Anxious Quotes

“In order to eliminate negative emotions and avoidance and secure enduring therapeutic changes, Beck argues that it is necessary to identify and evaluate the maladaptive beliefs (some of which are unconscious) and replace them with more realistic thought patterns, which will result in healthier thinking, behaviors, and feelings.46”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“It was as if the amygdala was the accelerator of defensive reactions and the prefrontal cortex the brake upon them (Figure 11.1). Malfunction of the brake makes the expression of the reactions hard to control. This idea has since been supported by research in animals and humans and is now commonly accepted.10”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Fear and anxiety are not biologically wired. They do not erupt from a brain circuit in a prepackaged way as a fully formed conscious experience. They are a consequence of the cognitive processing of nonemotional ingredients. They come about in the brain the same way any other conscious experience comes about but have ingredients that nonemotional experiences lack.108”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Autonoetic consciousness is our best friend and worst enemy. It enables us to write and revise our narrative, our self-story, as we live each moment of each day.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Stress can also prevent extinction from taking place.53 This is thought to be due to the fact that stressful events release the hormone cortisol via the pituitary-adrenal system (see Chapter 3); this hormone has impairing effects on PFCVM function.54 Thus, the very factor needed to induce extinction—exposure to stressful threats—can prevent extinction. This is an argument against the use of flooding and related exposure procedures that elicit high levels of “fear.” However, the hormones released during stress that impair extinction have complex and sometimes opposing effects on different phases of learning (acquisition, memory consolidation, memory retrieval, extinction, and memory reconsolidation).”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“twin studies of anxiety have revealed that genetic factors account for roughly 30 percent to 50 percent of an individual’s tendency to be generally anxious or to have a specific anxiety disorder.50”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“For example, one promising target is the peptide oxytocin, which has been reported to reduce anxiety, promote affiliation, attachment, and affection,33 and facilitate extinction of threat conditioning.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Restating Kierkegaard, the cultural historian Louis Menand noted, “Anxiety is the price tag on human freedom.”2 Kierkegaard believed that we are free to choose our future actions, and this defines who we are.3 But modern science has concluded that our freedom is often more illusory than we think.4 Regardless of how free our will really is, though, the fact that we believe it is free makes us anxious when we perceive that we do not actually have control, when we face risky options in situations of uncertainty, or when we ruminate over how the present and future might be different if we had acted differently in the past.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“When split-brain patients fabricate verbal (left hemisphere based) explanations for behaviors that were produced by the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere is generating explanations of behaviors produced by nonconscious systems and does so in the maintenance of a sense of self. That is, our behavior is an important way we come to know who we are. This is the essence of Gazzaniga’s interpreter theory of consciousness (see Chapter 6).”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Anxious people exhibit: (1) increased attention to threats; (2) deficient discrimination of threat and safety; (3) increased avoidance of possible threats; (4) inflated estimates of threat likelihood and consequences; (5) heightened reactivity to threat uncertainty; and (6) disrupted cognitive and behavioral control in the presence of threats.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“It also enables us to fill in the blanks of our future self. The way we fill in those blanks is an important element in our overall outlook on life. Fearful, anxious people see troubles ahead and lead their lives dwelling on worst-case scenarios that often do not come to pass. They believe that worrying gave them the power to execute plans that prevented the bad things from happening in the past. But”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Initially, we thought that all memories might be susceptible to disruption by reconsolidation blockage. But Nader, who is now a professor at McGill University, found that strongly conditioned memories (those conditioned with an especially intense US) were protected from reconsolidation blockade.135 This was bad news for those who had hoped that reconsolidation blockade could be used as a treatment for PTSD, because this disorder usually results from very strong memories having been created in response to horrific situations. But Diaz-Mataix and Doyère found that strong memories can indeed undergo reconsolidation if new information is incorporated into that memory—in other words, if the memory is updated.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Conceptual Differences Between Consolidation and Reconsolidation. According to consolidation theory each time we retrieve a memory we retrieve the original memory. Reconsolidation theory, on the other hand, suggests that each time we retrieve a memory, the memory is potentially changed (updated); thus, you retrieve the memory you stored after the last retrieval rather than the original memory.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Fourth, within the session, the learning should be spaced out. It is well known that massed training is much less effective than spaced training in creating enduring memories,74 including implicit memories of extinction.75 The explanation at the molecular level involves CREB, the transcription factor that initiates gene expression and protein synthesis in the conversion of short-term to long-term memory.76 Massed training depletes CREB, and once used up about sixty minutes of recovery is needed to replenish the supply, so additional training within that period only interferes with the resupply process.77 It has been shown that CREB-dependent protein synthesis in the PFCVM78 and amygdala79 is required for the long-term retention of extinction. So if one is going to do twenty-five exposures, they should be done in blocks of five, with breaks between, rather than all twenty-five at once. Temporal spacing, in short, could make the effects of extinction and exposure more persistent.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“The amygdala plays an important role in the acquisition, storage, expression, and extinction of threat memories. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFCVM) regulates the acquisition, storage, expression, and extinction of threat memories by the amygdala. The hippocampus learns about the context of acquisition and modulates the expression and extinction of threat memories in relation to context.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“In the fall of 2000 I started getting calls and emails from people asking me to erase their memories. Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, and I had recently published a paper in the journal Nature with a rather technical title, “Fear Memories Require Protein Synthesis in the Lateral Amygdala for Reconsolidation after Retrieval.”3 In this study we conditioned rats with a tone and shock and then later presented them with the tone alone after a drug that blocks protein synthesis had been infused in the lateral amygdala (LA), a key area of the amygdala where the tone-shock association is stored. When tested the following day, or at any time afterward, the rats behaved as though they had never been conditioned. The procedure, in other words, seemed to erase the memory that the tone was a signal of danger. Toward the end of the short piece, we proposed that it might be possible to use a technique like this (but without having to inject a drug directly into the amygdala) to dampen traumatic memory in people with PTSD.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“In line with contemporary learning theory, emotional processing theory holds that new information does not replace old information in the fear structure but instead creates a competing memory that suppresses the old memory.75”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“For example, if you are shocked when you turn on a lamp because of a wiring defect in the switch, the lamp-shock association (a CS-US association) will cause you to avoid touching the lamp. Then, if after getting the lamp repaired you cautiously turn it on and find you are not shocked, you can proceed with abandon in using it. You’ve formed a new association—a “lamp–no shock” association (CS–no US association)—that overrides or suppresses the original association.61”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“To be rid of fear, the theory goes, one has to overcome habitual avoidance and be reexposed to the fear-arousing stimulus, experience the fear, and then learn, via extinction, that the stimulus is not really the portent of a harmful outcome. The”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Acceptance and commitment therapy, a variant on cognitive therapy, attempts to teach people to accept rather than change their emotions and make decisions within the context of what they value, as opposed to letting negative feelings control their behavior.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Humanistic therapies (existential, Gestalt, and client-centered) help people make rational choices and realize their potential in life while showing care and concern for others.7 Behavior therapy assumes that many problems are due to learning and uses principles of Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning to change maladaptive behaviors.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Anxiety’s like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you very far.” —JODI PICOULT1”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“As I have argued, the essence of anxiety is the unpleasant feeling—the apprehension, dread, angst, and worry—that one experiences when one perceives a lack of control in situations of uncertainty and risk. It”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“With the rise of molecular genetics, it has become possible to search for possible changes (mutations, polymorphisms) in target genes. Much effort has gone into investigating variations in genes that contribute to serotonin transmission, because serotonin-related drugs have antidepressant and anxiolytic properties. This assumes, however, that the treatment mechanism is the same mechanism that gives rise to the disorder.53 Although this is consistent with the old chemical imbalance hypothesis, it is not a conclusion that should simply be accepted without careful assessment. Nevertheless, studies of the genetic control of serotonin have found interesting results. For example, people with a certain variant (polymorphism) of a gene controlling a protein involved in serotonin transmission are more reactive to threatening stimuli, and this hyperreactivity is associated with increased amygdala activity during the threat.54 Further, it has been reported that this variant of the gene can account for 7 percent to 9 percent of the inheritance of anxiety.55”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Fear and other emotions are based on assumptions, presuppositions, and expectations; they are constructed in the brain from nonemotional ingredients.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“The most obvious way that defensive motivational states make themselves known to us is, in fact, through our own behavior. The ability to observe one’s behavior and thus create representations of behavior in working memory is called monitoring.77 By directing our attention to our behavioral output, we can acquire information about what we are doing and intentionally adjust our behavior in light of thoughts, memories, and feelings. As an executive function of working memory, monitoring, not surprisingly, involves circuits in the prefrontal cortex.78 We use observations of our own behavior to regulate how we act in social situations.79 If you become aware that your behavior is negatively affecting others, you can make adjustments as a social situation evolves. Or if you notice you are acting in a biased way toward some group, you can make corrections. In addition, through monitoring one can observe undesirable habits and seek to change these through therapy or other means. Not everyone is equally adept at using monitoring to improve self-awareness. The field of emotional intelligence is all about how people differ in such abilities and how one can be trained to do better.80”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“The problem is that there may not be any way to really prove animal consciousness with data. Clever experiments can show that animals perform behaviorally in ways that people behave when they are in a particular state of phenomenal consciousness. But we can create robots that behave the way humans behave when we are having a phenomenal experience. Consciousness is, and probably always will be, an inner experience that is unobservable to anyone other than the experiencing organism. And in the absence of verbal report, there is little to measure.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Your conscious experiences are personal. They are yours, and could not exist without you. And a major fact that makes them personal is that they are experienced and interpreted through the lens of your memories. Conscious experiences, including experiences of fear and anxiety, are colored by memory.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Their function is to keep the organism alive. Emotion is the feeling an organism has when it consciously experiences these consequences. Keeping separate the processes that detect and respond to significant events from the processes that generate feelings is thus key to making progress in understanding what emotions actually are and how they work. Although these processes are related, conflating them only impedes a genuine understanding of the emotional brain.”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious

“Psychotic conditions were considered to involve thought disturbances, including delusions and/or hallucinations, a break with reality, and, in general, an inability to function in normal social situations. Neuroses involved several conditions in which one suffered from distress (sometimes debilitating distress) but without significant distortions of thought, or loss of touch with reality. The neurotic conditions most related to fear and anxiety included anxiety neurosis (excessive worry, dread), phobic neurosis (irrational fears), obsessive neurosis (repetitive thoughts), and war neurosis (mental problems in soldiers that stemmed from stress, exhaustion, and specific battlefield experiences).”
― Joseph LeDoux, Anxious