Anxiety can be created by the body, mouse heart study suggests

I’m not sure what your objection is. The article pretty clearly qualifies its assertions that this phenomenon is observed in mice. Are you saying there is no possible way that these results could be recapitulated in humans?

Yes that's why yoga is so good at calming you down and making you healthy. It soothes and calms the parasympathetic nervous system, and helps relieve and release many held tensions in the body.

It's no good just to do meditation and calm your mind if your body and nervous system is still holding on to so much stress.

The body remembers many things and "embodies" many emotions. You can notice this if you do part-by-part relaxation. Lie down in corpse pose and close your eyes, and relax each part of your body by turn. From right toes, through feet, ankles, calves, shins, knees, thighs, hips. Then the left leg. Then right fingertips and the rest of the right arm. Then left arm. Then abdomen. Then chest. Then spine. Then head.

The more granular you go with relaxing each part of the anatomy, the more intense (and longer in duration) it is. [E.g. in feet you can do: relax each toe, toe nail, first joint of the big toe, ball of the big toe, next toe. Then soul of the foot. Then inner side of the foot. Then outer side. Then top of the foot. Then inside the foot. Bones and joints in the foot. Muslces and tendons in the foot. Nerves of the foot. Skin of the foot.] Relax each part. Let of any tension in each part. And move on.

Anyway, you can just do a level of anatomical granularity you are comfortable with. But what you will probably notice is that as you go over your body doing this, your mind will wander, and stuff you hadn't thought about the entire day (or longer) will come up. Some annoying or painful or traumatic moment or whatever will arise, as you hit on some particular body part. And it will interrupt your relaxation. So you just stay with it, and then keep going, relaxing your body. Skeptical folks will probably doubt that there's a correlation between a body part and a "stored" emotion or experience, but in that case I encourage you to try it. Relaxing the body in this way really relieves and releases many things stored in it, that without bringing awareness to them in this way, you would not have realized.

And it often compounds.

E.g. I have hyperhydrosis (excessive sweating). When my hands start sweating (for no good reason), I get anxious especially when around people expecting a handshake, which makes me more anxious which makes the hand sweating worse.

(If anyone suffers from the same re: sweating, ask you doctor about glycopyrrolate - it’s one of those drugs that is completely life changing for anyone with excessive sweating and with minimal/tolerable side effects)

Propranolol is also a godsend for anxiety (also with minimal side effects, unlike benzos , etc)

> It’s possible, he says, that this heart–brain loop evolved to help animals process danger signals more quickly: when the animal sees a potential threat, even before the brain can fully process what the situation means, the heart rate rises, essentially telling the brain that it should be worried.

I suppose, but how does the information about danger get from the eyes to the heart to the brain faster than from the eyes to the brain?