Anxiety and high IQ are linked: http://www.livescience.com/36259-anxiety-linked-high-iq.html so it is possible (I am speculating) that by reducing anxiety, you are reducing IQ. Not everyone wants to be smart, but it is not a decision I would take lightly. I wonder if you could perform the opposite operation, jacking up anxiety and IQ...
As someone who has experienced this from the inside let me share with you exactly what is going on...
A large part of anxiety is the result of basically running mental simulations of the world with "negative" assumptions. Thus, people who are better at cognitive simulation (i.e. high IQ) are naturally going to have a greater capacity for worry. That being said, if you train your mind to stop running simulations all the time (mindfulness) or just start running simulations with positive assumptions, that anxiety can be eliminated without any impact on intelligence whatsoever.
Severe anxiety is painful for sure, but doesn't that seem a bit unnecessary? Given there are proven methods for treating anxiety such as medications, meditation, cognitive behavioral therapies, etc without such a high cost.
Most people who are turning to more extreme and DIY solutions are doing so precisely because they've tried everything else. Outside of a small core of "natural cure" quacks, alternative medicine or "unproven medicine" is the last thing people try after conventional medicine and methods of symptom regulation have failed.
Combined, the anxiety treatment options you mentioned are probably about 80-90% effective, which is good from a societal outcomes perspective, but that still leaves millions of people with no other options.
Furthermore, many of the FDA approved medications for anxiety have side effects that can be more harmful than the original anxiety, and patients have far less experience coping with those second-order effects. A sufferer of extreme anxiety can have developed a toolset of partially effective coping mechanisms built over decades of experience, but be totally unprepared to deal with the disassociative effects and suicidal thoughts that come from something like Xanax.
Anecdotal, but the people I know who have messed with brain hacking did not do it to treat anxiety but because they believe it makes them better at learning stuff. Precisely because of the effect described in this letter - they read a couple of studies that sound very positive and think this is something they could easily do at home.
I doubt we can get any real numbers about the motivation behind DIY tDCS. But I'm glad this was written.
I think you're right and for me the numbers skew about 70-30 for people who want an "edge" and people who want a "cure".
Although, (at the risk of being pedantic and playing parlor games) I would say that many of the people seeking to boost their ability to learn and go to such great lengths to do it are also experiencing psychological problems.
Only anecdotal, but it's never been my most successful friends trying to become even moe successful, but rather people who feel like failures or that they're stuck in a rut, or that they're just not cognitively capable of being in this industry at the highest levels on their own.
That coincides with what I have seen, those studies definitely made me and my friends curious. With better evidence I will definitely be trying tDCS for accelerating learning.
Thanks for this. There is a bottle of contingencies in my bathroom, but, it simply is not an option for what plagues me daily. I quickly become wholly inefficient & anxiety transmutes to doldrums. In the days directly after having to succumb to the use of a benzo I am foggy and detached...hungover. Have not tried some of the newer beta-blockers that are supposed to work without creative lobotomy.
They're each "proven" for a relatively small (sometimes overlapping) subset of the population. If anything, psychopharmacology has taught us about the extreme variance in brain chemistries and how difficult the problem is when it comes to treatment. Adding more options is a great thing, as long as there is strong science behind it.
As long as people recognize the costs. It is painful to watch people try to solve a problem without looking into the costs of side effects. Because of hyperbolic discounting our brains are often prone to take the easier short term relief despite much higher long term costs.
For severe anxiety/panic, the main course of treatment when it comes to medication is to load the patient up with high doses of SSRIs. We're talking hitting the maximum doses for medications, where side effects will almost certainly appear. They aren't fun, they slow you down, give you nausea, change your behavior/personality and might make your dick not work.
Some doctors not in the loop will end up overprescribing Xanax and benzodiazepines to deal with the symptoms, but fail to recognize that they're only indicated to be used for a period of 4-6 weeks because they're highly addictive drugs with a withdrawal that can last 6mo or more, can cause brain damage or kill. They mask the symptoms, add their own (you are essentially drunk and impaired while on them) and tend to make the disorder worse after quitting.
By how much?
If someone can trade severe anxiety for perhaps 5-10 IQ points, then in most cases they will probably sign up.