DISCOVERY
1. FINDING, UNCOVERING, UNEARTHING
2. REALIZING, RECOGNIZING, REVEALING
3. CREATING A NEW PERSPECTIVE AND WAY OF LIFE
Discovering a New Understanding of anxiety & depression
If you're reading this, you're most likely someone has been diagnosed with anxiety and/or depression, love someone who has been, curious about the possibility, or simply interested in the topic. Merging clinical experience with scientific research and principles of evolution, the following is a new perspective on what happens to us to become anxious, depressed, or both.
Everybody gets down, nervous, upset, and cranky. These are normal parts of life, and it's our brain's way of telling us things aren't good, and things need to change. It's our nervous system telling us we don't like the situation, we fear the situation, or we are stressed by the situation. And sometimes, if life has been too difficult for too long, we can experience feelings of anxiety and depression.
There are two kinds of anxiety and depression, or generalized and situational. Generalized anxiety is feeling anxious all the time, something we call Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Generalized depression is feeling depressed all the time, something we call Major Depressive Disorder. These are similar but different experiences to situational anxiety or depression, or situationally feeling anxious, or situationally feeling depressed, but more continuous and challenging to our daily lives.
Merging clinical experience with scientific research and principles of evolution, it is clear that these are natural reactions to our environment. As you will see in the videos below, both generalized anxiety and generalized depression occur when we have been living in constant fear. Many parts of the brain and the body are activated when living in fear, including the hormone cortisol, which can change some of the structures of our brain. When the amygdala gets bigger, there’s more fear or anxiety all the time. And when the hippocampus gets smaller, there’s less feeling and emotion all the time, which we call depression. The near constant infusion of cortisol into the brain from constant fear causes both of these to occur. The episodes below will explore this with more detailed explanations.
All of this is based on the idea, which you will also see in the videos, that we have emotions or feelings that fall into four broad categories. These categories of emotions/feelings are Joy, Fear, Anger, and Sadness. In each of those four categories, we have many feelings with many words to describe them. Most importantly to this discussion, our fear feelings are the basis for anxiety difficulties, both generalized and situational, and our sadness feelings are responsible for situational depression, but not generalized depression. Again, the videos below will provide more of an explanation.
treatment of these emotional challenges
Treatment, or addressing the emotional challenges and diagnoses of anxiety and depression, comes in three forms, or three areas: relationships, change, and (maybe) serotonin.
Relationships reflects the caring relationships in our lives, the quality and quantity of those, the mutuality of those experiences, and the support they give us. We all need to be liked, loved, and supported, an experience given to us by evolution, and that becomes even more important to addressing anxiety and depression.
Change means that when anxious and/or depressed, it’s our nervous systems way of saying that change needs to happen. Events, situations, relationships, and beliefs need to change to improve how we feel and experience things. Changes like more mutually caring relationships, removing toxic stress, and changing negative beliefs all result in the improvements we need.
Serotonin may be indicated (something you will determine with your medical provider) if you’re living with generalized anxiety or generalized depression. Serotonin medication has been proven by both clinical experience and scientific research to change parts of the brain like the amygdala and hippocampus back to their normal size, thereby helping a person feel freed from continuously high anxiety and/or lifted from a vacant and empty depression. It’s impossible to underestimate how important that is.
Taken together, these three treatments/interventions can and really do change lives, something that a therapist and medical provider can help you accomplish. Please watch the videos below to understand these issues as a part of making positive and lasting change.
START YOUR TREATMENT, START TO FEEL BETTER
It's important that we understand these emotional challenges are reactions to toxic stress and not because of something inherently wrong with ourselves, our personalities, or our character.
If you do feel a lot of anxiety and depression, especially generalized anxiety or generalized depression, this discovery explains why you feel that way, and there is nothing wrong with you. It's just that you have experienced too much stress for a long period of time, and your nervous system is telling you that.
Anxiety and depression are more common than you think, most likely affecting a majority of the world’s population at one point or another. And treatment is remarkably simple and powerful: relationships, change, and (maybe) serotonin.
Please join me at discovery / solutions to begin this discovery, and/or watch the video series below, and start to feel better.