A ride through recent studies on anxiety, highlighting the playful and the practical. Why anxious people prefer to worry than relax. City parks lift mood, and a bike helmet changes the perception of risk. Anxious triggers are less distracting as we get older, and for a select group of patients metformin may reduce anxiety and depression.

Date Published: 11/25/19

Duration: 11 minutes, 59 seconds

Studies Referenced:

1. Hanjoo Kim et al. The paradox of relaxation training: Relaxation induced anxiety and mediation effects of negative contrast sensitivity in generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder. Journal of Affective Disorders, 2019 (link)


2. Aaron J. Schwartz, et al. Visitors to urban greenspace have higher sentiment and lower negativity on Twitter. People and Nature, 2019 (link)


3. Barbara Schmidt et al.  Wearing a bike helmet leads to less cognitive control, revealed by lower frontal midline theta power and risk indifference. Psychophysiology 2019 (link)


4. Briana Kennedy et al. Age differences in emotion-induced blindness: Positivity effects in early attention.Emotion, 2019 (link)


5. Caroline Charpentier, Enhanced Risk Aversion, But Not Loss Aversion, in Unmedicated Pathological Anxiety. Biological Psychiatry, 2017 (link)


6. Juliane Zemdegs et al. Metformin promotes anxiolytic and antidepressant-like responses in insulin-resistant mice by decreasing circulating branched-chain amino acids. The Journal of Neuroscience, 2019 (link)


7. Fenqin Chen. Risk factors for depression in elderly diabetic patients and the effect of metformin on the condition. BMC Public Health. 2019 (link)