To the math-minded among us, tackling something like the Pythagorean theorem is easy, even fun. To others, anything with numbers and letter causes sweating, teeth gnashing, broken pencils, and a general feeling of dread. Now, a new study shows when number-phobic people anticipate math, their brains believe they are feeling physical pain.

“People often walk around talking about how awful math is,” says Sian Beilock, psychology professor at the University of Chicago and author of the book, “Choke: What The Secrets Of The Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.”  

“In our society it is common to hate math," Beilock says. "You don’t hear people walking around bragging about how they can’t read.”

Beilock and doctoral student Ian Lyons asked 14 adults with math anxiety to verify the results of an equation such as  (a*b) −c = d or work on word puzzles -- where subjects discerned whether a string of letters makes an English word if the spelling is reversed --while in a fMRI. Beilock and Lyons found when people with high levels of math anxiety anticipated equations, their brain reacted much like they would if they were in physical pain. The higher the person's anxiety, the more the posterior insula flashed with activity. (The posterior insula is what springs into action when one burns her hand or stubs her toe.) The researchers also found activation in the cingulate cortex, which also serves in the brain’s pain center.

 “We have this evolutionary ancient, pain system that responds when we burn our hands on the stove and are in physical pain … when people are anxious and anticipating the math test, (our brains) activate the same system,” Beilock explains.

Beilock, who views math positively as a challenge and puzzle, was surprised to learn that people reacted as if they were in pain only when they anticipated math, not while working on the equations.

“We weren’t necessarily expecting to see the activation in the anticipation and thought that was interesting,” Beilock says. She believes that when people actually started the math problems, the pain and anxiety subsided because they focused on the task at hand.

While people don’t actually feel pain—there aren’t any mysterious burning or pricking sensations while thinking about numbers—the brain reacts as if the hand is being burned. 

“The brain isn’t making a clear distinction (between physical and mental pain),” she says. “People talk about math as if it is actually painful.” And it is. Because of this, people anticipating math might also feel the same physiological symptoms that a person who stubbed her toe, such as sweaty palms and increased heart rates.

Some of these unpleasant math side effects can be reduced. Beilock has evidence that if math anxious people spend 10 minutes writing about their fears, they purge their anxiety and perform better—and reduce any physical reactions.

The paper appears in the online journal PLOS ONE.

Related:

Bad at math -- or is it dyscalculia? 

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It's a nightmare scenario we've heard about again and again: mass shootings at political rallies, college campuses, crowded food courts. Friday morning, many Americans woke up to the news of one of the worst mass shootings in recent memory in an Aurora, Colo., movie theatre, where a lone gunman shot 71 men, women and children, killing 12 of them.

News like this is chilling to all of us, but what about those who already harbor fears of public spaces? Elizabeth Lombardo, a psychologist who specializes in anxiety disorders, says the Colorado shooting will most likely exacerbate the fears and phobias some people have about going out and about in public.

"What took place in Colorado is only going to fuel that fire," she says. "A lot of times when people have a phobia, they focus on possibility rather than probability. It could happen versus it's likely to happen. People will say, 'That's not likely to happen,' however, because this just happened, it increases that fear that they already have."

Lombardo, author of "A Happy You: Your Ultimate Prescription for Happiness," says events like this can also increase stress, which in turn, can ramp up people's fears.

"When people have a higher stress level, their fears or concerns or even their irrational thoughts -- thoughts not based in fact -- tend to get stronger," she says. "That's another way something like this can affect people's phobias and fears. The overall stress level goes up and that will strengthen any other fear, make it more powerful, or any other negative thought someone might have."

Responses to the tragedy on Twitter certainly seem to indicate a heightened sense of unease. "Afraid to see dark knight rises Saturday after #Colorado #batman shooting!" tweeted @nadamtawfik. "This is unreal."

To cope with anxieties and fears like these, it's best to turn to exercise and other healthy stress relievers. "Don't grab for Ben & Jerry's therapy," she says. "Spend time with a loved one, go for a walk, practice deep breathing, listen to music, or watch a funny movie. Any of these things will help your stress level."

Focusing on the bright side is also effective, she says.

"I recommend my clients review all the positives," she says. "Things that are going well in their lives. I have them focus on all the times when good things happened when they were out in open spaces."

Dr. Dan Iosifescu, director of the mood and anxiety disorders program and associate professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, agrees.

"The best way of handling it is reminding yourself that this is just one very negative situation among thousands and thousands of normal situations," he says. "Remind yourself that this is something very unusual and let it pass."

Does it help to come up with a battle plan, like @FeliciaGanci, who tweeted "Sitting in the theater waiting to watch #batman watch must admit I'm kinda scared! I've already planned my escape route ..."

"That depends on the person," says Lombado. "For some people, if they're objective about it, as in, 'If something bad happens, I'll do X, Y and Z,'" then [a battle plan] could help."

Coming up with a plan of action may prove too distressing for others, though, she says.

"If they're too emotional, as in 'Oh my God, if I'm shot, it will be horrible and my kids won't have a mother and my poor husband, etc.,' that will make it worse," she says. "We call this fortune telling in psychology. When you predict the future negatively and emotionally react as if it's imminent."

The most important thing, Lombardo says, is to try to keep the fear from getting stronger.

"I'm not saying everyone should go out to the movie theatre today, but if you go to a movie theatre a fair amount, I encourage you to not let this discourage you from going," she says. "Your fear will only get stronger and stronger and it could go from a fear to a phobia."

Related: 

Colo. ER doc: 'Oh, my heart sank'

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Crossing that bridge when you come to it is terrifying when you have a fear of bridges.

Known as gephyrophobia (pronounced jeff-i-ro-fo-bia), people with an intense fear of driving over a bridge -- or for some, the mere thought or anticipation of it -- brings on a panic attack. Their hearts race and palms sweat, and they may also have trouble breathing and feel light-headed.

If driving, their hands death-grip the steering wheel. They worry about losing control of the car and veering off the bridge, or of becoming so freaked out that they stop traffic with no shoulder of the road to pull into. 

Gephyrophobes are "not worried about the bridge collapsing, they're worried about themselves collapsing," says Jean Ratner, a social worker who directs the Center for Travel Anxiety in Bethesda, Md. She says a bridge phobia may stem from a fear of heights, and what's at the root of the problem is being scared of having a panic attack and not being able to manage it.

This anxiety disorder usually has a sudden onset and tends to strike extremely good drivers, suggests Ratner. It often catches a person by surprise because this was someone who previously had no trouble crossing bridges. Then one day, a panicky feeling occurs on a tall bridge, typically on the first half of it as the car is climbing up the arch.

Both the length and the height of the bridge can freak out sufferers, who may drive miles out of the way to find an alternative route or make excuses for their travel-related anxieties. A dread of bridges is more likely when the person is doing the driving, but may also occur as a passenger. 

Although less common than a fear of flying, bridge phobia is treatable in 6 to 9 months, suggests Ratner. She starts with office-based sessions to develop relaxation strategies that target the symptoms of panic, such as a slower breathing pattern and looking straight ahead. Then these behavioral methods might be practiced in a car on local roads.

Next Ratner might accompany that person while they walk across a bridge. Very gradually, the person works up to walking halfway across alone.

As a person slowly builds up more courage, then Ratner will discuss driving over a small bridge in a car with her sitting in the front seat. Then they may attempt a bigger bridge together. The next session may find Ratner in the back seat, then eventually to her in a separate car trailing behind the fearful driver.

Some people may take a mild tranquilizer to help them get over their bridge jitters, or carry it in a purse or wallet in case of panic.

Of the phobias she treats, Ratner says this is a hard one. With a fear of flying, people realize they're not piloting the plane. But with a fear of bridges, the driver is in charge and that person often feels an incredible sense of responsibility especially if other family members are depending on this individual to transport them safely.

Some bridges have drive-over services for the skittish. Nervous motorists can arrange to have someone else shuttle your car while you close your eyes or cower in the back seat. Some places charge for the service while others do it for free.

If drive-over services helps people get where they want to go, Ratner says she's very open them. But working with a therapist who treats phobias can be a bridge to getting over these fears for good.

Related:

• That weird urge to jump off a bridge, explain
• Some insomniacs may just be afraid of the dark
• Spiders look bigger to arachnophobes

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Could fear of the dark be ruining your sleep?

Scientists now say that many sleep problems can be traced to an anxiety that sparks as soon as the lights go down, according to a new study presented at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies.

The small study found that 50 percent of adults who reported sleep problems also admitted to being scared of the dark - and were also measurably more anxious when the lights were turned off.

“The good news, is that if this is what is going on, it’s very treatable,” said the study’s lead author Colleen Carney, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. “And it doesn’t take long to treat.”

To see if bad sleep might be phobia driven, Carney and her colleagues rounded up 93 college students and asked them to fill out surveys that included questions about their sleep quality and whether they were afraid of the dark.

Then the researchers ran an intriguing experiment: In the first half of the experiment the volunteers sat in a room with the lights on. In the second half, they sat with the lights off. All the while, the volunteers were wearing headsets that would periodically play a blast of noise.

“Then we watched their reactions in the light and the dark,” Carney said. “In the light they were no different. But in the dark, the poor sleepers were more likely to be startled.”

In other words, compared to the sound sleepers, the insomniacs were more likely to blink and to flinch when they heard the noise in the dark. In fact, the more times they heard the noise, the more anxious and jumpy they got. The good sleepers, in contrast, got used to hearing the noise and eventually stopped reacting to it.

Fear of the dark isn’t something that sleep doctors currently look for, Carney said. So the new research might open new avenues for treatment.

And the good news is that phobias often respond very quickly to treatment with exposure therapy, Carney added. So, just as a therapist can get you used to spiders and snakes by slowly exposing you to them, they’ll also be able get you over your fear of the dark.           

Related:

• Why do we twitch as we're falling asleep?
• Waking a sleepwalker is totally safe -- for them
• Sleepwalking more rampant than thought, research shows

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By Cari Nierenberg

A spider doesn't look so itsy-bitsy to people who are petrified of them. In fact, a new study suggests that the more the eight-legged arachnid freaks someone out, the bigger that person perceives the spider to be.

People who were the most fearful of spiders tended to overestimate their actual size, Ohio State University researchers have found.

In the study, published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders, scientists recruited 57 spider-phobic individuals. In three separate sessions over a two-month period, participants were asked to estimate the size of five different live tarantulas. It was actually part of the treatment they were receiving to get over their fear.

For each close encounter of the spider kind, arachnophobes were told to stand next to a glass tank and guide a spider around inside it with a probe. Participants also completed questionnaires in which they rated their fears, anxieties, and panic-related symptoms.

To estimate size, the spider-phobes would draw a line on a card to represent the length of the tarantula they had just seen.

"We found that some of our most fearful participants drew lines that were nearly three times as long as the actual spider," says Dr. Michael Vasey, a professor of psychology at Ohio State University, and the study's lead author.

Phobias reflect distorted thinking and perception, which leads to fear responses that are excessive given the reality of the feared object, Vasey explains.

In other words, fear makes the spider seem bigger, which increases a person's fear of it, which makes it look even bigger, which leads a person to remember it as larger than it is, so the fear persists.

So, Vasey says, a person who is spider phobic may not only see spiders as larger than they are. That individual may also believe spiders are much more likely to bite or be dangerous, or that encountering one would be terrifying. 

These mistaken beliefs are often perpetuated because the person avoids all contact with the feared object and is sheltered from learning the truth: Many spiders are completely harmless.

There's some evidence a tendency to overestimate is common to other phobias: People who are afraid of snakes as well as those who fear needles may also misjudge their length. And folks who are fearful of heights might say a balcony is higher off the ground than it is. 

But the good news is that many participants who were terrified of tarantulas conquered their fear in a remarkably short time. By working with a mental health professional trained in exposure therapy, "the vast majority of spider phobics in our study overcame their fear in less than two hours," says Vasey.

Related:

• Spiders! Ants! Did that make you itchy? Here's why
• Spider venom better than Viagra?
• Spiderphobes spot the bugs first, study shows

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Charlie Riedel / AP

Scared of spiders? An intriguing new study examines both arachnophobia and "Dr. Who" fandom.

Picture this: you're sitting in a garden on a pretty summer day, and along comes a butterfly and a bumblebee. Which grabs your attention first?

Evolution would suggest that we're primed to detect threats, so we might pay attention to the buzzing little bee. But butterflies are pretty. And here are some complications: what if we're especially afraid of bees or especially entranced by butterflies?

The answers could provide insight into phobias, since we pay close and immediate attention to things that scare the bejesus out of us, even if they're probably harmless and there are more interesting things around. Now, a new study aims to discover how we get distracted by things that are (or aren't) scary.

"Very intense stimuli, such as bright lights or loud sounds, capture our attention automatically, "says study co-author Helena Purkis. "Other types of stimuli, such as threats like snakes and spiders, supposedly grab our attention in the same way."

Instead of bees and butterflies, the researchers turned to arachnoids and cult TV: they exposed 72 British subjects to a variety of photos, including some of spiders and characters or objects (including the T.A.R.D.I.S.) from the British show "Dr. Who." (The researchers are proud of this, noting that "we are the first study to use images from Dr. Who for the purposes of scientific research!" Positively wibbly-wobbly!)

The idea was to figure out whether people would be more automatically distracted by spider photos because spiders are potentially threatening. It turns out they were -- but only if they were afraid of spiders to begin with.

"The higher the participants ranked on "Dr. Who" fandom, the more attention they allocated to Dr. Who," Purkin said. "Similarly, the more fear they had of spiders, the more attention was allocated to spiders."

Some subjects were both spider phobes and fans of "Dr. Who." They were more distracted by the spiders, said Purkis, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia, whose study appears in the journal Emotion.

The study suggests that non-phobic people don't come pre-programmed to immediately notice a possible threat like a spider, even though it's an age-old threat to humans. They might first notice something they're especially interested in, like a bit of pop culture that's only been around for a little while. 

The next step is to determine how to train people to not pay attention to certain threats, Purkis said.

That may be tough for arachnophobic "Dr. Who" fans who might especially appreciate the characters called The Daleks. ("EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!") It turns out that the Empress of Racnoss, a character in the show, is a giant spider.

 "The Empress," Purkis said, "would be the ultimate attention- grabbing stimulus for any Dr. Who-loving spider phobe."

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