Category: Christmas

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95% of Serotonin is produced and stored in the gut  not the brain. Research has uncovered a connection   between your gut bacteria and depression. In  your lower intestine and colon there is a   garden of microscopic bacteria, fungi and viruses,  this collection of organisms is called the gut   microbiome. Now individually they are minuscule  but collectively they weigh about the same as   your brain, and when fed the right food they  become an incredible pharmacy, they produce   vital chemicals that are key to your immune  system and they produce neurotransmitters   such as Gaba and serotonin. Gaba has a calming  effect on the body and mind and serotonin plays   a crucial role in regulating mood, sleep, appetite  and pain sensitivity. Let’s look at Emily, she has   always been known for her cheerful and outgoing  nature but after a long course of antibiotics   she found herself plagued by persistent feeling  of sadness, Emily was eventually diagnosed with   depression. Now what is really interesting here  is that she had a happy childhood, no traumas, a   good relationship and supportive friends, so the  depression made no sense to her, but one day she   stumbled upon a fascinating article about the  connection between the gut and mental health.   She learned that antibiotics actually kill off the  good gut bacteria and this can cause depression.   So doing some further research Emily decided  to take charge of her gut health and started   to incorporate probiotic rich foods such as live  natural yogurt, sauerkraut and kimchi into her diet.   These foods contain live bacteria that helped  populate her gut with beneficial microbes and   to further support her gut health she minimized  processed foods and refined sugars which are   known to kill off the good bacteria. So as time  passed Emily noticed little changes she began to   experience improved digestion, increased energy  levels and a more stable mood. Her depression   started to lift and she felt more resilient  and better equipped to handle life’s challenges.   Now as a psychotherapist I’m more than aware  that treating depression isn’t always as simple   as changing your diet, depression is a complex and  chronic mood disorder that’s influenced by many   factors including genetics, environment and your  history but what I’m trying to illustrate is that   a vast amount of research has shown a definite  link between your gut microbiome and your mental   health. For example scientists transplanted poo  from depressed mice into sterile mice, now the   sterile mice had no gut microbes but once the poo  transplant had taken place the previously sterile   mice demonstrated behavioural and physiological  features characteristic of depression.   Researchers are now experimenting with faecal  microbiota transplants in humans and this has   shown improvements in bipolar disorder, depression,  insulin sensitivity, Crohn’s disease as well as   reductions in anxiety and ADHD symptoms. So you  can see that researchers are moving towards the   development of microbiota based interventions  in the treatment of depression. For example   there are now a lot of studies that illustrate how  probiotics reduce depression and anxiety symptoms,   now researchers are calling these probiotic  psychobiotics and the main constituent of   these psychobiotics is the bifidobacterium and  lactobacillus families. Fermented food containing lactic   acid such as cultured milk and yogurt products,  sauerkraut and sourdough bread have been   found to increase levels of the bifidobacteria  and lactobacillus families. I think it’s really   empowering that you can increase serotonin by  the food you eat and this really conflicts with   the notion that you need antidepressants  because you have a chemical imbalance in   your brain, remember 95% of serotonin is actually  produced and stored in the gut not the brain.   The Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry says, “Although scientists have been testing the chemical   imbalance theories validity for over 40 years, and  despite literally thousands of studies, there is   still not one piece of direct evidence proving  the theory correct”. The chemical imbalance theory   originally came from pharmaceutical companies  as a way of marketing their antidepressants   and if you think about it there is not, and never  has been, a test to measure your brain chemicals.   You cannot measure neurotransmitters  from a blood test, MRI scan or a CT scan.   I’m not saying don’t use antidepressants but I  do believe that rather than relying so heavily   on antidepressants we do need to address the root  cause of depression from a psychological therapy   and increase the growth and diversity of your gut  microbiota. So you’ve gut talks to your brain and   your brain talks to your gut, the communication is  bi-directional. Your gut and brain send messages   via your vagus nerve, so the vagus nerve connects the  gut and brain through what is called the gut brain   axis, all of which play a vital role in sleep, pain,  mood, hunger and stress. It communicates information   from the gut to your brain using neurotransmitters  such as serotonin and glutamate and gut hormones.  Suddenly the idea of having a gut instinct  makes sense, so if you ever notice how language   is rich we’ve gut based expressions? Have you ever  had a gut-wrenching experience or butterflies   in your stomach? Your emotions, brain and gut  are intricately connected, in fact your gut is   frequently called your second brain, it even has  its own nervous system, the enteric nervous system.   The enteric nervous system is embedded in the lining  of your gastrointestinal tract beginning in your   oesophagus and extending down to your anus,  it consists of more than 500 million neurons.  So scientists are now recognising the  importance of a healthy and diverse   gut microbiome in the role of good mental health.
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So are you going to make some changes to your diet to improve  the growth and diversity of your   microbiome? Let me know in the comments  and if you’ve enjoyed this video you may   be interested in the video on the screen  now and I look forward to seeing you soon.

Depression is a complex mental health condition that can affect multiple aspects of your life, including your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and physical wellbeing. When you’re depressed, you tend to disengage from your usual routines and withdraw from your environment.
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When you do this, you don’t get the psychological reward from pleasurable activities, and this creates a feedback loop that perpetuates more depression.
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A very effective intervention that is often underutilized is behavioral activation. That’s what I’m talking about today.
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I’m Dr. Tracey Marks, a psychiatrist, and I make mental health education videos. First, let me explain a little more about the cycle of depression and how it leads to the inactivity that makes your depression worse.
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A single depressive episode can be triggered by many different factors: loss, trauma, prolonged stress, or a genetic predisposition and no identifiable trigger. Once depression sets in, you can experience persistent negative thoughts, like, “I’m worthless,” “No one cares about me,” and feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and a lack of pleasure in things that you previously enjoyed.
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Also, another thing that can happen when you get depressed is even the smallest things feel really hard and you have no motivation to exert the energy that you don’t have to do these hard things.
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Then because of these negative thoughts and feelings, you withdraw from social situations, avoid responsibilities, and neglect hobbies and interests. This leads to less involvement in activities that once brought joy or a sense of accomplishment. As things progress, you become more and more inactive mentally and physically. You may sleep more or stay in bed more even if you’re not asleep. You can feel sluggish all the time and even feel mentally foggy and slowed.
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Feeling like this makes you continue to not do very much because you don’t feel well, and then the loop just keeps circling on itself and you feel more and more lonely and hopeless.
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You may even blame yourself for being inadequate. Research shows that participating in constructive activities, even in minor amounts, can have a positive reinforcement effect. And we’re not talking about exercise here, although exercise also improves depression because it increases brain derived neurotropic factor, called BDNF.
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BDNF is a brain chemical that promotes nerve growth. I talk more about the science of how exercise impacts your mood and rewires your brain in another video that you can watch after this one. The activities of behavioral activation can be anything that you normally do that you’re now not doing much of.
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You’re reengaging with these activities, even if you don’t feel like it, and over time, repeated exposure to these activities produces a sense of accomplishment and productivity that is positively reinforcing and offsets the negative thoughts you have about yourself and the world when you’re depressed. Behavioral activation is a form of cognitive behavioral therapy and it is purely behavioral.
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You’re looking into modify what you’re doing instead of what you’re thinking, but what you do affects how you think about yourself and your environment, so we’re indirectly addressing your negative thoughts by changing your behavior. How do you do it? The first thing you want to do is monitor your activity. It’s easy when you’re depressed to slip into this low activity state and not be aware of just how much you’re no longer doing. You may know that you’re not doing a lot, but you’ve lost perspective and can’t appreciate the change as much. Keep track of your activities for a week.
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Break down each day into morning, afternoon, and evening. For each segment of the day, write down what you did and how you felt about it on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being awesome and 1 being awful. You don’t have to write down every single thing, like “I brushed my teeth and used the bathroom.” In fact, you can probably eliminate going to the bathroom from the list because that’s not really an activity.
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That’s a body function that’s going to happen whether you’re lying in bed or not.
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The activities on this tracker are intentional things that you do that you don’t have to do to live. To help you identify these things, you can answer the W questions. What were you doing? Who were you with? Where were you? You want to make sure you write down things soon after you do them.
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It’s much harder to remember things hours later.
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I have a handy activity tracker that you can use for this, or you can keep track on your phone.
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But you want to keep the tracker or your phone nearby so you can immediately write down what you did. You’re only tracking for a week, and you want to record activities even if they seem trivial like doing laundry. After you’ve monitored your activities for the week, next thing you want to do is review your activities and how you felt with each of these activities. What were you doing when you felt your best? What were you doing when your mood was the lowest? Also, think about these questions.
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What activities made you feel the most connected to people? What activities made you feel the most accomplished? Can you see a relationship between your mood and activity level? In general, we get more satisfaction out of life when we are doing things that align with our core values, or doing things that are important to us.
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When we get depressed, we tend to lose sight of our values and things that are meaningful, so step three would be to reflect on your core values. There are different ways to think about your values. You can find articles online about common values that people have.
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You can also use this values assessment that is part of this Life in Action workbook that I created. Look at the chart and circle the values that most resonate with you. The next step is to plan your activities. You’re going to create a list of activities from a few sources: your activity monitoring sheet, your values assessment, and you’ll need to include essential activities of daily living like preparing meals, laundry, paying bills. I mentioned earlier you don’t have to list every single thing like brushing your teeth.
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You could group all of your grooming as just a grooming activity because you don’t want the list to be too long you can’t fit it in the space.
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Then you can also use the activity menu that’s included in the workbook to help brainstorm some other activities.
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The last step is to schedule and plan the activities. You can use the same activity tracker that you used from the activity monitoring in the first step.
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You are going to need to be patient with this process. Getting active won’t make you feel better immediately. It takes time.
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But the more you do it, the easier it gets. You become more motivated and more energized and feel better about yourself. If you really struggle to do this, you can ask a friend or a family member to help you brainstorm some activity ideas, help you realize your values, or hold you accountable for sticking to the things that you scheduled.
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Connecting with people you care about in and of itself is extremely valuable and can be one of your activities. If you don’t have much support, a therapist can also help you create a behavioral activation plan. To get started with this, you can download the activity tracker free from my new Mental Wellness Store.
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Or if you’re on my email list, it was sent to you, and you can get the Complete Life Action Workbook from the Mental Wellness Space Store.
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It includes the activity tracker, values assessment, activity menu, and activity planner. If you are part of my Mental Wellness Space community, the workbook is included in your membership. Watch this video for more on how exercise helps rewire your brain. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

(text clicks) (pensive music) – Trauma is so ubiquitous that if you think you have never seen it, you have not looked.
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We meet people who fly off the handle. We meet people who shut down.
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We meet people who are very difficult. You know, it is a rare family that doesn’t have a drug addict, alcoholic, disturbed person.
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You know, one thing I like to say when I give a lecture, “Are there any normal people, who come from normal families, in the audience?” And sometimes one or two people raise their hands. I say, “Can I please come to your family for Thanksgiving? Because I’ve never been to a normal family.” My name is Bessel van der Kolk.
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I’m a psychiatrist, neuroscientist.
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I have been studying trauma for about 50 years now. I’ve treated a whole variety of different traumatized populations, see trauma in many different countries around the world, and I am the author of the book “The Body Keeps the Score.” (pensive music) It’s important for people to realize that not every mental health professional knows what we’re talking about here.
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The mainstream system of psychiatry-psychology is that there is something wrong with you and I need to fix you.
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That’s a very different attitude than dealing with trauma. Around the time that I first started to work for the VA, a group of us started to define what trauma is and started to define what happens to people. 1978 was the year, and the Vietnam War was over by about six or seven years. The very first day that I met Vietnam veterans, I was just blown away.
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They kept referring back to their dead comrades. Their hearts seemed to be with the people who were no longer around.
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They had a hard time loving their wives and girlfriends.
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They had a hard time being in any way meaningfully involved in the present.
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These were guys who were my age, who were smart and competent, but they clearly were just a shadow of their former self. And what was also really striking is they were sort of passive much of the time.
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And then people told them something that was disappointing, and they went from zero to 10 and blew up and became extremely angry. Something seemed to have happened to them that made it very hard for them to modulate their responses to their environment.
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My colleagues and I started to think about how is what these guys suffer from different from what other people who are in psychiatry textbooks suffer from? So I dug up a book that was written in 1941 by Abram Kardiner who had been working with World War soldiers.
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He wrote, “These guys suffer from a physioneurosis. Their bodies continue to re-experience that very terrible, frightening situation, and that event keeps coming back in terms of images, behaviors, and physical sensations.” So that became the core of our definition of PTSD. We write, “These people have been exposed to an extraordinary event that’s outside of normal human experience.” And in retrospect, that shows us how ignorant and narrow-minded we were because it turned out that this is not an unusual experience at all.
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Trauma is actually – unlike what we first thought – extremely common.
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One out of five women in America has a history of sexual molestation.
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Even a lot of men have histories of sexual molestation.
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One out of four kids get beaten very hard by their parents. One out of eight kids see physical fights between their parents.
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People usually think about the military when they talk about trauma, but when we started to work with inner city kids, the amount of trauma that these kids experienced was just unspeakable.
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The nature of trauma is that an experience enters into your ears, into your skin, into your eyes, and it goes down into a very primitive part of your brain that automatically interprets what’s going on. Is this dangerous or is this safe? An event becomes traumatic when there is nothing you can do to stave off the inevitable and your body starts automatically going to the state of fight/flight or collapse.
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The lingering effect of trauma is that you continue to react to mild stressors as if your life is in danger. And so you tend to become hyperreactive. Somebody may irritate you in the supermarket. You may develop road rage.
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You may have a difficult time putting up with misbehavior from your spouse or your kids.
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And most people actually are barely aware or not aware at all that their reactions that they’re having right now are actually rooted in experiences that they’ve had before.
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That event itself is over, but you continue to react to things as if you’re in danger. So the big challenge of treating trauma is how do we help people to live in bodies that feel fundamentally safe? The tradition in mental health is to dismiss the reality of people’s lives.
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For example, it’s only in the past few years that people are beginning to talk about the impact of poverty or the impact of racism or the impact of unemployment. And people have sort of been labeling people, “Oh, there something wrong with you. Let me fix you.” But if you go to a physician or a mental health practitioner who doesn’t understand that, they’re going to try to fix you with drugs or cognitive behavioral treatment to not do these crazy things anymore. It usually doesn’t work very well.
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What was very clear is that being in a relationship where people can hear you, where you can talk about how badly you feel, where you can talk about your guilt, and where you can start opening up where these feelings come from, how old these feelings are, and how you develop these feelings in response to particular things that happen to you, that was actually quite helpful because you need to really develop a deep sense of, “This is what happened to me.
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This is what I’m dealing with, and I need to take care of the wounds that I’m carrying inside of myself.” This issue of self-compassion and really knowing that your reactions are understandable and are rooted in you getting stuck in the past is a terribly important part of beginning to recover from trauma.
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Most of us are survivors of one thing or another, some much worse than others.
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And so if people say what do you wish your legacy were, I’d say, I want our society to know about trauma and to really do all the things that are necessary so that people who grow up under extreme adverse conditions can develop a brain and a mind that can help them to become full fledged members of society. That’s our big issue, and that’s the big challenge that we have.
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(pensive music)

[Music] it’s not that luck and Randomness and uncertainty  don’t play a role in life they do you know luck   luck is a part of all of our Lives to a certain  degree both good fortune and bad but by definition  
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you don’t have control over luck and your habits  also matter and I think that the reason they’re   so worthwhile uh to focus on and understand is  that they are the portion of your life that you   can influence that also determines your outcomes  it’s not just luck it’s not just habits but one  
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of those you have control over and so it makes  sense the only reasonable strategy is to focus on   what you can control if you spend all of your time  focusing on things you can’t control then you’re   just going to end up frustrated and so I think  habits are maybe the best lever for that talent  
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and genes uh they play a role and it’s important  you know people have natural predispositions to   things that make them better but what you find  is that nearly always when someone is a great   performer in a particular domain they are both  Well Suited so naturally talented or have some  
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kind of predisposition to that area and well  trained and so even if you are talented you   can’t succeed without having great habits to  to execute and to fully realize the potential   that you have your outcomes in life are often  a lagging measure of your habits you know like  
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a lot of the time people talk about you know I  want to have more money or I want to lose weight   or I want some kind of result but the truth is  your bank account is a lagging measure of your   financial habits your weight is a lagging measure  of your eating habits your knowledge is a lagging  
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measure of your learning and reading habits and  so it’s actually we think the thing that needs   to change is the bank account or the test score  or the number on the scale but actually the thing   that needs to change are the habits that precede  those outcomes every action you take is kind of  
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like a vote for the type of person you want to  become and if you can Master the right actions   if you can Master the right habits then you  can start to cast votes for this new identity   this desired person that you want to be and I  think that’s one of the reasons why small habits  
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matter so much they don’t necessarily transform  your life overnight right right away like doing   one push-up does not transform your body but it  does cast a vote for being the type of person   who doesn’t miss workouts or meditating for one  minute might got not give you an immediate sense  
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of calm in your life but it does cast a vote for  being a meditator the real goal is not to run a   marathon the goal is to become a runner goal is  not to write a book the goal is to become a writer   because once you’ve adopted that identity you’re  really not even pursuing Behavior change anymore  
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you’re just kind of acting in alignment with  the type of person you already see yourself to   be it’s kind of like true Behavior changes really  identity change because once you’ve changed that   internal story it’s way easier to show up each  day you’re not even really motivating yourself  
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that much to do it you’re just like this is who  I am now there’s a sort of an a misalignment of   rewards that often happens with habits so there’s  an immediate outcome an immediate reward and then   an ultimate reward and for your bad habits one  reason bad habits stick so readily that they they  
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form so easily is because bad habits often the  immediate reward is favorable right like what’s   the immediate reward of eating a donut it’s kind  of great it’s sweet it’s sugary it tastes good   it’s only the ultimate reward if you repeat that  habit for six months or a year or two years that  
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is unfavorable meanwhile good habits are often the  exact opposite the immediate reward of going to   the gym or going to the gym for like a week isn’t  really that great your body’s probably sore you   don’t have much to show for it your body looks the  same your weight hasn’t really changed but it’s if  
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you stick to that for six months or a year or two  years then the ultimate reward is favorable and   so a lot of the balance or a lot of the challenge  of building good habits and Breaking Bad Ones is   figuring out how to pull the long-term costs of  your bad habit habits into the present moment so  
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you feel a little bit of that pain right now and  have a reason to avoid it and pull the long-term   rewards of your good habits into the present  moment so it feels good and you have a reason to   kind of make it through that like valley of death  in the beginning and stick with it while you’re  
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waiting for those delayed rewards to accumulate  I think we could just summarize that whole uh   cognitive bias or mismatch uh misalignment of  rewards by saying the cost of your good habits   is in the present and the cost of your bad habits  is in the future and the fact that we prioritize  
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the present over the future ends up making a  lot of habit change difficult for that reason   if I was going to give some practical takeaways  uh I would say first thing that you can do is   probably optimize your environment because  sometimes that’s all you need to do so might  
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as well start there and then maybe it’ll take  care of itself you know like I mentioned putting   the apples in a bowl on the counter that  was all I need to do and then the habit   of eating apples every day was done uh or  maybe uh you know putting your TV inside a  
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wall unit or something maybe that’ll be enough  to reduce it or curb the The Habit unsubscribe   from the food blogs and now you’re not tempted  to eat as many cookies or something like that   um mobile phone super important yes right things  like that removing the the applications or like  
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you deleting Instagram off your phone well that  was enough now your Instagram habit is roughly   where you want it to be and you just look on  the desktop instead of on your phone and that   that was enough and now you’re you’re fixed  so environment design good place to start next  
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thing that I would recommend is the two minute  Rule and scaling your habits down making them   as easy as possible basically just down scale  it to a point where you can answer the question   can I stick to this habit 98 of the time without  fail no matter what the conditions and if you have  
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to say no to that then it’s probably too big to  start so you know pretty much every habit has   an entry point uh or the first thing that you try  to do just focus on mastering that and uh I think   that’s a good place to focus and then building  off of that the the last one that I recommend is  
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um there’s this great story that I mentioned  in the book about Twyla Tharp the famous dance   choreographer and instructor and she trains  for still even now she trains for two hours   a day she’s you know 50s 60s she’s been  training for a long time dancing her whole  
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career but she doesn’t actually focus on the  exercise habit The Habit that she focuses on   building is I put on my workout clothes and  my sweatshirt and I hail the cab on the side   of the street and if I’ve done that then I’ve  completed the habit and I think the the Insight  
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that she realized is that habits are often  the entry point not the end point they’re   the cab not the gym they’re like an entrance  ramp to the bigger routines in your life and   if you can master that habit that like little  decisive moment that determines what happens  
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in the next chunk of time then the rest of it  kind of Falls in line like I have this moment   each morning where either I open up Evernote  and I start writing the next article I’m going   to work on or I go to ESPN to check the latest  sports news and what happens in the next hour  
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is really determined by what happens in the  first like 30 seconds because if I go to ESPN   then the next hour is kind of shot but if I start  writing the article if I master that entry point   then I’m kind of speeding in the right direction  and the momentum carries me into the rest of the  
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task and I think that for me that’s a little bit  inspiring when it comes to building habits because   what you realize is that there’s actually not  that much to change there may be five or ten of   those little decisive moments those little entry  points throughout your day that determine whether  
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the next chunk of time is productive or not and  if you can organize your environment or join   a community or restructure your habits so that  those entry points are mastered then you’re much   more likely to live a good productive day and so  I think that those three things environment design  
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scale your habits down and master the entry points  those are some really good places to start foreign [Music] the information in this video comes from  the Fantastic book Atomic Habits by James Clear   this book is jam-packed with simple tools  that you can apply to change your habits and  
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dramatically improve your life right now you can  listen to Atomic habits on Audible which has the   world’s largest library of audiobooks and makes it  incredibly easy to digest the material while you   are working exercising gardening or on the go I  use it all the time while drawing these animations  
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let audible help you discover new ways to laugh  Be Inspired or be entertained new members can try   it free for 30 days visit audible.com after  skool or text after skool to 500-500 that’s   audible.com after skool or text after skool to  500 500 to try audible free for 30 days [Music]

Anxiety can wreak havoc with the body  and the many symptoms it can produce   can make you worry that there is something  seriously wrong with you. Understanding   what causes these symptoms can be the first  step in learning how to manage your anxiety. So in this video I’m going to  explain 20 common and sometimes   uncommon symptoms of anxiety and what causes them.
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Number one is headaches tension in the  suboccipital muscles at the base of the   skull can cause anxiety headaches. See my video  on anxiety and headaches for more information.
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Number two blurred vision. When the body thinks  it’s in danger it releases a lot of adrenaline.   This causes the pupils to  dilate to see the danger better   but paradoxically it can  actually cause blurred vision.   Number three is ringing in the ears. The cause  of tinnitus is a bit of a mystery even to the   ear specialists but changes in pressure and  blood flow in the ears are popular theories.
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Number four is concentration problems or brain  fog. The release of adrenaline and cortisol have   an effect on how the brain operates. This may be  an evolutionary response where your brain shuts   down unnecessary thinking processes to focus  on functions to deal with the perceived danger.   Number five. Dizziness and feeling faint are  common symptoms during a panic attack. Changes   in blood flow in the ears and hyperventilation  can both cause dizziness. However as I explained   in my video ‘will a panic attack caused me to  faint ‘ fainting is unlikely in most people as   blood pressure increases during a panic attack and  fainting occurs due to a drop in blood pressure.
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Number six. A feeling of a lump in the throat  difficulty swallowing or a choking feeling   are all caused by the glottis expanding  to allow more air into the lungs   because your body thinks it has to run or  fight. I have a whole video on this subject   so if you want to know more  click the link in the top right.
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7. Breathing difficulties. Some people who  suffer with panic disorder are abnormally   aware of their breathing ironically it can be the  constant checking if their breathing is normal   that triggers the panic attack and when a panic  attack begins the surge of adrenaline causes   faster breathing. This then leads to more panic  and a greater attempt to control their breathing,   but this often results in fast and shallow  breathing from the thorax instead of the abdomen.   This hyperventilation causes levels of carbon  dioxide in the blood to drop which can cause all   sorts of other symptoms which we will talk about  later. Number eight. Chest pain or tightness in   the chest is another subject I’ve made a whole  video about but the two most common causes are   muscle tension and the arteries or blood vessels  in the heart constricting. And why does this   happen? It’s because as mentioned hyperventilation  causes blood carbon dioxide levels to drop which   makes the blood more alkaline which in turn causes  constriction of the arteries and blood vessels.   Although this can be quite painful  it is not dangerous for most people.
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Nine is palpitations which may be felt in the  chest or throat. The reason you get them is simply   because your heart is pumping much stronger  to deal with a perceived danger that is not   there and the reason you feel it in your throat is  simply because that’s where your carotid artery is   and an increase in blood volume and speed  through this artery is very noticeable.
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10. The feeling of skipped heartbeats.  It’s not easy to explain this briefly   so if this is something you experience I  recommend you watch my video on ectopic   heartbeats and anxiety but suffice  to say they are generally harmless. Number 11 nausea or the feeling  of butterflies in the stomach.   When the body senses danger digesting food  is not a priority so it diverts blood from   the stomach to the arms and legs to fight  or run and that can upset the stomach.   It can also affect the stomach in other ways  like causing acid indigestion so 12 is GERD. 13. Bowel changes. Anxiety can cause  digested food to move through the bowel   quicker leading to loose bowels. There is also a  link between anxiety and irritable bowel syndrome   which can cause diarrhea or constipation  as well as abdominal cramps and bloating   and yes you guessed it I  have a video on that also.
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14. Overactive bladder. An increase in the need  to urinate is a little understood anxiety symptom.   Tense muscles squeezing the bladder is a fairly  simple explanation but there are more complicated   theories about the serotonin system and the  effect of cortisol on the bladder. One thing   is sure is there is definitely a correlation  between anxiety and frequent urination   and by the way a type of  social anxiety called pauresis   could cause the bladder to completely lock and  I have a whole series of videos on that subject. 15 is tremors and twitches. To  deal with danger the nervous system   sends more blood to certain areas ,tightens  muscles ready for action, increases blood sugar   and primes the whole body ready to fight or  run. Any of these can cause twitches or tremors   sometimes even in unusual places like the eye.  Oh and hyperventilation can also cause twitching. 16 is one of the strangest symptoms of anxiety.   The feeling of your skin crawling or burning can  be caused by changes in blood flow. When anxious   the release of cortisol can also make the skin  sensitive to allergens chemicals or even sweat.
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17. Derealization or depersonalization. In  derealization you feel the world around is unreal.   People and things around you  may seem lifeless or foggy.   With depersonalization you feel  disconnected from yourself.   This is mainly caused by hyperventilation and the  effect of alkaline blood that I mentioned earlier,   only this time it affects your brain  causing these strange sensations 18 is heat. The reason you get  hot when anxious is simple.   Your circulation increases  just like when you exercise 19. Weakness or fatigue. In a panic  attack or a prolonged period of anxiety   your body is called on all its resources  to protect you from a perceived threat.   Afterwards it needs to replace those resources  so it shuts down for a while to do that. 20 Aches and pains. If you  suffer anxiety every day   it’s like your body is fighting a  tiger every day or running for its life   so it’s not surprising the aches and  pains can appear pretty much anywhere.
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But you may ask how do I treat each of  these symptoms? The answer is you don’t.   These symptoms are signs that your body  is doing exactly what it’s designed to do   only it’s doing it at the wrong  time because there is no danger.
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If you try to suppress these  symptoms not only will it not work   but the part of the brain that deals with  danger will think the symptoms are dangerous   and activate the fight or flight  response causing even more symptoms.
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To make all these symptoms go away  you have to retrain your anxious brain   not to go into fight or flight mode at the wrong  time and that’s what I teach you to do in many   of my videos so check out the playlist  for whichever anxiety disorder you have.