Neuroimaging Study Shows Mindless Distractions Keep Away Anxious Thoughts

Anxious individuals often engage in mindless distractions to keep from thinking frightening or troubling thoughts. However, findings from a new neuroimaging study suggest that brain-sharpening activities--instead of mind-numbing ones--can rein in a restless psyche by triggering the area of the brain that controls logical reasoning and concentration.

With the current economic crisis and daily obligations spurring people's anxiety, a new study's findings could prove helpful to those feeling overwhelmed. Instead of washing the dishes or watching a soap opera to tune out negative thoughts, for example, the results suggest that anxious people might want to train their brain to stay focused with a tough crossword puzzle or a game of chess.

"If anything, hard tasks can keep anxious people from being sidetracked and can help them stay on task,” said Dr. Sonia Bishop, a University of California (UC), Berkeley (USA) psychologist and lead author of the brain imaging study, published online in the journal Nature Neuroscience on December 14, 2008.

Dr. Bishop's study revealed that individuals who are overly anxious have a difficult time concentrating on everyday tasks such as ironing and filing paperwork, even when they are not imagining worst-case scenarios. This is because, when distracted, anxious individuals struggle to activate the prefrontal region of the brain needed to focus on the task at hand.

These findings provide new insights in understanding the brain circuitry of anxiety because previous anxiety investigations have focused on an overactive amygdala, or fight-or-flight reflex, which alerts the body to protect itself in times of danger. They suggest that poor concentration in anxious individuals is as much due to a slow response in the prefrontal cortex when they are engaged in undemanding pastimes or chores.

U.S. national surveys indicate that one in five adults experience above-average levels of anxiety in a given year. Researchers have established that anxious people have a hard time concentrating, but the source of this difficulty has not been fully understood.

Utilizing functioning magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Dr. Bishop and her team conducted the study of 17 men and women, ranging in age from 19 to 48, at the University of Cambridge (UK). They scored in standardized tests as having varying levels of anxiety, but were not on medication. Their brains were scanned as they performed letter-searching tasks on a screen.

Each time the participants saw an "N” or "X” in a string of letters, they had to press a corresponding button. At times, the Ns and Xs were easy to find, and at other times, they were buried among long strings of letters. To present a distraction, a similar but irrelevant letter was placed above or below the letter sequence.

When the letter search was demanding, brain scans showed all the study participants' dorsolateral prefrontal cortexes, which control planning, memory, and organization, to be fully engaged. But when the letter search was easy, the prefrontal brain activity in high-anxiety participants plunged as their attention wandered. In contrast, low-anxiety participants easily activated the prefrontal brain to focus on the task when presented with distractions.

"The results go a long way in explaining the general day-to-day difficulties in concentration and distractibility associated with clinical anxiety,” Dr. Bishop said, adding that her new research leads the way for new coping strategies for poor concentration in anxiety, such as mindfulness training and drug therapies that target the prefrontal brain.

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University of California, Berkeley
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