Did you know that uncontrollable worry
is an anxiety disorder that typically starts in childhood?
It's a disorder that it's usually lifelong
and comes and goes over the course of your life.
I'm gonna tell you about a non-medication help for it
that's not talked about much.
I'm Dr. Tracy Marks, a psychiatrist
and I make mental health education videos.
Uncontrolled worry is one of the hallmarks
of generalized anxiety disorder.
And this is different from obsessive compulsive disorder,
where you have obsessional thoughts
or rituals that you have to perform.
It's also different from panic disorder,
where you have sudden attacks of anxiety
with lots of physical symptoms.
Many people with anxiety
have a mixture of all of these by the way,
but with generalized anxiety,
you tend to anticipate worst case scenarios,
worry about negative outcomes
and feel a lot of fear about the negative scenarios.
It's like you have a super sensitive threat meter.
And even if you know that your worry is unreasonable
or find a way to be reassured for the moment,
you still can't help entertaining the fearful thoughts
and running them over and over in your mind.
A sign that your anxiety
is causing functional impairment or interfering with your
daily activities,
it is when it races out of control at night
and keeps you awake.
So there's a loss of control
of your ability to tune out these thoughts
or distract yourself from them.
If you're one who has worked hard at meditating
and using exercises to reduce your anxiety,
you may be able to turn down the volume on these thoughts,
but it's like a script running in the background
that you can't completely quiet.
That negative commentary that you can't make go away
can start to make you feel depressed and hopeless.
Why does this happen?
A current theory that has gained a lot of traction
is that this uncontrolled worry comes from deficits
and attentional control
and its effect on your working memory.
Attentional control is a higher level
brain function called an executive function.
Your attentional control has two parts.
One, is the ability to sustain your focus on a task
and block out other distractions,
the other is the ability to shift your attention
from one task to another.
Let me say that a different way.
If you have good attentional control,
you can sustain focus on a task
and filter out things that don't relate to the task.
You are also able to cleanly move your attention
from one task to another
without the previous task distracting you
from doing a new task.
A common example of this is being able to work on a project
then stop before you're finished to go to a meeting,
then you can pay full attention in the meeting
without still working through your project in your head.
When that meeting is over, you can resume your project
and leave what happened in the meeting behind
while you finish your project.
The ability to do this is based on the strength
of your neural pathways that make these actions possible.
So with anxiety and depression,
these nerve pathways are disrupted
or not functioning properly,
and this makes you unable to filter out information
and let go of the thoughts that cause you this distress.
So for an example,
you can go to a nice dinner party
or a socially distance gathering,
and even though people are talking and having fun,
you can't stop the worry tape from playing in your head.
The person without an anxiety disorder
or someone who maybe has mild symptoms
can shift their attention
to the positive activity that's right there in front of them
and block out the other thoughts.
So the party is able to distract them from their worries.
That's one of the differences between situational anxiety
and an anxiety disorder.
When you have situational anxiety,
you worry about whether you're gonna lose your job after
the company announces cutbacks,
or you fear that you may lose your home
before you get your stimulus check.
These are real worries that people have in those situations,
but those worries are temporary,
and people can usually distract themselves from them
if they can find other things to focus on.
So here's something that shows real promise
for helping you get more control over your thoughts.
It's called brain training games
or cognitive training.
These specialized exercises boost attentional control
and improve your working memory.
That improvement in your executive function
has positive effects on your emotional functioning.
There's a research reference in the description from 2019,
where they used the training and teenagers
to reduce emotional, vulnerable stability.
That's huge.
Because as I mentioned earlier,
anxiety disorders start early.
If we can get better control of the problem earlier,
it can make a huge difference
for the quality of your life as an adult.
But even if you've already dealt with anxiety for years,
the brain training can still have benefit
for the adult brain,
because the cognitive exercises have shown to improve
neuroplasticity.
Neuroplasticity is the ability of your brain
to change the nerve connections and rewire itself.
So here's why I really like this finding.
The brain training exercises
are not just something used by researchers,
they are commercially available options
that can be used on a self-help basis.
One such company is called CogniFit.
They've been around for a while
and they have a version
available for clinicians and educators,
but they also have a version personal use.
You're able to take a cognitive assessment
to see what your weaknesses are,
then choose the games
that can help you build up your skills.
You can see an example of what a testing report looks like,
and you can sample the brain games
to get a feel for what they're like.
This video is not sponsored by CogniFit
and I get no financial benefit from recommending them,
it's just one option you can explore
for scientifically validated brain training games
that are available to the public.
On the issue of brain training,
take a look at this video that I have
talking about learning to play a musical instrument
to improve your mental capacity,
and your brain plasticity
is just another tool in your arsenal
to improve your mental health.
Thanks for watching,
see you next time.