Fear in Hawaii: The Biology of Stress

Residents and visitors in Hawaii were sent into a panic after officials accidentally sent an emergency alert warning of a "ballistic missile threat." It took officials 30 minutes to send a correction.

What happens in your brain...in clear, concise language.

What could people have been feeling?

From Healing the Brain: "Wounds that Time Alone Won’t Heal The Biology of Stress."

Imagine you are a zebra grazing on the plains of Africa. It's midday. The sun is bright, the food is plentiful.

Suddenly you sense an attack. A lion is chasing you. Its fight or flight in action.

Your brain tells your body to prepare for a fight or take flight. The body responds by preparing extra hormones to create more energy and by increasing the rate the heart pumps blood to the muscles. For most animals, this stress reaction lasts for just a short time and it saves lives.  

As a body is preparing for fight or flight, however, practically all systems, such as digestion, physical growth, and warding off diseases are placed on hold. This means that people for whom stress has become a way of life are endangering their overall health. Researchers have learned by studying primates whose systems are similar to human beings that those who learn to have control over their lives and are able to reduce or avoid stress live longer and healthier lives.

Are zebras better equipped to deal with stress than humans? No. However, according to Dr. Robert Sapolsky, author of ​Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, "For a zebra, stress is three minutes of some screaming terror running from a lion. After the chase, either it's over or they are." On the other hand humans, he says, have constructed a network of social stressors. Since we are obliged to live in this framework, stress builds up.

How do the brain and the body react to stress? Stress, such as the threat of attack, forces various changes in the body. First, adrenaline causes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure so that blood can be sent to muscles faster. Second, the brain’s hypothalamus signals the pituitary gland to stimulate the adrenal gland (specifically the adrenal cortex) to produce cortisol.

This stress hormone, a longer-acting steroid, helps the body to mobilize energy. However, prolonged exposure to cortisol can damage virtually every part of the body. Chronic high blood pressure can cause blood vessel damage and the long-term shutdown of digestion can lead to ulcers.  

Trump: The only thing we have to fear

After shocking executive actions from the White House, fear is gripping the world. The new president Trump has unleashed immigration bans, a plan to build a wall across the Mexican border, plans to cut Obamacare and more. Fear comprises our most primal emotion and we talk about it in our book series, Healing the Brain

(Book excerpt.) New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, Ph.D., and other neuroscientists have begun to examine the way the brain shapes our experience—and our memories—to generate the varied repertoire of human emotions. Specifically, as Dr. LeDoux explains, he chose to begin his inquiry by examining an emotion that is common to all living creatures: fear.

Wikimedia.com

Mice serve researchers well as animal models. These very distant relatives possess well over 90 per cent of the same genes as humans.

Years of research by many workers have given us extensive knowledge of the neural pathways involved in processing acoustic information, which is an excellent starting point for examining the neurological foundations of fear. The natural flow of auditory information—the way you hear music, speech, or anything else—is that the sound comes into the ear, enters the brain, goes up to a region called the auditory midbrain, then to the auditory thalamus, and ultimately to the auditory cortex. Thus, in the auditory pathway, as in other sensory systems, the cortex is the highest level of processing.

So the first question we asked when we began these studies of the fear system was: Does the sound have to go all the way to the auditory cortex in order for the rat to learn that the sound paired with the shock is dangerous? When we made lesions in the auditory cortex, we found that the animal could still make the association between the sound and the shock, and would still react with fear behavior to the sound alone. Since information from all our senses is processed in the cortex—which ultimately allows us to become conscious of seeing the predator or hearing the sound—the fact that the cortex didn’t seem to be necessary to fear conditioning was both intriguing and mystifying. We wanted to understand how something as important as the emotion of fear could be mediated by the brain if it wasn’t going into the cortex, where all the higher processes occur.

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response.

So we next made lesions in the auditory thalamus and then in the auditory midbrain. The midbrain supplies the major sensory input to the thalamus, which in turn supplies the major sensory input to the cortex. What we found was that lesions in either of these subcortical areas completely eliminated the rat’s susceptibility to fear conditioning. If the lesions were made in an unconditioned rat, the animal could not learn to make the association between sound and shock, and if the lesions were made on a rat that had already been conditioned to fear the sound, it would no longer react to the sound. But if the stimulus didn’t have to reach the cortex, where was it going from the thalamus?

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response. To find out, we made a tracer injection in the auditory thalamus (the part of the thalamus that processes sounds) and found that some cells in this structure projected axons into the amygdala. This is key, because the amygdala has for many years been known to be important in emotional responses. So it appeared that information went to the amygdala from the thalamus without going to the neocortex. We then did experiments with rats that had amygdala lesions, measuring freezing and blood pressure responses elicited by the sound after conditioning. We found that the amygdala lesion prevented conditioning from taking place. In fact, the responses are very similar to those of unconditioned animals that hear the sound for the first time, without getting the shock. So the amygdala is critical to this pathway.

It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus, and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this thalamo-amygdala pathway the low road because it’s not taking advantage of all of the higher-level information processing that occurs in the neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala.

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Trump exploits and benefits from fear, our most powerful emotion

Volumes will be written about how Donald Trump sits in the White House despite low poll numbers, and a historically low popular vote.

One element of power, examined from Machiavelli on down, is the exploitation of fear, or the acquiescence to it. Trump is the new Teflon president, fast outpacing Ronald Reagan. The more he is critiqued for obvious lies, the more support he gains, irregardless of public polls. He sits in the White House despite losing the popular vote in historic proportions.

In our book, Healing the Brain, we look at fear, the most powerful emotion of all mammals. It can be said that Trump took the low road to the White House.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux, in his landmark book The Emotional Brain, looks closely at the irrational mechanisms of the fear response:

Years of research by many workers have given us extensive knowledge of the neural pathways involved in processing acoustic information, which is an excellent starting point for examining the neurological foundations of fear. The natural flow of auditory information—the way you hear music, speech, or anything else—is that the sound comes into the ear, enters the brain, goes up to a region called the auditory midbrain, then to the auditory thalamus, and ultimately to the auditory cortex. Thus, in the auditory pathway, as in other sensory systems, the cortex is the highest level of processing.

So the first question we asked when we began these studies of the fear system was: Does the sound have to go all the way to the auditory cortex in order for the rat to learn that the sound paired with the shock is dangerous? When we made lesions in the auditory cortex, we found that the animal could still make the association between the sound and the shock, and would still react with fear behavior to the sound alone. Since information from all our senses is processed in the cortex—which ultimately allows us to become conscious of seeing the predator or hearing the sound—the fact that the cortex didn’t seem to be necessary to fear conditioning was both intriguing and mystifying. We wanted to understand how something as important as the emotion of fear could be mediated by the brain if it wasn’t going into the cortex, where all the higher processes occur.

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response.

So we next made lesions in the auditory thalamus and then in the auditory midbrain. The midbrain supplies the major sensory input to the thalamus, which in turn supplies the major sensory input to the cortex. What we found was that lesions in either of these subcortical areas completely eliminated the rat’s susceptibility to fear conditioning. If the lesions were made in an unconditioned rat, the animal could not learn to make the association between sound and shock, and if the lesions were made on a rat that had already been conditioned to fear the sound, it would no longer react to the sound. But if the stimulus didn’t have to reach the cortex, where was it going from the thalamus?

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear response. To find out, we made a tracer injection in the auditory thalamus (the part of the thalamus that processes sounds) and found that some cells in this structure projected axons into the amygdala. This is key, because the amygdala has for many years been known to be important in emotional responses. So it appeared that information went to the amygdala from the thalamus without going to the neocortex. We then did experiments with rats that had amygdala lesions, measuring freezing and blood pressure responses elicited by the sound after conditioning. We found that the amygdala lesion prevented conditioning from taking place. In fact, the responses are very similar to those of unconditioned animals that hear the sound for the first time, without getting the shock. So the amygdala is critical to this pathway.

It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus, and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this thalamo-amygdala pathway the low road because it’s not taking advantage of all of the higher-level information processing that occurs in the neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BRAIN AND FEAR IN OUR NEW BOOK

How to call your congressman when you have social anxiety

Many people have social anxiety and the idea of call a representative to fight Trump is daunting. We talk about depression, stress, and trauma in our new book, Healing the Brain. Click for your copy. And learn about small steps to make difference.

“How to call your reps when you have social anxiety”

There’s a LOT going on in the U.S. right now. Many people’s rights and safety are at risk. You’ve probably heard that one of the most effective ways to advocate for issues you care about, or stand up against dangerous policies and appointments, is to call your local representatives.
If you want to help but have social anxiety and find phone calls very intimidating, you may be thinking, “How do I do this?!” (An oversized telephone handset hovers ominously over the narrator with its cord spiraling around her body. She looks up at it with great concern.)
Here’s a step-by-step:

1. Block off time on your calendar. Each call only takes a minute or so, but you might want to block off more time for your first call, so you can prepare your words & nerves. Don’t rush yourself! Scheduling is super important, otherwise you will perpetually delay calling.
2. At the scheduled time, go sit somewhere quiet.
3. Find out who represents you. Some places to look: House (http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/) and Senate (http://www.senate.gov/senators/contact/).
4. Write out exactly what you plan to say. It only needs to be a few lines, and there are lots of templates online that you can use. e.g. “Hello! I am constituent from city (zip code) and I am calling to urge Some Name to publicly…” If they have already released a statement, don’t use that as an excuse to avoid calling. I know it’s hard, but call anyway. Thank them and ask them to keep pushing.
5. Take a deep breath. You can do this.
6. Do this: dial. (This is the hardest part.)
7. Read from your script. At this point, you’ll likely be sent to voicemail or to an actual person. The person will most likely be friendly and probably won’t have much time to talk, so you shouldn’t have to deviate much from your script. It’s a quick conversation.
8. That’s it! Say “Thank you” and hang up.

You did it! If you’re thinking “Hey, that wasn’t so bad…”, call more people! And follow up with them next week, or even tomorrow, to make sure they keep these issues top of mind.
It is okay if your voice shakes. It is okay if you feel awkward.They get a lot of calls, so they don’t have time to judge you by how well you delivered your message.
Is is also okay if you can’t call.
This week, my best friend told me, “Do something that is uncomfortable but not harmful to your mental health.” For me, calling was enough outside my comfort zone to be stressful & scary, but not so far away as to use up all my energy. That might not be the case for you, and that’s okay. Do not beat yourself up about it. There are lots of ways to take action without picking up a phone:

• Write to government officials
• Create art that challenges and art that inspires
• Donate, if you’re financially able, to organizations that fight injustice
• Listen to immigrants, people of color, women, trans and non-binary people, people of all faiths and sexual orientations, and people with disabilities. Support their work. Amplify their voices.
• Keep it up. 
  
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One Month After: 'Fear of Trump' Is Making Some Youth Physically Sick

One month after Trump's 'election,' many adults anecdotally and many children, documented, express more fear and anxiety about Donald Trump. In this excerpt from an article published by Common Dreams, we look at 'fear of Trump.'

To find more detailed information about fear, our most powerful emotion, get our book, Healing the Brain.

After a campaign built on xenophobic remarks, a pledge to construct a massive wall across the southern border, and promises to form "a deportation force" to rid the nation of millions of undocumented immigrants, it's not surprising the psychological impact of Donald Trump's rhetoric would be most sharply felt among those living within those communities.

"People worry their families will be broken up, that parents will be deported and children will end up in foster care, on a scale that we’ve never seen before. The feeling out there is one of great fear." —Marielena Hincapié, National Immigration Law Center

And now, with the reality setting in that Trump will soon by the President of the United States, the Guardian reports Friday how pediatricians serving in communities with large populations of undocumented immigrants are seeing a spike in anxiety-related physical illnesses, most notably among children expressing worry that they, their parents, or other loved ones will soon be arrested or deported.

As the Guardian's Andrew Gumbel reports:

One little boy in North Carolina has been suffering crippling stomach aches in class because he’s afraid he might return home to find his parents gone. In California, many families are reporting that their children are leaving school in tears because their classmates have told them they are going to be thrown out of the country.
Children are showing up in emergency rooms alone because their parents are afraid of being picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement if they show their faces. Even American-born children are suffering – one boy in the south-east asked a doctor for Prozac because he was worried about his undocumented friend.

"It’s as though a volcano erupted. It’s been awful," said Mimi Lind, director of behavioral health at the Venice Family Clinic, one of the largest providers of healthcare to low-income families in southern California. "People who don’t have a history of anxiety and depression are coming forward with symptoms they’ve never had before. And people who had those symptoms already are getting much worse."

It’s too soon to put precise figures on the wave of Trump-related anxiety, but health professionals and immigrant rights groups say it is unmistakable. "People worry their families will be broken up, that parents will be deported and children will end up in foster care, on a scale that we’ve never seen before. The feeling out there is one of great fear," said Marielena Hincapié of the National Immigration Law Center.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ANXIETY AND FEAR IN OUR NEW BOOK.

Trump's low road to the White House

The human brain has developed over millenia. Like a non-stop power plant, the brain added new structures to basic ones (controlling basic functions like breathing). The crowning achievement is the cortex, the largest brain structure, where higher thought and reasoning take place.

Scientists have learned that sensory input, e.g., sounds, do not have to travel to the cortex to induce fear. Impulses need only travel to a primitive brain structure called the amygdala. 

When FDR delivered his first inaugural address, he appealed to reasoning, though his topic was the fear of a nation shattered by the Great Depression. Like dictators and demagogues through history, Donald Trump goes straight for the lower brain with pointed, uncomplicated messages that require little thought. For example, his nicknamesl for nearly all of his opponents (Low Energy Jeb, Little Marco, Crooked Hillary) make for instant recognition and easy identification--and great ratings for cash-starved cable media. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Trump echoes right wing talk radio hosts, who offer short, immediate solutions that fit neatly into a brief format. No exhausting engagement of the thinking brain required. Fear is our most powerful emotion and when Donald Trump boasted he knew how to win this election, like ad men from Madison Avenue, he knew what worked: the low road to the White House. Hillary Clinton and the Democrats had a long, arduous path to the thinking brain to overcome the power of fear and other powerful emotions.

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PTSD: Wounds that Time Won't Heal

With many Americans in shock after this election, it's good to take a look at our stress response. Excerpted from Healing the Brain.

The Biology of Stress

Imagine you are a zebra grazing on the plains of Africa. It's midday. The sun is bright, the food is plentiful.

Suddenly you sense an attack. A lion is chasing you. Its fight or flight in action.

Your brain tells your body to prepare for a fight or take flight. The body responds by preparing extra hormones to create more energy and by increasing the rate the heart pumps blood to the muscles. For most animals, this stress reaction lasts for just a short time and it saves lives.

Wikimedia Commons

Why don’t zebras get ulcers? According to Dr. Robert Sapolsky, their stress is decidedly short term, not long term.

As a body is preparing for fight or flight, however, practically all systems, such as digestion, physical growth, and warding off diseases are placed on hold. This means that people for whom stress has become a way of life are endangering their overall health. Researchers have learned by studying primates whose systems are similar to human beings that those who learn to have control over their lives and are able to reduce or avoid stress live longer and healthier lives.

Are zebras better equipped to deal with stress than humans? No. However, according to Dr. Robert Sapolsky, author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, "For a zebra, stress is three minutes of some screaming terror running from a lion. After the chase, either it's over or they are." On the other hand humans, he says, have constructed a network of social stressors. Since we are obliged to live in this framework, stress builds up.

Nature.com

While the stress response activates automatically, its duration and intensity relies on factors such as individual temperament.

How do the brain and the body react to stress? Stress, such as the threat of attack, forces various changes in the body. First, adrenaline causes an increase in heart rate and blood pressure so that blood can be sent to muscles faster. Second, the brain’s hypothalamus signals the pituitary gland to stimulate the adrenal gland (specifically the adrenal cortex) to produce cortisol.

This stress hormone, a longer-acting steroid, helps the body to mobilize energy. However, prolonged exposure to cortisol can damage virtually every part of the body. Chronic high blood pressure can cause blood vessel damage and the long-term shutdown of digestion can lead to ulcers.

SimplyPsychology.org

Stress, such as the threat of attack, forces changes in the body carried out by the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA).

Why do some people experience more stress than others? Individuals who feel they have control over their lives appear to experience less stress. It also depends on personality and temperament. Aggressive, competitive types are more likely to define a situation as stressful than a passive, accommodating personality. A universal stress producer seems to be social isolation.

PTSD: A Breakthrough in Diagnosis

In 1980 the mental health community established the diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, and revolutionized the way the field views the effects of stress. This change acknowledged that many of the symptoms people experience after exposure to trauma can be long-lasting, if not permanent. Before that shift, the field tended to view stress-related symptoms as a transient, normal response to an adverse life event, not requiring intensive treatment.

Furthermore, before 1980, people who did develop long-term symptoms following trauma were viewed as implicitly vulnerable; the role of the actual event in precipitating their symptoms was minimized. For a while, in a reversal of previous thinking, experts expected most trauma survivors to develop PTSD. More recent research has confirmed that only about 25 per cent of individuals who are exposed to trauma develop PTSD.

So who is likely to develop PTSD following a traumatic experience, and why? The answer is not yet clear, but it now appears that PTSD represents a failure of the body to extinguish or contain the normal nervous system response to stress. This failure is associated with many factors:

• the nature and severity of the traumatic event
• preexisting risk factors related to previous exposure to stress or trauma, particularly in childhood
• the individual’s history of psychological and behavioral problems, if any
• the person’s level of education, and other cognitive factors
• family history—whether parents or other relatives had anxiety, depression, or PTSD

People who develop PTSD are also more likely to develop other psychiatric disorders involving mood (depression, anxiety and panic, bipolar disorder), personality, eating, and substance dependence.

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Fear and the brain: A very timely issue

Politicians know it. Advertising executives also. So do sexual predators.

Fear is our most powerful emotion and triggering it can paralyze victims into submission.

Brain scientist Joseph LeDoux explains just how the fear response works, in this excerpt from my new book, Healing the Brain: Stress, Trauma and Development.

The Power of  Emotions    

By Joseph E. LeDoux, Ph.D.   
(Book excerpt.) New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux,  Ph.D., and other neuroscientists have begun to examine the way the brain shapes our experience
—and our memories—to generate the varied repertoire of human emotions. Specifically, as 
Dr. LeDoux explains, he chose to begin his inquiry by examining an emotion that is common to all  living creatures: fear.   

Mice serve researchers well as animal models. These very distant relatives possess
well over 90 per cent of the same genes as humans.

Years of research by many workers have given us extensive knowledge of the neural pathways
involved in processing acoustic information, which is an excellent starting point
for examining the neurological foundations of fear. The natural flow of auditory information\—the way you hear music, speech, or anything else—is that the sound comes into the ear,
enters the brain, goes up to a region called the auditory midbrain, then to the auditory
thalamus, and ultimately to the auditory cortex. Thus, in the  auditory pathway, as in other sensory systems, the cortex is the highest  level of processing.    

So the first question we asked when we began these studies of the fear  system was: Does the sound have to go all the way to the auditory cortex in  order for the rat to learn that the sound paired with the shock is  dangerous? When we made lesions in the auditory cortex, we found that  the animal could still make the association between the sound and the  shock, and would still react with fear behavior to the sound alone. Since  information from all our senses is processed in the cortex—which  ultimately allows us to become conscious of seeing the predator or hearing  the sound—the fact that the cortex didn’t seem to be necessary to fear  conditioning was both intriguing and mystifying. We wanted to understand  how something as important as the emotion of fear could be mediated by  the brain if it wasn’t going into the cortex, where all the higher processes  occur.     Some other area or areas of the brain  must receive information from the  thalamus and establish memories about  experiences that stimulate a fear  response.     So we next made lesions in the auditory thalamus and then in the auditory  midbrain. The midbrain supplies the major sensory input to the thalamus,  which in turn supplies the major sensory input to the cortex. What we  found was that lesions in either of these subcortical areas completely  eliminated the rat’s susceptibility to fear conditioning. If the lesions were  made in an unconditioned rat, the animal could not learn to make the  association between sound and shock, and if the lesions were made on a rat  that had already been conditioned to fear the sound, it would no longer  react to the sound. But if the stimulus didn’t have to reach the cortex,  where was it going from the thalamus?    

Some other area or areas of the brain must receive information from the  thalamus and establish memories about experiences that stimulate a fear  response. To find out, we made a tracer injection in the auditory thalamus  (the part of the thalamus that processes sounds) and found that some cells  in this structure projected axons into the amygdala. This is key, because  the amygdala has for many years been known to be important in emotional
responses. So it appeared that information went to the amygdala from the  thalamus without going to the neocortex. We then did experiments with  rats that had amygdala lesions, measuring freezing and blood pressure  responses elicited by the sound after conditioning. We found that the  amygdala lesion prevented conditioning from taking place. In fact, the  responses are very similar to those of unconditioned animals that hear the  sound for the first time, without getting the shock. So the amygdala is  critical to this pathway.    It receives information about the outside world directly from the thalamus,  and immediately sets in motion a variety of bodily responses. We call this  thalamo­amygdala pathway the low road because it’s not taking advantage  of all of the higher­level information processing that occurs in the  neocortex, which also communicates with the amygdala. 

(Excerpted from  ​States of Mind: New Discoveries About How Our Brains  Make Us Who We Are, ​ Roberta Conlan, editor. Dana Press and John  Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, 1999.) 

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