Hey, this is Dr. Lee Angle with Upper Cervical Health Centers. Today I want to talk about a topic that is prevalent in society, and can really be a big problem. That’s anxiety. A recent study showed that one out of six people in America take some sort of psychiatric anti-depressant anxiety medication. Some studies say that 8% to 10% percent of prescriptions filled today are for very much for that same thing.
Look, there are going be multiple causes of anxiety. Sometimes it is some sort of actual life event you’re going through, a divorce, someone dies, you have a job problem, and those things absolutely can drive anxiety right, environmental factors and things like that. But what I really want to talk about are for the ones where that’s not really a thing, or it was a thing a long time ago, and you can’t seem to get out of that pattern. You might be a person that comes in and says, “You know what, Doc, every thing in my life is great. I don’t have any problems. Not financially stressed. My marriage is great. My kids are great. Everything is fantastic. But I feel so anxious, I can’t function, or I can’t really leave the house.” Whatever the manifestation of that anxiety may be, that’s really the thing I want to talk about.
So the biggest thing that will drive that anxiety is the nervous system. So if there’s not anything else going on in your life to cause it, then your anxiety is that the nervous system isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. You may have heard the term fight-or-flight response. So there’s two halves to our autonomic or automatic nervous system—that’s the one we don’t think about, not the nervous system that makes me move my arm, the one that makes everything else function. It always has us either in fight-or-flight, or rest-and-digest. And they’re exactly what they sound like…when we are in fight-or-flight, we may not be actually out fighting or running, but if you’re up during your day, and moving around, and doing things that’s going to be the more dominant system. However, it shouldn’t be pegged way up here, that’s where we run into trouble. But it shouldn’t be the more dominant of the two if you sit down to eat or you lay down to go to sleep, then rest-or-digest should kick in. So if you’re the kind of person who lays down all night, and no matter how long you’re in bed, or how long you are asleep, you wake up exhausted, this is probably the problem that fight-or-flight is still dominating. If your body never gets into rest-and-digest sleep cycle, it doesn’t replenish its hormones, it’s neurotransmitters, and it doesn’t repair itself. And eventually, you sort of just run out of energy in the end, like you’ve had your foot on the gas for way too long and your car is kind of shot.
So it’s that kind of thing. Maybe it’s social anxiety, or whatever it may be. Often that fight-or-flight is just running too hard, and you never make the transfer over to rest-and-digest. And that’s what we want to talk about here and how to maybe correct that.
So obviously, in what I do in chiropractic, that’s going to be my biggest concern is to correct that nervous system, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.
First, there’s a few things diet-wise we can do. So let’s talk about excessive alcohol intake. Serotonin is kind of the happy hormone, the thing that makes you feel better. Excessive alcohol intake will lower serotonin levels, which is not good. That’s not what we want. And sometimes, as a coping mechanism, maybe we’re really anxious and ramped up, so we try to drink a little to bring that down. But actually, it’s counterproductive.
Caffeine is the same, and sometimes you get in a vicious loop of, “I’m tired all the time. I can’t sleep. I’m just pounding coffee all the time.” Again, caffeine can lower serotonin levels, so a little bit of coffee is okay, but we can’t get a ton and make that the major source of our energy. It’s just going to make the problem we’re already dealing with, much worse.
You want to watch your sugar intake, and make sure that you have balanced meals that are at a balanced time of day, because if you have a blood sugar crash, no matter what else is going on, it immediately makes you feel depressed, it makes you feel really tired, maybe a little “hangry,” and those things aren’t good. Chances are you’re now going to intake a bunch of junky, fatty foods or sugary, processed foods, and then not eat maybe for six or eight hours or whatever that may be. This will send your blood sugar and your mood up and down, up and down all day.
And then let’s talk about watching out for trans-fats—trans-fats have been linked to depression and anxiety problems, and again they lower serotonin and dopamine levels. So you want to avoid processed foods and things like that. Just like in any medical condition or issue, a clean diet is going to make your system run better, right. That and exercise, we need to get out and move a little bit. That gives us some endorphins. It gives us a hormone boost, it helps level those blood sugar levels better, and the whole body is going to function better. So that’s one solution to anxiety issues.
Now let’s look at the biggest thing that I work with, which is chiropractic and specifically the upper cervical spine. So we have the brain that sits in our skull, and we have the brainstem, which is the tail end of the brain, which comes down in the middle of the top two bones in the neck. So that brainstem has a huge impact on that autonomic nervous system—you know that fight-or-flight or the rest-and-digest system.
Let’s say somewhere over the years there was a car accident, there was a slip and fall, or it could even be birth trauma, or whatever it may be. But if that area gets kind of jammed out of position, and it starts to impact that brainstem, it can limit blood flow a little bit and it starts to irritate the nerves in there too. Suddenly, now it’s not going to be able to regulate and balance itself the way that it should, because now your brain is not able to communicate clearly with the rest of the body.
Sometimes people get locked in the rest-and-digest mode, and feel just completely shut down. But for the most part, the biggest thing I see, is that fight-or-flight is just running all the time, as a sympathetic dominance, and we can’t relax enough, we’re always feeling jittery, or whatever that anxiety may be, we can’t sleep, we’re tired all the time. And then maybe we turn to prescription drugs, like Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors SSRIs. These are used to block serotonin from getting reabsorbed, so the levels stay higher in our brain, because maybe they’ve been judged to be too low.
But I’ve found that if we clean up our diet, we get some exercise, and we make sure that the nervous system doesn’t have any pressure on it, those serotonin levels will do what they’re supposed to do, and balance out on their own. I’ll give you a good story about that.
I had a 15-year-old girl come in for treatment. Previously in life she was very outgoing, you know, had a lot of friends, went to school, played sports, she was very active. Then she was in a car accident. Suddenly she became very reclusive and anxious. She didn’t want to leave the house; she had to quit school, because she would just go into panic attacks, every time she had to go. I mean, it even expanded to the point where she had started to cut herself, and she couldn’t figure out why. She had a great family. She had a great life; there was nothing else wrong, except internally, she was just so anxious. Her mom brought her in, and we found a big misalignment in her neck from the accident. We corrected it, and we watched all of that start fade. She quit cutting herself, she quit feeling anxious and having panic attacks. Suddenly, she had a big smile on her face. She got back into school, and since then she’s been to college and graduated, gotten married and now has kids. So it’s a great story. And we see that over and over here at Upper Cervical Chiropractic Health Centers Fort Myers.
But if you have an anxiety problem going on, we’ve got to figure it out, especially if it’s not due to your environmental factors. . . like it’s not that something in your life is terrible, and everything is reasonably okay. We’ve got to look internally, and figure out what the problem is, and what we need to do to correct it. Generally, the body responds quickly once we’ve done a gentle adjustment, and you will do much, much better. So if that is something you’ve been dealing with, I would look into this avenue, and at least be evaluated to find out if there’s a problem there in your neck area. And we can also look at the rest of your lifestyle, and see what we can do to help you.
Dr. Lee Angle
“I enjoy the fact that I can help others feel better or be at their best thru upper cervical care.” — Dr. Lee Angle
Dr. Lee Angle is originally from southern West Virginia. After having his life changed through Upper Cervical Care he chose to pursue it as a career. He is an alumnus of Virginia Tech, and later completed his Chiropractic education at Sherman College of Chiropractic in Spartanburg, SC . He has been practicing Upper Cervical Chiropractic for over nine years. Dr. Angle previously worked as a certified personal trainer. This background allows him to educate his patients on proper movement and exercises to speed their recovery and enhance their Upper Cervical Care. In his free time, Dr. Angle likes to exercise and spend time with his loving family.
12651 McGregor Blvd Ste 102 Fort Myers, FL 33919
Phone 239.243.8810 • Fax 239.243.8804
https://uppercervicalfortmyers.com/
Email uchcfortmyers@gmail.com
