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From the Endocrine Web
https://www.endocrineweb.com/adrenaline?utm_source=EndocrineWeb+eNewsletter&utm_campaign=f669ce45b4-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e6f563893f-f669ce45b4-49394013&ct=t(EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_09_18)
In This Article:
Definition | Causes | Symptoms | Treatments | Fast Facts | Frequently Asked Questions
Featured Voices:
Elena Christofides MD, Zlatin Ivanov MD, and Brittany Johnson LMHC
What is adrenaline?
Picture this: you’re driving down a country road, singing along with your favorite song, cool air rushing through your hair, when out of nowhere a moose appears in a bend in the road. Before you know what’s happening, you swerve to miss it and slam on your breaks. You’re breathing hard and fast, your heart is pounding, your legs are shaking, your body is sweating, but your mouth is dry.
How did your body go, in seconds, from relaxed in the driver’s seat to full fight-or-flight mode? You have adrenaline to thank.
Adrenaline is a hormone that prepares your sympathetic nervous system to fight or flee, and your body makes it in response to a stressor or threat. It’s an amazing thing to have coursing through your system when facing danger—people have been known to lift cars off children and run faster than they ever had due to adrenaline. It increases the flow of blood to muscles, releasing sugar into your bloodstream, along with a cascade of other effects that make your body alert and more able to fight off an attacker or outrun a flood.
But you can also have too much adrenaline due to nonphysical stressors, like traffic, financial worries, frustrating meetings, or relationship troubles. The physical changes it causes in your body can become problematic and uncomfortable, creating issues with digestion, hormone regulation, sleep, and more.
What causes an adrenaline spike to occur?
- You perceive a threat or danger
- Your hypothalamus, part of the limbic system at the brain’s base, activates the sympathetic nervous system—also known as flight-or-fight state
- Your brain instructs the adrenal glands to produce adrenaline
- Adrenaline is released throughout the bloodstream
In addition to actual threats and dangerous situations, people with certain mental-health challenges may experience adrenaline rushes as part of their condition. Those with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can experience adrenaline rushes from memories or thoughts about trauma. People with panic disorders, like agoraphobia or social-anxiety disorder, can experience an adrenaline rush when faced with a situation they fear, or other specific phobias. Some people love the thrill they feel when adrenaline is released and enjoy their heart racing, their pupils dilating, and breaking into an excited sweat....
From the National Institute of Health, the most recent studies on the factors found to help lower risk for becoming depressed.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/factors-affect-depression-risk
From the free Online app "The Breathing App"
What Resonance Breathing Does
About Resonance
The effects of resonance supports the innate ability of our body, nervous system, and emotions to restore themselves through the balancing of the complementary branches of our autonomic nervous system, which control our heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, respiration, and many other automatic functions of the body.
There have been hundreds of scientific studies performed on resonant breathing, which show a wide array of benefits, including:
- Increases pulmonary function
- Lowers blood pressure
- Has positive applications for anxiety and depression
- Improves baroreflex gain
- Improves heart rate variability
- Tones the vagus nerve
- Increases resiliency
- Increases the ability to handle stress
- Leads towards emotional balance
- Clinical improvements in asthma
How is it possible for one breathing technique to do so much? The answer lies within our nervous system. By breathing at resonance, we enter into an even balance between the two branches of our autonomic nervous system, the sympathetic (which moves us towards activity) and the parasympathetic, which moves us towards rest.
The sympathetic branch is our accelerator, and speeds us up. The parasympathetic is our braking system, which slows us down. We alternate between these two every second of the day, with each breath we take.
However, in our fast-paced, information heavy world, we often lean towards acceleration. Spending just a few minutes consciously breathing sends signals of balance to our brain, telling us that we are ok, and brings us out from the part of our brain that makes us feel overwhelmed, into a state of calm. With resonant breathing, you learn how to apply your brake at will, rather than being sidelined by anxiety, distractedness, or excess stress.
Our world is very much in sympathetic overdrive: we are overly active, overly plugged in, and live in a world of both heated politics and climate. It’s important to learn to cool down, so that we can be as effective in our lives as possible, and conscious breathing is one of the best ways to do that. The Breathing App, by virtue of toning the vagus nerve, reduces inflammation, and induces a state of restful alertness and mental clarity.
Resonant breathing is like a stress reset button."
How the "Lost Art" of Breathing Can Impact Sleep and Resilience May 27, 2020
Fresh Air interview with "Breath" author James Nestor
ttps://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/05/27/862963172/how-the-lost-art-of-breathing-can-impact-sleep-and-resilience?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20200823&utm_term=4772325&utm_campaign=health&utm_id=20422408&orgid=1574
From Psychology Today! March 2020
Seven Ways To Manage Anxiety Related to Health Concerns
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/friendship-20/202003/7-tips-manage-coronavirus-anxiety-now?collection=1141026
Supportive Parenting Can Help Reduce Children's Anxiety
From the National Institute of Health
How Trauma Changes the Brain
from the National Institute for Clinical Applications of Behavioral Medicine
https://www.nicabm.com/trauma-three-ways-trauma-changes-the-brain/
Toxic Stress and Child Development :
from The Harvard Center For the Developing Child
High conflict divorce, childhood separation
and brain development
https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/aces-and-toxic-stress-frequently-asked-questions/
January 9, 2019
From the National Institute of Mental Health newsletter.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/revealing-gene-regulation-brain
July 10, 2018
Treatment for depression in young children
At a Glance
- Researchers found that a therapy-based approach focused on emotional development may be an effective option for treating early childhood depression.
- This study suggests that improving the parent-child relationship along with their emotional coping skills is an effective, low-risk approach to treating depression.
Everyone feels sad or low sometimes. These feelings usually pass with a little time. Depression—also called “clinical depression” or “depressive disorder”—is a mood disorder that causes distressing symptoms that last for at least two weeks. These affect how you feel, think, and handle daily activities, such as sleeping, eating, or working.
Children as young as 3-years-old can be diagnosed with clinical depression. However, the therapy used to treat depression in teens and adults isn’t appropriate for young children. Alternatives that are more suitable for working with young children and their parents are needed.
One type of therapy, called Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), has been shown to help treat disruptive behavioral disorders in young children. In PCIT treatment, parents are taught techniques for successfully interacting with their kids. They practice these techniques in controlled situations while being coached by a clinician.
To test whether PCIT could be adapted to treat childhood depression, a team led by Dr. Joan Luby at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis enrolled 229 children (ages 3–6) with early childhood depression and their parents. Over an 18-week period, they tested PCIT with an added emotional development (ED) component. The therapy used the basic techniques of PCIT for 12 treatment sessions, but added eight sessions that train parents to be more effective at helping their children regulate emotions. The study was supported by NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Results appeared online in American Journal of Psychiatry on June 20, 2018.
The children and their parents were randomly assigned to either the PCIT-ED treatment or a waitlist group. There are currently no proven treatments for early childhood depression, so children in the waitlist group were monitored but received no active intervention during the study period.
Before and after the treatment period, the researchers assessed the children’s psychiatric symptoms, emotional self-regulation abilities, level of impairment and functioning, and tendency to experience guilt. Parents were assessed for depression, their coping styles in response to their child’s negative emotions, and parenting stress.
At the completion of the study period, children in the PCIT-ED group were less likely to meet criteria for depression and scored lower on depression severity than children in the waitlist group. Children in the treatment group also had improved functioning, greater emotional regulation skills and greater “guilt reparation” (e.g., spontaneously saying ‘‘sorry’’ after having done something wrong).
Parents in the PCIT-ED group also showed many improvements. Families in the waitlist group were offered PCIT-ED treatment after completion of the study.
“The study provides very promising evidence that an early and brief psychotherapeutic intervention that focuses on the parent-child relationship and on enhancing emotion development may be a powerful and low-risk approach to the treatment of depression,” Luby says. “It will be very important to determine if gains made in this early treatment are sustained over time and whether early intervention can change the course of the disorder.”
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/brain-scan-may-predict-best-depression-treatment
Brain Scan May Predict Best Depression Treatment In people with major depression, low resting brain activity in the front part of the insula (red area ...
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/treatment-depression-young-children
6 months ago - Researchers found that a therapy-based approach focused on emotional development may be an effective option for treating early childhood depression.
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/depression-screening-treatment-adults
Depression screening and treatment in adults . At a Glance. A study suggests that most adults with depression may not receive treatment, and that many ...
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/meditation-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-ease-low-back-pain
almost 3 years ago - Study results validate mindfulness-based stress reduction and cognitive-behavioral therapy as treatment options for people with chronic low back pain ...
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/depressed-adolescents-respond-best-combination-treatment
Depressed Adolescents Respond Best to Combination Treatment A major clinical trial has found that a combination of psychotherapy and antidepressant ...
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/benzodiazepine-often-used-older-people-despite-risks
Benzodiazepine Often Used in Older People Despite Risks. At a Glance. ... Practice guidelines now recommend psychotherapy approaches and ...
Brain Circuits Involved in Compulsive Behaviors | National ...
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/brain-circuits-involved-compulsive-behaviors
Researchers identified brain circuits responsible for compulsive behaviors in mice. The findings could lead to new approaches for obsessive-compulsive ...
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/placebo-effect-depression-treatment
Predicting the usefulness of antidepressants | National Institute of Health
www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/predicting-usefulness-antidepressants
Earls F, Cook S. Play observations of three-year old children and their relationship to
parental reports of behavior problems and temperament characteristics.
Child Psychiatry and Human Development. 13(4):225-32. PMID: 6205829.
Parental awareness and child abuse: a cognitive-developmental analysis of urban and rural samples.
Abstract
A cognitive-developmental analysis of parental reasoning on child-rearing issues is presented and applied in two controlled studies of parents of abused or neglected children. Significant differences in parental awareness were found between urban parents and their controls; this relationship is sustained in a rural sample, controlling for child developmental status as well as for other familial characteristics.
What is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR)?
http://emdria.site-ym.com/?page=emdr_therapy
How Meditation Changes the Mind and the Body
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/contemplation-therapy/
Are There Benefits to Yoga?
https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/yoga-may-be-good-for-the-brain/
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