Xingchen Liu: Breaking the Spell

Our perspective towards mental health determines our coping approaches.

I was used to being told to “stay positive,” “be optimistic,” or “stop being sad,” and believed these behaviors alone defined “normal” mental health. My first encounter with mental health education happened in a course roughly translated as “Morality and Values,” in elementary school in China. My teacher, holding a textbook, smiled widely, citing that we all should be positive and uplifting. My attention drifted in and out during the class, and I never thought mental issues would concern me. 

That doesn’t mean I never felt anything other than “positive.” I experienced other complex feelings too: melancholy when my family moved away from the little town I grew up in, sadness when my pet bird passed away. But elbowing through “passing this exam” and “getting into that school” while being bombarded by constant positivity preaching, I found that the joyous moments of laughter and banter lingered longer in my memories. 

This energy propelled me forward until I moved to my dream city, New York, and became a neuroscience Ph.D. student– the rosiest picture I could ever imagine. After a whole first year in a sugar high, I joined my thesis lab and committed to a long journey where “real life” awaited.

My thesis project is on a neural pathway that regulates fear and anxiety. My professor sent me a list of papers in my first week, and one of them read “direct ventral hippocampal-prefrontal input is required for anxiety-related neural activity and behavior.” Frankly, that sentence made little sense to me. It’s not that I didn’t know what anxiety was, but that emotion had never left a memorable mark on me. I also couldn’t comprehend how a scientific paper experimented on abstract emotions that can hardly be put into words. I imagined the behavioral task they did: mice roamed in a “+” shaped maze with two paths closed and the other two open high above the ground. Because they are timid animals, afraid of danger and risk, the “anxious” mouse stayed in the closed paths and avoided open paths as much as possible. My concept of “anxiety” started to crystalize in this experiment. I theorized and reduced “anxiety” to a frequent abstract word in my research proposals, detached from real life. 

But graduate school had its way to strike. After I turned 24, more complex and nuanced emotions emerged in my daily routine. I found that I talked less and stayed in more, cranking out data as much as possible. I buried myself in endless neural activity recordings, coming to the lab the earliest and leaving the latest. Stress to meet deadlines and anguish about failing in my experiments drained my energy. I felt alienated and isolated. 

The worst thing about these “negative” feelings was not essentially the feelings themselves, but how I reacted to them. Here I was living a dream, working as a neuroscientist in NYC. These all-consuming feelings seemed ridiculous, and I felt guilty for their presence. I fought and refused to accept them, but they only came back stronger. 

Caught in this vicious cycle, I needed that moment of realization to break the spell.

I was in the lab rushing to edit my manuscript before a full day of experiments. I had gone through the text numerous times, but the words “elevated neural activity contributes to anxiety” jumped out of the screen this time. I mumbled these words while getting up to the bench, with thousands of things still racing in my anxious head. Then, things suddenly clicked. 

We experience emotions, like anxiety, when certain neurons and the communications between them are activated. When a group of neurons in the hippocampus (a seahorse-shaped region towards the back of the brain) become active, they start sending out electrical signals all the way to neurons in the prefrontal cortex (the emotion regulation center in the front of the brain), triggering synchronized electrical activities. It is following this chemical and electrical cascade that a mouse feels “anxious.” My research goal has been to precisely describe this organized neural pathway and answer how each type of neuron participates in this network. We keep updating our model with constant new findings, but one message has been certain – nature precisely hardwired this “anxiety structure” in every brain I have ever seen.

If all the electrical pulses I see from the recording screen are the biological basis of “anxiety,” and if the same rules apply to me, my own emotions become a bit more tangible and less mysterious. When I worry about uncertainty in the future, or feel overwhelmed by unfinished tasks at hand, or become anxious for no apparent reason at all, I imagine neurons in my own hippocampus and prefrontal cortex firing and singing in their own electrical language. Because these emotions exist with a concrete biological foundation, I don’t have to feel guilty for having these feelings anymore. Just like a skin itch or muscle pain, they happen to my body but don’t define me. 

 I haven’t become a buddha or someone devoid of any unpleasant emotions, but I have acquired a new perspective. Instead of fighting and rejecting “negative” emotions, I have started to accept them with more curiosity. I have been picking up new clues every now and then: sadness and loneliness feel very different; nostalgia can be enjoyable and painful at the same time; anger is pressure on my chest; anxiety is numbness around my shoulders. They are not simply “good” or ‘bad.” They are hardwired tools – as valid as nature itself – to help us navigate the external world. 

Promoting conventional notions of positivity is harmful because we inevitably deny other valid (albeit unwelcome) feelings in the process, which only simmer and produce more problems. I wish that my own elementary school “mental health” course had taught this idea, and that the society we live in were more accepting of the many valid facets of human experience. We can still rewrite stories of mental health, and sometimes it only takes a moment of newfound perspective to open a fresh chapter. 

–Xingchen Liu

Xingchen Liu is a doctoral student at NYU studying the brain circuits involved in anxiety and stress.