Category: Anxiety

Almost half of females had an anxiety disorder along with just over a quarter of males.

There are specific signs that a child will go on to develop an anxiety disorder, a study finds.

These include a tendency to do things alone, crying easily and often and frequently appearing sad and miserable.

All these behaviours are related to being socially and emotionally withdrawn.

In contrast, being shy, submissive or fearful of authority figures  or people in general does not predict adult anxiety disorders.

Mr Nathan Monk, the study’s first author, said:

“Basically, what we have found is that childhood anxious behaviors related to social isolation and sadness appear to carry risk for developing an anxiety disorder in later life.

In contrast, behaviors related to situational fears and anxiety around adults do not appear to carry the same risk.”

The study tracked over 1,000 children born in Christchurch, New Zealand for over four decades.

It found surprisingly high levels of anxiety, with almost half of females having an anxiety disorder along with just over a quarter of males.

Dr Kat Donovan, study co-author, said:

“This research reinforces the importance of actively developing social skills and skills in managing emotions, especially in the first 1,000 days of a child’s life where parents and whānau (a Māori word for extended family) play a key role.”

She continued:

“All tamariki (Māori children) experience anxiety at a certain stage but it only causes concern when it disrupts their development and reduces educational and emotional learning opportunities.”

Dr Donovan has some advice for parents of anxious children:

“It’s tough for parents and whānau to see their child in distress but it’s important they help them tolerate their feelings and not avoid them, by encouraging them to be in situations which are challenging and providing them with opportunities to be exposed to those situations.

However, if they don’t feel they have the skills to cope with certain behaviors they should seek out parenting courses or professional support.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Medicine (Monk et al., 2021).

Anxiety is contagious, social isolating, it changes eating habits, provokes difficulties concentrating, interferes with sleep and is partly inherited.

Like many mental health problems, almost everyone experiences anxiety from time-to-time.

Whether it is a problem all depends on the amount and nature of the anxiety.

Everyday anxiety in response to stressful events is normal, but severe anxiety in response to relatively minor events can be seriously disabling.

Anxiety is contagious, social isolating, it changes eating habits, provokes difficulties concentrating, interferes with sleep and is partly inherited.

Below are 12 psychology studies from the members-only section of PsyBlog on anxiety and the best ways to cope with and treat it.

(If you are not already, find out how to become a PsyBlog member here.)

1. This Sign Of Anxiety Is Easy To Miss
2. 3 Childhood Signs Of Adult Anxiety Disorders
3. Baking Cookies For A Friend Beats CBT Techniques For Depression
4. The Best Treatment For Anxiety Is Often Not Medication
5. Anxiety: This Activity Triples Chances Of Symptom Improvement
6. How To Lower Anxiety Disorder Risk By 60%
7. The Most Effective Ways To Reduce Worry And Rumination
8. A Food Supplement That Reduces Anxiety
9. 2 Psychotherapies That Reduce Neuroticism Dramatically
10. The Best Diet To Beat Anxiety
11. 2 Personality Traits Linked To Social Anxiety
12. The Best Treatment For Social Anxiety Disorder

→ Get Dr Jeremy Dean’s anxiety ebook.

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The reason that smart people with a high IQ are sometimes more anxious may have an evolutionary explanation.

Intelligence and anxiety may have evolved together as mutually beneficial traits, research finds.

This may help to explain why people with a high IQ also tend to have higher levels of anxiety.

The benefit may be that intelligence allows people to better imagine what might go wrong.

Worriers tend to keep out of danger so that their genes are the ones carried forward into the next generation.

Non-worries, meanwhile, starved to death because they didn’t prepare for winter or failed to anticipate an enemy raid.

Professor Jeremy Coplan, who led the study, said:

“While excessive worry is generally seen as a negative trait and high intelligence as a positive one, worry may cause our species to avoid dangerous situations, regardless of how remote a possibility they may be.

In essence, worry may make people ‘take no chances,’ and such people may have higher survival rates.

Thus, like intelligence, worry may confer a benefit upon the species.”

Study of smart people and intelligence (IQ)

For the study, people with high anxiety levels were compared with those with average levels.

Brain scans were carried out, along with tests of intelligence and anxiety.

In people diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, IQ was positively correlated with worry.

In other words, people who were more intelligent also worried more.

Brain scans found that activity in sub-cortical white matter correlated with both anxiety and intelligence.

Previous research has shown that people who are low in intelligence are also prone to worry — possibly because they achieve less in life.

Average IQ show less of a link with anxiety.

The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience (Coplan et al., 2012).

Take the test for ‘nomophobia’: short for “no-mobile-phone phobia”.

Nomophobia is the fear of, or anxiety caused by, being without your phone.

The word is short for “NO MObile PHone PhoBIA”.

Around half of people suffer from nomophobia, according to one survey carried out by the UK Post Office in 2008.

The study also found that people experienced nomophobia when they had no network coverage or their phone was low on battery or credit.

Psychologists have developed a test for nomophobia: the fear of being without your phone.

The researchers found four aspects to nomophobia:

1. not being able to communicate,
2. losing connectedness,
3. not being able to access information,
4. and giving up convenience.

People in the study of nomophobia responded to the statements below on a scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree).

You can add up your total score, by adding your responses to each item.

The higher the score, the more you ‘suffer’ from nomophobia.

Here are the nomophobia statements:

1. I would feel uncomfortable without constant access to information through my smartphone.
2. I would be annoyed if I could not look information up on my smartphone when I wanted to do so.
3. Being unable to get the news (e.g., happenings, weather, etc.) on my smartphone would make me nervous.
4. I would be annoyed if I could not use my smartphone and/or its capabilities when I wanted to do so.
5. Running out of battery in my smartphone would scare me.
6. If I were to run out of credits or hit my monthly data limit, I would panic.
7. If I did not have a data signal or could not connect to Wi-Fi, then I would constantly check to see if I had a signal or could find a Wi-Fi network.
8. If I could not use my smartphone, I would be afraid of getting stranded somewhere.
9. If I could not check my smartphone for a while, I would feel a desire to check it.

If I did not have my smartphone with me:

1. I would feel anxious because I could not instantly communicate with my family and/or friends.
2. I would be worried because my family and/or friends could not reach me.
3. I would feel nervous because I would not be able to receive text messages and calls.
4. I would be anxious because I could not keep in touch with my family and/or friends.
5. I would be nervous because I could not know if someone had tried to get a hold of me.
6. I would feel anxious because my constant connection to my family and friends would be broken.
7. I would be nervous because I would be disconnected from my online identity.
8. I would be uncomfortable because I could not stay up-to-date with social media and online networks.
9. I would feel awkward because I could not check my notifications for updates from my connections and online networks.
10. I would feel anxious because I could not check my email messages.
11. I would feel weird because I would not know what to do.

Nomophobia, anxiety and depression

While people experience nomophobia without their phones or coverage, there is little evidence that normal phone usage causes anxiety.

Simply using a phone as a way of alleviating boredom is not linked to depression or anxiety.

However, being highly engaged with, or even ‘addicted’ to mobile phones is linked to elevated levels of anxiety and depression, research finds (Panova & Lleras, 2016).

People seem to use their phones as a kind of security blanket in anxiety-provoking situations.

While this is not necessarily a problem, the study also found that using mobile phones as an emotional coping mechanism was linked to depression and anxiety.

For the study, over 300 people were surveyed and asked questions about their phone and internet usage, their mental health and so on.

The questions included:

“Do you think that your academic or work performance has been negatively affected by your cellphone use?” and “Do you think that life without the Internet is boring, empty and sad?”

Professor Alejandro Lleras, who led the study, said:

“People who self-described as having really addictive style behaviors toward the Internet and cellphones scored much higher on depression and anxiety scales.

However, [there was] no relationship between cellphone or Internet use and negative mental health outcomes among participants who used these technologies to escape from boredom.

Thus, the motivation for going online is an important factor in relating technology usage to depression and anxiety.”

In a follow-up study, the researchers tested the effect of a stressful situation on phone usage.

Professor Lleras explained that the phone sometimes acted as ‘comfort item’:

“Having access to a phone seemed to allow that group to resist or to be less sensitive to the stress manipulation.”

Just using your phone when bored won’t lead to anxiety or depression, Professor Lleras said:

“We shouldn’t be scared of people connecting online or talking on their phones.

The interaction with the device is not going to make you depressed if you are just using it when you are bored.

This should go toward soothing some of that public anxiety over new technology.”

The study was published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior (Yildrim et al., 2015).

Facts about anxiety, including how to reduce it, why some people are so anxious and the behaviours that increase it.

Facts about anxiety include that acts of kindness can reduce social anxiety and some dietary supplements may help with the condition.

Another fact about anxiety is that it can be socially isolating and inherited from your parents.

Discover these and more facts about anxiety based on psychological research below.

1. Acts of kindness reduce anxiety

Performing acts of kindness can help people with social anxiety mingle with others more easily.

People recruited into the study were put into one of three groups for four weeks:

• One group performed acts of kindness, like doing their roommates’ dishes.
• Another group were exposed to various social interactions without the acts of kindness.
• A third group, who did nothing special, acted as a control.

At the end of the study it was those who’d performed the acts of kindness who felt more comfortable in social interactions.

2. Fact about anxiety: dietary supplements

Dietary supplements which contain passionflower, kava or combinations of L-lysine and L-arginine can help reduce anxiety, according to a review published in the Nutrition Journal.

The supplements generally had mild to moderate effects without producing any serious side-effects.

Of the supplements included, kava has been the most extensively studied.

The researchers found that taking kava on its own…

“… significantly reduced anxiety symptoms in a variety of patient types.

This provides good evidence for the use of kava in patients with GAD, non-psychotic anxiety and other anxiety-related disorders.”

3. Anxiety is socially isolating

Anxiety interferes with the ability to take other people’s perspective, research reveals.

Anxiety makes people focus more on themselves and reduces their empathy for others, psychologists have found.

The study’s results may help explain why anxiety can be such an isolating emotion.

4. Fact about anxiety: it is inherited

An over-active network of brain areas is central to how children inherit anxiety and depression from their parents.

The network consists of three regions in the brain which work together to control the fear-response.

The study found that around 35 percent of the difference in anxiety was explained by family history.

5. Sedentary behaviour linked to anxiety

Sitting down all day has been linked to increased anxiety, a study finds.

Low energy activities like watching TV, working at a computer or playing electronic games may all be linked to anxiety.

The cause of the link could be down to disturbed sleep, poor metabolic health or social withdrawal.

6. Social anxiety linked to higher serotonin levels

Social anxiety disorder is linked to higher levels of serotonin in the brain, not lower as previously thought.

People with both social anxiety actually produce more of the neurotransmitter serotonin in their brains.

The more serotonin they produce, the more anxious they become.

The result is a surprise as social anxiety are often treated with SSRIs like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft.

SSRIs actually increase the levels of serotonin in the brain.

7. Fermented foods can reduce social anxiety

People who eat more fermented foods have lower social anxiety, a study finds

The benefit is particularly noticeable amongst people who are highly neurotic.

Neurotic people are prone to anxiety.

Fermented foods that are a regular part of the Western diet include milk, cheese, yoghurt and bread.

They typically contain probiotics, which are likely behind the benefit.

8. Fact about anxiety: it is contagious

Anxiety is contagious and can be passed from parents to children and the other way, a study finds.

The ‘catching’ nature of anxious thoughts and behaviours exists over and above the effects of genetics.

Anxious children can also pass on their anxiety to parents, even when they were not initially anxious.

9. Prebiotics can reduce anxiety

Consuming a prebiotic can have an anti-anxiety effect, the research has found.

Researchers at the University of Oxford have discovered that a prebiotic can reduce levels of anxiety in a clinical trial.

Like foods containing probiotic bacteria, prebiotics are functional foods: they have benefits beyond their purely nutritional value.

The positive influence of the prebiotic was similar to that obtained by taking existing anti-depressant or anti-anxiety drugs.

10. How exercise and relaxation help reduce anxiety

In treating social anxiety — discomfort or fear in social situations, often of being judged — both relaxation techniques and exercise have been found beneficial (see: how to deal with anxiety).

Research suggests this is because it changes the way people perceive the world.

After exercise or relaxation, people are less likely to interpret neutral social signals as threatening — something that people with social anxiety have a tendency to do.

→ Now read more about anxiety:

• Signs Of Anxiety: 21 Symptoms Everyone Should Know
• 5 Relaxation Techniques For Stress And Anxiety
• Anxiety Attack Symptoms: 2 Signs People Usually Ignore
• Get Dr Jeremy Dean’s anxiety ebook.

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