I didn't even know that this was a matter of debate.
I had moderately serious heart problem (atrial murmur, sort of the less-serious cousin of afib/atrial fibrilation) and it was extremely clear to me that whatever was happening in my chest was also directly spiking my feelings of anxiety.
To be clear, I mean a direct heart->anxiety link, as opposed to "I'm thinking about my heart problem and therefore my anxiety is spiking" indirect link. On an experiential level it was very, very distinct from, say, being stressed out because your toenail hurts.
I realize that I'm a sample of one, and self-diagnosing phenomena like that is not particularly reliable. However, it was so crystal clear to me that I would consider it something close to truth and would place the burden of proof on anybody looking to claim otherwise.
There would certainly seem to be a significant biological advantage there, to having certain biological situations (pain, etc) cause a spike in corisol etc directly, as opposed to relying on the slower and less reliable processing our wonderful brains can provide. Especially in species with far simpler brains than humans.
I have a friend with panic attacks and she was pretty much the last one in our circle of friends to figure out that stomach distress was triggering attacks. The Vagus nerve is a puppet master and it can fuck with your sense of well-being on a good day, but if you have an adrenal disorder, good fucking luck.
stomach distress was triggering attacks. The Vagus nerve is
a puppet master and it can fuck with your sense of well-being
on a good day
This rings true. I had one actual panic attack in my life and it was absolutely wild and confusing.
For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what caused it. I certainly was not particularly mentally stressed out that day. I'm not even really anxious in general compared to others. I am middle aged and have had a lot of acutely stressful days without panic attacks, and also just... a lot of days in general... so I can't imagine why an unstressful day lead to one.
It certainly didn't feel like it originated within my brain. It felt like my body was triggering it. It felt like an incident in the past when I was diagnosed with acute pericarditis and nearly died. However, when I went to the ER following the panic attack, they found nothing physically wrong on the EKG.
Of course, we are not necessarily biologically or cognitively well-equipped to self-diagnose "why" our brains are feeling a particular thing. But nonetheless whether it was my vagus nerve or something else, it certainly felt like it originated outside of my mind.
As far as I know, it isn't. I have anxiety as part of the bipolar package. And every psychiatrist I've had says that increased blood pressure can trigger anxiety.
They can both feel like tightness in the chest and from what I was told, the brain isn't good at separating signals. So your body feeling anxious leads to your brain feeling anxious. It's a wonderful cycle. Throw in asthma for more fun. Now you have three possible problems that can all trigger each other! Get sick and feel short of breath? Now you have four! Aren't bodies fun? :D
That's a wild package. You are dealing with a lot. I hope you are able to step back and give yourself credit once in a while for dealing with so much. The world is full of secret superheroes, mustering up a lot of strength and ingenuity to get through their days. You are one of them.
No bipolar here but for years I struggled with asthma for years. It is quite the addition to the whole anxiety mix. It definitely took me quite a while to figure out I was dealing with a heart issue, because the symptoms were really similar to asthma.
> The world is full of secret superheroes, mustering up a lot of strength and ingenuity to get through their days.
I know you mean well, but I don't like being thought of as a superhero. It defines me by my limitations and hold me up as something exceptional. I actually find this to be quite harmful. :(
Consider this: I only need to be exceptional because society would not allow me to be successful otherwise. There are many others with my disability who aren't.
Damn, I meant the opposite - I just wanted to recognize the struggle. But that's no excuse. Neither is the fact that I have disabilities as well. I'm very, very sorry and extremely appreciative that you took the time to explain that. I owe you.
Prior to properly getting diagnosed I went through a bunch of tests and episodes because the sensations manifested as heart-attack-like symptoms. I can tell you the anxiety produced was, ... palpable.
also helped me to eat more gelatine (one teaspoon in the morning), seemingly the body can work these amino acids very fast and it sounds crazy but I felt the effects within a day. The main problem didn't go away for a long time, but a lot of small side issues went away.
EXACT same situation. I’ll never forget the time I felt a murmur and several seconds later I was panicking. This was before I was diagnosed so I legitimately thought I was having a heart attack. I wasn’t even worried about the murmur, in between those seconds I was thinking “huh, that was weird.” And then wam, slammed with adrenaline. I had never even had panic attacks before…
I went to the doc, and he recognized the symptoms as a panic attack. I told the doc “no, you’re not listening. I have zero anxiety in my life right now.” Several dozen attacks later and a doctor that didn’t try to gaslight me into having an anxiety disorder, we found the heart problem.
Most importantly: best wishes. I'm sure you've been through a looooot. I hope there are brighter days ahead.
Does your current valve situation cause an elevated heart rate, presumably because your heart is is compensating for not pumping as efficiently as it should?
I had a different issue and I'm extremely unqualified to have an opinion here, but based on my personal experience I'd be willing to put down a pretty decent sum of money on a bet that lowering your heart rate will reduce your anxiety directly.
(And then you'll of course have lower stress in general I should think, because you won't be worrying about the upcoming valve replacement and all the uncertainly surrounding a major operation. But that part is pretty clear, I would think)
Yeah, I discovered it by trying to figure out why my resting heart rate and blood pressure was higher than it should be for an athletic person. Used to take beta blockers to slow things down (Which I do wanna say made me more calm). Turns out the medication was causing more damage, ACE inhibitors would have been better. Right now I'm not taking anything.
Just getting tests every 6 months and waiting for the time to come. I have fine resting heart rate around 70bpm and 130 blood pressure avg. (These numbers went down after college)
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.
> 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.
I just want to point out that for nearly all of its history yoga is primarily about meditation, with the asanas being preliminary, quickly covered material in most classic texts.
The Yoga Sutras of Patañjali are a good reference for anyone curious (though the sections on the siddhis is... interesting).
Exactly. Was created to support meditation. But doesn't mean you have to meditation. You can get the benefits without it...although maybe not the magical powers! Haha. Although...the postures are pretty powerful! :)
Hehe. The linguist has identified a distinction. Whatever works for you: maybe some stimulation, maybe some relaxation. :)
We calm it and maybe it isn't active. We stimulate it and then it's relaxing us. I see what you're saying.
Is there another side to it? Isn't calm and soothed a form of stimulation? An active, easy coherence?
Maybe we don't want to be over-stimulated. Stimulated in the right way creates coherence, in the wrong way, chaos. We can be calm--and active. Or we can be stimulated--and uneasy.
You don't have to worry that it won't be stimulated in the right way when it's calmed and soothed: it will be. And that's what you want.
So, I don't think you can go wrong with a calm and soothed parasympathetic nervous system. That's the way to go. For me, soothes and calms is coherence. And that's good for your body, and good for you, it's what you'll feel when you do yoga.
I would argue that the verb forms of calm and sooth connote stimulation, whereas the adjective form of calm might be a lack of stimuli. I'm not sure there is a present tense adjective form of sooth? But certainly one might say, "this music is very calming" so in that case the stimulus is causing the non-stimulated (by my definition) state... Offsetting the anxiety causing stimuli? I am neither a linguist nor a medical professional, but you got me thinking! Thanks.
I think the non-scientific explanation is that with conditions such as anxiety and chronic stress it's consistently engaged, but only slightly (like background noise).
You need to fully stimulate it for it to relax afterwards. That can also be accomplished with breathing exercises, ice baths, etc.
The parasympathetic nervous system is a control mechanism over the sympathetic nervous system. When the latter is stimulated, you become anxious and excited. When the former is stimulated, it tamps down on the latter, causing you to relax. Either one or the other is active.
“Relaxing” the parasympathetic system would therefore free the sympathetic nervous system to activate more strongly, thereby making you more anxious.
It’s distracting and disorienting when people appropriate medical and scientific language to explain their internal experience of the world. One is measured through experiment, the other through direct perception.
Is it really tho, a control mechanism? Not really.
Tamps down on? That's not true. Either one or the other is active? They're both continuously active.
Relaxing would free it? No, that's not true. When you relax a nervous system it becomes more effectively active, because the signals are more coherent. Yeah, more anxious? No.
Hahaha! Distracting and disorienting? Hahah! Medical and scientific? You mean like you're doing? You're the one misappropriating meanings here.
Internal experience of the world? Or their internal experience of a textbook, that you've misinterpreted anyway? Well look, internal experience is what you have to rely on. Otherwise you end up with these sort of uh, twisted textbook definitions where you don't have the experience.
You need to have the experience first. Only then will you know the meaning of those words. That’s why yoga is so important: it gives you more experience—of who you are, of your body, of how it works.
Perception and experiment? Very clever, haha :) Well look, I see you're trying to make a point. I see you're trying to contribute. But the problem is here, you just don't know. You don't have the experience to know what these words really mean in this context. And so, you know, you're not useful here. I'm sorry. Your contribution is not useful anyway.
Maybe you have a bad experience with yoga or a teacher or something. In the past, I don't know. It's possible. A girlfriend left for someone she met in the class or you felt like the class humiliated you. Look, it can happen. You can have bad teachers or bad classes. I feel sorry for you if that's the case. But you just don't know in this context. So, I encourage you to give it another shot. Give yoga another shot and give it a try. I got super lucky. I had a great teacher. So, I encourage you to try to find a really great teacher. Best of luck to you.
I don't know. Nicotine can produce that intense relaxation. But why take a toxin for what you can get with just your body and some intelligent practices? All upside. Except it takes effort! :) But the longer term effects are way better for yoga than nicotine. Those two paths diverge pretty quickly by a lot I think.
Nicotine is only toxic in high doses, which naturally greatly exceed that which you get from a patch. You could say the same thing about basically anything; say someone recommended eating a banana to cure cramps. Potassium is also toxic in high doses. I agree yoga is a great practice but that doesn’t exclude the beneficial effects nicotine can provide. For example, I can chew nicotine gum during exams but I can’t do yoga.
For example, I can chew nicotine gum during exams but I can’t do yoga.
But if you're doing yoga the benefits extend in time far beyond the session. So say you're doing hatha yoga 3 times a week. You're going to be relaxed and calm; your nervous system is going to be more resilient to stress; You're going to be more focused; you're going to sleep better and need less sleep -- for that whole week. So the "half-life" is a lot longer compared to nicotine.
Nicotine is only toxic in high doses
But also...acutely toxic at high doses. It's still a toxin at low doses. And I wouldn't say how it's giving you the relaxation it is healthy for you at low doses. But yoga is.
It was already know that the peptide fragment CCK-4 reliably causes sever panic panic attack when administered in doses of 50 μg. And CCK4 is fragment of an hormone produced by the duodenum.
If the small intestine can trigger a panic attack, it's not that surprising that other organs can also create anxiety.
> “It was a chicken-and-egg question that has been the subject of debate for a century,” says Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in California
Huh, I'd have said this idea was already well-established. I'm curious how this finding is different than the existing evidence that bodily sensations can influence emotions. I mean, I can't be the only one who feels anxious when I've had too many cups of coffee or ate something funny
Yes! And if you have problems with anxiety, it may be helpful to simulate your vagus nerve to help calm your body down. Taking cold showers, massaging your ear, eating probiotics are all things that I've personally been doing and I feel a general improvement of my own anxious feelings. It's such an easy/accessible way to manage anxiety; I would think it should be more mainstream.
I’ve had anxiety my whole life. Tried CBT, therapy, medication, everything.
Eventually got diagnosed with a congenital heart disease. Turns out, when your heart is behaving in a way that mirrors symptoms of anxiety, your brain decides you’re anxious. Your brain just picks something to be anxious about, because there’s no mental reason for anxiety.
Within a week of being on the heart meds my anxiety mostly disappeared. Still get anxious from time to time, but over actual things and it’s manageable. But, was really a life changer
So obvious that it makes you question the effectiveness of medical research.
The association between mitral valve prolapse and anxiety is well-known. However this physical difference is completely ignored when it's mild. In the general population, mild prolapse is seen as a common thing.
However there are also diseases caused by genetic mutations which cause both mitral valve changes and also a whole set of body problems including chronic pain, elasticity, vascular problems etc. The underlying causes are so under-researched that an easily fixable problem tied to a gene becomes a progressive disease over a lifetime which is damn hard to diagnose. You suddenly see that too few resources are dedicated to actually understand and solve medical problems instead of treating symptoms when they get severe.
Plus... coffee is a pretty good way to kick off anxiety and we know it for at least a century I guess.
> So obvious that it makes you question the effectiveness of medical research.
The point of medical research - especially the kind that seems obvious - is not just to discover new things, but to confirm what we think is obvious really, indeed, is obvious, and this isn't always the conclusion of such research.
Yes, I know the aim of medical research, you're right there. However it also has trouble confirming obvious things over decades. Medicine is a tough problem for sure.
Exactly. I have anxiety and panic attacks. When my heart beats faster for whatever reason, it triggers anxiety and in more extreme cases, panic attack. It's kind of obvious, really.
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)
Yup. Just thinking about panic attack getting worse or experiencing any of the effects like sweating or pounding heart (regardless of the cause) starts a bad positive feedback loop (more panic, more sweat/heart pounding, then more panic because of that) until the doom/derealization and fight-or-flight kicks in. I can easily call that feeling "the worst/most frightening experience ever" in my whole life.
Same happens whenever it dips too, and if it stops completely you get a feeling of "impending doom" (infinite anxiety haha). For example using adenosine to turn the heart off and on again if it's acting wonky.
Maybe just messing with the heart causes anxiety lol. Brain there like "wait, I didn't tell you to do that.. red alert!"
Anxiety is only ever created by the body. I understand the experiment, but I don't understand what this headline is supposed to mean. I think somebody is letting their liberal arts leak into their science.
External things don't cause anxiety. Anxiety often occurs as a reaction to external things. Of course anxiety might be caused by a faster heartbeat; one of the symptoms of anxiety is a faster heartbeat. You can also cause it with injections of adrenaline, or amphetamines. Lack of oxygen works, too.
Maybe this seems profound because the mice can't explain their feelings?
> 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?
Brain is still in charge - I think the key is bypassing consciousness and reacting sub-consciously. Which makes sense, your body will starts releasing adrenaline before you ever think "oh no!"
Right, but it seems like the eyes can plug straight to the unconscious parts of the brain more easily that a Rube Goldberg connection via messages to the heart and back again. Like, whatever connection there is from the eyes to the heart is going to go via the spinal cord anyway. It could stop off and tell the brainstem on the way down.
There are actually exercises where you imagine a dial, like a volume knob, and imagine dialing the emotion that you want to regulate down a bit. The astonishing thing is, it works quite well!
I just finished reading a book by John Sarno M.D. that talks about this connection.
I was always under the impression that it is a two way street. Just that modern science doesn’t want to accept that emotions cause bodily problems and vice versa. If anxiety can be created, perhaps anger can too.
Here’s an old study about escaping stressors leading to tumor rejection in mice:
This could explain what is happening with long covid. Many sufferers (including me) complain about feeling anxious and stressed, along with insomnia. We assume it is from the worry of being sick or having to deal with life. But maybe myocarditis which is common with Covid is causing the anxiety and insomnia. Suffers need sleep and the removal of stress to heal, so people are stuck in an endless loop.
It's remarkable how deeply ingrained in our worldview mind/body dualism is, even though I think on paper most people don't accept this as an axiom.
If anxiety is not created by the body where does it originate from? extra terrestrial beings? the immortal soul? purely in our surrounding environment?
All of these (except the third option) require pretty impressive assumptions to even be a workable hypothesis.
This is pretty interesting finding. I think the idea that the body itself can produce emotions has been around for a while. I remember an essay by William James about this.[0]
I had anxiety for years, coming and going unpredictably. Not being worried -about- something realistic, just a very jittery feeling paired with brain fog, concentration problems and mood swings. Eventually I was diagnosed with Celiac disease and I almost never feel that way any longer, except when I'm accidentally exposed to gluten.
The body generates a hurricane of consciously-interpretable signals. A lot of people can agree with "anxiety can come from the body", but I think it's worth going further - anxiety can be computed, all over the body, and then the brain is a bit of an internet/routing hub itself for all those messages.
Medical students have been using propranolol (heart beat rate reducer) to calm down they exam anxiety since half a century ago. I used it during my exams too. Very effective, quick and safe. The same goes for atenolol and other beta blockers.
Makes sense. On days I skip eating for the whole day I will get a sense of impending doom later in the day. Just "something is going to really badly somewhere!"
> Mice and rats have long served as the preferred species for biomedical research animal models due to their anatomical, physiological, and genetic similarity to humans. Advantages of rodents include their small size, ease of maintenance, short life cycle, and abundant genetic resources.
It's almost as if research is done on mice on purpose. Of course you're going to see new discoveries, positive or negative, come out of studies involving the most widely used test subject on the planet.
I think the iron-man argument is -- wouldn't it be much less a waste of everybody's time here if we never posted mice articles, and only waited until they go to the human stage to share/discuss them?
Of course it's a free community, people are welcome to post and upvote whatever they like, still we do have cultural norms here around high signal/noise and I understand the sentiment.
I mean, that's the entire purpose of the algorithm and downvoting things. Our "cultural norms" are to downvote and ignore if something doesn't interest us. Not to explicitly whine about something being posted in the first place.
Does a comment complaining about the high signal/noise ratio do anything but discourage discussion?
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?
I'm saying that we see article after article about breakthrough findings in mice, only to find out later that it doesn't apply to humans, and therefore findings in mice aren't particularly interesting news.
Except when they do apply to humans. For example, intracellular bacterial communities formed by uropathogenic E. coli were observed in mice before humans.
I had moderately serious heart problem (atrial murmur, sort of the less-serious cousin of afib/atrial fibrilation) and it was extremely clear to me that whatever was happening in my chest was also directly spiking my feelings of anxiety.
To be clear, I mean a direct heart->anxiety link, as opposed to "I'm thinking about my heart problem and therefore my anxiety is spiking" indirect link. On an experiential level it was very, very distinct from, say, being stressed out because your toenail hurts.
I realize that I'm a sample of one, and self-diagnosing phenomena like that is not particularly reliable. However, it was so crystal clear to me that I would consider it something close to truth and would place the burden of proof on anybody looking to claim otherwise.
There would certainly seem to be a significant biological advantage there, to having certain biological situations (pain, etc) cause a spike in corisol etc directly, as opposed to relying on the slower and less reliable processing our wonderful brains can provide. Especially in species with far simpler brains than humans.