Frank Herbert Quote: I Must Not Fear

Frank Herbert

Hunter S. Thompson: Still Gonzo After All These Years...

Dr. Cynthia Thaik: Don't Be Paralyzed by Fear

At some point or another, we've all experienced fear -- that feeling when your heart is racing out of control, your palms are sweating, you're short of breath and your digestive track goes into spasms.

Fear has very real effects on the body, and these effects are meant to protect us from danger.

In day to day life, a small amount of fear or insecurity can be beneficial, in that it keeps you on your toes and motivated.

However, when fear and insecurity eclipse common sense, these unhealthy thought processes can cloud your judgement and prevent you from realizing your goals.

Moreover, constant anxiety, self-doubt and irrational fear can cause a myriad of health problems, including digestive ailments, headaches, depression, high blood pressure and even cardiovascular issues.

It is important to be aware of your own fears and insecurities, and to recognize if and when they are preventing you from living the life that you truly deserve.

How to Let go of Fear and Insecurity

1. Identify your fears and insecurities. Make a list of all your fears. The first step to eliminating fear is recognizing exactly what it is that makes you afraid. Is it a fear of failure? Rejection? Looking foolish? Once you pinpoint your fears, think about why you are afraid of those things. Are your fears rooted in logic or are they a product of your own emotions?

2. Stop overthinking everything. Sure, it is good to think a situation through before you make a major decision, but too much thinking prevents you from actually doing anything. And if you never act on anything, you'll never get ahead. So stop over-analyzing every single little thing, don't talk yourself out of making decisions and instead, just act.

3. Find your strengths and play those up. When you remind yourself of what you are good at and what you like about yourself, you gain more confidence and start to let go of your fear. The next time you feel that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach, try to think about at least three strengths that you have that make you unique.

4. Exercise and eat well. We all know that exercise and a healthy diet are good for our bodies, but a healthy lifestyle can also improve your mood and make you feel more relaxed, balanced and confident. This in turn, is a surefire way to vanquish anxiety and insecurity.

5. Set goals. Without a plan it is very easy to get lost and feel as though you have no purpose in life. Goal setting can give you some direction and force you to rise above your fears to achieve the things you want in life. In addition, every for milestone or goal that you reach, you will gain that extra boost of confidence that will help you to get over your insecurities.

When it comes down to it, fear is very much a product of the mind and more of an internal struggle than anything to do with the reality of the outside world.

If you look within yourself, trust your decisions and learn to love yourself, you will find that your fears will dissipate and you can get on with enjoying everything that life has to offer.

In the News: Oxytocin Could Increase Anxiety, Fear In Response ToFuture Stress

The "love hormone" may not be as warm and fuzzy as first thought. A new study shows that while oxytocin does play a huge role in social bonding and feelings of love, it also is the reason why terrible events can scar you for life.

This new finding is important because "by understanding the oxytocin system's dual role in triggering or reducing anxiety, depending on the social context, we can optimize oxytocin treatments that improve well-being instead of triggering negative reactions," study researcher Jelena Radulovic, the Dunbar Professsor of Bipolar Disease at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, said in a statement.

The study, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience and conducted in mice, explains that oxytocin can not only make us remember stressful situations from the past (like being bullied), but they also increase feelings of anxiety and fear in the face of future stress.

The hormone does this by triggering a molecule called ERK, which itself makes sensations of fear greater because it stimulates fear pathways in the brain's lateral septum region. This molecule is activated for hours after a stressful social experience.

Researchers noted this is the first time oxytocin has been identified to have a function that isn't just boosting feelings of love and connection.

Past studies have looked at the hormone's role in relationships and friendships. For instance, a study in the journal Psychoneuroendocrinology earlier this year showed that oxytocin makes people more likely to "tend and befriend" others who have just experienced social rejection.

And a 2012 study showed that oxytocin levels could be a predictor for how long a relationship lasts.

On the Blogs: Top 10 Stigmatized Health Disorders

Please try to help  -- don't blame or shame!

by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer

Sickness and Shame

As if being sick weren't bad enough, some diseases come with a social stigma that can make sufferers hide their illness.

#10  Colon Cancer: Colorectal cancers are very curable in the early stages, according to the National Institutes of Health. Unfortunately, colon cancer often sneaks up without symptoms, and even if symptoms do show up, patients may be embarrassed to talk about diarrhea and abnormal bowel movements with their doctors. The best way to diagnose colon cancer is early screening, including colonoscopies.

Journalist Katie Couric tackled the stigma surrounding this bowel cancer straight on in March 2000 by televising her colonoscopy. Along the way, she proved that talking about hidden diseases can help people seek medical care. According to a 2003 study in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine, colonoscopy rates went up after Couric's TV special. Before the campaign, a physician could expect to conduct 15 colonoscopies a month. For 9 months after Couric's on-air procedure, that number jumped to 18 colonoscopies per physician per month.

#9 Erectile Dysfunction: The stigma surrounding erectile dysfunction has lessened in recent years, thanks to hours of commercials depicting happy, wholesome couples dancing to the soundtrack of an announcer talking about pharmaceutical side effects. But it can still be tough for men to admit to sexual dysfunction. According to a 2010 review of sexual dysfunction treatments published in the journal Primary Care: Clinics in Office Practice, only half of men with erectile dysfunction get treatment.

Men with erectile problems shouldn't feel alone, however. According to the same report, 10 to 20 million American men have erectile dysfunction, and by age 70, about two-thirds of men have trouble achieving or keeping an erection.

#8 'Manly' Problems: If erectile dysfunction is surrounded by a stigma of unmanliness, some female disorders come with symptoms that challenge our cultural definitions of femininity. Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, a hormone disorder that can cause infertility and diabetes, among other medical problem, is often marked by excessive facial hair. That symptom can leave women struggling to shave, wax or otherwise hide their hirsutism.

Disorders like hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating, can be stigmatizing to both genders. But the disorder comes with extra baggage for women.

"You know, with women, you don't want to be someone who is sweaty," Sophia Wastler, a 36-year-old Virginia woman with hyperhidrosis, told LiveScience. "It's kind of more of a male characteristic than a female characteristic, so it's quite embarrassing."

#7 Psoriasis: Psoriasis is a chronic immune disorder that causes patches of cracked, scaly skin. These outbreaks can be hard to hide and understandably embarrassing. The embarrassment is multiplied by people who see psoriasis and shy away, mistakenly believing the disorder is contagious.

According to a 2008 survey by the National Psoriasis Foundation, 63 percent reported feeling self-conscious about their skin. More than half, 58 percent, said they felt embarrassed, and one-third said they limited their social interactions and dating because of psoriasis flare-ups.

#6 Irritable and Inflamed Bowels: Any disease related to excretion is bound to come tied in some sort of stigma. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) aren't exceptions. IBD is actually a cluster of syndromes, all marked by the inflammation of the intestines. IBS is a vaguer diagnosis, but the disorder is marked by intestinal pain, cramping and constipation or diarrhea without the inflammation that marks IBD.

In general, IBS patients feel more stigmatized by their disease than IBD patients, according to a study published online March 2011 in the journal Quality of Life Research. Among more than 200 IBS patients surveyed, 27 percent said they felt moderately or extremely stigmatized, compared with 8 percent of the more than 200 IBD patients surveyed. The difference may be because without a clear physical cause, IBS sufferers feel their disease is not taken as seriously.

#5 Obesity: Fat stigma has gone global. According to a 2011 study in the journal Current Anthropology, there are almost no cultures that don't associate obesity with laziness and gluttony, despite the fact that many of these same cultures once saw heftiness as a sign of wealth.

Those who would shame the overweight often say they're concerned about the person's health. If that's the case, shame is likely to backfire? A 2011 study in the journal Social Psychology Quarterly found that shame and stigma hasten physical decline in people who are obese.

#4 Leprosy:  Leprosy, or Hansen's Disease, looms large in the public imagination. The disease is thought to be extremely contagious and believed to result in body parts falling off.
Wrong on both counts. More than 90 percent of people who come in contact with the bacteria that cause leprosy will fight the disease off without symptoms and without becoming contagious (though humans may be able to catch the disease from close contact with armadillos).

The disease is also curable with antibiotics. And while the skin lesions caused by the infection can be disfiguring without treatment, fingers and toes don't just fall off. This myth likely got its start because nerve damage to digits can cause numbness, putting people with leprosy at more risk of accidental injury or amputation.

#3 Lung Cancer: Like obesity, lung cancer is a condition that people tend to blame on the victim. The link between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer leads people to believe that sufferers bring cancer upon themselves. But in fact, thousands of people who have never smoked get lung cancer every year.

Besides, as Jamie Ostroff of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center pointed out at the 2009 World Conference on Lung Cancer in San Francisco, people who have smoked are no less worthy of lung cancer treatment than those who have never lit up. According to LungCancer.org, the disease is the leading cause of cancer deaths in men and women, killing more than 158,000 people each year in the United States.

#2 HPV: Human papillomavirus (HPV) infects the skin or mucous membranes, often asymptomatically. But some strains of the virus can cause cervical cancer in women, making them dangerous sexually transmitted infections (STIs). HPV can also cause genital warts.
HPV became a flashpoint in the GOP primary elections in September 2011, when Republican candidates criticized Texas Governor and frontrunner Rick Perry for issuing an executive order in Texas that would have made vaccination against HPV mandatory for girls attending school in the state. Many other vaccines are already mandatory in Texas, but the HPV vaccine is controversial because the virus is spread through sexual contact. Medical experts say that the vaccine is most effective when administered before a person becomes sexually active and potentially exposes themselves to the virus. But Perry's attempt to make the vaccine mandatory was shot down by social conservatives, who argue that getting vaccinated may spur teens into early sexual activity.

#1 HIV/AIDS: Perhaps one of the most famously stigmatized diseases ever, HIV/AIDS first appeared as a mysterious syndrome in mostly gay men in the early 1980s. Anti-gay activists blamed gay men's "immoral" behavior for the spread of the disease, setting up a persistent victim-blaming attitude.

According to a 1999 study published in the journal American Behavioral Scientist, 52 percent of Americans still associated HIV with homosexuality, despite the fact that by that time, only about a third of new HIV cases were contracted by gay men. In 1997, the same study found, 55 percent of Americans believed that most people with AIDS were responsible for their illness, and 28 percent went as far to say that most of them deserved it.

As late as 2006, a Kaiser Family Foundation report found significant confusion among Americans about HIV. According to the report, 37 percent of Americans erroneously believed that HIV could be spread by kissing, while 32 percent thought it could spread via shared drinking glasses.

The Role of Stathmin in Emotional Regulation

Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7, 6 (January 2006)

Neurogenetics: Fear not

by Jane Qiu

Fear helps animals — including humans — to survive, as it allows them to avoid predators and dangerous situations. However, too much fear, or inability to control it, can be detrimental and result in phobias, pathological anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. The identification of the gene stathmin as an important mediator of both instinctive and learned fear might shed light on these disorders and help us to develop ways to erase unwanted fear.

The role of stathmin in emotional regulation was first proposed a couple of years ago. Gleb Shumyatsky and colleagues conducted a differential gene expression screen of single cell cDNA libraries derived from neurons of the hippocampus and the lateral nucleus of the amygdala (LA). They identified two genes, gastrin-related peptide (Grp) and stathmin, which are highly enriched in the LA but are almost absent from the hippocampus. As the LA lies at the crossroad where sensory information is transmitted from the auditory cortex and auditory thalamus to the amygdala — a crucial process for fear processing — the researchers set out to study whether these genes have a role in fear.

Writing in Cell, they show that mice lacking stathmin are fearless daredevils. Knockout mice do not seem to have instinctive fear, venturing bravely into potentially dangerous environments, such as open fields or elevated platforms, which normal mice would usually avoid.

Stathmin-knockout mice also have weaker memories for past aversive experiences. Shumyatsky et al. tested this using the fear conditioning paradigm. During training, mice were given a conditioned stimulus (a loud tone), which was immediately followed by an unconditioned one (a mild electric footshock). Normal mice make an association between the stimuli and freeze up when they hear the tone during testing the next day. However, the stathmin-knockout mice performed poorly in this test, which indicates that they are inept at forming fear-related memories.

To ensure that this was not due to changes in other features that might have resulted from lack of the gene, the researchers tested the mutant animals' sensitivity for pain. It was normal, as was their performance in spatial memory, which indicates that the effect of stathmin on learned fear is genuine and specific.

How does stathmin affect fear-related memory? It turns out that stathmin can inhibit the dynamics of microtubule formation. Microtubules in the amygdala of the mutant mice are more stable (less flexible) compared with those of their normal counterparts. As new memories involve the formation of new synpases, which may require asembly and disassembly of microtubules, the researchers conjecture that this might explain why mice lacking stathmin cannot effectively form fear-related memories. Consistent with this hypothesis, there was a significant decrease in long-term potentiation in the cortico-amygdala and thalamo-amygdala pathways of mutant mice.

This elegant study represents a significant step forward in our understanding of fear. Although stathmin is conserved across many species, including humans, whether this gene is also expressed in the human amygdala remains to be seen.

Joseph LeDoux on The Tyranny of Anxiety

Joseph E. LeDoux says a “tyranny of anxiety” now wreaks havoc on our society, with more than 40 million people in the United States suffering from disorders at an economic cost of $50 billion per year.

Exceprted from the NYU Alumni Magazine #10 online article By written by Carlin Flora, Spring 2008

"Joseph E. LeDoux has become a crusader for alleviating all sorts of anxieties, a scientist who aims to literally transform the mood of the American public. Author of the acclaimed books, The Emotional Brain (Simon & Schuster) and Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are (Viking), LeDoux says a "tyranny of anxiety" now wreaks havoc on our society.

And with 24-hour TV news channels and Internet sites barraging us with a daily dose of panic and high drama, the national level of fear is only expected to rise. But LeDoux, the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science and winner of the Fyssen Foundation's 2005 International Prize for his work on the neural basis of emotion, believes he's close to understanding how to prevent and treat fear-based disorders, which are affected by our experiences and genetic influences.

"Anxiety is the low-hanging fruit of psychiatry," he says. Unlike depression or schizophrenia, which, he notes, are far more complex, LeDoux claims that fear is "a problem that could be solved with a focused research effort."

This mission to move fear off of the emotional forefront is the focus of NYU's new Emotional Brain Institute, founded in 2007, which LeDoux heads."We're not going to eliminate fear—it's always going to be waiting for another trigger," he cautions. "But we can develop strategies to overcome it."

As a kid in the small Cajun town of Eunice, Louisiana, LeDoux, a good-but-not-great student, never pursued scientific hobbies or considered research as a career. But he did get some early anatomy lessons in his father's butcher shop. "Since I was 8 or 9, my job was to take the bullets out of the cow brains," he says. "I used to think about what had been going through the cow's mind when…bam!"

Coming from a cognitive science background, LeDoux wanted to understand emotion as information processing rather than as subjective feeling—to know why we choose emotions instead of simply how we experience them. At that time, emotion was assumed to be a function of the limbic system, which includes the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure in the brain's temporal lobe. But attached to the theory as scientists were, no one had honed in on the fact that there was no clear evidence linking emotion to most other limbic areas besides the amygdala.

LeDoux began conducting simple fear-conditioning experiments in rats (pairing a tone with a mild shock, for example) to map out the effects of emotional stimuli on the brain and, in the process, discovered that the amygdala itself is the brain's virtual seat of fear. When triggered by fearful sounds or sights, the amygdala rapidly signals to our bodies to freeze while the brain processes the threat.

LeDoux's true eureka moment came after he traced the nerves connecting the rats' auditory sensations to areas in their brain and found that their emotional, rather than rational, responses to fearful stimuli were processed more quickly. Reacting to a scary sound, a rat brain's "low road" of sensory processing, which centers in the amygdala and leads to an emotional response, functioned almost twice as fast as the "high road" of processing, which involves conscious thought. Because the fear system in humans developed so long ago, it's analogous to that of rats, LeDoux says; when we hear a loud noise, we freeze until our brain decodes whether the noise is threatening.

In rats and humans, the fear of threatening stimuli is triggered by emotionally potent memories, which is why the study of memory formation has been key to LeDoux's research. His lab team is working to figure out how to chemically interrupt the consolidation of traumatic memories so they won't have such a debilitating hold over people. So far, the team has been able to erase specific memories in rats by injecting a chemical into their brains, disrupting the protein synthesis that normally occurs when a memory is recalled. "We've had great success in the animal models," LeDoux says, but notes that "the human work is very slow." Because many victims of post-traumatic stress disorder suffer from drug and alcohol addiction, it's difficult to find the necessary substance-free subjects for the study.

In the meantime, LeDoux has found a less conventional method of spreading his understanding of the emotional brain to the masses: music. At Madison Square Garden last May, he led the Amygdaloids—his rock band comprised of fellow NYU scientists. During one song, from the group's CD titled Heavy Mental, he crooned, 'Why do we feel so afraid? Don't have to look very far. It's all in a nut—in your brain.'"