• Avoiding danger is what keeps us alive. Humans call this signal anxiety.
• Avoiding this sensation drives much of dysfunctional human behaviour. We know how to stay alive but not necessary thrive.
• Anxiety is a physiological reaction that is about a million times stronger than the conscious brain. It cannot be controlled.
• We can auto-regulate and redirect it. Addressing anxiety at the root physiological cause will solve many mental health problems.

Why is Anxiety Considered a Psychological Diagnosis?

Anxiety is simply a warning signal. Every form of life has a withdrawal/ avoidance response to real or perceived danger. All life forms, from one-celled organisms to humans respond with complex changes to optimize the odds of survival. This unconscious automatic reaction is powerful and has evolved to feel extremely unpleasant in higher life forms. It compels action to lessen the sensations. The species who did not pay attention to these danger signals, simply did not survive.

 Staying alive

When you sense danger, how do you feel – anxious? Although this a basic survival feeling, humans have the capacity to name it. It is the result of stress, threats, and life challenges, not the cause. Avoiding this sensation is the driving force behind much of human behavior, and seeking safety is necessary to store up reserves to fight another day.

What happens in your body that creates this sense of dread? The term is, “threat physiology.”

Threat physiology

Physiology is the term that refers to how your body functions. Your survival reactions are mostly unconscious, and about 40 million bits of information are processed per second. Our conscious brain deals with only about 40 bits per second. Your unconscious brain is a million times stronger than your conscious brain; the responses are hardwired and automatic, and the reason it is not subject to being controlled. However, it can be regulated and reprogrammed.

Examples of physiological actions are heart rate, blood pressure, blinking your eyes, acid-base balance, sweating, breathing, bowel and bladder function, hunger, and the list is almost endless.

These are some of drivers activating threat physiology.

• Stress hormones – adrenaline, noradrenaline, histamines – ready the body for fight and flee
• Cortisol – mobilize fuel (glucose) from tissues throughout your body.
• Glutamate – Neurotransmitters change from calming to excitatory to increase alertness and sensitivity to danger signals.
• Inflammatory cytokines (small molecules that transmit signals between cells) – the many aspects of the immune system kick into action.

Anxiety is a physiological state

This is a small fraction of actually what occurs in fight or flight physiology. Consider how you feel when your body is in this state. Here is a suggested word progression.

• Alert
• Nervous
• Afraid
• Angry
• Paranoid
• Terrorized

They fall under the umbrella of “anxiety” or “fear.” We will do almost anything to avoid this sensation resulting in many bad behaviors. Psychological diagnoses are ALL anxiety driven. The exceptions are in the positive psychology domain.

A paradigm shift

The way we view mental health must change. Here are some suggestions.

• Eliminate the word anxiety from the DSM coding system. It is the driving force and cause of poor mental and physical health.
• Most psychological diagnoses are descriptions of behaviors driven by the sensations created by threat physiology. Descriptions are less pejorative than labels (diagnoses).
• Substitute the word anxiety with the phrase, “activated threat physiology.”
• Anger is “hyperactived threat physiology.”

“Dynamic Healing”

The root cause of our mental health crisis is sustained threat physiology. There are many ways of lowering it and creating “cues of safety.” The model is called “Dynamic Healing” and is at the core of how medicine should be delivered. The portals are:

• The input – you can process your stresses so as to have less impact on your nervous system.
• The nervous system – the resiliency can be increased so it takes more stress to set off the flight or fight response.
• The output – your nervous systems takes in sensory input, summates them, and sends out signals of threat or safety. There are ways to directly dampen the threat response.

None of the approaches are difficult and require few resources. There are many clinicians in all medical fields that understand and are applying these approaches. It is just not happening on a wide enough scale.

There is no question that symptoms and behaviors must also be addressed while people heal. But if the root cause is not dealt with, their suffering will continue. Hence, the nationwide burden and fallout of poor chronic mental health continues to skyrocket.

Let’s do this!!

Our mental health crise reflects a lot of needless suffering as deep science has pointed the way to effective treatments for over 40 years. Most of clinical medicine is not connected to the data or is categorically ignoring it. It is certainly not being widely taught in medical school.

Where will the energy come from to wake us all up? It has to emanate from the public demanding better care because the business of medicine seems to have little interest in true change. It is the responsibility of the medical profession to honor the known data and implement what is already known.

The answers for our mental health crises are right in front of us if we just pay attention. Take your medical care and life back. It is your right.

The post There is an Answer to the Mental Health Crisis first appeared on Back in Control.

The post There is an Answer to the Mental Health Crisis appeared first on Back in Control.

Can’t escape your thoughts

It turns out in recent neuroscience research that thoughts are also sensory inputs that create the same bodily responses as other physical sensations. Pleasant input yields reward chemicals and a feeling of contentment. Unpleasant input stimulates stress hormones and you’ll feel anxious. What you’re experiencing is the body’s chemical surges. The problem with human consciousness is that you cannot escape your thoughts. They will progressively become stronger over your lifetime regardless of your defense mechanisms – unless you address them correctly.

One of the “solutions” for anxiety, or rather the normal response to it, is control. The reaction to a threat is to control the situation or your response in order to resolve it. So, all the players in this game are focused on gaining more control, which means that more power is desirable. So what we call “socialization” is simply a massive power struggle. This set of behaviors continues to play out in adulthood with horrendous results. Why would these early patterns change even though we intellectually know that love, peace and compassion are better principles by which to live our lives? Because these survival behaviors are part of the unconscious brain and are about a million times stronger than the conscious brain. Anxiety basics

Anger is anxiety with a chemical kick

When you lose control or are trapped by anything, including your thoughts you will become angry. Anger = loss of control It is the body’s survival response to elevate the stress chemicals that will improve your chances of solving a problem. Since we cannot escape our thoughts, we are all under an endless adrenaline/ cortisol / histamine assault. These sustained levels of stress chemicals affect every cell in the body and translate into many different physical symptoms. You’ll eventually become physically ill. Mental or physical health – which is more critical?

The patterns of behavior are established on the school ground and play out through adulthood. Every child has anxiety with it being more of a problem if he or she is from an abusive family. Aced Out They are thrown into the school system without any awareness what it is or how to process it. Then they are taught that having more self-esteem is a desirable trait – except that it isn’t. Achieving self-esteem now means that your self-worth is dependent on the approval of others who are also searching for an identity. You are also trying to utilize conscious means to solve a problem that originates in the powerful unconscious brain. It’s a mismatch and is an endless deadly loop. The myth of self-esteem

The need for power and control

Bullying is one of the earliest individual manifestations of the need to gain power to deal with anxiety. There’s even a physiological reward for being a bully. It has been shown that children who are bullied have an elevated C-reactive protein compared to those who haven’t been bullied. This is a marker of inflammation and high levels are associated with many disease states. What I find particularly disturbing is that the bullies had significantly lower levels of these markers. (1) Power has its rewards. School or prison – what is the difference? Bullying

What is even more problematic is the cultural effect of untreated anxiety / anger has on the human condition. Human history is one of unending power struggles and violence. People in power use fear to subjugate other people. This occurs in families, at work and at a societal level. It is the history of the human existence. For example, it has been the custom of nations to systematically torture conquered populations as the first act of rule. Do you think this is outdated and irrelevant? Seattle has a remarkable center that treats the survivors of torture from around the world. Their data shows that there are still over 118 nations that utilize political torture.

The Future

Although statistics show that the world has less violence than it ever has, it’s still pretty awful and seems to be getting worse. The basic power struggle at the individual and collective level hasn’t changed. We are also headed down a dangerous path in that teen anxiety / chronic pain has gone up over 800% in a decade. Many people in their late teens, twenties and early thirties are suffering from crippling anxiety. I’m seeing this play out in my office every week. They are also angry, reactive and often not open to new ideas. This group is headed into taking charge in their family and workplace with a large percent lacking resilience skills. I am seeing many buckle quickly and also am seeing a disturbing trend of workers being bullied by managers.

We have to get this right – and soon. Every person has anxiety, whether they feel connected to it or not. Instead of relaxing and enjoying the incredible comforts of living in this modern era we are becoming more reactive and angry (destructive).

Although psychology has a role in dealing with anxiety, the current paradigm of addressing it can’t work and it isn’t working. If anxiety is the survival sensation created by your body’s stress chemicals, the correct approach is to use tools to decrease these hormones. Psychology has to be combined with these other strategies. There are numerous effective ways of accomplishing this and these form the essence of the DOC process.

Implementing methods to regulate the body’s stress chemicals are simple and could be taught in school starting as early as pre-school. This would decrease the need for more power and creativity could flourish. Consider the impact of treating this as a public health issue and teaching how to effectively calm down the nervous as a part of the basic school curriculum.

Untreated anxiety is the most important public health issue on our planet. It’s the root cause of destructive behavior. Our human survival will depend on us addressing it correctly as a neurochemical survival response. We do have the knowledge and means to accomplish this task.

Listen to the Back in Control Radio podcast Societal Disintegration – Untreated Anxiety.

1. Copeland W, et al.” Childhood bullying involvement predicts low-grade systemic inflammation into adulthood.” PNAS (2014); 111: 7570-7575.

The post Societal Disintegration – Untreated Anxiety first appeared on Back in Control.

The post Societal Disintegration – Untreated Anxiety appeared first on Back in Control.

Crystal could not walk for more than half of a block without having to sit down. As she had been this way for several years, she was becoming increasingly weaker. She was very unhappy at the prospect of losing her independence, in addition to experiencing a lot of discomfort. Understandably, her anxiety was through the roof.

The Surgery

I performed a three-level laminectomy on her at L2-3, L3-4, and L4-5. This procedure removes the narrowing around the nerves, and about 70% of the time, patients are able to walk without pain. It takes a while for the strength and endurance to return. Unfortunately, most patients don’t engage in the rehab enough to experience the full benefit of their surgery. As she was so frail, my optimism for Crystal was tempered. I knew her leg pain would improve, but probably not her strength.  She also just did not seem like the person who would engage in a full rehab program.  I never give up though, so I talked to her about the DOC project and told her about my website.

Post-Op

The surgery went well and Crystal’s legs felt better. During our first phone appointment, she began to ask a lot of questions about the website and had begun the writing exercises.  She was slightly encouraged, and I was pleasantly surprised. The talk evolved into a somewhat extended conversation about the central nervous system and conditioning. It is difficult to make the effort to exercise when a person has a lot of anxiety.  To see a full recovery, I ask all of my patients to workout with weights three to five hours per week.  She was interested in getting completely involved in the process.

One month after the surgery, she was sleeping better, and felt her anxiety dissipating. She would go out for small walks every now and then. I encouraged her to join a gym. I really did not expect her to go.

Her Outcome

When I talked to her a few months ago, she was a different person. Her voice was energized. She had joined a gym and was working out four or five times a week. She felt a dramatic increase in her strength and endurance. Her anxiety was down by 80-90%.  She was going out with her friends and socializing. She was ecstatic.

I asked her to write a follow up letter about her experience, which is about a year from her surgery.

Crystal’s Letter

Dear Dr. Hanscom,

How nice it is to feel better!

It’s great to be able to do some of the things again that I used to do. I am doing everything that I have been asked to do. I am working out in the gym every week. I am also working through all of the stages of the web site. All of the books have been interesting and helpful.

My friends tell me how good I look. They say that they no longer see the look of pain in my face.

I feel like I have my life back.

Sincerely,

Crystal

Move Forward

I have kept in touch with Crystal and we talk every three months. Seven years later, she is still working out in the gym, and her strength and endurance have continued to improve. She is active in the community with a nice circle of friends. This in sharp contrast to when I first met her and she was lying around her house, at the mercy of her pain.

The tools on this website are self-directed. My observation is that there is no question of “if” you’ll better, but only a question of “when.” The decisive factor is a patient’s willingness to engage. It is stories like Crystal’s that keep me moving forward with this project.

“Better Not Look Down”

The post A New Life at 72 first appeared on Back in Control.

The post A New Life at 72 appeared first on Back in Control.