Last week, we talked about loneliness, as one of the great epidemics of today’s world. Today, we’re going to talk about another, even greater than that: anxiety. At this point it almost sounds like saying “today we’re going to talk about… feeling bad,” it’s such an eternal presence in most of our lives. Of course, there’s anxiety and then there’s anxiety. For some of us, it’s not much more than a persistent tendency to worry over things—nagging, but not debilitating. For others, it can seriously affect their ability to get through daily life. But even for the former group, anxiety can be difficult to get rid of, and stifling to one’s ability to grow and create a better life.

What the Research Says

So what can we do? First let’s look at some of the facts. Research shows that about 90 percent of the things people worry about never actually happen to them. Because even though anxiety can feel like an attempt to prepare for rational concerns, it’s rarely as logical as it seems to us in the moment. More likely, it comes from a specific unhealed trauma in our memories, or else just festered out of some smaller fear that was never addressed.

You may have heard the term, “paper tiger,” meaning something that looks big and menacing at first glance, but when you look closer you see that it’s completely harmless. Persistent anxiety is like a dark forest full of paper tigers. Though it doesn’t always seem so harmless, because it can cause us stress, and stress can create all sorts of physiological problems when there’s enough of it, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Need proof of that? Nearly every reputable medical authority on the planet, but I’ll use the CDC for simplicity’s sake, says that physiological stress is the source of 90 percent of illness and disease. Some sources go even higher. I know of at least one respected doctor who says that not only does stress cause 95 percent of illness and disease, but the other 5 comes from genetic issues that were originally manifested through stress. Outside of something like breaking your arm, it is the root of nearly everything that can go wrong in your body.

The Fight or Flight Response

So once again, we must ask the follow-up question: if stress is the root of illness and disease, then what causes stress? Well, there’s the simple answer to the question of how we are supposed to be stressed, and then there’s a more nuanced answer to the question of how we are actually being stressed. We’ll start with the simple one, which is, of course, the fight or flight response. When our lives are in danger, the hypothalamus sends a fear-signal throughout our body. Cell growth, digestion, immune responses and a number of other things all slow down or stop—because these are energy-intensive processes that the body can do without for a few minutes, while we use that energy to run or fight to stay alive. Chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol flood the body with a temporary burst of strength and energy to suit the emergency. You’ve heard of moms lifting cars off their children? Very much that sort of thing.

I had a driving instructor once, many years ago, who told me that if you’re following a couple of car lengths behind someone on the interstate, 60-70 miles an hour, and that person slams on their breaks, it is impossible for you to consciously process the need to press the breaks, make the decision to do so, and move your foot into position before you’re occupying the same space as the vehicle in front of you. People are able to do it because the unconscious mind takes control, and you act without conscious thought. That’s the fight-or-flight response. It’s a wonderful, incredibly powerful survival mechanism that must have been especially crucial during more savage times, and still saves lives today.

But.

I told a small lie in the above paragraph. I said that the hypothalamus sends a fear-signal through our bodies when our lives are in danger. I should have said, when our subconscious mind thinks our lives are in danger. And it is in the nature of our subconscious mind to hedge its bets on this issue. After all, if our subconscious overreacts, then what happens? We spend a few minute in physiological stress? The human body can tolerate this easily. On the other hand, if it underreacts when we really need to go into fight or flight, then we could end up dead from a car collision, or eaten by a bear, or any one of who knows how many other things.

Now that by itself still wouldn’t be so bad, but it seems that somewhere along the way, the threshold for what counts as an emergency has slipped further and further from its original intent. Ideally, sticking to fight-or-flight as a response to immediate, mortal danger, we would be using it, what? Once or twice a year at most, and usually in traffic? Research says that today, the average person is going into fight-or-flight five to ten times PER DAY.

After all, most of you reading this don’t worry about car accidents and being eaten by bears. You worry about whether that issue with the money will turn out alright, if your significant other will ever start/stop doing that thing, or if you don’t have a significant other, whether you’ll ever get one. You worry about whether that small health concern might be evidence of some unseen and dangerous condition, or whether or not your friends really like you, deep down. These are all common things that people worry about. I’ve worried about all of them at one time or another, and I bet you have too.

How many times in life have you found yourself stressing out because a stranger looked at you funny, or because of some imagined subtext in something a friend or family member said to you, or some other concern that turned out to be nothing at all? But that’s normal, isn’t it? No. It has been normalized, but that is not the same thing. And when this becomes the de facto state of affairs for a long period of time—like, for example, your entire adult life—then eventually, that physiological stress becomes persistent. It sticks with us all through the day, and once that starts to build up, it can cause nearly any sort of problem.

The Source of Illness and Disease (again)

Anxiety is, more or less, a particularly acute example of this same stress, more specifically fixated then the general stress that radiates from the above cycle, and more persistent than the usual fight-or-flight response is meant to be. Anxiety takes the form of a fear that something will happen in the future—and the future could mean five minutes from now, or five years. However, it is rooted in the past, in memory.

In 2004, Dr. Eric Nestler announced research out of Southwestern University that shifted the foundations of the medical world. He said: “We have found the source of illness and disease.” Until this moment, if a man came in for an X-ray, and the doctor saw a cancerous shadow lurking on it, then when the man asked how he got cancer, the answer was always, “We don’t know.”

Of course, we had pinpointed risk-factors for various diseases, but when someone asks the question of why one person with those risk factors catches the disease while another person with the same risk factors does not, or when someone asks why they caught it despite having no risk factors, this was our first real answer.

“Dr. Alex,” you might say, “I thought stress was the source of illness and disease?” It is, but you might also say that what they found was the source of physiological stress. What was it? Cellular memories—which really means the same thing as plain old memories to most of us. They call them that because they realized that individual cells actually retain complete memories, previously thought only to be stored in the brain.

Naturally, our subconscious mind uses these memories to determine possible dangers. If a person is nearly killed by a bear, then the next time they see a bear, their subconscious mind will, of course, remember that and hit the fight-or-flight button. But what about all of these other non-traumatic traumas?

The subconscious mind does not think through each of these memories and logically determine whether the danger was real. It goes by hormones, by the amount of adrenaline that the event caused you to release. If something scares you bad enough, then it becomes a trauma, and a legitimate danger as far as your subconscious is concerned, even if all that really happened was that you got chewed out by your boss.

So now you have a paper tiger staring you down every time you go into work. You get a little more worked up, a little more stressed every time traffic threatens to make you late, every time a work project isn’t progressing smoothly, every time you have a performance review or a trip to HR. Because as peculiar as it sounds, your subconscious mind remembers that time your boss raised their voice to you, and it treats the idea of that happening again like a life-and-death threat. Maybe it gets worse over time, or you start to stress about stressing about it, and now you’re in full-blown anxiety.

So What Do I Do About Anxiety?

For many years here in America, there has been a bad habit of turning to pharmaceuticals for everything. Sure, you can manage symptoms with anti-anxiety medication—and to be clear, this can sometimes be really helpful as a bridge, giving you enough relief to do what you need to do. But this is only coping with the problem, not curing it. If you want to do that, you have to deal with the memories.

Banish any ideas that having to work on your mental state this way makes you weird, or crazy, or effeminate (although thankfully, perspective is rapidly shifting away from this idea). Modern research suggests that about 50% of our memories have errors in them. And since human beings by default also lean about 80% to the negative, it’s hardly surprising that we’ve found ourselves in this situation.

Of course, I have to recommend the Healing Codes and Belief Mapping. I’ve spent my life studying this issue, and they’re the best tools I know. We have free options available, so please make use of them. As far as other things you can do, I’d say that one of the best is just talking about what’s bothering you.

I don’t necessarily mean therapy either, although that can be a big help for some people. It sounds overly simple, but anxiety thrives in isolation. COVID has given us overwhelming evidence of that, if there was ever any doubt. Human connection is one of the best grounding mechanisms there is, but connection means interaction, not only being around people. So get it off your chest!

Relatedly (and some of you may scoff, but I can’t leave it out), prayer may be the single most powerful tool out there. This is not my religious opinion (and I hate the word religion anyway), but a medical one. In their wonderful book, How God Changes Your Brain, Andrew Newberg, M.D., and Mark Robert Waldman originally set out to find the healthiest activity on earth for the human brain. The surprising result was that prayer placed first by a longshot. Exercise was a distant second.

Nevertheless, I wouldn’t encourage anyone to do something they don’t believe in. If you feel you can do it in sincerity, then give prayer a shot. I believe honest prayer is the best prayer. Don’t try to follow a ritual or a particular mode of speaking, just talk like you’re talking to a good friend. Scream and cuss if that’s the most honest thing for you, just say what you mean.

But if you’re not up for prayer, you might try what I call “making a request of your heart.” Essentially, speaking out loud to your subconscious, rather than to God. You may feel a little silly, but actions make a bigger impression on the subconscious than thoughts, and I’ve seen this trick work wonders for a lot of people.

If you struggle with anxiety, PLEASE try at least one of these methods. The nature of the beast can make it feel inescapable, but with the right tools, you might just be amazed at how they turn back to paper.

Have a blessed, wonderful day!

Dr. Alex Loyd