And University of Otago neuroscientist Dr Olivia Harrison is counting on it for her research, which aims to find better treatment options for people with anxiety.
Mild anxiety may feel vague and unsettling and may impact only a few areas of your life, but severe anxiety can feel overwhelming and have a serious impact on your ability to function in a number of ways.
"We’re interested in understanding how your brain and your body talk to each other normally, and then also when you get more anxious.
"What we understand is that communication can break down a little bit when you get anxious, and that can be really unhelpful because it can fuel our anxiety and make it even stronger."
Some of the symptoms of anxiety included sweaty palms, breathing faster, a stomach that felt like it had butterflies in it, and trouble concentrating, she said.
"If we don’t perceive those signals very well, then that can fuel even more anxiety because we’re not sure what’s going on, those signals can surprise us and it can become this worsening cycle.
"So what we are trying to measure is the perception of signals from your body — in particular, we are focusing on breathing — and we’re trying to see how that is altered with anxiety."
Dr Harrison said the researchers were using machines that could control how hard it was for a participant to breathe.
"It’s like breathing through a straw, and we can make it really small or we can make it a bit bigger.
"The smaller straw induces anxiety because it’s harder to breathe and you aren’t getting enough air.
"That’s a really powerful way to be able to see the really important signals of anxiety.
"We can see how sensitive people are to really small changes in the size of the straw."
Dr Harrison said the research would also look at how treatments that are available at the moment, might help reconnect our brain and body and help them to communicate better.
One of those treatments was exercise.
"It’s a powerful way to help people with anxiety.
"We’re trying to understand how aerobic exercise helps.
"It involves lots of those symptoms, because when you run, you breathe harder and your heart beat goes up, but they’re all in a really positive context.
"We’re trying to understand how that part of the exercise might help reconnect our brain and body, and also compare that to other types of exercise like stretching which is also a really great way to improve your anxiety."
She said anti-anxiety medications were being studied as part of the research.
"We’re looking to see how those types of therapies might help us, or maybe not help us, reconnect to our bodies. What are they doing?
"We need to understand who they are working for and why they are working, so that we can then tailor treatments a bit better in the future."
She said it was important to understand how the different treatments worked because there was "no-one answer that fits all" for anxiety.
"Ultimately, if we can understand how these things work, then we can work to better pair the right treatment option with the right person.
"The next step will be to work out how we create different tools, flexible tools that might suit different people better, in different scenarios, in different ways for individual needs."
She encouraged people interested in participating in the research to contact the university.
