How to cope with your fear of the Coronavirus?

Many of us perceive the conoravirus as a serious illness or threat of death. Do you aware that this is considered as a form of traumatic event too?

People can develop acute stress response after experiencing one or more traumatic events. A traumatic event can cause significant physical, emotional, or psychological harm.

A person with acute stress response experiences psychological distress immediately following a traumatic event. Unlike PTSD, acute stress disorder is a temporary condition, and symptoms typically persist for at least 3 to 30 days after the traumatic event.

Acute stress response can trigger symptoms of anxiety or depression or both.

Symptoms of anxiety include:

-feeling a sense of impending doom

-excessive worrying

-difficulty concentrating

-fatigue

-restlessness

-racing thoughts

Symptoms of depression include:

-persistent feelings of hopelessness, sadness, or numbness

-fatigue

-crying unexpectedly

-loss of interest in activities that were once pleasurable

-changes in appetite or body weight

-thoughts of suicide or self-harm

What can you do about it now?

- Be mindful, focus on the task at hand

- Differentiate your unhealthy worry vs healthy worry (Each time avoid to spend more than 30 minute in worry)

- STOP google your symptoms

- REDUCE your social media news-reading time

- Seek for help if you need it

More info about the Acute Stress Response: 

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324354#symptoms

You May Be Able To Train Your Brain To Be Fearless - Neurofeedback Malaysia

A developing treatment called neurofeedback may help people suffering from anxiety and PTSD.

All your fears, stresses and anxieties have one thing in common. They are sensed by a pair of pea-sized patches of neurons, called the amygdala, sitting deep inside your brain. So what if you could control your amygdala? What if you could change your brain and become calmer and braver?

That idea has a particular appeal for people suffering from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. But it’s easier said than done. The amygdala is an old part of the brain that does its job automatically, without much care for commands from more conscious parts of the mind. You can’t just tell an oversensitive amygdala to quiet down.

But a brain training technique known as neurofeedback might help people find a way to change such involuntary and automatic brain processes. In recent years, the technique is being developed and refined to address mental health issues. The treatment involves monitoring a person’s brain activity in real time using electroencephalography (EEG) or functional MRI brain scans, and showing those patterns of activity to the person so they can try to boost or reduce them ― basically, changing how their brain functions.

In a new study published last month in Biological Psychiatry, researchers set up a series of experiments to use neurofeedback to teach several dozen people how to regulate their amygdala activity.

“People were able to use this new EEG model to learn how to control their brain activity in a deeply located brain area, the amygdala,” said Dr. Talma Hendler, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Tel Aviv Center for Brain Functions in Israel. 

Reading brain signals from deep parts of the brain is difficult, especially with a cheap and accessible method. Functional MRI, or fMRI, can access these areas, but the device is a complex, gigantic magnet that you can’t just set up at home, even if you could afford it.

EEG, on the other hand, is cheaper and simpler. It mainly involves a few electrodes placed on the scalp. The downside of EEG is that it can’t accurately zoom in on structures deep in the brain.

So, the researchers combined the two methods. They used the detail provided by fMRI to tease out the amygdala’s signal from the electrical activity picked up by the EEG.

“[This method] enables home-based imaging that [targets] brain regions relevant for our mental health,” Hendler said. “It opens a wide horizon of treatment possibilities for the mentally ill, but also for everyone on a daily basis as an empowering tool for mental activity and well being.”

For the experiments, Hendler and her colleagues asked the volunteers to listen to a sound. They were then instructed to lower the volume of the sound by “exercising mental strategies.”

It sounds like a vague instruction. What are the mental strategies that can, seemingly telepathically, control the volume of a sound? No one really knows, and that’s sort of the point. People have to try many different ways of thinking ― thereby changing their brain activity ― until they stumble upon a desired activity pattern.

What the participants didn’t know was that the volume of the sound was programmed to change based on the electrical activity of their own amygdala, and it would lower if the participants managed to dial down that activity. In other words, they were listening to their own amygdala’s firing, disguised in a sound.

A series of tests afterward showed that this game seemed to help participants become more capable of regulating the activity of their amygdala. In response to viewing a series of images, for example, the participants’ amygdalas seemed less sensitive compared to those of people in another group given a fake neurofeedback treatment.

The participants in this study were healthy. But Hendler believes that people with mental health problems, too, would respond to training with neurofeedback.

“We already have indication for this (unpublished yet) that people suffering from depression, chronic pain and post traumatic disorders are able to learn and greatly benefit from such training,” Hendler said.

If the method proves useful in treating mental health conditions in the future, this low-cost, personalized treatment could be used at home to complement and sometimes substitute medications, Hendler said. 

Source:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/neurofeedback-mental-health_us_57fbee6fe4b0b6a43034b431

EEG Biofeedback Training for Stage Fright and Performance Anxiety

EEG Biofeedback Training for Stage Fright and Performance Anxiety

You may have had the experience that when the greatest demands are made upon you, your brain is so preoccupied with fear of failure that it is actually prevented from performing. This kind of anxiety seems at such times to take on a life of its own, and one loses any sense of control.

There is hope. Our brains are capable of learning how to control the anxiety state. The usual way this is done is called biofeedback. If you have heard of biofeedback before, it has most likely had to do with training in relaxation and “stress management”. Much of this work deals with controlling anxiety states which are worsened by stress. Anxiety states include such reactions as panic attacks and phobias at one extreme, and such problems as performance anxiety and stage fright on the other. When the person is challenged to perform in some way, the brain reacts by overly heightened vigilance that actually undermines the ability to function well. This problem can compound itself, as the person becomes anxious, observes himself or herself becoming anxious, and becomes even more anxious. At a time of future challenges, the anxiety response can be more readily kindled because of the memory of earlier failure to perform.

Recently brainwave training has become available as a new option for doing biofeedback for stage fright, performance anxiety, and other anxiety states. This kind of learning is based on information derived directly from the brain’s electrical activity, the EEG, which can reveal anxiety states. In this way, anxiety is seen as one manifestation of diminished self-regulation by the brain. By challenging the brain to regulate itself better, it subsequently also functions better under life’s normal as well as extreme challenges. Once the brain has been trained to self-regulate, it is no longer as vulnerable to the paralyzing and disabling downward spiral of anxiety.

During EEG training for stage fright or performance anxiety, the person is shown information derived from his or her EEG in real time, and is asked to bring certain aspects of it under control. This training repeatedly challenges the brain to improve its own internal regulatory processes. The therapist adjusts the level of difficulty to the situation.

As with other learning, the process is largely accomplished at a subconscious level. However, there may very well be some conscious awareness of changes taking place as the training proceeds. For example, the trainee will usually observe times when the EEG reflects existing anxiety states. The trainee then brings his skills to bear to bring these states under control. As mastery improves, the person gains confidence in his ability to control and regulate these states. The improved level of confidence further supports the process, and allows the person to work at a higher level of difficulty. Eventually, the person may visualize situations in which they may have previously become anxious. They will see their brain waves change, and will actively bring them back under control.

We find that most persons who undertake the training gain significantly in their ability to control anxiety states, to the point that these no longer interfere with the conduct of their life, even during their greatest challenges. Once the task is learned, the brain tends to retain that ability, and follow-up sessions are usually not necessary.

Source: http://www.eegspectrum.com/applications/anxiety/stagefrightperformanx/