The Real Reason You’re Anxious (It’s Not What You Think)

Your anxiety is not in your head! Discover the hidden causes of anxiety disorder to finally say goodbye to anxiety symptoms for good. Stop anxiety attacks before they start by addressing the root cause.

There is an obvious clue that your anxiety is not mental. It’s not in your head. There are so many people that have anxiety without any reason for feeling that way. Today, we’re going to show you the most overlooked reasons for having anxiety that has nothing to do with something going on in your head and it has everything to do with what’s going on inside your body. But I do want to be clear, there are certain mental reasons for having anxiety, but that’s not going to be in this presentation.

Anxiety is a state or a condition of worry. It’s indecision. It’s kind of like a condition of fear, tension. You kind of have this feeling or concern that something not good is going to happen. And it really messes up your ability to feel comfortable in your own skin.

Especially if you’re trying to sleep, right, with the heart rate pounding and even your mind just racing. It can really affect your state of well-being. The interesting thing about anxiety is that your body can put you into that state and that state of anxiety can directly affect the body as well. When you have anxiety deep inside your body, your chemistry is altered. You have all sorts of physiological things that are happening that keep your body in a state of fight or flight.

That would be different than the system rest and digest which allows you to feel calm and sleep through the night and not have so many worries. There actually is a test to measure how much of this sympathetic nervous system that you’re in at any given time. It’s called heart rate variability and you can get certain watches and devices to pick up that information. I used to use this technology in my practice all the time and it’s amazing. Some people would come in and they’re literally sitting there calm, but the inside of their body is like someone has the foot on the gas pedal.

They’re just in total stress mode. It’s because the nervous system is so far out of whack. So, there are physical reasons why your body has a certain emotion. I mean, just take a child for example. If your child’s blood sugar is off, they are not going to be calm, okay?

They’re going to be bouncing off the wall. They’re going to be slightly irritable. They’re going to be anxious. has nothing to do with some mental problem. It has everything to do with a physical problem.

Blood sugar. That’s number one right here. If someone’s blood sugar is too low, they’re going to have anxiety. They’re going to be irritable. They’re going to be on edge.

Just think about how many couples get in a fight just purely because of blood sugar. It’s just a very common problem that a lot of people don’t connect the dots with. Because when your blood sugar goes down, your brain is not getting fuel. And that puts your body in panic mode, not just with the hormone called cortisol, but with adrenaline. And then it tells the liver to release sugar, to bring it back up.

So a really important purpose of these hormones like cortisol and adrenaline is to raise the sugar back up so the brain can get fuel. Your brain does not have any way of storing fuel, okay? It doesn’t have fat that it can tap into directly. It has to get its fuel from the blood. And so this is why it’s so important to have really healthy blood sugar.

Typically, when people think about low blood sugar, especially medically, they’ll say, “Well, that’s why you need to carry candy in your pocket to raise your blood sugar. ” Huge mistake. Huge mistake. Because the blood sugar will go back up. But the question is what’s going to happen next?

It’s going to go back down because the very reason why it went down in the first place is it’s being pushed down by a hormone called insulin. Insulin is the hormone that keeps a person in a mode where they have low blood sugar. And so taking candy to solve low blood sugar is like pouring gasoline on a fire. It’s just going to keep happening over and over and over. The way you fix this very easily is you cut out the sugar.

That way we cut out the need for creating so much insulin that drops the blood sugar and then we replace those carbohydrates or the sugars with high quality protein. Protein and other foods that don’t raise insulin a lot like certain healthy fats. You can do vegetables. But to fix low blood glucose, you need to go low carb and you also need to not eat so frequently and not snack. Your mental state will be so much better.

You’re not going to be as hungry anymore. You’ll probably lose weight. Your skin will do much better. Very important. And one really simple clue to know that your anxiety is coming from low blood sugar is this.

Does it go away when you eat something? Okay, at least temporarily. If it does, then we know the anxiety is coming from your blood sugar. Okay, that’s the clue. Number two, lack of sleep.

How many people have anxiety just because they’re not sleeping that great? When a person does not sleep adequately, their cortisol is going to be high and they’re going to be grouchy as well and especially have worry and anxiety unnecessarily. It’s just amazing when people get a really good sleep how good they feel mentally and emotionally. They just don’t have anxiety. One reason why people can’t sleep is a blood sugar problem.

You go to bed, you have to not eat for a period of let’s say seven or eight hours, right? What happens in that seven eight hours is your liver has to stabilize your blood sugar. And many people have problems with the liver if they have blood sugar issues and then they start getting this high and low blood sugar situation kick in adrenaline. Okay, between one and three or four o’lock, okay? And then now they’re up.

A lot of times a lack of sleep is connected to this right here. So a lack of sleep is not a mental problem, okay? It’s a physical problem that’s causing a mental effect. Okay, anxiety. Next one is low vitamin B1.

This is called thamine. Thamine is one of the most important vitamins involved with your nervous system in your brain. And when you’re deficient, you will have this anxiety and nervous tension in your body. I’ve seen it in practice. I would give people that had that symptom some B1 and within minutes, probably three or four minutes, it disappears.

So, one big clue that your anxiety is coming from a B1 deficiency is does it go away when you take B1? Number four is stimulants, primarily caffeine. I’m guilty of consuming a lot of caffeine during college. I would drink pots of coffee and at first I could get away with it until I got an ulcer. And the reason I was so tired all the time is I was eating all these carbs.

So it was a never-ending blood sugar issue, sleep problem, fatigue, but I coped with it with caffeine. Too much caffeine affects the nervous system. Not to mention caffeine depletes B1 as well. Too much chocolate can have stimulants in it as well. And also there’s a lot of medications that are stimulants, weight loss pills, and those can really create anxiety.

In fact, there are quite a few medications that have a side effect of anxiety. And I didn’t even put that on the list, but medications can cause anxiety. Again, it’s not a mental problem. It’s something you’re doing to create this effect. And then also low protein.

And that is one of the solutions to low blood sugar, to consume more protein. But you have to realize the reason why we need so much protein is not for fuel but to replace all of our biochemistry, the neurotransmitters, certain hormones. All of our biochemistry is built with the foundation of protein. When you do not consume enough quality protein, so many things suffer and it’s really difficult to get sufficient protein through plants. And this is why many people who do more of a vegetarian or vegan diet