Fort Myers, FL – Dealing with Anxiety? | Get Relief From Local Chiropractor

This is Dr. Lee angle with Upper Cervical Health Centers. 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 depend on the location. Six, eight, 10% of the prescriptions filled are very much for that same thing. And look, they’re going to 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. 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 or. He might be a person that comes in and says, you know what, doc, everything 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. I feel so anxious. I can’t function or I can’t hardly leave the house or whatever. The, 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 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. The thing we don’t think about, not the nervous system that makes me move my arm, the thing that makes everything else function.

So in there we have fight or flight. We have rest or digest. And they’re exactly what they sound like. 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. It shouldn’t be pegged way up here.

That’s where we run into trouble, but it should be the more dominant. The two, if you sit down to eat or you lay down to go to sleep, the rest or digest should kick up. So if you’re the kind of person who lays down all night, 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 dominant. Your body never gets into a full sleep cycle. It doesn’t replenish its hormones. It’s neuro-transmitters and it doesn’t repair itself. And eventually you’re sort of just ran out the other end. Like you’ve had your foot on the gas for way too long and your car is, is kind of shot.

So if it’s that kind of thing, maybe it’s social anxiety, whatever it may be. Often that fight or flight is just running too hard and you never make the transfer over to rest or digest. And that’s what we want to talk about here and how to maybe correct that. So obviously in one I do in chiropractic, that’s going to be my biggest concern is correct that nervousness.

And I’ll talk about that in a minute. There’s a few things. Diet wise we can do so excessive alcohol intake. So serotonin, that’s kind of the happy hormone. That thing that makes you feel better. Excessive alcohol intake will lower serotonin levels. Not good. That’s not what we want. And sometimes right, as a coping mechanism, maybe we’re real anxious and ramped up.

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. 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 energy.

It’s just going to make the problem. We’re already dealing with much worse. We want to watch our, our sugar intake and make sure that you have balanced meals at a balanced time of day. Because if you have a blood sugar crash, no matter what else is going on immediately, it makes you feel depressed. It makes you feel really tired.

Things aren’t good. Your body’s not functioning. Right? Many level blood sugar levels, which means we’re not 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 or. Just bad meals because our blood sugar is going to be doing this.

And if your blood sugar is doing this, your mood and how you feel is going to be doing the same thing, it’s going to be up and down, up and down. And then we will watch out for trans fats. We’ve all talked about those. That was a huge fad years ago, but those trans fats have been linked to depression and anxiety problems.

And again, lower, so are tone and dopamine levels. So 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. And exercise. That gives us some endorphins. It gives us a hormone go. It keeps level those blood sugar levels better.

The whole body is going to function better. And then the biggest thing that I deal with in, in chiropractic and especially in 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. It comes down a little bit in the top two bones in the neck.

So that brainstem has a huge impact on that autonomic nervous system when that fight or flight or the rest or digest. And let’s say somewhere over the years, there was a car accident. It was a slip, a fall, a birth trauma, whatever it may be. But if that area gets kind of jammed out a position and it starts to impact that brainstem it limits blood flow a little bit.

It starts to irritate the nerves in there. Suddenly. Now it’s not going to be able to regulate and balance itself the way that it should. Sometimes you get locked in the rest or digest, and people are just completely shut down. But for the most part of the biggest thing I see is that fight or flight is just running all the time.

The sympathetic nervous system, sympathetic dominance. We can’t relax enough. We’re jittery, whatever that anxiety may be. We can’t sleep tired all the time. And then we turn to. Maybe, um, prescription drugs, right? Things that you’re taking serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, SRIs. Those are to block serotonin from getting reabsorbed.

So the levels are higher because they’re low, but I’ve found in here that if we clean up the 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.

I had a girl come in. She was 15 years old, previous in life. Very outgoing. A lot of friends went to school, played sports that thing’s very active. She had a fall. She was in a car accident. And then suddenly she became very reclusive. She couldn’t hardly leave the house. She had to quit school because she’d just go into panic attacks every time she had to go.

I mean, it even expanded the point where she 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 her mom brought her in. We found a big misalignment appear. We corrected it and we watched all of that started fade off.

She quit cutting herself. Suddenly she had a big smile on her face. She got back into school. She’s been in college and graduated, married and has kids. So it was a great story. And we see that over and over. But if we have a problem going on, we’ve got to figure out. And especially if it’s not again, not environmental, it’s not that something in your life is terrible.

Everything is reasonably okay. We’ve got to look internally and figure out what the problem is. What do we need to do to correct it and then correct it generally, the body responds and we will do much, much better. So if that’s you, I would look into this Avenue and at least be evaluated to find out if there’s a problem here and we can look at the rest of the lifestyle and see what we can do to help you.

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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
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