Could Anxiety Be Good for Depression?

Could being anxious actually be a good thing for depression? Researchers at the University of Illinois think that anxious apprehension, better known as worrying, helps to fight depression. However, anxious arousal – the type of anxiety characterized by fearfulness that could turn into panic – has the opposite effect.

The study involved a task wherein the subjects were asked to identify colors of words connotative of negative, positive or neutral meanings, ignoring the latter part.

Then they used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to scan the subjects’ brain areas that became activated in response to emotional words.They looked at such brain activities in different types of patients — those who were depressed and not anxious, those who were anxious but not depressed and those who showed signs of variable degrees of depression along with one or both types of anxiety.

The researchers found that  anxious arousal enhanced activity in the part of the brain that is also associated with depression, while anxious apprehension suppressed activity in that area. They also found that depressed-worriers did better in the color-identification task than the depressed-fearful. This suggests that the worriers were better able to focus on the task at hand, and had a better ability to ignore the emotional content of the words. In other words, their brains were too busy being worried about doing the task that they could not be depressed at the same time.

The full article has more details about the study and the findings of the researchers. Do you believe that worrying could be good for depression, or do you think that worry merely acts as a temporary distraction for depressed people? What are the implications of the findings on depression treatments? Let us know what you think by leaving a note below.