Anxiety is one of the most common mental health disorders. Since the pandemic, there has been a surge of cases. Even if you do not experience anxiety firsthand, it is likely that you have a loved one that does. According to recent studies, it has been discovered that anxiety is heavily related to a warped perception of the body’s own internal states. New research has been published in the journal Neuron, and it discusses the relationship between anxiety and the perception of breathing.
In the study from Neuron, they started with thirty individuals with low anxiety levels, and thirty individuals with moderate anxiety levels. The participants were requested to do a scientific questionnaire while the researchers used devices to create different levels of resistance to breathing. During one of the tasks an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) to record brain activity.
For individuals with moderate anxiety, they reported breathing-related catastrophizing significantly more than the group with lower anxiety levels. Basically, they became afraid that the feeling of breathlessness would get worse. The group who experienced higher anxiety also showed less of a “positive-minded” interoceptive awareness. This means that they were more likely to get distracted by their own breath, and also it is harder for them to pinpoint where tension is coming from within their bodies.
The researchers also discovered that there were notable differences between the moderate and low anxiety groups’ performance on breathing tasks. The group with higher levels of anxiety were less sensitive when it came to changes in resistance to their breathing. Their brain actually displayed altered activity when they were anticipating the changes in breathing resistance.
The researchers concluded that people with higher levels of anxiety have altered perceptions of their own breathing, compared to those who experience less anxiety. They were actually less sensitive to changes in their breathing, but they have a reduced insight on how well they were able to perceive their body generally. It was also found that anxious individuals have altered brain activity when they were anticipating what will happen to their breathing in the future.
These results offer some insight into how the communication between brain and body can start to be warped with anxiety. However, not all research can be absolutely perfect. The study author, Olivia Harrison, makes it clear that these results can’t distinguish whether anxiety causes the changing in breathing perceptions, or if the differences in breathing perception could contribute to different levels of anxiety. This is what is known as a “cross-sectional study”, which means that it can only display that there are differences in breathing perceptions associated with different anxiety levels.
The study, “Interoception of breathing and its relationship with anxiety“, was authored by Olivia K. Harrison, Laura Kochli, Stephanie Marino, Roger Luechinger,