Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

There is nothing to dismiss

health issues can both directly and indirectly make your psychological issues worse (or even be the direct cause of it)

and also the other way around

I think many of the "dismissal" (assuming non troll) comments come from with health issues people being feed up with getting the force feed the same advice they long time now every time their health comes up without the person giving their advice understanding their health issues. (e.g. not you because you just wrote what helped you in a neutral way).

For example some absurd examples I have seen repeatedly:

- a person with serve enough clinical depression to just be a step away from getting suicidal getting told "just do sports it will help" for the thousands time in a situation where they frequently have issues to even eat because their brain just stopped caring about being hungry

- or a person with motion sickness from certain games being again and again told the same set of well known and years ago tried advice, potentially combined with "you must never try VR" even through they did try VR and depending on the title it's not an issue as long as movement in VR is done through motion tracking

- or a person which had to stop their masters degree because of sever depression and anxiety being told "oh it's you could have done the masters because I was able to do so" when that other person just had a mild depressive phase due to overwork

- or people which had Vitamin-D deficit (which is really good at making other health issues worse) now insisting that every time they meat a "sick" person they should take Vitamin D supplements because sure their trauma induced psychological issues are just a Vitamin D deficiency.

Just to be clear I appreciate your your post, this is not trying to dismiss it in any way. In different to many of the examples I listed you bothered to formulate it neutral in a "this helped me, fixing health issues can help, here is why it helped me if you thing this could apply to you why not try it" way instead of a "this helped me so it 'must' help you too way". Through the line between both formulation is thin, and not seldom a matter of tone which is often lost in writing.

I'm not surprised tbh.

This fits very well with what you can see in anxious people, especially when combined with depression.

Through I guess the meat of the paper is in all the subtle biological details they found, which I just honestly do not understand at all.

Yes, but we are one proverbial red button away from nuclear hell on Earth no ancestor could have prepared for, where a lot of anxiety will translate into a lot of lives being saved. So we’re not too far from being adapted to the modern world.

It’s just that temporarily things are going well - there are no famines, no lawlessness, and no wars. As soon as we return to chaos even a bit, all those thrifty genes and anxious genes won’t be so maladaptive.

There doesn’t even need to be a world-ending scenario. Just go live outside an urban center, among wild animals, and all these genes will help you.

The authors/others interested in anxiety, may be interested in the paper: Dreaming Is the Inverse of Anxious Mind-Wandering:

https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz

Written by me and discussed on HN here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590

There is a coherent argument to be made that the problem of misplaced anxiety is so prevalent/fundamental to the species, that dreaming is a built in mechanism for diagnosing it.

A summary of the paper is:

Anxious states involve: The default mode ("imagination") network, high levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and an active amygdala.

REM dreaming states involve: The default mode ("imagination") network, extremely low levels of the fight-or-flight neurotransmitter norepinephrine (80% below base levels), and (surprisingly) an inactive amygdala.

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/must exist outside of something so variable.)

From my experience, the way I'd describe it is:

- fear is transient, you feel it in the moment and then it goes away. You can then remember "boy I was scared" and feel the memory of fear but not fear itself. You can project and imagine a situation where you'd be scared.

- anxiety is a persistent state of stressful anguish. There are peaks and troughs. During peaks it can be overwhelming and look like, trigger, or mix with fear. During troughs anxiety is still there somewhere deep, it merely takes a backseat to other emotions. In every moment it biases every process your mind undertakes.