting that he needs his anxiety to make it through his time onstage.
“Before I go on, I’m a nervous wreck,” he says. “But ultimately I feel more comfortable being uncomfortable. I feel I’m a better artist without a set list, so I never had one and never will” The actress Sarah Bernhardt once told a young protégée who claimed not to have stage fright, “Don’t worry. It comes with talent.”
Non-performance-related anxiety can have a certain buzz at first too. “The adrenaline rush I get is extremely powerful,” says Nathan (not his real name), 55, an artist who suffers from paralyzing panic attacks that strike in the night. “It’s this feeling where I’m wide awake and I can see things behind me, in front of me and all around me, and it’s a really cool feeling. But if it stays at that high level and I can’t calm myself down, I feel like I might explode.”
The metabolic jujitsu that Lewis has learned— turning anxiety back on itself—is a skill that we all possess but are not all adept at using. Professional performers, by contrast, learn to call on this trick almost at will watching how they work is what revealed to Psychologists the dichotomy of challenge and threat stress, and they’ve worked since to define the precise characteristics of the two states. “Challenge stress be curs when you feel like you can cope with the situation, that despite its high demands, you have the resources to handle it,” says Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California San Francico. “With threat stress you feel less capable of handling the situation, and that can lead to a more unhealthy response.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)