The university environment can fill the life of a student with multiple stressors ranging from worries about grades and test performance to a more general fear about what the future holds in store.
“Feeling anxiety, especially about life after college, is natural,” said Andrea Niles, UCLA psychology researcher. “It is actually even beneficial and a motivating force to feel some form of fear,” she added.
“It becomes an anxiety disorder when a higher level of fear than that which is adaptive occurs,” Niles said. “Those who suffer from it and experience enough fear will engage in avoidance behaviors which perpetuate the disorder.”
To address this issue, researchers at UCLA are diving in to get a full understanding of the many different types of anxiety to develop more effective treatments and to get the word out to the public: that anxiety exists but can be minimized to improve one’s quality of life.
The newest project coming out of the UCLA Anxiety Disorders Research Clinic is a study assessing the differences between two forms of treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy as well as the new application of mindfulness meditation as therapy to treat anxiety.
The study uses a functional MRI brain imaging tool to assess the changes in brain activation after patients received one of the two treatments during a 12-week period, Niles said.
The study will be done of people suffering from social anxiety, the fear of being severely judged in social situations, and general anxiety disorder, which is the excessive worrying about areas of life that can be trivial and out of one’s actual control.
While in the fMRI brain scanner, participants will be exposed to their fear, which will be intrusive images such as a crowded room, said Michelle Craske, professor of clinical psychology at UCLA.
Limited research in the past has found the activation of the amygdala, an area of the brain responsible for emotion and fear regulation, gets dampened after cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which teaches the patient alternative ways of thinking and acting, Craske said.
In addition, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for higher order thinking and planning, is activated more after the treatment, allowing the person to override their emotions with rational thought, she added.
The big questions will be to see whether the mindfulness therapy, termed acceptance and commitment therapy, will cause the same pattern of brain activation in participants.
Mindfulness meditation is a form of mental training where the mind acquires skills that teach one to become fully of aware of their own experiences and live in the now, said Lobsang Rapgay, professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Science at UCLA.
“There are many treatments already in place for anxiety, such as CBT, which is highly effective. But there is still room for improvement,” Rapgay said.
People who are overly anxious have been shown to talk to themselves excessively, Rapgay said. CBT may inadvertently increase self”“verbalization and as a result maintain the anxiety in the long run.
In fact, Rapgay said that those who suffer from anxiety disorder usually suffer the most when they are alone with their thoughts, in the early morning and late at night.
With mindfulness, patients are thought to become aware of themselves in the present moment and observe their experiences in a more detached way in order to get a more objective moment-to-moment perspective, Rapgay said.
“This helps to replace the habit many have of coloring the present with unresolved issues from the past which bias experiences,” Rapgay said.
Anxiety disorders, at their deepest core, are formed due to misinterpretations of experiences in life.
Mindfulness teaches one to become aware and understand the moment without coming up with possibilities that have no evidential backing.
“If you hear a sound of a car, mindfulness teaches you to learn to experience the sound of the car rather than immediately think that an accident has occurred,” Rapgay said. “Only when you attain real access to the event can you form a conclusion.”
Rapgay believes that a hybrid of both the psychotheraputical CBT and the mindfulness therapy will be the most impactful in treating anxiety, with CBT focused on teaching an alternative way of thinking and mindfulness bringing the person back to the present moment when the mind begins to stray and worry.
Rapgay said that for students, all of whom experience some form of anxiety at some point, practicing the skill of mindfulness could help in the management of everyday stressors.
It is not a clinical therapy, but a meditation that anyone can learn. But, just like any other skill, mindfulness requires practice; up to 20 minutes each day for three months. However, the perks of increased attention and awareness of the present moment are well worth the work, Rapgay said.