A guest post today from Nisha, the Editor for healthypages.co.uk
Anxiety and the Mind
Sometimes it seems that we live in the age of anxiety. There certainly appears to be some cause for anxiety these days as our futures are being threatened by everything from global warming to rising unemployment and diminishing retirement funds. Governments throughout the world are struggling under massive debt loads, some teetering on the edge of complete economic collapse. Granted, there is plenty to worry about, and yet not everyone reacts to all this uncertainty in the same way.
Anxiety disorders, which can take several forms: generalized anxiety, panic, social anxiety, phobia, obsessive-compulsive, and post-traumatic stress, have become the most common types of mental health problems. Why some people suffer from anxiety to the point that it interferes with their ability to function while others seem to be to be relatively unaffected, has been the subject of research in a number of countries over the past two decades. What they have discovered is that some people are born predisposed to be anxious.
One of the most enlightening studies has been going on for over twenty years now. Jerome Kagan, a professor of psychology at Harvard, instituted a major longitudinal study in 1989, to look at temperament and its effects. His subjects were several hundred four month old babies and the study measured how babies reacted to new or novel stimuli. Each baby was videotaped as they were exposed, over a forty-five minute period, to a series of non-threatening images, objects, noises and smells. Many of the babies just watched contentedly, while others showed varying signs of distress, some even crying and flailing about when shown the unfamiliar things. Their reactions were later scored on a scale from low-reactive to high-reactive. Those children, who scored on the extreme ends of the scale, have been followed and retested at three year intervals.
Certain patterns soon emerged. When tested at age four, children who had been highly reactive as babies, were four times more likely to be behaviorally inhibited (shy, wary, subdued), while those in the low reactive group tended to be uninhibited (high-spirited, fearless, adventurous). By age seven, half of the highly reactive group had developed symptoms of anxiety, exhibiting extreme shyness and fearing things like the dark, dogs or thunder. Only ten percent of the low reactive group had any symptoms of anxiety. As the children have aged, the overall levels of anxiety have declined, as many, even in the high risk group; have developed better control over their innate fearfulness.
Other recent studies have identified biological abnormalities in the brains of people suffering from anxiety disorders, leaving little doubt that a predisposition to anxiety is genetic. People with this genetic predisposition are more susceptible to experiencing anxiety or developing anxiety disorders when exposed to environmental factors, such as stressful life events, which serve to trigger a reaction. Attempts to simply will the anxiety away or overpower it with positive thinking are unsuccessful because their brains are wired differently. But, by increasing our understanding of the anxious mind, they can be helped to shift their innate tendencies into something more constructive.
Hello my name is Nisha, I am the Editor for healthypages.co.uk. I love to write about health and beauty, especially Complementary Therapies, please visit our site for more informationHypnotherapy.
