The Dr. Hyman Show - Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Functional Medicine Deep Dive: Anxiety

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

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Hey podcast community, Dr. Mark here. I'm so excited to offer you a seven-day free trial of my revolutionary new platform called Dr. Hyman Plus. For seven days you get special access to all the private content included in Dr. Hyman Plus entirely free. It's so easy to sign up. Just go to Apple Podcast on your phone and click try free button on the Doctors Pharmacy podcast. You'll get exclusive access to ad-free Doctors Pharmacy podcast episodes and functional medicine deep dives where a practitioner dives into topics like heart health, muscle health, insulin resistance, and more to help you understand the root cause of specific ailments and walk you through the steps to improve your health today. You'll also get access to all my Ask Mark Anything Q&As where

I answer the community's biggest health and wellness questions. Because I'm so sure you're going to love this platform, I am offering you free access to all of this content for seven days and a teaser of my brand new Functional Medicine deep dive episode, diving deep into one of the most important topics in health. Head on over to the Doctors Pharmacy podcast on Apple podcast and sign up for your free trial right now. Okay, here we go. So let's start talking about some of those root causes. And we're gonna go through a lot of information and a lot of slides.

But I want you to understand we're going to talk about what the root causes are. And then after we cover all the root causes, we're going to talk about the solutions for it. So the things you can start doing today, and honestly, all the things I implemented, I personalized for myself, or I personalized for for my clients or my students or my patients so that they can experience that relief of an anxiety-free life. So there are mind, body, and spirit root causes. I organized it this way so we can kind of digest it a little better and understand it

because there's a lot of different factors that could be the root cause of your anxiety. We're just going to kind of briefly touch on the mind and the spirit side because those are kind of in different realms. They're in psychology or more spiritual or esoteric medicine and the body stuff is what we're going to focus on because this is really where functional medicine is a game changer. It can find out things and offer solutions that are life-changing when it comes to anxiety. So with the mind root causes of anxiety, we're looking at things that are really psychologically based. So psychological root causes, this could be things having to do with our thoughts or feelings our mental ideas our emotions our our conscious self

with the body these are more physiological things so you know anything to do with our biochemistry or our physical body systems our musculoskeletal system our nervous system so the chemicals the hormones the muscles the joints the brain the immune. We're going to go really deep into that today. That's what we're going to focus on. And then there's the spirit root causes. So this is more how I define it, like social or spiritual connections that we have. So stuff outside of our self, our contained self. This could be our relationships, our interaction with others like people or animals, even nature, the world, everything around us, the universe, the cosmos, whatever it is, our connection with that. And a lot of this also falls into our unconscious thoughts and ideas or our belief systems. And that

can actually be the thing that's triggering the root cause of anxiety persisting in your life. So, you know, let's just briefly look at the mind causes. We're just going to look at a big list of different things that you might identify with. And we'll talk about when we get to the solution, some of the things you can do to resolve these, but just stress itself, chronic stress. If you have stress every day in your life, there's going to be times where you're not going to be able to recover from it and it can build and build into an experience of anxiety and also same with fear if there's something that is really fearful to you whether it's an imagined fear it's actually a thing that is triggering you every day to be afraid you're going to go into a protective state unhealthy boundaries this, you know,

a big thing that you, for sensitive people that we talk about, because they often feel a lot of what other people are feeling. They pick up on other people's needs and thoughts and emotions. And so they don't necessarily have the boundary of like, this is me and my experience. And they're just picking up on everybody's stuff so they can get overwhelmed or they can start feeling someone else's anxiety. So boundaries are really important as well. But also boundaries to be like, you know, I'm setting a boundary. I'm going to bed at a certain time. And sometimes if we cross that line and we don't do the things that we know we need to feel good, those are where we cross boundaries and sometimes betray ourselves that can lead to anxiety. There's also kind of this

mindset of living from fear or avoidance. So it's kind of either or, right? Like you can either, the way you do one thing is the way you do everything. And if you're living from a place of fear or avoidance, like you're trying to avoid pain or problems or disease, you're constantly looking for dangers. So that's going to put you in a state that heightens stress response and heightens a lot of these physiological factors of stress and anxiety. Whereas kind of the opposite of that is living from a place of abundance rather than scarcity and fear and, you know, trying to avoid pain or suffering, looking for optimization, living from a place of abundance and experience and vitality. Those are just mindset type things that happen psychologically for us that it might not be something we're even aware of, but it's how we go about our day and can build up and have an experience of anxiety. People who suffer from chronic illness or pain disorders, which I highly identify with

just having chronic pain and chronic illness, the majority of my life, it's stressful and you can get triggered very easily. And you can start to say one little thing, you know, might's stressful and you can get triggered very easily. And you can start to say one little thing, you know, might go wrong and we spiral and we start to have anxiety around worst case scenario, those types of things. And that can kind of lead into like a trauma response. So people who get stuck in fight or flight, maybe they've had trauma, you know, really obvious trauma, big T trauma or little t trauma. There's, you know, a lot to talk about with trauma. That's a whole nother deep dive in and of itself. But trauma is a really big

factor that needs to be addressed if it's there for somebody who's experiencing anxiety, flooding or overwhelm, screen time, social media, there's like actually a lot of research showing that, you know, there's either correlation or an association with especially these teenagers, all these young adolescents who have such a high prevalence of anxiety and the time that they spend on social media. But there's also these aspects of comparison, right? We're comparing to someone's highlight reel, right? The good things in their life. And we, when we start compare, and that can create a sense of I'm not doing enough, or just a sense of anxiety for ourselves. It can also come from learned behaviors. This could be parenting styles or attachment styles

that we grew up with, childhood experiences. So maybe if we experienced adverse childhood experiences or isolation or specific experiences at school. I know school's pretty anxiety inducing for a lot of people that deadlines, the exams, the constantly being evaluated and told you're good enough or not good enough. That can really ingrain this inherent sense of anxiety for a lot of people and particularly these adolescents that are going through it right now. Not having enough downtime or rest and then chronic social, financial or relationship stress as well. These are things that if they're just putting weight on us every day and we're dealing with it constantly, it's going to mount to a place of anxiety. And, you know, things like negative self-image are also these psychological factors that really increase the likelihood or make it a lot harder for people to

overcome anxiety in their life. So this is just a big summary of some of those mind psychological factors. So next we're going to dive into the body factors, which is where we're going to spend most of the time today. And I'm going to try to go through these slides. There's a lot of slides, but I want to get through these things because if you haven't considered all of these body factors and explored functional medicine for your anxiety, you're missing a huge piece of the puzzle that could actually be the thing that helps you find resolution and resolve that anxiety for yourself. So as a big picture in the body, physiological root causes, we're going to look in these big categories of inflammation, gut dysfunction, neurological causes, chemical and

hormonal, and then environmental causes of anxiety so inflammation is this you know huge in the functional medicine world i know if you're in this community you've heard a lot about inflammation chronic inflammation how it's kind of the precursor or the cause of a lot of diseases that we're dealing with these days but you know inflammation in and of itself is not bad. We it's great. We need inflammation. It's a very healthy protective process in our body. And, um, you know, if there's a stimulus, whether it's a trauma or an infection or whatever it is, there's healthy inflammation that has an immune response and then it resolves and we kind of go back to normal function.

But when we have excessive inflammation we're sort of it's again we're setting off these alarms through our immune system and it's overactive it can get fatigued and all kinds of things can get out of whack and there's just an excessive stress alarm immune response to tissue so it doesn't really resolve and it kind of is like these little fires that keep burning and burning and turn into a wildfire so chronic inflammation is one of the major factors in terms of why a lot of people these days are experiencing anxiety because when you're inflamed your brain is also on fire there's no separation separation here. So, you know, it's not like just because it goes up to your neck that those areas are not getting those inflammatory signals. And when we have that type of inflammation, we have tissue destruction. We have a lot of

stress response within the body. And when areas of our brain are on fire, they can't perform their processes as well they're not clearing out toxins and it's causing that experience of anxiety and often depression which goes hand in hand or a lot of these mental illnesses or disorders that are becoming so common and prevalent in our society as inflammation is also becoming a lot more of a rampant problem. So stress in and of itself can cause inflammation. So just having stress on a day-to-day basis from work, not having enough downtime, just having a stressful life will cause inflammation. Autoimmunity, incredibly, I don't know if it's under-recognized, but I don't think a lot of conventional doctors will look at this approach. It's something that I've really seen in my niche or a lot of my clients. I'm always screening to see if there is

an autoimmune process going on when somebody is experiencing anxiety or depression, because you can have neuro autoimmunity, meaning, you know, that, that autoimmune process happening to your neurological tissue. And that in and of itself right there needs to be addressed with a holistic autoimmune approach in functional medicine and mind body medicine. You can have gut autoimmunity, you can have endocrine autoimmunity, like the thyroid stuff, which really can, that in and of itself can be the root cause of why you experience anxiety. We talked about the acute and the chronic infections, but chronic, you know, is always talked about the, you know, the slow burn, the stuff that really gets to our health and really causes a lot of decline in health. But acute inflammation can cause the same thing too. You

can have a cold or allergies or like a flare up of histamine, and that can set your brain on fire too, especially if you've had low grade inflammation. So, um, you know, that's a really common thing too. You might hear I'm a little bit stuffy right now. I'm just getting over a six week flu that I had at the beginning of this year. Um, and I will tell you that I have been pretty anxiety-free, depression-free for years, but this flu took me out and in the worst part of it, when I was feverish and I was really dealing with a lot of inflammation in my body, instantaneously, my severe anxiety and severe depression returned. And I really had to like ground myself and grapple with that and get support from my loved ones and my partner and my family to not spiral and it as soon as the flu started to clear and that you know the inflammation from the infection the flu the viral thing that i was going through went away so did the anxiety and

depression i got back to my normal lifestyle anti-inflammatory habits and it was gone. So it's a big factor there. Chemical exposures can cause inflammation and then allergies, sensitivities to food, environment, those types of things. So inflammation is major. You can run tests on inflammation. You want to look at homocysteine, ESR, highly sensitive CRP. These types of markers will help us see the inflammatory process in our body. And for some people too, like ferritin, really high levels of ferritin are an indication that there's an inflammatory issue going on in their body. Well, I hope you enjoyed that teaser of exclusive content that you get every single month with Dr. Hyman Plus. If you want to listen to the full episode and get access to ad-free podcast episodes, plus Ask Mark Anything episodes,

plus monthly functional deep dive episodes, I guess that's why we call it Dr. Hyman Plus, then head on over to The Doctor's Pharmacy on Apple Podcasts and sign up for your seven-day free trial. Hi, everyone. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.