What causes anxiety?

Let’s break it right down to the very simplest level. I believe anxiety is caused by your nervous system doing too much. Your brain is just working too hard. It's that simple.

This might come from working too many hours or various types of stress. Stress comes in many forms like financial, physical or emotional. It could be caffeine which overstimulates certain parts of our bodies, or a food additive, or side effects to a medication. Often it's a combination of more than one thing. But at the end of the day, when your brain is NOT able to cope with all the things that are happening in your life - you feel anxious.

We can cope with different stresses up to a certain level, but go over that level and the wheels fall off. The tipping point between where we can or can't cope is different for everyone.

Maybe it's only a little thing that tips us over the edge to where we’re NOT OK. We might blame that small thing, but in reality it was the combination of all the different things that added up to create the issue.

We need to do a number of different tests to check out the causes of anxiety. Let me give you an example of one of the common causes.

Magnesium

Magnesium is often an important part of treating anxiety.

When your brain sends a signal, there's a chemical reaction that happens inside each individual nerve to get the message from your brain to somewhere else in your body. Your nerves need magnesium to run that chemical reaction properly.

Let's say your brain wants to send a message to a muscle in your body. Let's assume there are 100 nerve cells supplying that one muscle. Of the 100 nerves, 70 have enough magnesium, 30 don't have enough magnesium. So the signal from your brain goes out on the 70 nerves that are working…

And the muscle gets a mixed message.

70 nerves say do something. 30 nerves are silent. So the muscle says back to the brain...What??? And the brain sends the message again. Still only 7/10ths of the message gets through. So the muscle and brain have a big conversation. It's a bit like when we call someone on a mobile phone and we're in a bad area. The call is all crackly and breaking up and we get frustrated. And it takes us 5 times longer than it should to communicate with the other person.

This is what happens when you're low in magnesium. Instead of the brain saying "Do this" and the muscle saying "OK", there's a whole back and forward thing going on.

That's happening with just one muscle. You multiply that hundreds of times with all the muscles, organs, glands, tendons, fascia and other things that your brain controls. They're all getting mixed messages because the nerves don't have enough magnesium to function properly. What does that do to you? You get anxious because your brain is doing way more than it should.

If low magnesium is the cause of your anxiety, you top up your magnesium levels by taking a supplement or by eating foods high in magnesium. Your anxiety usually melts away, and usually fairly quickly.

Just a side note here, is that there are many different types of magnesium available. Most are not harmful, but lots of them have such a low absorption rate that they're almost useless to top up your body magnesium levels. I'll do another article soon on the different types of magnesium.

Back to anxiety. I recommend you analyse your life. Make a list of the things that are causing stress for you. There will probably be some things you can change, and some things that you can't change. For example, you may not be able to change the stress around your job, but you can change things you eat or drink, like coffee for example. Coffee is not necessarily bad, but it may be a contributor to anxiety.

So if you work on the things you can change, even if they're only small things, they can potentially make a big difference in reducing your anxiety levels.

Here at Total Health, we do tests during your first appointment to pinpoint the cause of your issues, including anxiety.

There are many different treatments that target the symptom of anxiety. These are things like sedative medications or herbs for example. There's nothing wrong with treating a symptom for a short time, but often these things end up as long term treatments. I always try to treat causes rather than symptoms so that you get the best long term result.

So if you're ready to start dealing with your anxiety, click the Book Online button below.