Generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, is characterized by excessive, difficult-to-control worry that interferes with daily functioning. Rates of anxiety have been rising in the United States, particularly among adults under fifty and among women, whose risk exceeds that of men. Worsening mental health among pregnant and parenting women of low socioeconomic status has raised alarms in the maternal health community, because untreated anxiety threatens both mothers and children. Yet scientists have struggled to identify modifiable, upstream drivers of anxiety in marginalized groups, and research explicitly linking manifestations of structural racism to GAD has remained rare. The SECURE investigators argued that residential eviction, which disproportionately affects Black women and children, is one such discernible consequence of structural racism, and that the specific experiences of Black women have been largely absent from the scientific record, a gap the researchers attribute in part to misogynoir, or the systematic dismissal of Black women’s testimony.

The SECURE Study recruited self-identified Black women aged eighteen to forty-five who were parents or had a parenting role and lived in Wayne, Oakland, or Macomb counties in Michigan. Between July 2021 and July 2024, participants completed online or telephone surveys, yielding a final sample of 1,428 women, a remarkable 91.1 percent response rate among confirmed eligible participants. Crucially, the study was designed as participatory action research: a Community Advisory Board of Black women local, national, and international leaders helped shape the survey questions in culturally appropriate language, interpreted the findings, and are named coauthors on the paper. This structure was not merely symbolic; it shaped how eviction itself was measured, distinguishing five separate exposures: eviction during childhood, ever experiencing a court-ordered eviction, ever experiencing an illegal eviction, a court-ordered eviction in the past two years, and an illegal eviction in the past two years.

In Michigan, a lawful eviction requires written notice of a lease violation, a court filing, a judicial eviction order, and a physical removal carried out by a court officer or sheriff. An illegal eviction bypasses all of these protections: the landlord or their representative simply forces a resident out. Anxieties were assessed with the GAD-7, a validated seven-item scale on which participants rated how often they were bothered by symptoms such as nervousness, uncontrollable worrying, restlessness, irritability, and fear that something awful might happen. The scale showed excellent internal consistency in this sample, and scores of fifteen or above, indicating severe symptoms, were analyzed as the outcome. Roughly one in three participants screened positive for moderate or severe anxiety symptoms in the previous two weeks, with about sixteen percent falling into the severe category.

The headline result emerged with striking clarity. In unadjusted analyses, all five eviction measures were associated with elevated risk of severe anxiety symptoms, with relative risks ranging from roughly 1.3 to 2.0. After statistical adjustment for age, income, marital status, education, employment, enrollment year, current housing tenure, and prior clinician-diagnosed anxiety and depression, most associations attenuated. But one held firm: women who reported an illegal eviction in the past two years had 46 percent higher risk of severe GAD symptoms than women with no such experience, a finding that remained statistically significant with a confidence interval of 1.03 to 2.07. A sensitivity analysis comparing women illegally evicted more than two years earlier against those with no lifetime history found no elevated risk, while recent illegal eviction conferred fifty-two percent higher risk, sharpening the picture of a potent, time-sensitive association that resembles an acute threat response rather than a lasting scar of past displacement.

The study’s design cannot prove causation, and the authors are careful on this point, acknowledging possible recall bias and the cross-sectional nature of the data. Yet they argue the estimate is likely conservative, given that half of the sample reported some eviction experience, that prior mental health diagnoses may themselves lie on the pathway between eviction and anxiety, and that self-report is the only feasible way to measure illegal eviction, since such displacements never enter court records. Notably, the researchers found no evidence that Black women are more likely to misremember major life events than other groups, undermining a common methodological objection to within-group research built on lived experience.

The qualitative arm of the study adds the texture that numbers alone cannot supply. Of the ninety-five women reporting a recent illegal eviction, seventy-seven also answered open-ended questions about why they were put out and what their landlords did. Thematic analysis of their responses revealed seven recurring themes. Reasons for illegal eviction included landlord conflict, abuse, and fraud, such as retaliation against tenants who filed discrimination complaints or who knew their rights; landlord neglect, including refusal to repair infestations and dangerous conditions; gentrification, property sales, and unaffordable rent increases; and family or neighborhood conflict. One participant described being deceived by a landlord who ‘came and lied to the police to remove us’ after a court had failed to displace her. Another, seven days late on rent, received a fraudulent notice that mimicked a court document and left within a week, unaware she had a right to stay.

The methods of displacement were often overtly coercive, fitting what researchers call ‘self-help’ eviction: changing the locks while tenants were away, shutting off water and utilities, removing belongings to the street, sending threats by text and email, calling police with false reports, and arriving with groups of people to intimidate. Participants described daily harassment, destroyed property, and inspections they could not refuse. The authors contend that such experiences produce exactly the cognitive conditions that sustain generalized anxiety: anticipatory worry, hypervigilance, an inability to plan, and a pervasive sense of ongoing threat. Because illegal evictions are sudden, violent, unpredictable, and offer no immediate legal recourse, they may generate an intolerable level of uncertainty, a known driver of GAD. The researchers go further, framing the incomplete enforcement of tenant protections as a form of state-sanctioned violence, and drawing a parallel to police brutality, which has likewise been linked to hypervigilance and anxiety in Black communities.

The implications reach well beyond psychology clinics. More than one in three participants carried a prior diagnosis of anxiety or depression, and even after adjusting for those diagnoses, the association between recent illegal eviction and severe symptoms remained strong. People with GAD face elevated risks of additional mental and physical health conditions, and identifying modifiable upstream causes is therefore a public health priority. The authors argue that addressing the dual crises of eviction and poor mental health among reproductive-age Black women is essential to maternal and child health equity, and they call for a layered response: emergency support and mutual aid for those experiencing illegal eviction, trauma-informed interventions, stronger enforcement of tenant rights, and structural solutions including policy change and government-funded reparations for descendants of enslaved people in the United States. As the first and most comprehensive study of its kind, built with rather than merely about the women it studied, the SECURE investigation transforms a largely invisible form of housing violence into measurable scientific evidence, and sends a clear signal that where eviction law ends and landlord whim begins, the mental health consequences are anything but abstract.

Subject of Research: Associations between illegal residential eviction and severe generalized anxiety disorder symptoms among reproductive-age Black women

Article Title: Illegal eviction and risk of severe anxiety disorder symptoms: Qualitative and quantitative data from the Social Epidemiology to Combat Unjust Residential Evictions (SECURE) study

Article References: Sealy-Jefferson, S., Ross, L. J., Mishra, S., Sanders, K., Anderson, T., Anderson-Mays, T., Oneal, R., & Jones-McBryde, C. (2026). Illegal eviction and risk of severe anxiety disorder symptoms: Qualitative and quantitative data from the Social Epidemiology to Combat Unjust Residential Evictions (SECURE) study. SSM – Mental Health, 10, Article 100699. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100699

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.ssmmh.2026.100699

Keywords: illegal eviction, generalized anxiety disorder, Black women, structural racism, housing instability, maternal health, SECURE study, GAD-7, self-help eviction, tenant rights, reproductive justice, Michigan

The research team, based at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, recruited eleven healthy young adults with an average age of 29, all of whom had been training with weights for at least a year and screened positive for subclinical generalized anxiety disorder using validated questionnaires. To qualify, participants needed scores of at least 6 on the generalized anxiety subscale of the Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire and 45 or above on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire, thresholds previously validated for identifying heightened, clinically relevant worry that falls short of a formal diagnosis.

The experimental design was a rigorous randomized crossover: each participant completed both resistance training protocols on separate laboratory visits separated by at least 72 hours, with order determined by balanced randomization. The two sessions were engineered to match volume load and relative intensity while differing sharply in structure. The first protocol, 3 x 10 with 60-second rest intervals, involved three sets of ten repetitions at 85 percent of the participant’s ten-repetition maximum, performed on leg press and leg extension machines. The second, 8 x 3 with 120-second rest intervals, spread eight sets of three repetitions at 85 percent of the three-repetition maximum across the same exercises. Both protocols sat firmly in the high-intensity zone, but the shorter-rest configuration imposes far greater cardiometabolic strain, driving up heart rate, blood lactate, and the acute sensations of distress that exercise psychologists call interoceptive signals.

Anxiety, measured with the State subscale of the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, dropped significantly 30 minutes after both sessions. After the traditional 3 x 10 protocol, state anxiety fell from a baseline of 44.1 to 40.3 points, a large effect size of 1.1. After the cluster-style 8 x 3 protocol, it fell from 44.8 to 41.9, a moderate effect of 0.65. Crucially, the difference between protocols was not statistically significant, meaning that the anxiolytic effect did not depend on which configuration the participants performed. Total mood disturbance, a composite score from the Profile of Mood States that weighs tension, depression, anger, fatigue, and confusion against vigor, declined after both sessions as well, with effect sizes exceeding 1.3 in each case.

Beneath those headline results, the two workouts told very different emotional stories. Only the traditional high-repetition protocol significantly reduced anger, while only the cluster protocol cut fatigue and boosted vigor. More telling were the measures taken during exercise itself. Using the Feeling Scale, an 11-point scale from very bad to very good, the researchers tracked affective valence set by set. The 3 x 10 session pushed participants steadily into the high-activation displeasure quadrant of the circumplex model of affect, the emotional territory of tension and distress, and produced significantly lower post-exercise pleasure than the cluster session. The 8 x 3 session, by contrast, shifted participants toward high-activation pleasure, the quadrant associated with energy and vigor.

The perceptual side of the story was equally lopsided. Participants rated their exertion significantly higher after the 3 x 10 protocol, 9.6 versus 8.1 on a repetitions-in-reserve-based scale, and enjoyed it significantly less, scoring 42.3 versus 46.1 on the eight-item Physical Activity Enjoyment Scale. In other words, the two sessions moved roughly the same amount of iron but felt like entirely different experiences, one punishing and unpleasant, the other demanding yet enjoyable and energizing.

Those differences mattered for the psychological outcomes. In the traditional protocol, the magnitude of improvement in total mood disturbance correlated strongly with exercise enjoyment (r = 0.872) and negatively with post-exercise affective valence (r = -0.809), while changes in state anxiety tracked changes in affective valence (r = 0.547). In the cluster session, enjoyment correlated strongly with reductions in anger (r = 0.921), confusion (r = 0.823), and total mood disturbance (r = 0.821). These associations, though drawn from a small sample and not proof of causation, support the theoretical framework the authors set out to test: contemporary dual-mode theory holds that how exercise feels, the dynamic interplay between cognitive appraisal and bodily signals such as muscular burn and cardiovascular strain, shapes emotional outcomes, and hedonic theory predicts that people return to activities that feel good and avoid those that do not.

The findings complicate decades of dose-response research. Earlier studies, including work by O’Connor and colleagues in 1993 and Bartholomew and Linder in 1998, suggested a Goldilocks zone: moderate-intensity lifting reduced anxiety while low and high intensities did not, and one 2005 study found that lifting at 100 percent of the ten-repetition maximum actually increased anxiety. The new results show that high-intensity resistance exercise at 85 percent of maximal load, in two different configurations, reliably lowers anxiety in an anxious population when volume load is comparable. The authors suggest one intriguing explanation: exposure to controlled, manageable physiological stress may itself train emotion regulation, enhancing perceived control and cognitive reappraisal, effects that may be especially pronounced in people with elevated baseline anxiety.

Why did the more grueling session still calm the participants even while feeling worse? The researchers argue that anxiolysis and affective experience are partly separable pathways. The acute reduction in state anxiety may follow from physiological and psychological stress-processing mechanisms common to both protocols, while the subjective experience, pleasure, effort, and enjoyment, shapes which dimensions of mood improve and whether people will come back for more. That distinction has practical weight: if a workout leaves an anxious person feeling drained and miserable, adherence will likely suffer, and the long-term benefits of training will never materialize. The cluster configuration, with its long rests and brief sets, offered the same anxiety relief with less fatigue, more vigor, and greater enjoyment, making it the more attractive prescription for people who dread the gym.

The authors are candid about the study’s limits. The sample was small, only six participants completed the full mood-state analyses, and the study relied on self-report measures vulnerable to response bias. Only three women participated, precluding any analysis of sex differences, and the absence of a non-exercise control condition means expectancy effects or natural mood fluctuations cannot be fully ruled out, though the crossover design controls for many individual factors. Still, the moderate-to-large effect sizes observed suggest real clinical relevance, and the researchers call for larger trials with control conditions and long-term follow-up to test whether the perceptual and affective mechanisms identified here mediate the chronic mental health benefits of resistance training.

Even with those caveats, the study lands at a moment when the mental health case for strength training is accelerating. Meta-analyses have already established that resistance exercise training reduces anxiety symptoms in randomized controlled trials, and the mechanisms proposed for its effects span endorphin release, cortisol regulation, monoaminergic modulation, and improved sleep. What this new work adds is a sharper picture of the psychology inside the workout: anxiety relief appears robust across training configurations, but the feeling of the session, effort, pleasure, and enjoyment, is not a luxury. It may be the very pathway through which lifting weights rewires an anxious mind, and the detail most likely to determine whether an anxious young adult ever picks up a barbell twice.

Subject of Research: Acute effects of different resistance training configurations on anxiety and mood in young adults with subclinical generalized anxiety disorder

Article Title: Resistance Training Performed in Different Configurations Reduces Anxiety and Improves Mood States in Young Adults with Subclinical Generalized Anxiety Disorder

Article References: de Oliveira, L. C., Gobbo, H. R., Barbosa, G. M., Semmer, L. V., & de Oliveira, G. V. (2026). Resistance Training Performed in Different Configurations Reduces Anxiety and Improves Mood States in Young Adults with Subclinical Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00523-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00523-w

Keywords: resistance training, anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, mood states, affective valence, exercise psychology, state anxiety, perceived exertion, exercise enjoyment, mental health, randomized crossover trial, strength training

The study, led by Michael J. Mason of the University of Tennessee’s Center for Behavioral Health Research, recruited 102 young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 through social media. This age band matters epidemiologically: according to federal survey data cited by the team, more U.S. young adults report moderate to severe symptoms of generalized anxiety disorder and major depressive episodes than any other age group. The comorbidity figures are striking. Almost half of people with major depressive disorder will also experience generalized anxiety disorder, and roughly two-thirds of those with generalized anxiety disorder will experience major depression. Any treatment that can reach both conditions with a single, low-cost intervention could reshape how this population is served.

The trial design was a three-month randomized clinical trial comparing the automated texting program against a wait-list control condition. Participants in the treatment arm received CBT-txt-A, a program that had already demonstrated efficacy in treating generalized anxiety disorder in the team’s earlier work. Depression symptoms were measured with the PHQ-8, an eight-item instrument widely used to assess current depression in general populations. Using repeated measures analysis of variance, the researchers found significant differences between the treatment and wait-list conditions on depressive symptoms over time, producing a medium treatment effect of Cohen’s d equal to 0.61. In practical terms, a medium effect means the difference between groups was large enough to be clinically meaningful, not merely a statistical artifact.

Clinical significance testing, which goes beyond statistical significance to ask whether individual participants moved into healthier diagnostic ranges, reinforced the result. At the three-month follow-up, 27 percent of participants in the treatment group had no or minimal depressive symptoms, and an additional 33 percent had only mild symptoms. For an intervention that requires no therapist, no clinic visits, and no appointments, that proportion of participants reaching minimal or mild symptom levels is notable. The team frames the program as a potential low-burden support option for young adults in settings where access to conventional treatment is limited, whether because of cost, distance, workforce shortages, or stigma.

What elevates the study beyond a simple secondary-outcomes report is its analysis of mechanism. The researchers did not merely document that depression scores fell; they tested how the treatment produced those reductions. Drawing on the tradition of mediation analysis in psychotherapy research, they hypothesized three clinical pathways through which an anxiety-focused treatment could indirectly ease depression: increased behavioral activation, reduced perseverative thinking, and reduced cognitive distortion. All three hypotheses were supported. Participants in the treatment condition showed greater gains on each of these mechanisms relative to controls, and changes in each mechanism were associated with statistically significant reductions in depressive symptoms.

Each mechanism has a well-established theoretical pedigree. Behavioral activation, the process of re-engaging with rewarding and meaningful activities, is a core component of depression treatment, and the team measured it with the short form of the Behavioral Activation for Depression Scale. Perseverative thinking, the repetitive, content-independent negative thought loop that fuels both worry and rumination, was assessed with the Perseverative Thinking Questionnaire. Cognitive distortion, the systematic errors in thinking described in Aaron Beck’s foundational cognitive theory of depression, was measured with the Cognitive Distortions Scale. The finding that an anxiety treatment moved all three levers simultaneously lends empirical weight to the generic cognitive model, which holds that cognitive and behavioral change processes cut across emotional disorders rather than belonging to one diagnosis at a time.

This transdiagnostic interpretation is where the study connects to a broader shift in clinical psychology. Increasingly, researchers argue that anxiety and depression share common underlying processes, including repetitive negative thinking, avoidance, and maladaptive cognitions, and that treatments targeting those shared processes should produce crossover effects. The current results provide precisely that kind of evidence in a digital format. Prior trials by the same group found that CBT-txt-A reduced anxiety symptoms and, in a companion analysis, that a digital depression treatment produced secondary benefits for anxiety, which the authors describe as empirical support for the generic cognitive model. The new study completes the loop by demonstrating the reverse crossover: treating anxiety secondarily benefits depression.

The delivery mechanism itself is part of the scientific story. Text-message-delivered interventions sit within a growing family of digital mental health tools, including app-supported smartphone programs and internet-delivered psychotherapy, that meta-analyses have found effective across a range of common mental health problems. But CBT-txt-A differs from app-based approaches in an important way: it is automated and arrives in the messaging channel people already check constantly throughout the day. There is nothing to download, no login to remember, and no therapist waitlist to join. For young adults, a demographic that notoriously underuses traditional mental health services, embedding evidence-based therapeutic content into an everyday communication medium may lower the barriers that keep people from seeking help.

Recruitment through social media also deserves attention as a methodological feature. Rather than waiting for distressed young adults to find a clinic, the team met them on the platforms where they already spend time. This approach raises questions about sample representativeness that the researchers will need to address in future work, and the authors note that data will be made available upon request once the research team has completed all analyses. The trial was approved by the institutional review board of the University of Tennessee and funded by the Betsey R. Bush endowment for Children and Families at Risk and Behavioral Health Research at the university’s Center for Behavioral Health Research.

The mediation findings, in particular, point toward future refinements. If reductions in perseverative thinking, cognitive distortion, and increases in behavioral activation statistically account for the improvements in depression, then digital programs could be deliberately engineered to strengthen those specific ingredients rather than simply transplanting face-to-face protocols into text format. Mediation analysis of this kind also informs dosage questions: understanding which mechanisms activate earliest and most strongly could guide how program content is sequenced. The research team’s prior work testing mechanisms of change for text-message-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy in young adult depression laid the groundwork for the current mediation models, and the convergence of results across trials strengthens confidence that these are genuine change processes rather than statistical noise.

Limitations remain. The comparison condition was a wait-list rather than an active control, which means some of the observed effect could reflect nonspecific factors such as expectation or attention, although the presence of specific, hypothesized mediation pathways argues against a purely placebo interpretation. The three-month window captures short-term benefit, and longer follow-up will be needed to determine whether gains persist. The sample of 102 participants is adequate for the mediation models used but modest in absolute terms, and replication in larger and more diverse samples will be essential. Still, the combination of a medium effect size, a meaningful proportion of participants reaching minimal symptoms, and three empirically supported mechanisms of change makes a compelling case that automated texting programs can do more than their designers intended.

The practical implications are considerable. A program that requires no clinician time can be scaled at near-zero marginal cost, and if it simultaneously treats anxiety and reduces depression, it functions as a force multiplier for stretched mental health systems. For the millions of young adults experiencing comorbid anxiety and depression who never make it to a therapist’s office, a stream of carefully constructed text messages may be the only evidence-based intervention they ever receive. The study suggests that this unlikely delivery channel, powered by the same cognitive and behavioral mechanisms that drive traditional therapy, can produce clinically meaningful change, and that the boundary between treating one disorder and treating its most common companion may be far more permeable than diagnostic manuals imply.

Subject of Research: Secondary effects and clinical mechanisms of a text-message-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety on depressive symptoms in young adults

Article Title: Secondary Effects and Mechanisms of Digital Anxiety Treatment on Depressive Symptoms: A Randomized Clinical Trial with Young Adults

Article References: Mason, M. J., Coatsworth, J. D., Zaharakis, N., Brown, A., Russell, M., & Mennis, J. (2026). Secondary Effects and Mechanisms of Digital Anxiety Treatment on Depressive Symptoms: A Randomized Clinical Trial with Young Adults. International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11469-026-01733-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11469-026-01733-0

Keywords: digital mental health, text message therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive disorder, young adults, randomized clinical trial, behavioral activation, perseverative thinking, cognitive distortion, comorbidity, CBT-txt-A