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Research Reveals a Surprising Solution for Anxiety - Psychology Today
How compassion can help you relieve stress.
Millions of Americans are suffering from chronic anxiety, the most common mental illness in the United States. Anxiety affects over 40 million adults and over 25% of children between 13 and 18 (Anxiety and Depression Association). Undermining our ability to function, anxiety can fill us with incessant worry, tension, nervousness, and a fearful sense of foreboding that makes us feel we are not safe.
The stresses of contemporary life contribute to our anxiety, according to neurosurgeon James R. Doty, M.D., director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). Deprived of sleep by electric lights and electronic communication, and assaulted by workplace demands and the frantic pace of modern living, he says, we can experience “chronic engagement of our sympathetic nervous system, depressing our immune system, increasing our blood pressure, causing the production of inflammatory proteins, decreasing our cortisol level, our epinephrine, norepinephrine, with a very deleterious effect on long-term health” (Doty, 2019).
How compassion can help you relieve stress.
Millions of Americans are suffering from chronic anxiety, the most common mental illness in the United States. Anxiety affects over 40 million adults and over 25% of children between 13 and 18 (Anxiety and Depression Association). Undermining our ability to function, anxiety can fill us with incessant worry, tension, nervousness, and a fearful sense of foreboding that makes us feel we are not safe.
The stresses of contemporary life contribute to our anxiety, according to neurosurgeon James R. Doty, M.D., director of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE). Deprived of sleep by electric lights and electronic communication, and assaulted by workplace demands and the frantic pace of modern living, he says, we can experience “chronic engagement of our sympathetic nervous system, depressing our immune system, increasing our blood pressure, causing the production of inflammatory proteins, decreasing our cortisol level, our epinephrine, norepinephrine, with a very deleterious effect on long-term health” (Doty, 2019).