Emotionally Hijacked: What New Research Reveals About Anxiety, Attention, and the Brain’s Flawed Alarm System

Why Generalized Anxiety Disorder May Be More About Emotional Rigidity Than Just Worry

Let’s talk about what happens when your brain becomes a well-meaning but extremely annoying overprotective parent. That’s generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) in a nutshell.

It means waking up every morning convinced that something is about to go wrong—and having the receipts to prove it, all neatly misfiled in your frontal cortex.

Now, new research out of China suggests that the problem isn’t just worrying too much.

It’s how people with GAD process emotion itself.

Think less “too many feelings” and more “bad emotional software with a tendency to crash during emotionally charged updates.”