Anxiety Impacts Ability To Perceive Changes in Our Breathing: Study

Eastern medicine has used breathing as a tool to improve mental health for centuries. Yoga, meditation and exercise can help in keeping anxiety and depression at bay.

Does your breathing pattern change when you are anxious? A new study reveals that when people become anxious, the perceptions of their breathing is altered, which can lead them to become more anxious.

Lead author Dr Olivia Harrison, //now a Rutherford Discovery Research Fellow in the Department of Psychology, says anxiety is one of the most prevalent mental health conditions, with even more people suffering in the current pandemic.

Depression, Anxiety Linked to C-Section Risk Among Pregnant Women: Study
New study sheds light on relationship between perinatal mood and anxiety disorders and first time cesarean delivery among pregnant women.

‘Eastern medicine has used breathing as a tool to improve mental health for centuries. Yoga, meditation and exercise can help in keeping anxiety and depression at bay.’

For the paper, published in Neuron, the researchers looked at how the symptoms of anxiety which end up in our body – such as a racing heart, sweaty palms, fast breathing – can feed back and possibly start a negative spiral of emotions, creating even more anxiety.

The study, conducted by Dr Harrison while at the University of Zurich, involved thirty healthy people with low anxiety and thirty people with moderate levels of anxiety. Participants completed a questionnaire and two breathing tasks, with one during a brain imaging session to assess changes in blood oxygenation and flow.

“We found people who have higher levels of anxiety have altered perceptions of their breathing compared to people with lower anxiety – they are actually less sensitive to changes in their breathing, they have reduced ‘insight’ into how well they are able to perceive their body, and they have altered brain activity when they are predicting what will happen to their breathing in the future,” Dr Harrison says.

Anxiety and Dementia may be Reversible by Understanding Brain Cells� Talk
Mental health conditions like anxiety and memory ailments such as dementia may be reversible by understanding how our brain cells talk.

“We might believe we are very ‘in-tune’ with our bodies, but what we’ve seen is that anxiety can actually reduce our ability to notice changes in our breathing. This is really important, because if we don’t realize when we are breathing faster or harder due to being worried, then we could more easily have further symptoms such as feeling lightheaded – if we don’t realize what is happening in our body, then these symptoms can make us feel even worse and worry us even further.”

While the study does not provide answers about how to effectively treat anxiety, it is a starting point to understand how higher levels of anxiety can influence body perception.

Outdoor Activities can Improve Mood and Reduce Anxiety
A new study showed that taking part in outdoor, nature-based activities led to improved mood, less anxiety, and positive emotions.

“Even this knowledge might help to make a few things clearer; when we are anxious, we are likely ‘tuning out’ from body symptoms, even though we might not know it.

“These results are just the beginning of our understanding about how the communication between the brain and body can start to break down with anxiety. We hope to use this information to help improve treatments by giving people the tools to perceive their body better and break the negative cycle of anxiety leading to symptoms leading to more anxiety.”

Mask-Wearing May Up Social Anxiety
Mask-wearing by people with social anxiety is influenced by their perception of social norms and expectations, which may or may not be consistent with public-health guidelines and can vary widely by region and context.

The next step – now running at the University of Otago – is to investigate whether treatments such as exercise or anti-anxiety medications may help people perceive their breathing more accurately, and whether this contributes to reductions in anxiety.

“We know that many types of medicine – particularly Eastern medicine – has used breathing as a tool for improving mental health for centuries. We also know that things like yoga, meditation and exercise can help to calm us and reduce our worries, but we don’t yet know why or how these practices work.

“We would like to see whether the reductions in anxiety are at least in part mediated by improvements in body perceptions, or ‘tuning in’ to our bodies, and whether we can help improve these mental health benefits – both by understanding their mechanisms and creating novel treatment strategies that build on these principles.”

Source-Eurekalert