NY Times: Taking Anxiety to a New Level

The New York Times has a posting in their Fashion and Style section on anxiety. Who knew that my psychological disorder was either stylish, fashionable, or both?

The author experiences some knee-knocking while looking over a cliff at Big Sur and notices that as she gets older, she’s much less inclined to engage in activities that involve elevation. She claims to never have been afraid of heights before, but now, at 47, altitude causes her anxiousness.

From a clinical perspective, as one gets older, we lose some of our mobility, and our confidence in being able to handle some of the physical demands as well as we did in our youth can wane. But is that anxiety?

From the article:

There is a difference between a fear and a phobia, of course. The people at the Anxiety Disorders Association of America will tell you that we all have things that scare us, after all. It’s when fears start limiting our behavior that they become the kind of full-fledged anxiety-producing phobias that afflict more than 19 million people nationwide. That’s more than 8 percent of the adult population, and the only reason I agreed to hike on the headlands trail in the first place was to keep myself from joining them.

So she takes to nature so she doesn’t have to join our ever-growing group of anxiety sufferers? Really?

I think there’s a big difference between fear and anxiety. Standing on the edge of a craggy cliff that juts out over the ocean is the kind of thing humans learned to stay away from, because experience reminded us of the time when Urg the caveman did that and plunged to his death. Our self-survival mechanisms kicked in, and over time it became ingrained in us to avoid doing silly things like that. It reminds me of a cat that sits on a hot stove. He never sits on a hot stove again – but he never sits on a cold one, either.

I’m guessing that the writer was trying to be cute and draw comparisons between loafing at Big Sur and having a panic attack for no discernible reason, but I’m not buying it. We don’t have the choice to avoid our everyday lives like she can avoid Big Sur, or an expensive dinner at a rotating restaurant at the top of some tall building.

Please don’t use anxiety for alliteration purposes, especially if you don’t understand what it is. A couple of quotes tossed in from authoritative anxiety sources doesn’t help explain how crippling anxiety disorders can be, and equating them to being afraid of falling into the ocean do nothing to educate the general public about a very real, very serious illness.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – Dysepsion

Germany Building a Better Anxiety Drug

Via Reuters, German scientists believe they have found a new drug for panic disorders that works effectively without many of the effects of current compounds such as Valium (drowsiness, forgetfulness) and that work much more quickly than SSRIs that can can weeks to build up effective blood levels.

The new drug, termed XBD173, appears to work by targeting a much different “panic button” in the brain than other medicines. It also appears to be both safe and fast-acting. Studies showed XBD173 began to work as quickly as one hour after being administered, which would be ideal for people having acute panic attacks.

Also promising is the discovery that there are no withdrawal symptoms once patients discontinue use of the drug. Valium and other similar compounds are well-known to present dependency challenges and unpleasant withdrawal.

Let’s hope research continues on XBD173 and we see it on the market sometime in the near future.

German research points way to better anxiety drug , via Reuters

The Thing I Fear Most Is Fear

In 1580, French essayist Michel de Montaigne penned this sentence in “Of Fear,” The Essays (Les Essais). Others have used variations of this theme since (FDR is his inaugural address, for one) and there’s a lightning bolt of truth in this phrase for those with panic and anxiety disorders.

Once I started having panic attacks in my late 20s, fear and trepidation concerning the next episode began to intrude on everyday life. Knowing how unpleasant panic attacks were for me, I began to fret about attacks before they happened as I postulated and predicted the next one.

Would I be on an airplane? That would be terrible, for there is no escape from the pressurized metal tube in the sky. How about stuck in traffic on a tall bridge? Feeling the sway of the span would cause my heart to race in anticipation, completely ignoring the fact that engineers build flexibility and elasticity into the structure to ensure fault tolerance and to prevent catastrophic failure.

A crowded meeting room? A party filled with my friends? A job interview?

Once I began to anticipate the (inevitable) next attack, I was all but ensuring its occurrence. I became a walking, talking self-ensuring prophecy of anxiety.

Fear is scary, and physical / emotional response to perceived risks is part of our survival instinct. But it seems like we’re a lot more afraid than we used to be. I’m not sure if it’s because we see and hear hyped-up threats constantly in our 24 hour news cycle, or if we’ve lost our sense of ratio and proportion.

Driving is one of the more dangerous modes of transportation. If you ask around, people would generally acknowledge this statement as true. But in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when everyone was afraid to fly, more people took to driving to get to their destinations, even though the risk of driving far outweighs the risk of being in a plane that’s commandeered and flown into a skyscraper.

It’s projected that an additional 1,595 people died in traffic fatalities in the year after the World Trade Center attacks, the deaths directly attributable to the increase in people driving. Statistically, we stand a 1-6,000 chance of dying in a car crash. Since only 3000 people have died due to planes crashing in tall buildings at the hands of terrorists in the history of the world, and of those, only a couple of hundred were inside the planes themselves, it stands to reason that we tossed aside rational thought and elementary school arithmetic out of fear. And rather than making us safer, fear increased the number of deaths and injuries we faced, directly opposite the result we were seeking.

It’s important for us to be able to step back, take a deep breath, and evaluate whether the measures we take out of fear are helping or hurting our cause. It’s not an easy exercise, but it is a necessary one. Otherwise, we’re constantly reacting.

More people die of malaria in a month than have died from swine flu in recorded history, but people wore ineffective surgical masks in public and began to stock up on Tamiflu rather than sending mosquito nets to Africa.

Fear makes us do idiotic things.

Panic Attacks for Meditation

Here’s an interesting concept – using panic attacks for meditation purposes. Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche discusses the classic Buddhist concept of embracing the feeling, understanding it, letting it pass through you, rather than fighting it. It’s a tall order – becoming friends with your anxiety – but worth the effort.

h/t FullContactEnlightenment.com

Brain, Electricty, and Panic

Anxiety Insights details an abstract from a Brazilian study that examined the role that abnormalities in midbrain structures might play in panic disorders.

The research demonstrated that electrical stimulation of the periaqueductal gray matter (PAG) produced panic-like symptoms “and the effect of drugs that are effective in the treatment of PD in the simulation of public speaking model of anxiety is in agreement with data from animal models of PD.”

In a head-scratching moment, the study also states that other brain abnormalities outside of the PAG might also be to blame if they are used to process panic and anxiety, so I guess the lesson is that we know a little more about midbrain abnormalities now, but other parts of the brain are also key contributors.

Panic disorder: Is the PAG involved?

Pig Flu: The Odds Are With You

As the media continue to flog the pig flu story for all it’s worth, and I watch scores of people walking around wearing powder-blue surgical masks – you know, the kind with holes large enough for most bacteria to get through, including H1N1 influenza – it reminded me of how easily we’re moved into fear and panic mode by the remote possibility that something could kill us dead.

We’re all going to die of something, and none of us gets to choose the manner or location of our demise, unless we happen to take matters into our own hands. In the absence of having any real influence over the beginning of our end, one would think that we would concentrate on the next best thing – run the numbers and then attempt to learn from them in order to do as much as possible to live as long as we can.

If you take the actuarial route, you’d find that you’ll most likely die of heart disease – a one in five chance. I don’t see anyone wearing masks that keep cheeseburgers and fries from making their way into the body, or a warning system that sounds if the cold radiating from ice cream is detected close to your lips.

The odds are roughly 1 – 300,000 that we’ll perish in an asteroid strike. Where is the call to spin up a real-life team of crackpots to destroy renegade celestial bodies like that portrayed in Armageddon?

Based on the latest available information, the odds of contracting swine flu are 1 in 29,000, and the chance you’ll die from it are 1 in 736,000. You are eighty times more likely to get hit by a drunk driver right now than you are to get pig flu.

It almost seems that it’s the control, or lack of it, that’s feeding people’s fears. If we only knew what to do, what precautions to take, then we could take them. Even if they were probably ineffective (remember duct tape to keep our anthrax and biological agents?), there’s something empowering about staying out of airplances, washing your hands like Adrian Monk, and trotting around wearing a little gauze mask like Dr. Zorro.

Once again, the best advice appears to be similar to what mothers have been telling us for years – cover your nose and mouth when you sneeze, wash your hands, and stay home to rest if you don’t feel well. The Pork Council would also like to know if it would be too much trouble for you to eat something, after they’ve worked so hard to raise those piggies. Would it kill you to have some carnitas or a ham & swiss?

Anxiety – A Personal View

So you’re probably thinking to yourself, “What the heck is this blog about?” It’s about anxiety. Irrational fear. Panic. You know…the usual.

I’m not a doctor, or a therapist. I’m someone who lives with anxiety, brought on by a lifetime of traumatic events dating back to my early childhood. We’ll get into that as we go.

One of the things my 40+ years of living with this sneaky creature has done is to mold me into a walking, talking contradiction. I have panic attacks, but I go whitewater rafting. I’m an introvert, but everyone thinks I’m the life of the party. I make my living doing risk management even though I have absolutely no personal belief that risk can be mitigated.

In the words of my former psychologist, “You’re highly functional, amazingly!” Ahh, the sweet sounds of praise.

In the course of becoming (and remaining) “highly functional”, I’ve learned a lot about myself, along with developing a healthy respect for tools, and concepts, and being open to trying things that have worked for others.

I’d like to keep doing that, and to share what I’ve learned. Others have done it for me, and I’d like to pay it forward.

I hope you’ll join me over the weeks and months, comment on the things that interest you, and email or link to postings you think will benefit friends, relatives, and co-workers who might be looking for a little help from someone who’s been there and has lived to talk about it.

Thanks for listening!