StemCell Therapy

Have you ever sat down to meditate, only to feel a swell of anxiety and fear? If you have, you're not alone, and you've probably been dealing with relaxation-induced anxiety. As Bindiya Gandhi, M.D., integrative medicine doctor and certified yoga instructor, explains, "Most people actually do well with relaxation therapy, and their symptoms improve. However, there is an extreme group of people who this may not work well on as the study cites," she says.

So why does it happen? It could be something called "contrast avoidance," a theory one of the authors on the study, Michelle Newman, developed in 2011. As she explains it, "The theory revolves around the idea that people may make themselves anxious intentionally, as a way to avoid the letdown they might get if something bad were to happen."

In other words, you could be using worry as a sort of insurance policy or "pay in advance" policy against bad things that might occur. In their recent paper, published in the Journal of Affective Disorders, the authors explain that "the contrast avoidance model postulates that individuals with generalized anxiety disorder [...] fear a sharp spike in negative emotion, and thus prefer to worry to maintain their negative affect, rather than being in a more euthymic state, such as relaxation."

See original here:
Does Relaxing Make You Anxious? Here's Why, According To New Research - mindbodygreen.com

This entry was posted on October 18, 2019 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Integrative Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |