A ‘yoga pill’ to end anxiety? Neuroscientists discover a brain circuit that instantly deflates stress – Daily Freeman

By Deborah Vankin, Los Angeles Times

Your heart is racing, your arms are tingling and your breathing is shallow. You’re having an anxiety attack. And you’re in a public place, to boot. A crowded restaurant, say, or at the office. Not a space where you can comfortably lay on the ground and do some deep breathing exercises to calm yourself.

What if there were a pill that would instead induce that kind of calm breathing for you? That scenario might be possible after a new scientific breakthrough.

Neuroscientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla have identified a brain pathway that instantly deflates anxiety. The new study, which published earlier this week in the scientific journal Nature Neuroscience, lays out how the aforementioned brain circuit regulates voluntary breathing — meaning conscious breathing as opposed to automatic breathing that happens without your having to think about it — allowing us to slow our breath and calm our mind.

The discovery opens up the potential for the creation of new drugs that would mimic the relaxed state common during breath work, meditation or yoga. Sung Han, senior author of the study, says he’d like to one day see a “yoga pill,” as he calls it, on the market to ease anxiety. It would likely be useful for the more than 40 million adults in the U.S, who, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, suffer from an anxiety disorder.

Han says the new discovery is a real scientific breakthrough.

“As a scientist, finding something never known before is always exciting,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “This top-down breathing circuit has been a longstanding question in the neuroscience field. It’s exciting to find the neural mechanism to explain how the slowing down of breathing can control negative emotions, like anxiety and fear.”

We’ve long known that we can control our breathing patterns to alter our state of mind — when we get stressed, we might take a deep, slow breath to feel calmer. But scientists didn’t understand how that worked — which parts of the brain were actually slowing our breath and why that activity makes us calmer. Now they know that there is a group of cells in the cortex, the higher part of the brain responsible for more conscious, complex thought, that send messages to the brain stem, which in turn sends information to the lungs. That’s the aforementioned “circuit.”

The discovery validates soothing behavioral practices such as yoga, mindfulness and even “box breathing” — the latter a technique that involves repeatedly breathing in, then holding your breath, for four-second counts in order to relieve stress — because it grounds these behavioral practices in science.

But the practical applications is what makes the Salk discovery so important, Han says.

“It can, potentially, create a whole new class of drugs that can more specifically target anxiety disorder,” he says.