Chronic anxiety is a state of hypervigilance, I think we can agree on that. But the threat response is meant to continue until the threat is over and then the system is supposed to go back to baseline. People with chronic anxiety for whatever reason, and the reasons can be myriad, have lost the ability to come back to safety. This could be generational, a parent with chronic anxiety who overwhelmed the developing child with their own anxiety and never provided any way to settle back to safety, or traumatic events, whatever. Returning to safety is both a letting go of the hypervigilant state AND activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Depression is also not a single entity physiologically but it represents a kind of collapse and despair that can be lifelong, again from having no way to feel okay, from being surrounded by people who were depressed etc. This cannot possible be an elevated SNS state in the same way the an acute threat is.
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Dear Phyliis,
actually research is not only addressing sympathetic activity, but also parasympathetic activity. One potential index of PNS activity is heart rate variability. see for example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25472852
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20624513
kind regards
Adrian
Thank you Adrian. If you looked up my publications you would know that I am probably a world expert on skeptical clinical applications of HRV, how it can be interpreted or misinterpreted and there is a lot of junk out there. I think that a 24-hour Holter tells a very eloquent story of what that person experienced in the prior day and my career has been devoted to torturing that recording until it admitted everything. However, more recently I have become involved with the physiology of emotion, of trauma and human development and am uncomfortable about the simplistic, almost mechanistic way that is it being understood. You might look at some of Stephen Porges work on polyvagal theory...maybe a youtube video. It is all much more complicated and also elegant than we sometimes think. Here is a video that is not too long or hard to understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ByalBx85iC8
Dear Phyllis,
Anxiety is associated with hypervigilance and sympathetic activation.
Failure to disappear with its cause defines its as abnormal, as appearance without cause (anguish). It's a matter of fact that pathological sympathetic imbalance is usually associated with parasympathetic imbalance, like vaso-vagal faintness.
Explanation is almost always depression.
It is of utmost importance to realize that depression is basically biochemical with frequent behavior disturbances and not the reverse.
I my opinion (35 y. study on the subject), neuro-vegetative imbalances are basically the consequence of depression, modulated by ancient and/or present circumstances.
You could be interested by the english abstract of my book in french in attachment. in my site at section depressionF&E
bmaroy.free.fr
If you are not aware of Peter Levine's work and also that of Stephen Porges, (polyvagal theory) you might follow it up. I am not sure how you define depression. Here is a graphic that might orient you to how I have come to see this.
http://www.traumahealing.org/images/pages/GraphTraumaticL.jpg
Let me know how this relates to your experiences. It is taken from this page. http://www.traumahealing.org/about-se.php
Stephen Porges' Polyvagal Theory is predicated on unsubstantiated premises. In fact, there is more contradictory than corroborative evidence. See Paul Grossman's project on empirical investigation of the suppositions underlying Polyvagal Theory.
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