Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

So, heightened anxiety triggers alternate emotional regulation, with traits like pro-avoidance behavior.<p>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.<p>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 <i>even mild emotional challenges can saturate FPl neural range</i>, 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.

It&#x27;s always fear, isn&#x27;t it?<p>We&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>Every good opportunity that I ever got, was from me coming out of my comfort zone and avoiding to avoid situations.<p>It&#x27;s important to remember, anxiety is a useful defense mechanism, but not 99% of the time.

So from my understanding. Anxious people are so anxious that they overload the part of the brain that typical deals with anxiety so the brain routes it to another part of the brain to deal with it and that part of the brain isn&#x27;t what you want dealing with it so it cause problems.<p>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.<p>I could be wrong, but that my understanding of it.

Fascinating study.<p>For those who didn&#x27;t read any of it: anxious people&#x27;s brains use a different area when regulating emotions. Unfortunately the connection to this area may be more easily saturated during high emotional states.<p>So, over stressed&#x2F;anxious brains appear to have a different routing setup than everyone else. Very interesting find!

If you suffer from serious anxiety, I highly recommend you work on any health issues you have. Low blood sugar in particular is known to promote anxiety by increasing the amount of adrenaline in your system.<p>I used to suffer a lot of anxiety. Getting physically healthier helped mitigate that enormously.<p>Proviso: n=1, &quot;anecdata&quot; 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.

have agoraphobia pretty bad. I&#x27;ve spent so much time trying to work on exposure, but then I&#x27;ll have a huge panic attack, I don&#x27;t have access to my frontal cortex to reason through it, during this time I&#x27;m feeling the immensity of the universe, I feel electricity running through my body, at the end of it all when I get somewhere &quot;safe&quot; I&#x27;m not able to think straight or sleep well for months. So yeah the impulse to avoid those feelings is pretty strong. I&#x27;ll push myself once again in the future but the risk reward ratio is pretty bad. Thanks brain wiring!

The authors&#x2F;others interested in anxiety, may be interested in the paper: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psyarxiv.com&#x2F;k6trz" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;psyarxiv.com&#x2F;k6trz</a><p>Written by me and discussed on HN here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19143590">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19143590</a><p>There is a coherent argument to be made that the problem of misplaced anxiety is so prevalent&#x2F;fundamental to the species, that dreaming is a built in mechanism for diagnosing it.<p>A summary of the paper is:<p>Anxious states involve: The default mode (&quot;imagination&quot;) network, high levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and an active amygdala.<p>REM dreaming states involve: The default mode (&quot;imagination&quot;) network, extremely low levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine (80% below base levels), and (surprisingly) an inactive amygdala.<p>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&#x2F;must exist outside of something so variable.)

It&#x27;s a great study. I would welcome if they did the same experiment and analysis on groups of people who had an anxiety disorder diagnosed and got healed, preferrably with CBT or other non-pharmacological methods alone, and a healthy population. It would be interesting to see the effects of therapy on this mechanism and whether an higher excitable FPI stays activated in the healed cohort or it&#x27;s exitability is less, or the amygdala activation is again the root of all of this. It&#x27;s notable that some healthy individuals had high FPI excitability but were not anxious.

I wonder if this shift of processing areas is behind the the &quot;detachment&quot; or &quot;depersonalisation&quot; (feeling like you&#x27;re in autopilot, or not being you) that seems to be a common response to high anxiety.

The language of this is challenging for me to read and understand. Is there any clarity on whether high anxiety leads to this different routing, or whether there has been some event in the past leading to this routing which then leads to high anxiety? And is there any indication whether exposure to feared situations will lessen anxiety after this difference in routing is in place?

Dealing with stuff is dumb. Thank you, non_fpi secondary system, the round file of my brain.

My understanding of this is illuminated by (stay with me here...) blockchains.<p>Most blockchains use a kind of time-traveling&#x2F;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&#x27;re interested in.<p>The brain seems to be operating a similar data structure where the answer to your query depends on some sort of &quot;neural net root&quot; value. This value seems to come from primitive structures (HPA?) and depends on basic things like fight&#x2F;flight anxious&#x2F;relaxed.<p>The upshot is that people can believe&#x2F;think&#x2F;know different things depending on their current emotional state.

2 days ago my wife and I hopped on 737 MAX plane for the first time.<p>&quot;This is it&quot; I told my wife giddy when I saw the MAX 738-8 bold letters on the emergency pamphlet.<p>&quot;This are the planes that came down due to the...&quot;<p>&quot;Stop it!&quot; Shouted her because I was about to start one of my long engineering diatribes.<p>My anxious brain had acceptance on putting my life on the hands of well meaning people.<p>Other&#x27;s anxious brains rather not.

&quot;Anxious individuals consistently fail in controlling emotional behavior, leading to excessive avoidance, a trait that prevents learning through exposure.&quot;<p>Sounds a lot like burn out in ny experience.

This is just tedious. The electro-chemical map of the brain that is built and used to study it, is so primitive.<p>Almost certainly, &quot;the brain&quot; 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 &quot;formwork&quot; that formed it, is lost in evolutionary time.<p>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.<p>&quot;The brain&quot; is not in any way shaped like a physical object, and the formwork that formed it is infinitely complex.

In my head, what this says is that the brain is a muscle that will use pathways and otherwise more used areas, more frequently.<p>Seems logical when I think about it that way.

how to get over this and get over tendency to avoid? Please someone help I am struggling and procrastinating and destroying my life

I relate to this. Also that excessive caffeine exacerbates my anxiety and makes avoidance more likely.

so we should be avoiding avoiding?

Window of tolerance.

So can we fix it?

I have 0 motivation. I havent cleaned in 2-3 years. I sit in trash next to my PC. lol Atleast I have you guys

I just want benzos and lay in bed and watch Netflix all my life pleeeease please please its my dream life

If you suffer from anxiety, and haven&#x27;t tried any of the following yet, worth giving a go: escitalopram (with medical supervision, also 10mg did nothing for me, 20mg was life changing), ingesting silexan &#x2F; lavendar oil, L-Theanine with your coffee, less coffee, less alcohol, propanalol (see a dr) instead of benzos for break-through anxiety, ashwagandha.