An Interesting Way To Reduce Sadness And Anxiety At The Same Time

Let’s start with a few guesses.

Deep breathing? Relaxing self-talk? Exercise? All of these are helpful but I’m looking for “interesting” here.

The answer is …. an intense attentional training task.

Cohen et. al., (2015), in the journal, Neurolmage, found that a demanding attentional task, such as computer training, can help to reduce feelings of sadness and anxiety.

Researchers found that the more intense the training task, the better it reduced activation in the amygdala (a brain region involved in negative emotions) and the frontal cortex (a brain region involved in emotional regulation).

Take Home Message

If you are looking for another tool in the tool bag to help manage symptoms of sadness and anxiety, here it is. I would not advise using it as a stand-alone strategy but it can certainly be helpful as a first line of defence if you are feeling particularly overwhelmed or struggling with rumination (i.e., grinding away mentally on negative or anxiety-provoking thoughts).

And remember, if you choose use this strategy, the attentional task you pick has to be demanding; otherwise, it is easy to float back to entertaining thoughts of sadness and worry.