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Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

nature.com

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Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#81

Post by frereubu »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #57
mindwok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I completely agree. Instead of being upset with outcomes (like how people react to me in interactions), there's three things I've been trying to instead focus on: Am I at peace with my core values? Do my intentions align with those values? And finally, do my actions align with those intentions. If something bad has happened, and those three questions are a 'yes', then you have no reason to feel bad because you'v…

If you say something unpleasant to a boss or someone else with the power to hurt you in life, even if it is aligned with your values (like enforcing boundaries or refusing unethical tasks), you may get fired, lose your income and destabilize your future safety, and have every reason to feel bad about your situation.

Epictetus would add that you need to act in accordance with "nature", by which he meant the world as it is, including human behaviour, not as we want it to be. In this case "nature" would include the behaviour of the boss and you can act accordingly, knowing that if you challenge them you may suffer repercussions.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#82

Post by mindwok »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #57
mindwok wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I completely agree. Instead of being upset with outcomes (like how people react to me in interactions), there's three things I've been trying to instead focus on: Am I at peace with my core values? Do my intentions align with those values? And finally, do my actions align with those intentions. If something bad has happened, and those three questions are a 'yes', then you have no reason to feel bad because you'v…

If you say something unpleasant to a boss or someone else with the power to hurt you in life, even if it is aligned with your values (like enforcing boundaries or refusing unethical tasks), you may get fired, lose your income and destabilize your future safety, and have every reason to feel bad about your situation.

I see your point but I’d argue that if you feel bad about this it means your core value is actually financial stability over sticking to your principles at any cost, and in that case your actions and intentions didn’t align with what you truly value.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#83

Post by bloopernova »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #68
bloopernova wrote: post #3

Fascinating study. For those who didn't read any of it: anxious people's brains use a different area when regulating emotions. Unfortunately the connection to this area may be more easily saturated during high emotional states. So, over stressed/anxious brains appear to have a different routing setup than everyone else. Very interesting find!

In my reading: > Unfortunately the connection to (*the usual area = FPl, that's a L not an i) may be more easily saturated during high emotional states. I do wonder if the FPl is overactive and needs to be slowed down like the article suggests (which hurts behavior in non-anxious people), or if the amygdala is jamming the FPl with excessive signalling (and needs to be slowed down).

Yeah, I was thinking about the treatment possibilities while reading. My wife has very high anxiety, which cannabis edibles mitigates pretty well, so I wonder if the pot is affecting those areas.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#84

Post by psychphysic »

riazrizvi wrote: post #76

So, heightened anxiety triggers alternate emotional regulation, with traits like pro-avoidance behavior. 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 bef…

The paper suggests rTMS to disrupt the disruptive activities.

The emotional challenge in this study was that you had a joystick and sometimes you pulled that joystick towards you when you saw an unhappy face. That's what was paralysing emotional challenge was for highly anxious people. Meaning it's unlikely their PFl could have any control in real life scenarios. It's important to note that in both anxious and non-anxious people the PFl was highly excitable. It's the pattern of its activity that makes a difference.

Cognition is hard work and the truth is you can't reason about your entire life and expect much success. Like driving a car as a learner your whole life, I remember the first driving lesson I had, I couldn't even focus with the radio on. Imagine if every time you got in you had less intuition about how to drive.

Think of the absence of fpi as a lack of intuition you get once you learn to drive.

CBT +/- an SSRI for 6months is a small price to pay to regain intuition.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#85

Post by riazrizvi »

psychphysic wrote: post #84
riazrizvi wrote: post #76

So, heightened anxiety triggers alternate emotional regulation, with traits like pro-avoidance behavior. 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 bef…

The paper suggests rTMS to disrupt the disruptive activities. The emotional challenge in this study was that you had a joystick and sometimes you pulled that joystick towards you when you saw an unhappy face. That's what was paralysing emotional challenge was for highly anxious people. Meaning it's unlikely their PFl could have any control in real life scenarios. It's important to note that in both anxious and non-an…

I think we might each be talking to different ends of the extreme here.

> recruitment of FPl when controlling emotional behavior fails in patients with emotional disorders

I won’t comment on people who have emotional disorders, or who have operated in this modality for very long periods of time. I’m more interested in it as a transient mechanism in people without disorders.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#86

Post by [deleted] »

psychphysic wrote: post #84
riazrizvi wrote: post #76

So, heightened anxiety triggers alternate emotional regulation, with traits like pro-avoidance behavior. 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 bef…

The paper suggests rTMS to disrupt the disruptive activities. The emotional challenge in this study was that you had a joystick and sometimes you pulled that joystick towards you when you saw an unhappy face. That's what was paralysing emotional challenge was for highly anxious people. Meaning it's unlikely their PFl could have any control in real life scenarios. It's important to note that in both anxious and non-an…

[deleted]

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#87

Post by protoman3000 »

It'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's exitability is less, or the amygdala activation is again the root of all of this. It's notable that some healthy individuals had high FPI excitability but were not anxious.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#88

Post by psychphysic »

riazrizvi wrote: post #85
psychphysic wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper suggests rTMS to disrupt the disruptive activities. The emotional challenge in this study was that you had a joystick and sometimes you pulled that joystick towards you when you saw an unhappy face. That's what was paralysing emotional challenge was for highly anxious people. Meaning it's unlikely their PFl could have any control in real life scenarios. It's important to note that in both anxious and non-an…

I think we might each be talking to different ends of the extreme here. > recruitment of FPl when controlling emotional behavior fails in patients with emotional disorders I won’t comment on people who have emotional disorders, or who have operated in this modality for very long periods of time. I’m more interested in it as a transient mechanism in people without disorders.

Ah I'm not sure you can extend this study to high anxiety circumstances in otherwise non-anxious people.

The executive functions that highly anxious people need to engage are precisely the functions that high stress levels disrupt.

This is about low stress situations in anxious people.

Not high stress situations in non-anxious people.

It's not likely that we can extrapolate between the two. And it's likely under those scenarios a third or more mechanism comes into play (flight, fight, freeze).

Not to mention the control were all men so we do need better sample for replication before we consider extrapolation.

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#89

Post by _def »

impulser_ wrote: post #13

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't what you want dealing with it so it cause problems. 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…

Im also responding to the "do the things you fear" bit: I think you are right. As to why this works for some and worsens it for others, I think that depends on how you approach this.

In my experience these confrontational situations need to strike a certain place between "too easy" and "too hard". It hardly helps to throw people into situations they can't handle again and again. A more gradual approach via small wins is the way to go IMHO, with a focus on avoiding the learned avoidance patterns, heh. There's also the aspect of the perception: one needs to be able to accept small victories and see them as the improvement that they are.

But all of this is way easier said than done, especially if you have to deal with it all by yourself.

So while I think that you are technically right, I think it's easy to misunderstand for people as "just toughen up" (not implying that's what you meant, but there is this to many people unknown middle part of it that I wrote about).

Re: Anxious brains redirect emotion regulation

#90

Post by riazrizvi »

psychphysic wrote: post #88
riazrizvi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we might each be talking to different ends of the extreme here. > recruitment of FPl when controlling emotional behavior fails in patients with emotional disorders I won’t comment on people who have emotional disorders, or who have operated in this modality for very long periods of time. I’m more interested in it as a transient mechanism in people without disorders.

Ah I'm not sure you can extend this study to high anxiety circumstances in otherwise non-anxious people. The executive functions that highly anxious people need to engage are precisely the functions that high stress levels disrupt. This is about low stress situations in anxious people. Not high stress situations in non-anxious people. It's not likely that we can extrapolate between the two. And it's likely under thos…

It’s hard to say where the boundary of application lies, I believe. The paper is naturally concise, and experiments typically select potent examples to clarify the phenomena, economically. Without the authors’ clarifying contextual anecdotes, I believe there is a lot of room to interpret.
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