What Is Anxiety Anyway?

So… what is anxiety?

Where the heck does this miserable condition called anxiety come from anyway?

The Origins of Anxiety:

“If it’s difficult to understand why you are plagued by certain anxious thoughts, don’t take it personally — it’s a phenomenon that still…  [click photo for more]  eludes scientists. What is known, says Dr. Sonia Bishop, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, is that anxiety involves responses in two parts of the brain: the amygdala and the pre-frontal cortex.

The amygdala is responsible for the fight-or-flight response, while the pre-frontal cortex controls executive functions like decision-making and planning.A human foraging for berries, for example, would use the pre-frontal cortex to decide which berries to collect. If a predator suddenly jumped from the bushes, the amygdala would sound the alarm.

Scientists don’t fully understand why certain individuals are more prone to anxiety, but some theories suggest varying levels of neurotransmitters — the chemicals that relay signals between neurons and cells and affect how well the amygdala and pre-frontal cortex function — may play an important role.

What interests Bishop, however, is how the anxiety-ridden can reverse course regardless of pre-disposition. That’s why she recently conducted a brain-imaging study with 17 participants, some of whom had “high trait anxiety,” which was determined using a standardized measurement. While being monitored by an MRI that tracks changes in brain activity, each participant had to engage the pre-frontal cortex by identifying certain letters and ignoring others. When the task increased in difficulty, both groups did well on recruiting that region of the brain. But when the task was easy, those with trait anxiety did a poor job. This was particularly telling, says Bishop, because the participants were not exposed to any anxiety-triggering threats. The results have led her to believe that the anxiety-prone may have difficulty preventing the mind from lingering on distractions when performing easy, day-to-day tasks. Though not yet tested by other scientists, Bishop’s conclusion seems to reflect what works well in other successful techniques for battling anxiety: meaningful distraction.”

I don’t know about you but I can completely relate to this theory. I have always been a multi-tasking ‘scatterbrain’ who can’t stay focused on any one thing for more than a few moments. Complicating this is the fact that I am also a perfectionist who always tries to complete every job flawlessly. (Impossible I know).

Does that describe you too?

Most of people I talk to who suffer from anxiety and panic admit to being multi-tasking individuals who are easily distracted. From the busy homemaker managing all of the daily duties while taking care of the kids to the high level executive meeting tight deadlines at work. In my opinion a distracted mind is an anxious mind. The more thoughts we try to juggle at one time adds more layers of stress that is cumulative and eventually can spill over into anxiety & panic problems.

So what is anxiety? Anxiety is a false alarm from our bodies to our brains. The key factor in understand anxiety disorders is the simple fact that you actually have more control than you think you do. In future posts we will dive into this core issue together.

What are your thoughts?

source = Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

photo by: flydime
licensed under: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic