Answer Addiction

Tag: anxiety treatment

  • Liv Tyler Discusses Anxiety, Going To Therapy

    Liv Tyler Discusses Anxiety, Going To Therapy

    Tyler revealed that she uses coginitive behavioral therapy and meditation to manage her anxiety.

    Actress Liv Tyler, most recently of Hulu’s Harlots, spoke on her struggles with anxiety and her decision to attend cognitive behavioral therapy in a recent interview with The New York Times.

    Tyler, the daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler, admitted that she doesn’t enjoy the spotlight, yet she loves the creative process of her work, and is trying to change her priorities and thought patterns to make the fame part—and her life in general—easier.

    “That is definitely the great puzzle and mystery of my entire life,” she said. “I’m always trying to learn as much as I can about myself, both from my mind and anxiety in general. I definitely have a side to me that’s very shy, or shy in certain situations. I’m better one-on-one, I think. I’m trying to articulate it. I’m still trying to understand it.”

    Handling Fame

    According to the Times, Tyler started attending cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) this year to help reduce the anxiety that so much attention from her career has brought her. She also spoke on her personal fascination with the human mind and her desire to better understand herself.

    “I tend to ask a lot of questions so that I can understand the world more, people more,” said Tyler. “It’s fascinating, people, how they think, how the brain works.”

    Tyler also practices transcendental meditation in order to help her cope with the stress of her career and motherhood. She spoke about this coping technique in 2013, saying that “it helps me make better decisions and be a better mother, and just deal with the daily stress of the modern world that we live in.”

    The pressure of the world, particularly as it embraces social media as an everyday part of life, caused Tyler to consider quitting acting altogether in 2017, according to The Irish Examiner.

    Finding The Balance

    Due to her natural shyness, she had trouble learning how to promote herself online through this increasingly essential medium, and she wasn’t sure she liked it.

    “A world changing so much, I was just kind of trying to find my place in all of that.”

    Today, Tyler is still working on achieving a balance that works for her and her family. She calls herself a perfectionist and says she has trouble with time management and tends to overextend herself.

    “I’m always striving to achieve balance, which I think is a very tricky thing in the world today in general. I think our society is not really set up for balance, a lot of extremes going on.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • What The "Painless Woman" Can Teach Us About Anxiety, Pain

    What The "Painless Woman" Can Teach Us About Anxiety, Pain

    A woman with a rare insensitivity to pain may be able to help researchers develop new drugs to treat pain and anxiety.

    Jo Cameron experiences less pain, less anxiety and less depression than most people—but for the first 65 years of her life, she had no idea she was so unique. 

    “I was just a happy soul who didn’t realize there was anything different about me,” Cameron said, according to ABC News.

    It wasn’t until Cameron was in the hospital for a normally very painful surgery that doctors realized she had a much higher than normal pain tolerance. After learning more about her life that has been almost entirely free from pain, researchers began studying Cameron. The results were recently published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

    Researchers found that Cameron has mutations in her DNA that affect her body’s cannabinoid system, and thus how she experiences pain. Cameron has low levels of the enzyme FAAH (fatty-acid amide hydrolase), which breaks down anandamide, a cannabinoid neurotransmitter, Colin Klein explained in The Conversation. 

    “Since Cameron doesn’t break down anandamide, it accumulates in her blood,” Klein writes, pointing out that animal studies show that elevated anandamide decreases pain and anxiety. “So she not only feels less pain, she also feels less anxiety about the pain she does feel.”

    This is consistent with what researchers found. 

    “[Cameron] also reported never panicking, not even in dangerous or fearful situations, such as in a recent road traffic accident,” they wrote. 

    Cameron’s condition isn’t without negative side effects—she often is forgetful, and she doesn’t have pain to alert her when something is wrong with her body. “It would be nice to have warning when something’s wrong,” she said. 

    Researcher James Cox said that cases like Cameron’s can help the medical community better understand pain, anxiety, and how they interact. “People with rare insensitivity to pain can be valuable to medical research as we learn how their genetic mutations impact how they experience pain,” he said. 

    Understanding how FAAH interacts with the cannabinoid system could help researchers develop new drugs. 

    “FAAH is therefore an attractive drug target for treating pain, anxiety, and depression, although recent clinical trials with FAAH inhibitors were unsuccessful,” they wrote.

    Despite that, researcher Devjit Srivastava said that Cameron’s case is very important. 

    “The implications for these findings are immense,” Srivastava said. “The findings point towards a novel painkiller discovery that could potentially offer post-surgical pain relief and also accelerate wound healing. We hope this could help the 330 million patients who undergo surgery globally every year.”

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Could Parental Support Be The Key To Managing Childhood Anxiety?

    Could Parental Support Be The Key To Managing Childhood Anxiety?

    A new study examined whether parents’ accommodation of a child’s anxiety had a positive or negative effect on their mental health.

    Parental support may be equally as effective as individual treatment when it comes to managing childhood anxiety, a new report suggests. 

    According to Yale Daily News, the Yale Child Study Center recently conducted a study in which researchers randomly assigned 124 children with anxiety into one of two groups: a traditional, therapy-based group or a group with parents only. 

    The children in the therapy group went to 12 weekly meetings where they learned to use exposure therapy to manage their symptoms and fears. The children in the parent-only group did not speak to a therapist, but instead their parents were taught to “stop accommodating the child’s behavior and to be supportive of the child’s ability to cope with anxiety themselves,” according to the Daily News.

    The parent-only treatment was referred to as Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions (SPACE). 

    At the conclusion of the study, researchers found that children in the SPACE group had reduced anxiety symptoms, similar to those in conventional therapy. But in the SPACE group, the parents also reported stronger relationships than the parents in the other group.

    Study author and associate director of the Anxiety and Mood Disorders Program, Eli Lebowitz, tells the Daily News that SPACE is a treatment method equally as effective as traditional therapy. 

    “The results of the study were really quite remarkable,” he said. “Regardless of what measure we used to look at the outcomes, children whose parents received SPACE were as improved and as likely to be cured from their anxiety problem as children who had 12 sessions of some of the best CBT therapy available. And that is truly a remarkable outcome.”

    Lebowitz added that while it’s normal for parents to try to adjust to and accommodate a child’s anxiety, doing so may be detrimental in the long run and could lead the child to have greater anxiety.

    In the study, researchers worked with parents in the SPACE group to learn to use words of support and express confidence in their child instead. 

    In a 2013 study about SPACE, also by Lebowitz, parents were encouraged to follow this script:

    “We understand it makes you feel really anxious or afraid,” the script said. “We want you to know that this is perfectly natural and everyone feels afraid some of the time. But we also want you to know that it is our job as your parents to help you get better at things that are hard for you, and we have decided to do exactly that. We are going to be working on this for a while and we know it will probably take time, but we love you too much not to help you when you need help.”

    Lebowitz tells the Daily News that while the SPACE study results are promising, more research is necessary in order to determine how psychological pathways in a child’s brain are changed by practicing SPACE. 

    View the original article at thefix.com