How Your Mental State Is Affected By Mind Wandering
So much focus is given to the heart in this age of romanticized everything that we forget the value and the power of our brains – the power to think of ways to change our lives and others’, the power to dictate the decisions we make, the power to remember and to forget. But as our wild minds begin to wander, it takes its toll on us, throwing us off and making us lose our way even in the middle of a task we are working on.
In pursuit of a framework that would help in better understanding of mental disorders, some scientists began to study the results of a research published before in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. In the study, a concept utilized is of the wandering mind and how it affects mental health and possibly points toward some mental disorders such as anxiety, ADHD, and depression.
Anxiety arises when our mind wandering is coupled with our fears. Our fears tend to constrain the contents of our mind wandering, drawing us to the same thoughts that are usually causing worry in us. Now in this paper, we begin to see dreaming as mind wandering as in REM sleep, the regions of our brain that are activated in mind wandering are also activated, and our calm state functions as a constraint to our dreams’ content. With this in mind, dreaming and anxiety begin to form somewhat a relation, as those scenarios that we create in our mind birthed from our anxieties that we thoroughly avoid in real life start to manifest in our dreams and place us in situations that we cannot escape from. This new development causes a breakthrough in therapy and treatment as dreams could then be used to pinpoint the anxieties of one who is experiencing mental illness, especially those related with trauma like post-traumatic stress disorder.
There is a way to treat mental disorders
In our day and age, mental illnesses no longer hold stigmas as we push towards understanding and awareness when it comes to mental health. Nowadays, mental illnesses are seen in a different light – as issues that do not need discrimination but rather care, and people who are struggling with such is no longer avoided but rather listened to. The fortunate thing is, mental disorders can be treated and there is an abundance in methods to do so, including therapy with a psychiatrist or mindfulness treatment, both of which will absolutely help to keep your mind wandering at bay as this is often the reason why anxieties arise. There are also different help lines that offer aid when it comes to treatment and facing the difficulty of mental disorders. Seek help today – your mental health matters.