Anxiety | Addiction Treatment Strategies

Regular exercise may be a useful strategy for helping prevent the development of panic and related disorders, a new study suggests.
People with an intense fear of the nausea, racing heart, dizziness, stomachaches and shortness of breath that accompany panic — known as “high anxiety sensitivity” — reacted with less anxiety to a panic-inducing stressor if they had been engaging in high levels of physical activity, said researchers at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and the University of Vermont in Burlington.
“Anxiety sensitivity is an established risk factor for the development of panic and related…

People who self-medicate — that is, to use alcohol or drugs to reduce unwanted feelings or anxiety — are at greater risk for a later substance abuse problem, according to a new study.
Self-medicating also appears to up the risk for social phobia in people with anxiety. People typically self-medicate in an effort to avoid more formal treatment, whether it be with psychotherapy or medications.
Canadian researchers led by Jennifer Robinson examined data collected through the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism survey. Their study was designed to measure the occurrence of substance use disorders in individuals with anxiety…

Moderate alcohol consumption—a glass of wine with dinner or a few drinks at a party—is no cause for concern for many people.
 
However those with anxiety disorders may find that alcohol or other substances can make their anxiety symptoms worse. And they are two to three times more likely to have an alcohol or other substance abuse disorder at some point in their lives than the general population.
 
About 20 percent of Americans with an anxiety or mood disorder such as depression have an alcohol or other substance abuse disorder, and about 20 percent of those with an alcohol or substance abuse disorder also have an anxiety or…

ScienceDaily  — When psychotherapy is helping someone get better, what does that change look like in the brain? This was the question a team of Canadian psychological scientists set out to investigate in patients suffering from social anxiety disorder. Their findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science.
Social anxiety is a common disorder, marked by overwhelming fears of interacting with others and expectations of being harshly judged. Medication and psychotherapy both help people with the disorder. But research on the neurological effects of psychotherapy has lagged far…

Training teenagers to look at social situations positively could help those with anxiety and may help prevent problems persisting into adult life, new research from Oxford University is beginning to suggest.
The researchers found that tasks designed to prompt either positive or negative interpretations of unclear situations can shift how healthy teenagers think about such events. The approach is called ‘cognitive bias modification of interpretations’ or CBM-I.
Having shown in the lab that positive or negative styles of thinking can be induced in adolescents without any anxiety problems, the team now wants to see if it is possible…

 ”Self-medication of anxiety symptoms with alcohol, other drugs or both has been a plausible mechanism for the co-occurrence of anxiety disorders and substance use disorders,” the authors write as background information to a report in the August issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
“Given the significant consequences of mental illness comorbidity [coexistence with another illness] and its high prevalence in the general population, clarifying the underlying mechanisms through which comorbidity develops will have considerable implications for prevention and treatment.”Jennifer…

Yoga has a greater positive effect on a person’s mood and anxiety level than walking and other forms of exercise, which may be due to higher levels of the brain chemical GABA according to an article in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. The article is available free online.
Yoga has been shown to increase the level of gamma-aminobutyric acid, or GABA, a chemical in the brain that helps to regulate nerve activity. GABA activity is reduced in people with mood and anxiety disorders, and drugs that increase GABA activity are commonly prescribed to improve mood…

Just like everyone else, people with panic disorder have real stress in their lives. They get laid off and they fight with their spouses. How such stresses affect their panic symptoms hasn’t been well understood, but a new study by researchers at Brown University presents the counterintuitive finding that certain kinds of stressful life events cause panic symptoms to increase gradually over succeeding months, rather than to spike immediately.
“We definitely expected the symptoms to get worse over time, but we also thought the symptoms would get worse right away,” said Ethan Moitra, a postdoctoral researcher in the…

Panic attacks that seem to strike sufferers out-of-the-blue are not without warning after all, according to new research.
 A study based on 24-hour monitoring of panic sufferers while they went about their daily activities captured panic attacks as they happened and discovered waves of significant physiological instability for at least 60 minutes before patients’ awareness of the panic attacks, said psychologist Alicia E. Meuret at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
In a rare study in which patients were monitored around-the-clock, portable recorders captured changes in respiration, heart rate and other bodily functions, said…

Substance abuse can lead to anxiety disorders, and vice versa. Either way, both problems need to be managed and treated together.
While substance abuse is serious enough on its own, users run the additional risk of developing an anxiety disorder as a side effect of abusing drugs or alcohol. And for a certain number of people with an anxiety disorder — estimates are 20 percent or more — turning to substance abuse will add a serious complication to their emotional problem. Fortunately, there are ways to treat both, regardless of which came first.
Substance Abuse and Anxiety Disorder: The Chemical Connection
Chemicals in drugs like…