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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Fun times.
[0]: https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/kidney-disease/... [1]: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-disorders
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05748-8
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)
Good luck!
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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.
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).
Wouldn't you want to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system? Not calm it?
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.
You need to fully stimulate it for it to relax afterwards. That can also be accomplished with breathing exercises, ice baths, etc.
Deleted Comment
If the small intestine can trigger a panic attack, it's not that surprising that other organs can also create anxiety.
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
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
There's no reason for it, but for whatever reason it triggers anxiety.
I can't explain beyond that, and I'm very familiar with my own conscious anxieties and triggers outside this.
It just is that.
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.
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.