• Understanding the nature of chronic disease and the principles behind the solutions, allows you to fully engage in your care.
• Characteristics that keep us alive are what also create disease states.
• Chronic pain is a neurological diagnosis that has profound effects on your body’s physiological state. Existing in flight or fight breaks down your body.
• Survival depends on the protection of anxiety and anger. Letting go of trying to fight or change them releases energy to live your life.
• The essence of chronic illness is living in sustained threat and the solution lies in finding safety.

Here is a review of some characteristics of staying alive, which are the same ones that cause illness and disease.

Your health is dependent on the amount of time your body is in a physiological state of threat compared to feeling safe. Life is dependent on feeling safe in order to regenerate and also dealing with threats in order to survive. But, when you are exposed to sustained threat physiology, your body will break down.¹

Physical and mental symptoms are the result of each organ system in your body uniquely responding to your body’s chemical makeup.² In addition to the multiple physical symptoms, the sensations created by the flight or fight inflammatory state are called anxiety and anger. They are the result of threats, not the cause. They are also powerful, uncontrolable, amoral, destructive, and necessary to maintain life.

The starting point

Picture a complex circuit board that has trillions of etched-in circuits that represent your lifetime of programming. These circuits are not alterable for several reasons. First, they are memorized, similar to riding a bicycle.³ Second, any time you spend trying to analyze and figure them out is counterproductive. The more attention you pay to these patterns of activity, the more they are reinforced. Finally, as the powerful unconscious brain is estimated to process 20 million bits of information per second⁴ (compared to your conscious brain only processing 40 bits per second), rational interventions alone, such as talk therapy, cannot hope to make a dent in these circuits. It is like trying to move a high mountain peak with a shovel. It is not going to happen and much of your life’s energy is consumed in the process of trying.

It sounds discouraging. You have these permanently embedded pain circuits in your brain and the harder to try to fix them, the more they are reinforced. They are also necessary and much more powerful than your conscious brain. So, what do you do?

Solving the unsolvable

Understanding that you cannot solve or improve these unpleasant circuits is the first and necessary principle behind the solution. You must put down your shovel and move on. Instead of trying to “fix yourself,” new strategies are needed to create fresh circuits in your brain. Most of these approaches utilize methods that connect with the unconscious part of your brain with repetition. It’s similar to diverting a river into a different channel. You begin with small steps to create these new channels, but eventually the water’s flow will aid the process.

So why would we ever take anxiety or anger personally? They are inherent for survival but have little, if anything, to do with who we are. By letting go of trying to solve an unchangeable situation, you’ll experience a huge energy surge that allows you to move forward.

The second principle is that since it is impossible to fix your pain circuits, you must develop or shift onto a new set of circuits that aren’t painful. There are many ways of stimulating these changes, and the process is called, “neuroplasticity.” It is similar to installing a new virtual computer on your desktop. With repetition, it is remarkable how quickly these changes happen. Since your brain will develop wherever you place your attention, you must move towards your vision instead of continually trying to fix yourself. As you embrace wellness, you’ll crowd out pain.

Third, you cannot move forward until you have let go of the past. This is difficult because when you are trapped by a chronic disease, you are legitimately angry. However, you are also stuck. There are ways to effectively process anger and there are tremendous benefits to learning these tools.

Fourth, The DOC Journey is simply a framework that organizes your thinking and presents tools in a way that you can apply them in a focused manner. The steps in healing are:

• Awareness – you have to understand a problem before you can solve it.
• Treating all aspects of pain simultaneously – it is similar to fighting a forest fire. Every treatment can contribute to a good outcome, but nothing will work in isolation.
• You take control of your care. Since chronic pain is complex and you are a unique individual, each person’s situation is incredibly complicated. You are the only person that can possibly solve it with guidance. If you are not in charge, nothing can happen.

Fifth, a core concept of The Journey is awareness. It includes awareness of:

• Your emotions
  • Suppressed emotions are especially problematic
• The impact of your actions on others and theirs on you
• The nature of chronic pain
• The principles behind the solutions to chronic disease
• Your specific diagnosis
• Your vision of what you want your life to look like

Finally, since your sense of well-being and health is dependent on the composition of your body’s physiological state, all of your efforts are intended to stimulate it directly or indirectly into a safety state. There are three areas of focus:

• Input – how you process your stresses
• The state of your nervous system – calm or hypervigilant
• Output – it is desirable to remain in balance or safety and minimize the amount of time you are in a threat state.

The desired safety state allows you to feel content and secure, have a slower metabolic rate (rate you burn fuel), less inflammation, and lower levels of stress hormones. Optimizing your body’s physiological state from threat to safety has a profound effect on your health and quality of life.

Recap

The solutions to solving and preventing chronic disease lie in understanding the principles behind them. Embedding these of concepts allows you to continually practice them. This is in contrast to randomly learning techniques to fix yourself. The process gives you control of regulating your body’s physiology from one of threat state to safety.

Questions and considerations

1. Consider that it is your whole body that responds to your immediate set of circumstances in order to optimize your chances of survival. Your nervous system is the processing center for sensory input and an integral part of the reaction. There is absolutely no separation of the mind and body and why even the use of the term, “Mind Body” is inaccurate.
2. Why would you take your powerful survival reaction personally? It is intended to feel so unpleasant so as to force you to act. It is what you possess and not who you are.
3. You’ll be taken on a journey that will allow you to depersonalize this flight or flight reaction. It is just a part of your daily life.
4. Take some time to review the above principles of solving chronic disease. They will eventually enter every aspect of your life and become automatic. As you spend a lesser amount of time in a threat state, you will be able to move forward into a new life and thrive.
5. You can’t fix chronic disease. You must let go and move into wellness.

References:

1. Torrance N, et al. Severe chronic pain is associated with increased 10-year mortality: a cohort record linkage study. Eur J Pain (2010);14:380-386.
2. Schubiner H and M Betzold. Unlearn Your Pain, 3^rdMind Body Publishing, Pleasant Ridge, MI, 2016.
3. Hashmi, JA et al. Shape shifting pain: Chronification of back pain shifts brain representation from nociceptive to emotional circuits. Brain (2013); 136: 2751 – 2768.

4. Trincker, Dietrich. 1965 lecture at the University of Kiel. German physiologist

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Reality

The first step in this process is for your brain to define reality. There is nothing inherent in any receptor that defines anything. A cat is a cat because your brain has unscrambled visual signals and has determined the nature of this animal. A cat’s meow is analyzed from the auditory receptors and the signals travel to a different area of the brain. Your nervous system then has to link these two inputs together to associate this sound as one that emanates from a cat. This complex sequence occurs for every aspect of your reality. Whatever you call “real” is only your individual interpretation of the world. Although there are close similarities, no one sees even one object exactly the same.

Next, all of your senses keep combining input to determine other properties of objects, such as hot, cold, smooth, red,  yellow, loud, bright, etc. Other people are a basic part of this identification process. Your infant has to first recognize you as a human before other layers are added.

Identity

At some point, a child recognizes that he or she is separate from others and then realizes that the closeness of the bond with mother/ father hopefully not only represents a haven of safety, but also the link to life itself. Any threat to this connection is unacceptable. Identification of self, relationship to others, social awareness, ideas, concepts and abstract thinking all will progressively follow with age.

It is only so if I say it’s so

The reason why I am presenting the obvious, is to make the point that nothing exists without your brain gathering data, unscrambling it, and determining what is. (1) It is based on your prior programming. Somewhere in the midst of all of this, babies have to learn to survive on their own, which means that one basic function is determining what is and isn’t safe. However, that can’t happen until some sense of separation and definition of the world has happened. A newborn can’t determine that a hot stove is dangerous until it knows what a stove is. He or she can only instinctively pull away from too much heat but can’t know enough yet to avoid it in the future.

This is how every creature stays alive, with many species being able to care for themselves much more quickly than humans. The essence of this skill is avoiding danger and gravitating towards rewards. What drives this action? One of the main factors is the state of your body’s chemical makeup. If the brain has determined something or someone is a threat, it will compel you to take action to solve the problem.

Compelled

One of the responsibilities of the central nervous system is to maintain the delicate balance of the body’s chemistry. There are numerous chemicals to monitor. When there is a threat, hormones will be secreted that increase your chances of survival. Some of the core stress response hormones are adrenaline, noradrenaline, endorphins, histamines and cortisol. I won’t list the effects of each of these, but the net result is an increased capacity to flee from danger. Much of this is modulated through the autonomic nervous system, which also has many direct effects such as increased heart rate, rapid breathing, dilation of certain blood vessels and constriction of others.

All of these allow you to leap into action, but what compels you to do so? It is a feeling of dread that we call anxiety. It is so deep and uncomfortable that you have no choice but to take action. Once the threat is gone and the body is back in balance (homeostasis), you can go on with your life. Anxiety describes the cumulative sensation of a threat. It is symptom, not a diagnosis, disease, or disorder. Therefore, it isn’t treatable by primarily addressing it as the problem. Once you understand it is only a warning mechanism, you can address the root causes that are unique to you.

Seeking rewards

Conversely, survival also depends on engaging in behaviors that allow you to flourish and procreate. It is enjoyable to eat, quench your thirst, inhale a breath of fresh air, take a nap, empty a full bowel or bladder, make love and spend time with close friends and family. When you are lying in the sun or holding your newborn baby, your body is full of reward chemicals such as oxytocin (love drug), dopamine (rewards), serotonin (mood elevator) and GABA chemicals (anti-anxiety). Your heart rate is slower and your muscles are loose. What a great chemical bath. It isn’t as critical to survival to be in this state, and we aren’t urgently compelled to act.  We aren’t avoiding an imminent threat. Many words encapsulate this scenario and I will choose, “relaxed.” Relaxed is a description of this state and also not a diagnosis, disorder or disease.

These shifts in your body’s balance occur by the millisecond. Disease does occur when this balance is disrupted by sustained levels of stress hormones. This data has been known for decades. (2)

“The Curse of Consciousness”

The universal problem of being human is what I call, “The Curse of Consciousness.”  Recent neuroscience research has shown that threats in the form of unpleasant thoughts or concepts are processed in a similar area of the brain as physical threats with the same chemical response. (3) The “curse” is that none of us can escape our thoughts, so we are subjected to an endless stress chemical assault on our body. This translates into more than 30 physical symptoms and many disease states. These include autoimmune disorders and early death. (4, 5) However, the worst symptom is relentless anxiety. In my personal experience and working with thousands of patients in pain, the mental pain, manifested by anxiety, is beyond words, intolerable. It is the reason why the only description I could come with for this state of being was, “The Abyss.” It is the essence of human suffering and the additional physical symptoms are the final insult. It is a universal phenomenon, varying only in intensity and styles of coping – some much better than others.

Since this unconscious survival mechanism has been estimated to be a million times more powerful than your conscious brain, it isn’t responsive to rational interventions to manage or control it. The solution lies in the fact that this is an unsolvable problem. Without anxiety that is unpleasant enough so as to compel you take action, you wouldn’t survive. Neither would you or the human species survive without the drive to seek physiological rewards.

Solution principles

The first step is to understand the nature of anxiety, and it is simply feedback indicating the levels of your stress hormones. View it as the fuel gauge in your car. It simply lets you that you are being threatened, whether it is real or perceived. It doesn’t matter. But, you do have to allow yourself to feel it before you can deal with it.

Second, if anxiety is the measure of your body’s survival hormones, then the only way to decrease it is to lower them. This can be accomplished in two ways with each category requiring different tools:

• Directly through relaxation techniques
• Indirectly by lowering the reactivity of your brain to dampen the survival response. This is accomplished by stimulating your brain to rewire so the response to a threat results in a lower chemical surge and is of shorter duration. The term for this is, “neuroplasticity.” Your brain changes every second with new cells, connections and myelin.

By not wasting energy trying to treat or solve your anxiety, you now have the energy to pursue a new path with a remarkable surge in energy, life forces and creativity.

DOC is a framework

How is this accomplished? Learning tools to calm and rewire your nervous system is the core of the DOC (Direct your Own Care) project. These are approaches have been known for centuries and have been buried under the weight of modern information overload and pace of life. The DOC process is a framework for you to understand the nature of pain, your relevant issues and you can figure out your own version of a solution. The clarity will allow you to connect to your own capacity to heal by developing skills to auto-regulate your body’s chemistry from anxiety to relaxed. Consider anxiety as the fuel needed to take quick action and relaxation and is what we want for our baseline and cruising.

Success in learning to adjust your body’s chemical makeup is based on awareness and openness to learning so change can occur. It is remarkably simple and consistent. Join me in living your life in a manner that you could not conceive was possible – even better than before you were crushed by pain.

Is “relaxed” a diagnosis? No!! Is “anxious” a diagnosis? No!!!! To read your body’s chemistry gauge, you first have to allow yourself to feel.

References:

1. Feldman Barrett, Lisa. How Emotions are Made. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. New York, New York, 2017.
2. Rahe R, et al. “Social stress and illness onset.” J Psychosomatic Research (1964); 8: 35.
3. Eisenberger N. “The neural bases of social pain: Evidence for shared representations with physical pain.” Psychosom Med (2012); 74: 126-135.
4. Torrance N, et al. Severe chronic pain is associated with increased 10-year mortality: a cohort record linkage study. Eur J Pain (2010);14:380-386.
5. Song, H, et al. Association of stress-related disorders with subsequent autoimmune disease. JAMA (2018); 319: 2388-2400.

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The post Anxiety is a Symptom – Not a Diagnosis appeared first on Back in Control.

There is an intense relationship between anxiety and anger. Understanding this interaction is perhaps one of the most important concepts that will have a major impact in calming down your nervous system.

• The are first of all, the same entity. Anxiety is the sensation generated by your autonomic nervous system’s response to a threat. Stress hormones are elevated and when a given situation doesn’t resolve (chronic pain), more of these chemicals are secreted in an effort to regain control. The result is anger, which is anxiety with a chemical kick.
• Anxiety and Anger are universal. Few human beings are able to rise above them because they are survival emotions.
• Anxiety represents a feeling of vulnerability and helplessness. The intention is to be so unpleasant that it compels us to take action to decrease it. So, we are hard-wired to avoid this emotion at all costs.
• Anger feels powerful. It is a fast, effective response that masks anxiety. It also gives you the extra boost to assist you in solving the problem that is causing your anxiety.

The Disconnect of Anger

But what happens to your thinking when you are angry? The blood flow to the frontal lobes of your brain is diminished and you are flooded with a barrage of angry, irrational thoughts. It is temporary insanity.

• Anger both masks the feeling of anxiety and turbocharges the negative circuits that produce it.

Give Up Your Anger?

Not only is it deadly for your quality of life, but the interaction between anger and anxiety makes treatment difficult. In essence, you are being asked to give up your anger so you can experience anxiety. Raw anxiety is an unpleasant feeling. It is this interaction that may be the root cause of why it is commonly thought that you cannot really be open for change until you “hit bottom.” In other words, the anxiety is so out of control that it can no longer be contained by either functional or dysfunctional means.

I often asked my patients that what is your day like when you are angry? Forget about your pain. It isn’t a great day. So regardless whether you are in pain or not, anger will compromise your capacity to enjoy your day. You are in Hell and you may be so used to being there that you might not even know it. Take a deep breath and think about this scenario for a while………

Video: Anger Fueled Anxiety – “The Highway to Hell.”

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