A little anxiety can affect the way you walk

[In a study where subjects were blindfolded, it was found they veered to one side when feeling anxious. / Thinkstock]

Ever feel anxious? Are you maybe feeling anxious now?

That anxiety can have a surprising impact on your brain — and in turn, on your feet.

According to a new study from England, just published in the scientific journal Cognition, anxiety sparks a flurry of neural activity on the right side of your brain, and this can make you drift to the left when you walk.

“A lot of people think we attend to the left side and right side of space in an equal manner, but that’s actually not the case,” says Mario Weick, associate professor of psychology at the University of Kent.

“Right-handed people – and that’s a majority of around 80 per cent – have a slight tendency to shift attention to the left. So what I’m interested in is to examine the psychological mental states that make this shift stronger or weaker.”

The study wasn’t specifically designed to test the effects of anxiety. But the way it was conducted did actually arouse some.

“We did this study that involved students, who walked blindfolded to a cross on the floor, six meters away from the starting position,” Weick says.

Walking blindfolded didn’t cause any outright panic attacks among the subjects, but those that were prone to anxiety certainly felt a little.

“We used motion-capturing equipment to take fine measurements to digitize people’s walking. We found there is a slight shift to the left overall, and that we could make predictions depending on people’s disposition.”

Anxious people aren’t anxious all the time, of course. There’s not enough data yet to determine how they walk when they’re not in a moment of heightened anxiety.

“We measured what is called BIS (behavioral inhibition system). This is a trait, and people who score high on this will tend to be more cautious, and more inclined to worry. The higher people scored on this questionnaire, the more likely they were to drift to the left.”

Another method was used to balance the study.

“We also used a measure called BAS (behavioral approach system). That’s the opposite side of the coin. People who score high on this are more pleasure-seeking, more inclined to have positive emotions, and a go-get-it attitude. People with that kind of trait have been shown to walk more or less straight.”

Weick says there may be some intriguing practical applications for the data. Control panels for pilots and other high-stress machine operators could be tailored to take this possible attention drift into account. There might also be ways to assist stroke survivors, who often find their attention shifting leftward as they recover.

“We want go one step further, and study the same phenomenon in virtual reality, so it’s no longer a blindfold,” says Weick.

“You can control very closely the stimuli in a virtual world, and study that relationship between how people interact with a perceived space and motivation emotion.”

Which could help to ease any anxiety this story may have caused you.