The unknown causes of anxiety. (Things your doctor would never ask you.)

- Hey, there, you guys. It's Irene from irenelyon.com, and I wanted to talk to you today about anxiety. The reason why is because this word gets thrown around all over the place. I've got anxiety. I always have anxiety. I have mild anxiety, chronic anxiety. These anxiety disorders, it's just everywhere.

What I have learned in my years of doing this work, and in with my colleagues, my students, talking with people, is that anxiety is nothing more than sensation in the body that we cannot manage, contain, and resolve, and release. If you haven't already watched some of my old videos, my more recent one called, "Trauma, It's Not What You Think," I highly recommend checking that one out after you watch this one because we label this term anxiety, and we talk about it as if something that is wrong. In many ways, when someone experiences anxiety, there is something wrong going on inside, but it's not the type of wrong that we tend to label it with.

That's one thing I wanted to cover. The second thing is that there are many people that will try to manage their anxiety and cope, and do various exercises to make it better, or make it go away, or they'll take a pill to relieve it, whether it's homeopathic or pharmaceutical, and what's happening is they're not getting into the underlying reason for why that anxiety is there. Now this is a very big topic, but one reason that deserves mention is that there are early traumatic experiences that occur to us when we're really small, even in utero that can set up the nervous system, our autonomic nervous system, which is the nervous system that governs our fight, flight, and freeze responses.

When we have things that occur when we're really little that throw that system off, and put us into fear, threat, helplessness, or there's unpredictability in the environment, if we don't do the work to recover from that, and to resolve those wounds, those early wounds, we will carry that anxiety to the end of time. Time does not heal that kind of feeling of threat or fear. Here's what I mean by early trauma, and I'm gonna stick with one type of early trauma. I'm not gonna go into the kind of abusive trauma that occurs when there is a household that's dysfunctional or there's physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse where there's parents that have depression, or there's alcoholism, or there's not enough food on the table or shelter, or growing up in a war-tone zone. All that stuff I've just told you right now, that can contribute to a person and their nervous system being in a state of anxiety until it gets healed and dealt with at a very organic level. So one kind of early imprinting that can cause horrendous anxiety, and if left too long, depression.

That's kind of how the spectrum works. I guess it would be this way from what you're watching. You might start out with something that's anxiety, but then the system, it can't deal with it, so what it does is it shuts down, and then we go into more depressive states. Many people who have chronic anxiety, they will say that they also have depression.

They go both together. They're like cousins. But there's another subset 'cause some people will walk into my office and they'll say, "I did have a good childhood. "I did have love. "I did have care," and when I look at their history, I'm like, "Actually, yeah, it's not that bad, "so why is this happening?" But then I start to ask questions, like birth trauma. What occurred when you were being born into the world? Were there complications? Was there a lack of oxygen for a moment? Was there a horrific c-section that occurred? Emergency? Were you stuck in the birth canal? Was your little system going into kind of near-death mode? This is all real stuff. That little person is experiencing the world and they get scared. The other thing that can occur early on is if we have early hospitalizations due to high fevers, burns, sickness, viruses.

I have many clients when I start to ask, clients that have had high anxiety, and they cannot get rid of it, they'll say, "Yeah, actually, my Mom said they had "to take me to a hospital 'cause I had a rash "all over my body, and they had to restrain me "and give me strong medicine to take the rash down." That is an event that can send someone into a very high anxiety state. Often parents will say, "We get the baby home, "and they kind of aren't the same. "They've kind of numbed out.

"It's like they're not the same kid anymore." True story. That is another kind of imprint that can set a system up to have high anxiety. The other one would be surgeries a little later on, getting tonsils out when you're a little kid, having a bone set, even dental surgeries can leave a little one very, very scared.

Eye surgeries are another common thing that occurs really, really young. Surgical interventions can lead to a system feeling, and often under threat and helpless because you cannot get out of that chair, or out of that doctor's room, even if you are under anesthesia, there's a part of the system that's like, "I don't wanna be here." The other thing that can cause too high-level anxiety later in life, things like drowning. Many adults were once kids, they'll remember, "Yeah, I almost did drown out at the lake that summer, and it was highly scary. I remember giving up, and then all of a sudden someone was there, and I obviously survived. So drownings are one.

Choking on food, another one. These sorts of things, we need to look at that. We need to look at these early experiences. I already mentioned the adversity in childhood that we just know now, a link below here to a talk I did with someone, and another interview, another Q and A I did, where I talk about adverse childhood experiences, but it isn't necessarily a disease, a problem that we have to live with, but we need to approach and work with the anxiety, and the sensation, and the fear, and the threat, and the sense of helplessness, at a very biological body level. We can't just manage it away, think it away, breathe deep, and drink lots of green juice. All that stuff works for some things, but for this type of anxiety that was imprinted early, early on, we need to look at it from a much deeper level, from a nervous system level. Anyway, wanted to just throw that piece of information out there.

If you want to learn more about this work, about how to start this process, if you are someone that you know you had some early stuff that wasn't the best, and you cannot seem to get rid of, and fix, and ameliorate the levels of anxiety in your life, I highly recommend checking out my site, irenelyon.com. There's a shop there where I've got lots of free goodies, and also some paid programs where you can start to learn about this from a very deep, physiological level. I have found that when people learn this theory, that in itself can catapult the healing process in a really good way, and then we add in some really biologically-based neurosensory exercises, and you start to tune into your body in a completely different way, very different than meditation, very different than just deep breathing, very different, and then trying to clear the mind. It's organic work that the body is craving, and what I find is that when people start to learn this, that part of them that went into fear and helpless mode way back then, it starts to perk up and starts to go, "Oh, my God, someone's finally listening to this." So I'm gonna leave it at that. If you're watching this, and you're not on my website, head over there, irenelyon.com. You can sign up for my updates. There's lots of free stuff, like I said. Leave me a comment.

Leave me a question. I would love to hear from you. Take very good care. (happy, energetic music).