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As your thoughts run uncontrollably, your heartbeat starts to race and your breathing becomes heavy. Uneasiness is followed by fear, and then without warning, panic begins to set in. Suddenly you feel overwhelmed and overstimulated. If you periodically experience these symptoms, know that you’re in good company. Actors like Jennifer Lawrence and Emma Stone, musicians such as The Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson and Taylor Swift, artists and writers like Vincent Van Gogh and Emily Dickinson, all struggled with crippling bouts of anxiety.
We all know that anxiety affects our emotional state and makes interacting with the world difficult, but what may be less obvious is how it changes what we focus our attention on throughout the day. By biasing attention, anxiety alters what we are conscious of, and in turn, the way we experience reality. This can have profound consequences. Anxiety’s effects on attention may shape worldviews and belief systems in specific and predictable ways. It can even affect our politics without us knowing.
To protect against the reality-distorting effects of anxiety, we must first understand how attention works and the ways in which it can be influenced.
To use the metaphor inspired by the brilliantly forward-thinking 19th Century American psychologist, William James, our visual attention system works a lot like a spotlight that scans the world around us. This ‘attentional spotlight’ represents the finite region of space that is occupied by our focus of attention at any given moment. What falls inside the spotlight is consciously processed while that which is outside is not. By moving our eyes around a visual scene, we can shine our spotlight on any area of the environment we want to inspect in detail. In fact, in-depth processing of an object, a string of text, or a location can’t be carried out unless it is first brought inside the spotlight of attention.
The most popular type of training is known as Attention Bias Modification Training (ABMT), also known more generally as Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM). Although the type of specific task used varies, the general idea is roughly the same. In a typical training session, every few seconds a display featuring both positive and negative images appears on the screen — usually happy and angry faces — which is repeated hundreds of times. Since anxiety is associated with a tendency to focus on negative stimuli, the goal of the task is to locate or respond to the positive images with a button response or a tap on the screen. By doing this over and over, and ideally, over the course of days or weeks, the brain is trained to habitually focus attention away from threat and negative information towards positive information.
Will we ever find a way to correct this warped perception of threat and cure anxiety. Photo: iStock
Through exercises that work to dissolve anxiety-driven attentional biases for threat, and by becoming self-aware of the way that anxiety influences our attentional spotlight, we can help prevent it from distorting reality, instilling fear, and altering belief systems.
(BBC)
