Anxiety is everywhere. The new buzzword. But what does it really mean and is it really the culprit it is made out to be?

Simply defined, anxiety is a sense of unease, nervousness, or worry. It manifests on a continuum of physical, mental, and emotional symptoms from the feelings of butterflies in the stomach before a performance, athletic event, or speech all the way to a panic attack. There is a biological basis for anxiety. It is our stress response system, or our fight, fight, or freeze response. When our brain senses any kind of imbalance or potential threat to the body system, the stress response is activated in preparation for “survival mode.” For example, walking to your car alone in a half-lighted parking lot, you feel uneasy. This is an appropriate signal to you to be alert for danger. Sometimes, however, it is activated when it doesn’t need to be or it is often activated, leading to anxiety disorders.

One of the things that make human beings amazing is our metacognitive abilities. Meta-what? In fancy psychological terms, it means humans have higher-order thinking that allows us to analyze and control our thinking processes and our memories. We can think about how and why we think as well as how and why we have memories. We are aware of our abilities to think and form memories, we have thoughts and feelings about those abilities, and we evaluate them in the past and for the future. We are not born with this ability; it develops over time.

As wonderful a gift as this higher-order thinking is, it can also cause problems. Our brains are highly imaginative with a tendency to take some thought processes into realms that cause distress. Take excessive rumination and worry for example. Not only do we worry about things in our lives, but we also worry about how we worry about things. Sometimes people get lost in their ruminations, thoughts, and worries making it seem like they are in another world despite being physically here.

The wearables market is booming and this wave reached the mental health fields too. What is significant to our readers is that some of those companies are focused specifically on BFRB disorders such as excoriation disorder and trichotillomania. We decided to reach out to all vendors who are creating devices for the BFRB market, and put their products to the test. This is going to be the first post in a series of reviews dedicated to such devices. This following is a thorough review by a member of our team:

 
Hello – Slightly Robot

SlightlyRobot is a young and small venture run by two brothers from Seattle (we interviewed them last fall).  As their website states:

“The Slightly Robot Bracelet tracks your hands and vibrates when you forget what they're doing, whether it's pulling your hair, biting your nails, or something else.”

The world is full of stimuli that affect your five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Every person is unique in the way their brain processes that stimuli and sensory overload can occur for anyone.

What is sensory overload?

Some people feel increased stress when stimuli gets to be too much. Think of that fingers-on-the-chalkboard sound and the sensation you feel when that happens. Now imagine that feeling happening when there are too many people around or when someone touches you or when there is too much noise. When someone has a sensitivity to outside stimuli, the body’s stress response can activate in such a way that the nervous system becomes overwhelmed. Some people experience panic attacks when the nervous system overloads and some people experience physical pain. When that happens, the natural response is to search for a way soothe ourselves or to make it stop.