Transcription
Today, we're going to talk a little bit about anxiety. And by the end of the lecture, I'd love to equip you with some basic understanding of anxiety, starting with what is anxiety, how does it form, how does it manifest in the present, and how to approach it.
The truth of the matter is that anxiety is getting worse at an alarming rate, and this video is for three kinds of people. The first is, it's for people who may have gotten treatment for anxiety but are looking to better understand the problem or kind of improve what they can do about it. The second thing is that this is a video for people who may have tried anxiety treatment but found that it didn't really work for them very well, and we're going to dive into a little bit about why that could be. And the third thing is, this is a video for people who just want to understand anxiety, who may not need to engage in treatment, aren't really interested in it, maybe it's not that severe, and you just want to understand a little bit about how this stuff works within you.
Hey there, thanks for watching, and I'm glad these videos have been helpful. A lot of times, I'll read the comments and see people asking, "Well, what do I actually do about it?" Which is a great question. And unfortunately, the resources out there haven't been that great, which is precisely why I started HG in the first place. HG coaches are trained on a curriculum that integrates my understanding of what motivates us, what paralyzes us, and most importantly, what leads to lasting behavioral change. If you're ready to take the next step, HG coaches can help you build the life that you want. They've helped people build careers, help people find relationships, build networks of friends, and even do things like discover their passions or pursue hobbies. So, if this sounds like something that you'd be interested in, check out the link in the description below.
So, let's start by understanding a little bit about what we know already and also what we've learned recently. So, the biggest problem that I see today with anxiety is that we view it as a mental condition. And there's kind of like a good reason for this, right? So, if we look at our initial explorations of anxiety in the West, they were done by people like psychoanalysts. So, people like Freud and Jung would talk to other people and understood anxiety as a process of the mind. And they're not wrong, right? So, based on a lot of the discoveries they made, and some of those we'll share with you all today, really solid stuff, we've developed treatment protocols like cognitive behavioral therapy or psychodynamic therapy that actually statistically improve people's experience of anxiety. So, that's great. It's like, kind of a mental thing.
The challenge, though, is that a lot of recent research that we've discovered shows that anxiety is not localized to the mind. And this sort of like makes sense if you stop and think about it. We as human beings are like whole organisms, right? And our brain exists within our body. And even the functions of our mind can be influenced by what's going on in our brain, and even be influenced by what's going on in our body. So, I think one of the reasons that we're seeing anxiety get worse, despite the fact that we're spending more money on research, despite the fact that we are training a bunch of therapists, despite the fact that we're like investing a lot in brain science and all this kind of stuff, like, why is anxiety getting worse? It's because the professionals that usually deal with anxiety are specialized in the mind, right? So, if you look at a therapist or psychologist, chances are they're not a medical doctor, but they're someone who's focused entirely on the mind. Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not, it's not an indictment to therapists. And let's remember that they have effective methods, right? We have effective methods. But their education is lacking in certain major areas that we've actually discovered now contribute to anxiety, like the heart and autonomic nervous system, and even stuff like brain-gut stuff and gut microbiome. So, we're going to be diving into that.
So, this is why I think, even we've had a lot of people in our community who have gone to see therapists, and this is what's kind of frustrating, right? Is if someone complains about anxiety on the internet, people say, "Go see a therapist." And that is a great move. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for it. You should absolutely do it if you've never done it before. But also, that some people, that doesn't seem to help some people, or doesn't help them enough. And so that's why we're going to be talking about sort of a start-to-finish perspective on anxiety.
So, let's start by understanding what anxiety is. So, anxiety is essentially a heightened baseline of worry around projected threats. So, generally speaking, our mind and our body has a whole system that is designed to respond to threats, okay? And this is where, like, our adrenaline is going to increase, our heart rate is going to increase, we're going to change, we're going to make changes to our gut. So, there's all kinds of changes that our body and brain and mind are going to make any time we're faced with a stressor. So, the real challenge with anxiety is that what is a true stress, what is an actual stress, and what is a perceived stress is messed up. So, whereas 99 people may think this is something that you don't need to worry about, your brain is telling you, "Hey, this is a real threat."
So, the first thing to understand about anxiety is, it is a heightened awareness or a heightened emphasis on potential threats. And so, for a normal person, what they may experience is, they're not worried about it because the possibility of it happening is like pretty low. So, I don't need to stress out about stuff that like may not happen, right? If you struggle with anxiety, you're going to think that that's like absolutely insane. You have to think about everything that may not happen because that is how you avoid those negative situations and protect yourself. So, if that's something you resonate with, that is the crux of anxiety. There are real threats that our body responds to, brain responds to, mind responds to, and then there are these perceived threats. And the problem is that people with anxiety move the perceived threats into the real threat column. And so, everything feels like a real danger, and our body and our brain and our mind respond accordingly, and they tell us to freak out.
So, let's understand how that calibration gets messed up. Most people with anxiety have some kind of negative experience in childhood that teaches them to be worried. So, anxiety is a problem in adulthood or maybe adolescence, but at its core, it's actually a survival strategy or an adaptation. So, let's kind of put ourselves in the shoes of a five-year-old or a six-year-old, right? So, this is a five-year-old or six-year-old that maybe has an alcoholic parent. So, how does the five-year-old survive in this situation? They have to think about the parent a lot, right? Because what are your tools as a five-year-old? Can you create physical space? Are you financially independent? Can you adjust your diet? Can you create sort of like boundaries around how you manage your emotions? Can you use a meditation app to manage your emotions? Can you effectively communicate using words and theory of mind and empathy to calm people down? Of course not. You can't do any of that. All you can do is think, "How can I survive?"
So, when your parent comes home and they're drunk, what are all the things that you can think through? All the possibilities of how you're going to deal with if they're feeling like this, if they're feeling like this, if they're feeling like this. "I gotta clean up my room before they come home so they don't get pissed off, right?" So, you start to think and engage in behaviors to try to adapt to the circumstance. And so, what you learn as a five-year-old, and remember, this is like the part of our, the time where our brain is like learning the fundamentals of how the world works. So, we're learning things like, "How does gravity work? Right? So, how strong is gravity? How are relationships formed? How do I deal with challenges?" And what anxious kids discover is that the way that I deal with challenges is, I think about it a lot, and I will think about it so I can figure out how to best adapt to it. Because fundamentally, I cannot change the outward problem. I just have to think my way to success. This is the crux of how anxiety is born.
These kids then carry that into adulthood. So, how do I approach problems? Do I approach problems through communication? Do I approach problems through boundary setting? No. If I have a problem, I am going to think through it until I figure out what is the best way to solve it. Because that's the only thing that works. And remember that these five-year-olds, this works for them, right? This is why anxiety is so hard to kick, is because when you're five, you have no power. But what goes on in your head, all you, the only option you've got is to think through a thousand scenarios and think about how you're going to handle each one. And then when your mom or dad comes home, that's when you activate some plan. But fundamentally, you are not in control. And so, you have to plan for contingencies. And this is what happens in the mind of someone who's anxious.
So, now let's bring that person to adulthood. What's the strategy that your brain learned when you were learning how to walk and when you were learning how to talk? What else did you learn? You learned that if there is a problem out there, fundamentally, I can't fix the problem. So, what I have to do is deal with it, right? And the more that I think about it, the more effective my strategies will be. And this is where people who are anxious will oftentimes invest a ton of energy for even a tiny amount of control or a tiny amount of improvement. It's fundamentally not a good trade, but it's the only trade that their brain learned how to make.
So, now you're thinking about all these scenarios, and you even recognize as an anxious person that thinking about this doesn't help. And yet, you do it anyway. Why is that? It's because that's what your brain learned how to do. When your brain developed this strategy, when it learned how to play the game, it had the power and abilities of a five-year-old. And so that's the only strategy it knows how to do. And this is what's so damn confusing about anxiety, not only for the person who's experienced anxiety, anxiety for, for the people around you. They're like, "Why don't you just dot dot dot? Why don't you just talk to your boss? Why don't you just email your professor and ask him for an extension?" It's so confusing, right? And you may be beating yourself up because all you're doing is thinking about it instead of actually doing anything about it. And you're incredibly frustrated by yourself. Other people are frustrated with you, and they make it seem so easy. And then you feel terrible about yourself because you're like, "Why can't I do this?" It's a really good question. It's because your brain learned that doing stuff doesn't work. Your brain learned one survival mechanism, which is, "Think it through and adapt to whatever crap comes your way."
And this also can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because as you do less about it, right? If you don't email your professor, if you don't have a conversation with your boss, problems will arise. And as problems arise, your worst fears become true. But now, since you've been anxiously thinking about it, you're kind of okay at doing damage control. And then what is the conclusion that your mind comes to? Your mind is like, "Thank God we spent all of that time thinking through every single permutation and combination, because when our professor did email us and say, 'Hey, where's your paper? What's wrong? Why haven't I received it yet?' You had everything planned." And planning leads to survival.
So, this is the way that the anxious brain works. It reaches a new level of homeostasis, which is that it starts to see greater threats and tries to approach problems purely mentally. And this is explains kind of the experience of people with anxiety, which is why you can sit in bed and do nothing to solve your problems and anxiously be thinking about it over and over and over and over again. So, that's things from a mental perspective, and we'll get into a little bit more about how to deal with that. And therapists can absolutely help with that, okay? But there are a couple of other things that I think we need to explore.
The first is that our cardiovascular and autonomic nervous system. So, this is the system that governs things like adrenaline, relaxation, you know, danger signals. This system is very, very active when it comes to anxiety. And so, a big part of what we do, especially as medical doctors, is we'll try to medicate anxiety. Generally speaking, most of our medications have been neurologic in nature, so they affect the brain. But we're starting to see a lot of really interesting research around non-anxiety medications for anxiety, things that affect your heart rate, things that affect your immune system can also be beneficial for people with anxiety.
So, let's understand how this works. This is really cool. Our heart adapts to changes, okay? So, if you are walking down the street and you get jumped by a pack of wolves, your heart rate will increase. Our body responds to that change. It alters the way that it reacts to a particular environment. So, our heart rate goes up, okay? When we're in a relaxed situation, our heart rate goes down. Our body is able to adapt to particular stresses. In people who are anxious, that adaptation ability is weakened. So, what we sort of see is that things are always on kind of high alert. So, we see less variation in the body's ability to adapt to a stressor because we're already operating at high levels of stress at baseline. And why are we operating at high levels of stress at baseline? That's because we learned as a five-year-old that the world is a dangerous place, and we can't count on other people. We have to be on high alert all the time. Hypervigilance is a survival strategy, and that gets baked into our neurons, not just neurons in the brain, but neurons all over the body. Our body's ability to adjust its heart rate in response to stress is blunted in people with anxiety.
So, we also see this in cases of things like PTSD. So, if you look at the heart's ability to modulate its activity after you get diagnosed with PTSD, your ability to modulate activity goes down. You are always on high alert. There's other really interesting things that people have been able to discover. So, some people, some researchers have also been able to predict which emotion you are feeling by looking at your heart rhythm. They can predict with 75% accuracy the way that your heartbeat determines your emotion. They figured this out, okay? 75% accuracy. We're not 100% of the way there yet, but we're pretty good at that.
So, this is where we start to see a whole other realm of consideration about anxiety, which is that when you're physiologically active, it's going to change the way that you think. Because remember, our body and brain are moving in concert. It's not like the mind is completely disconnected from the heart. Like, those two things work together. So, we know, for example, that adrenaline causes perceived threats to become and feel more real. It causes a focusing of the mind on the particular threat. So, what, what do we see in anxiety clinically? We see distractibility. It's not distractibility. You're not distracted. You can't focus on what you want to focus on because your mind is hell-bent on focusing on anxiety. It forces you to focus on the, the threat. And this is physiologically mediated. So, if we can control our heart rate, and if we can control our autonomic nervous system, we will reduce our anxiety.
The third angle that a lot of people are not really familiar with, especially when it comes to therapists, and this isn't an indictment on them, it's just they're not trained in that, right? Because we're just learning this stuff, is gut health. So, this is super wild, but the bacteria in our gut heavily influence our anxiety level. So, there are a lot of different mechanisms at play here. The first is that people with irritable bowel syndrome also have some degree of depression and anxiety. We also see cases like inflammatory bowel disease, which is when you get an autoimmune inflammation of your intestines. When people have autoimmune inflammation of their intestines, they also experience worsening depression and anxiety. So, we've also discovered that depression and anxiety are, to a certain degree, inflammatory conditions. Since they're inflammatory conditions, this is wild. If I take a patient with IBD, inflammatory bowel disease, and I give them an immunomodulatory agent, I literally like, kind of shut off or suppress their immune system, their anxiety improves. You see clinically significant, scientifically valid results of anxiety reduction when I modulate someone's immune system.
What is going on there? Let's understand, okay? So, we have guts, we have our gut bacteria, okay? Got our intestines and stuff. And in our intestines, we have a lot of bacteria that live there and hang out there. By the way, you have 10 times as many bacterial cells in your body as you have human cells, okay? That's wild. So, you actually, the number of cells in your body is like nine to one, ten to one, bacteria to human cells. So, you've got a ton of bacteria in there. Now, let's understand what are these bacteria doing? So, we have a symbiotic relationship with those bacteria. So, over a million years, 10 million years, whatever, we've grown up as human beings, and we have all this bacteria that live in our gut. And the bacteria does stuff for us. So, bacteria will do things like break down food. That's why it lives in our gut. They'll do things like consume particular nutrients, and they will also produce particular nutrients. Because we have a nice relationship with our bacteria, right? They're going to live in the gut, and they're going to farm nutrients for us, and we are going to provide them with some degree of protection and whatnot. There's some bacteria which are healthy bacteria, which do not activate our immune system, because our immune system is learned, "Hey, these are our allies. We should not mess with them." Right? They're helping us.
So, now, what has changed the most in our society over the last hundred years? Diet. Diet has transformed completely. Twinkies did not exist a hundred years ago, right? You didn't get all those different kinds of food. We didn't have frozen food or anything like that. We just ate what was fresh. We ate what was around. We had a very limited kind of food. So, then what happens is, once we start eating different food, what happens to our gut bacteria? So, as we make dietary changes, like, let's say I eat a piece of broccoli. So, broccoli can be broken down and consumed by certain kinds of bacteria, and those are the commensurate bacteria. Those are the bacteria that help us out. They break down the broccoli because human beings have been eating broccoli for a while, right? We've been eating like green leafy stuff and foraging and whatnot, potatoes and things like that, a little bit of meat, whatever. And so, we will grow the bacteria depending on what we feed them.
So, now, as we eat more processed foods, we are selecting for the bacteria that can eat processed foods. And so, have those bacteria been in our guts for a million years? Absolutely not. These are new bacteria. They're foreign bacteria. They're the "Twinkie-eating" bacteria. So, as we develop these "Twinkie-eating" bacteria in our guts, they cause inflammation. Because this is our body's like, "Hey, like, we've never seen this bacteria before. This guy doesn't belong here. Let's attack it." So, as we increase the inflammation in the gut, that inflammation travels all the way to the brain, right? Because when we have an infection, if I have like a cold, let's say, and even the cold is localized to my nose, I feel the inflammation all over my body. The fever. If I've got like the flu or something like that, it's going to be all over our body. So, our body will respond in a complete way, in a total way, in a holistic way, to even inflammation within the gut.
There's also now evidence that certain kinds of bacteria have been linked to Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, as well as anxiety. And we'll get to that in a second. So, gut bacteria become really important. Next thing to understand, gut bacteria will produce things and consume things that we put into our body. So, what does this mean? So, we know that as psychiatrists, we will prescribe serotonergic medications to help people with anxiety. We will increase serotonin signal in the brain with medication. So, what about gut bacteria? So, this is really fascinating. There are some kinds of gut bacteria that will gobble up the serotonin precursors. So, there are certain neurotransmitters, there are certain building blocks, that's where they come from, right? That come travel from our gut to our brain, and then we turn those building blocks into things like neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, etc. There are some bacteria that will gobble those up. So, if they're gobbling it up, there is not enough building blocks going to the brain to make serotonin or whatever else.
There are other bacteria that not only don't gobble it up, but will produce excess and share it with us. This is a trading situation where we give you food in a safe place to stay, and you are going to produce neurotransmitter precursors for us, building blocks. You're going to send them to the brain, and we're going to turn them into neurotransmitters. So, as a clinician, when I work with patients with anxiety, the ones that are able to adhere to an anti-anxiety diet are the ones that I can bring off of medication way more easily. I'll start someone on an anti-anxiety medication like an SSRI. If they adhere to good diet for about a year, and I pull them off the SSRI, they do fine. It's the ones that aren't able to adhere to the diet that have more problems on average.
So, what is our gut bacteria doing for us? Three things: One is, the good bacteria is producing neurotransmitters for us, basically, and it's not causing inflammation. And the ones that are bad for us are consuming the building blocks that we need, and furthermore, are causing inflammation. And remember that what is inflammation going to do to your heart? It's going to elevate your heart rate. As inflammation elevates your heart rate, that is going to send signals to your brain to make you more anxious. Wild, right? And this is the shortcoming is that we don't understand this stuff in clinical practice. We haven't really implemented it yet.
So, just to give you all an example, there is one bacteria that I, I kid you not, is called *Ruminococcus*. I have no idea how where that name came from. I looked for it. It is literally called *Ruminococcus*. Rumination. And when *Ruminococcus* levels are low in the gut bacteria, anxiety is high. The severity of anxiety increases. More people, if you have low *Ruminococcus* levels, chances are you will have anxiety, right? It's wild. There are four or five other bacteria that are very focused on anxiety, okay, or related to anxiety.
The last thing that we're going to talk about, maybe second to last, is the mind. So, when it comes to the mind, there's a lot that you can do here. There's also where seeing a therapist is a really good idea. But let's understand what the approach in therapy is, okay? Especially for those of you all that feel like, "Okay, my anxiety isn't that bad that I need to see a therapist, but I still want to get control of it." This is important to understand.
So, the first thing that you've got to do is understand the wiring of your brain in terms of what is a threat. So, go back, and this is why a lot of therapy focuses on childhood. What are the lessons that you learned in childhood? So, in the Vedic model, like this is the model that our coaches use when they're sort of trying to promote wellness, we'll sort of focus on the formation of something called a samskara. So, a samskara is like a ball of energy that shapes the way a ball of emotional energy that shapes the way that you perceive the world, okay? So, when we have a samskara, it like it triggers this activity in our brain that causes us to perceive things as threats. But that is all based on this ball of emotional energy. So, if you go back and you actually pay attention to your experiences in childhood, you will find that even thinking about them will cause tears to come up, will evoke fear, and will evoke panic. That means that that emotion is sitting there in your brain, in your mind, and is shaping the way that you see the world.
So, you have to go back and ask yourself, "Okay, I am, let's say you're anxious about a particular thing. I'm worried that people will abandon me. Let's say, where did you learn to be afraid that people will abandon you?" Chances are, it's because you had some kind of traumatic experience in childhood where someone abandoned you. And so, then your brain learned, "Hey, we can't trust people." And so, you carry that learning with you forward to the present day. The problem is, it helped you survive back then. Now it makes your life hard today. So, you have to go back and digest that emotional energy.
The second thing that you can do is understand the effect of the anxiety in the present. And now we have to understand something really important about anxiety. When someone is faced with anxiety, as we experience more anxiety, what people with anxiety do is this: Anxiety is caused by a situation, right? Other people may not believe that it's real, but that's neither here nor there. And so, what do you do as someone who's anxious? You try to control the situation, because if you control the situation, your anxiety will come down. "Anyway, I'm afraid someone is going to break up with me. They could break up with me. This is a real situation. My anxiety is high. How do I fix this? I'm going to get them to promise never to break up with me." I'm going to engage in behaviors to bring down, to control the situation, because if I can control the situation, then the anxiety will come with it. You see these two things are tied. And so, what do people with anxiety do? They try to control the world around them.
Controlling the world around you is difficult, arguably impossible. And if you can't control your partner, or your boss, or your professor, or your friends, or your parents, what do you do? You keep trying in your head over and over and over again. And why do you never solve your problems? You never solve the problems because it's someone else. You can't control another human being. Then why don't you quit? Why do you keep trying to solve the problem? Because that is the survival mechanism that you learned, right? That is anxiety in a nutshell. So, we try to control the circumstances around us, we try to control other people to bring our anxiety down. That's a losing formula, but that's what we do.
So, what else can you do? There are two or three things to understand here. One is that we can disconnect this safe situation, low anxiety, dangerous situation, high anxiety. We can control this disconnect. We can actually be like this, where our anxiety can be high in the situation to be safe, or the situation you can feel unsafe, and we don't actually have to control it to tolerate our own anxiety. We can learn how to tolerate anxiety, because this is what people with anxiety don't learn how to do, right? Because what they learn is a survival mechanism. Is as a five-year-old, you can't teach yourself to tolerate anxiety. You just have to deal with it.
So, what you can practically do is learn how to tolerate some of these anxieties. So, this is where, if you look at like evidence-based treatment for phobias, for example, what therapists will do is exposure therapy. So, we're going to put you in a situation that activates your anxiety, but we're not going to let you control the situation. You're just going to wait until your body returns to homeostasis, which it will do. Why doesn't that happen in people with anxiety? Because we spend so much time trying to control the situation, escape from the situation, that we never develop the ability for tolerance, right? If a social situation makes me anxious, and I decide to avoid it, what happens to my ability to tolerate negative emotion? It goes down, because I'm controlling the situation. And since the situation is controlled, my anxiety is controlled. I never learned tolerance.
So, this is where I would say, sit with it and understand exactly what you are sitting with. It's hard to just sit with it, but understand this is what you should tell yourself in this moment: "My mind is terrified of this. This feels 100% real. Notice your physical sensations. Right? This is my body trying to protect me from this, and this is a reaction that my body learned." If you've done some samskara-oriented work, therapy, you can even go back and say, "This is how my body learned to survive here." And tolerate it for as long as you can, right? Start low. Okay, I'm going to go into the social situation for five minutes, and I'm not going to pull out my phone for five minutes. And then afterward, you can escape into your phone, go for it, right? So, start to learn how to tolerate that negative emotion. As you learn to tolerate the negative emotion, the negative emotion will start to come down. As the negative emotion starts to come down, you will be able to engage with things around you.
The last thing to consider, kind of related to this, is watch out for the tie between your anxiety and your behavior. So, when we are anxious, especially if we have, if we have an unhealthy relationship with anxiety, we are going to use behavior to control our anxiety, right? So, I will plead with someone not to break up with me, or I'll start crying, or I'll avoid things. So, watch out for that instinctive reaction of behavior to make yourself feel safe, and try not to engage in it right away. This is also a central principle of cognitive behavioral therapy. So, if you need help with that, work with a therapist.
The last thing, and this is a little bit off the wall, but this has honestly helped a lot of people that I've worked with, is to detach. So, if you really look at anxiety, anxiety usually has to do with the ego. And what do I mean by that? I'm opening a whole new can of worms, which we can do a whole new video about. But if you think about anxiety, the consequence always has to do with you. "This person won't like me. This person will think I'm stupid. This person won't respect me. This person won't give me opportunities. This person will break up with me." Anxiety is usually about, sometimes it can be around things like health-related stuff, like, you know, other kinds of fears and stuff. But a lot of times, it has to do with ego. It has to do with "I" in some way. And so, there's another process, which is its own thing, of detachment, where you sort of separate yourself from the ego.
And so, what if someone doesn't like you? So, imagine what your life would be like if you were not always trying to shape and control other people's perceptions of you, because that's what a lot of anxiety turns into. This is how people become doormats. "I can't afford to have this person dislike me." And since I can't afford to have this person dislike me, I can never set a boundary with them. Since I never set a boundary with them, I become a doormat, and they start to become abusive, because I don't check their behavior. There's never a consequence for their behavior. And then the anxious person gets stuck. They become frustrated with themselves, they become frustrated with the other person, but they don't know what to do about it. And so, the real antidote to all of this, at the end of the day, is detachment. Is to separate yourself a little bit from the ego. And, "Okay, so this person dislikes me. So what?" And this is what people may tell you, "Why do you care about what this person thinks?" And you're like, "I don't know. I wish I couldn't, but I do." And then how do you solve that? How do you develop that detachment? You go back. Detachment. You go back. "When did I learn that I cannot afford to piss anyone off?" That's the samskara that is controlling you. That is preventing the detachment.
Once again, there are practices that you can do, right? Meditative practices, spiritual practices, things like that can help you develop detachment. We have a whole path on that in, in Dr. K's Guide to Meditation. But for you all to understand, this is also where there's studies that show that spiritual perspectives to anxiety can be incredibly helpful. One of the mechanisms through which things like mindfulness and even some of the, the studies on psychedelics show that the mechanism of action here is that they separate you from your ego. And so, that's another aspect to consider.
So, if you're trying to deal with anxiety, I know it's a super challenging and overwhelming topic, but my hope is that if you understand how anxiety develops and what the mechanisms are in the, in the body and the brain and the mind, that you can develop a system to kind of tackle it. If you're already working with a mental health professional, my hope is that you can integrate some of the stuff into your existing treatment. If you're not working with a mental health professional, I strongly recommend you get an evaluation. And then you can also, if you don't need to, then you can also use some of these techniques to promote health, right? And this is another core problem with our system of medicine in the West is that we treat sickness, we don't build health.
And so, how does anxiety work in the body and in the brain? First of all, it is a learned experience. It is a change in your baseline to perceive normal things as highly threatening. Why did you learn that? How did you get wired like that? Because that's what you needed to survive. So, how can we fix this problem? The first is, we can change our diet. We can eat certain foods, healthy diet, things that are more traditionally eaten by human beings. So, like, you know, this is where a lot of that sort of like keto diet sort of comes in. It's not so much grains that's necessarily a problem, it's that a lot of these grains are processed, which we didn't grow up eating. So, there's a lot of details also on diet. Y'all can check out Dr. K's Guide. But you can also think about some of those probiotics and things like that, definitely something to consider. But the more inflammation in your gut there is, the less healthier your gut bacteria is, the more likely you are to be anxious.
Second organ system we're going to talk about is the heart. The heart is incredibly important. It's not just the heart, by the way. The heart is just the one thing that we use to measure and capture all the other parts of our body. So, if we look at the exercise benefits on anxiety, we're just focusing on the heart, but exercise is going to have benefits on the kidneys, which are going to affect your anxiety. It's going to have benefits on your liver, your skeletal muscle. All of these things will affect your anxiety. And this is the core shortcoming that we see with therapy today is that therapists are solely trained in the mind, but anxiety does not solely exist in the mind. So, you can do everything from heart chakra meditations to exercise. You got to slow down that physiology.
And the last thing that we're going to focus on is the mind. And that's where you have to understand how did I program this in the first place? Go back to that. Digest that emotion, because that will be driving your anxiety. You'll feel that emotion come up, and it's going to be an emotion from the past. And so, as you digest and process that emotion, your anxiety will weaken in the present. The next thing that you can do is manage your anxiety in the present by building the capacity for tolerance and not engaging in those default behaviors that control the situation. Because the more that you control the situation, the more you are artificially short-circuiting your anxiety. And then, if that's the way that you've done things, which is usually how you do things, then you end up with this disaster scenario where the way that I deal with my anxiety is controlling the situation. But if the way that I deal with my anxiety is controlling the situation, and I can't control the situation, then what happens? Then you get tortured with anxiety over and over and over again. You're thinking about something for a whole week, and you can't fix it, you can't fix it, you can't fix it, but you keep trying, you keep trying, you keep trying, and you're exhausted. As you get exhausted, your frontal lobes weaken, your willpower weakens, you eat unhealthy food, you stop exercising, and then you, the dominoes start to fall, and the anxiety gets out of control.
So, I sincerely hope that this has been helpful to you today for you to understand where does anxiety come from, how does it manifest, and what are the different levers that I can pull, because it's far beyond the mind. And if all that stuff isn't enough, do the spiritual stuff. Check out detachment, by all means. And the more you can cultivate that, the more it'll make everything else easy. So, good luck.