Category: Anxiety

Fear and anxiety are emotions that can trap you, but facing them can help, explains a clinical psychologist.

Phobias and anxieties, such as social anxiety, are best dealt with by facing them.

It is not easy, but if done step-by-step most people can learn to deal with anxieties and fears — even overcome them.

Dr Suma Chand, a clinical psychologist who helps people with phobias, says:

“The most reassuring thing I can say to anyone about fear is this: All emotions change.

You will never stay in a panicky state for the rest of your life.

Persevere, and the fear will dissolve.”

Fear and anxiety are emotions that can trap you, says Dr Chand:

“The more you feed it, the stronger it grows.

Fear traps people.

Fear puts you in a box.

Your world gets smaller and smaller.

After a while, you’re avoiding the discomfort of the fear itself, rather than the thing you fear.

When you avoid the things you fear you feel safe and comfortable and you don’t want to do anything that will shake this safe cocoon of comfort.

However you pay a heavy price – your freedom to live your life like the way you really want to live.”

One of Dr Chand’s patients had exactly this experience:

“I saw an elderly lady who had a fall and broke her hip.

It was very traumatic for her.

After she recovered, she didn’t want this experience to repeat itself.

She became very cautious and avoided walking anywhere where there was a possibility for falling.

Although the fear had initially translated into rational attempts to exercise caution it turned into avoidance as she went overboard with being cautious.

The avoidance made her feel safe but caused her fear to grow.

She stopped going to the store, the mall and to yoga, all of which she had enjoyed.

Her social interactions became restricted as she began to stay home more, and avoided her favorite activities, because she was overly fearful about falling.

She began to feel low and hopeless as she saw her isolated, limited existence stretch ahead of her.

While the treatment is to face the fear, it is done in a manner that does not overwhelm the patient.

The graded approach made this patient feel less overwhelmed and also more willing to face her fear.

Once she began to attain success in facing her fear and recognized that what she feared was not happening, it was like a switch was turned on, and she went faster.

Soon, she was fine and back to her old activities again.”

Dr Chand describes when to address fears:

“The time to address a fear is when you find that it is causing you a lot of distress and it is affecting your life in a significantly negative way.

For example, many people fear snakes, which of course can be dangerous.

But they are not preoccupied with this fear and they don’t find that it is impairing their lives very much.

On the other hand, some people fear cats, which are unlikely to cause much harm.

They may find themselves regularly panicked by visits to friends’ homes if they have cats and so begin avoiding such situations.”

Social phobias

Social phobias are extremely common and people experiencing it often feel very anxious about all kinds of social situations.

Dr Chand says:

“I had a patient who had social phobia…

[…]

I asked her to look at her choices.

If she were to choose to step into the situations she feared in gradual stages there’s a chance that she would realize her dreams.

However if she were to opt for the choice to avoid them she was guaranteed that nothing would change.

The good news is that she opted to face her fears and challenge her fearful thoughts.

Today she is dating someone and they are well on their way to a long term relationship.”

→ Signs Of Anxiety: 21 Symptoms Everyone Should Know

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The factors that predict recovery from the most common mental health problem.

Anxiety disorders are the most common type of mental illness.

However, a study provides hope for recovery for those with anxiety disorders.

Fully 72 percent of people with a history of an anxiety disorder were free of it in the last 12 months, the research reveals.

On top of that, 40 percent were in excellent mental health and 60 percent had no other mental health problems.

A key to recovery from anxiety disorders is having at least one person to confide in.

This provides a sense of wellbeing and security which can triple the chance of recovery, researchers found.

Professor Esme Fuller-Thomson, the study’s first author, said:

“We were so encouraged to learn that even among those whose anxiety disorders had lasted a decade or longer, half had been in remission from GAD for the past year and one-quarter had achieved excellent mental health and well-being.”

The conclusions come from a group of 2,128 Canadians who had Generalised Anxiety Disorder at some point in their lives.

Professor Fuller-Thomson says the results are hopeful:

“This research provides a very hopeful message for individuals struggling with anxiety, their families and health professionals.

Our findings suggest that full recovery is possible, even among those who have suffered for many years with the disorder.”

People found it harder to recover from anxiety if they were depressed, had a history of substance misuse or had insomnia.

However, they were more likely to recover when married and having someone they could share their experience with.

Ms Kandace Ryckman, study co-author, said:

“For those with anxiety disorders, the social support that extends from a confidant can foster a sense of belonging and self-worth which may promote recover.”

Spiritual or religious beliefs also increased the chance of recovery by 36 percent.

Professor Fuller-Thomson said:

“Other researchers have also found a strong link between recovery from mental illness and belief in a higher power.”

The study was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders (Fuller-Thomson et al., 2019).

How men and women’s brains react differently to negative stimuli.

Women react more strongly to negative stimuli than men, research finds.

Men, meanwhile tend to ‘rationalise’ away negative events.

The conclusions come from brain scans that have found critical differences in brain function in the emotional regions of men’s and women’s brains.

Dr Adrianna Mendrek, a study co-author, said:

“Greater emotional reactivity in women may explain many things, such as their being twice as likely to suffer from depression and anxiety disorders compared to men.”

For the research men and women had their brains scanned while they looked at positive, negative and neutral pictures.

Women gave the negative pictures more negative ratings compared to men.

However, the more testosterone both men and women had, the less they reacted to the negative pictures.

In other words: more ‘feminine’ men processed the negative images in the same way as women (and more ‘masculine’ women were similar to men).

The key finding in the study, though, was the differences in the brain function.

Men showed a stronger connection between the amygdala and the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC).

Dr Stéphane Potvin, study co-author, explained the significance:

“A stronger connection between these areas in men suggests they have a more analytical than emotional approach when dealing with negative emotions.

It is possible that women tend to focus more on the feelings generated by these stimuli, while men remain somewhat ‘passive’ toward negative emotions, trying to analyse the stimuli and their impact.”

Dr Mendrek concluded:

“So there are both biological and cultural factors that modulate our sensitivity to negative situations in terms of emotions.

We will now look at how the brains of men and women react depending on the type of negative emotion (e.g., fear, sadness, anger) and the role of the menstrual cycle in this reaction.”

The study was published in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology (Lungu et al., 2016).

People do not expect this trick for reducing anxiety to work – but it does.

Labelling anxiety — putting the feeling into words — can reduce the fear response, research finds.

In fact, the more fearful words people use to describe their anxiety, the more their anxiety reduces.

However, the study also found that people don’t expect that labelling their emotions will reduce anxiety.

But, recordings of their skin conductance show that it does.

The study compared labelling anxiety with other common methods of reducing anxiety, including distraction and reappraisal.

Reappraisal refers to thinking about anxiety in a different way.

For example, the study was carried out in people with a fear of spiders.

In the reappraisal condition they were asked to use neutral words to think about a spider.

Here is one:

 “Looking at the little spider is not dangerous for me.”

In contrast, people in the labelling condition were given these instructions:

“Participants in the affect-labeling group were instructed to create and speak a sentence including a negative word to describe the spider and a negative word or two to describe their emotional response to the spider (e.g., “I feel anxious the disgusting tarantula will jump on me”).

All the groups were exposed to spiders over varying lengths of time and followed up a week later.

The study’s authors describe the results:

“…the affect-labeling group exhibited reduced skin conductance response relative to the other groups and marginally greater approach behavior than the distraction group…

[…]

…greater use of anxiety and fear words during exposure was associated with greater reductions in fear responding.”

The lower skin conductance suggests that those who labelled their emotions were less fearful of spiders.

There are now many studies that show the benefits of verbalising emotions in all sorts of contexts:

“…experimental studies have found that when current emotional experience is verbalized, whether in spoken or written form, distress is reduced relative to conditions in which no verbalization or verbalization of nonaffective material occurs.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Kircanski et al., 2012).