Anxiety is a Big Cause of Chronic Symptoms

hey guys how are you this is jim prusak physical therapist from the pain pt and today we're going to talk about anxiety and chronic pain or chronic symptoms in the body so the topic today is going to be about anxiety and chronic pain or chronic symptoms in the body and i think you guys are going to be surprised to see how common anxiety disorder or even low to moderate levels of anxiety is associated with chronic pain or chronic symptoms in the body in my opinion when i work with people it's probably the number one thing i see in people that's contributing to or causing their symptoms so let me give you a couple statistics that are out there from the research in the science here i've wrote down a couple of things i found and you might be surprised to hear some of these stats so what we know is close to 50 percent of people with chronic pain have an anxiety disorder and anxiety disorders at least in the united states and it's probably worldwide is the number one mental health condition okay so it's very very common it's the biggest thing we see and like i said it's very highly linked with chronic pain and other conditions so there was a study done here in the u.s uh it was over a period of three years they pulled people 161 000 people and with chronic pain and arthritis and they found out that people with arthritis and chronic pain were more likely to screen positive for a mental health condition than healthy controls and it was 79 79 of the people with chronic pain and arthritis screened positive for a mental health condition so as you're seeing with the data there's very very strong links between our brain and pain our brain in chronic symptoms in the body okay we know that people with anxiety disorders are three to five times more likely to go to the doctor okay so what that tells us is that anxiety is creating physical symptoms in the body and they go to the doctor and it's not being diagnosed this is part of the problem is that we go to the physician and we're looking at a physical problem and they're looking at it physically and they're not realizing the cause is anxiety like i said the biggest thing i see in people from my observation is that anxiety is number one cause of symptoms in the body we'll talk in other videos about depression and ptsd being two of the other biggest causes of chronic pain and chronic health symptoms in the body okay so it's very very common um what we find here is that anxiety disorders and mood disorders are two to seven times more prevalent in people with chronic pain and migraines so people who have anxiety disorders and mood disorders they're two to seven times more prevalent in chronic pain and migraine suffers okay so again more data showing the connection and basically that's you know what i want to talk about in terms of the data now i want to go over this concept of anxiety here today because it is so prevalent something i see so commonly and often in people i work with is that we need to talk about what is anxiety and how can we look at it and how can we work with it in a different way now i can speak very personal about anxiety because that's something i went through i've had anxiety most of my life and it's something i've overcome now but it took a while for me to figure out what what this was and then how to work with it so with anxiety as you guys know it it's a version of fear right if it's that's the category of emotion is fear but the difference between anxiety and real fear is that anxiety is a perceived based on a perceived danger or perceived threat okay and this can be anything that at any time in your life where you're doing something being with a certain person out somewhere thinking about something watching something into tv having a symptom in your body it could be anything that triggers off this sort of anxiety reaction okay and so you'll feel a level of fear okay now if you're feeling pure anxiety emotional anxiety you're going to feel it as a level of fear that shaky nervy kind of energy in your body okay that's classic anxiety now first thing we got to do this decide is is there any danger okay so again we this is coming from your amygdala anxiety coming from the limbic brain and we need to tap into the cortex we always talk about the prefrontal cortex and decide and say hey let me look around here is there any real danger okay we need to have the cortex to come into play because if it doesn't the amygdala is going to be perceiving danger and threat when there is nothing going on and if we listen to that then we're going to be stuck okay it's like having real fear but there is no real fear so we're acting as if there's a real fear or real danger and there isn't so we got to check ourselves okay because anxiety is just energy in your body it's just uh emotion now as we know all emotions are okay normal all emotions are normal we need to learn how to work with each of these emotions so anxiety is different from anger it's different from sadness we want to be able to work with all three of the categories of emotions in a good way something i work with people on so with anxiety when we work with anxiety one of the principles with this is that we do not want to listen to anxiety we do not want to listen to it because again it's a false alarm it's it's false danger it's the idea that your brain you're making us believing there's a fire going on in your home or a fire going on in your body is a better way to put it when there's nothing going on it's just a false alarm okay it's it's there's not a real fire it feels like a real fire because the symptoms are real in your body but there is no physical danger there's no danger to your body okay so we have to really get to understand this concept first and then we need to apply the understanding into a practice okay this is more important that you practice what you understand or take theory to practice and this is the idea that whatever you're anxious about we need to face whatever you're anxious about we need to face directly we gotta face it head-on okay because it's the only way we're gonna overcome it anxiety just like fear is going to enact the flight reaction part of your nervous system want to make you avoid okay that's called fear avoidance make you flee pull back not engage okay and when we have anxiety we don't want to do that okay we can't do that we won't get better so one of the things with anxiety and i learned this in myself was that i would have social anxiety and some generalized anxiety and a little bit of health anxiety too because i went through chronic pain as well various times in my life that's why i'm very familiar with the stuff and you have to learn that anxiety i had to learn myself that i didn't need to listen to it i can just let this energy pass it goes from my brain it gets injected into my body just imagine a syringe just injecting you and all sudden you get this anxiety and your body and then you need to know what to do with it so instead of listening to it and saying oh i better get out of here i better avoid i'm uncomfortable i better go home i better avoid situations better avoid the pain i better avoid activities we need to confront that it's just chemicals it's just chemicals and again the chemicals are trying to indicate a danger to you guys or a threat when there isn't so that's why the cortex needs to come in and say there's no danger there's no threat there's nothing wrong there's nothing wrong here and then we have to let that danger signal that was injected into the body in the form of pure anxiety or physical anxiety which we're going to talk about next go we don't need to worry about it okay so what can happen is that we can get what's called physical anxiety or it's called unconscious anxiety in the psychological world where we're not feeling pure anxiety anymore we don't feel anxious in the classic sense but what we're now feeling is a symptom in the body a somatic symptom pain anything a stomach issue a headache back pain and knee pain i mean the symptoms are endless those are the hundreds of symptoms you can go to the anxiety center c-e-n-t-r-e.com anxietycenter.com and they have a list of somatic symptoms from anxiety and it's it's very comprehensive so same premise here what you're feeling in your body is anxiety okay once we can classify that and you know when i work at people i make that diagnosis that i think you know your symptom is just anxiety it's not structural it's not physical but it's coming from your brain then we are able to face it okay this is why we can confront the pain and start doing things again because because there is no danger in your body it feels dangerous the symptoms are exactly the same exactly the same or even worse than the physical version of it okay meaning it's real pain it's in your body it's in the same areas and locations if you had an injury but the source is from the brain sources from your anxiety so again if you listen to the pain now you listen to the symptom that's coming from your anxiety the anxiety now is serving the purpose okay to keep you from doing something it's trying to stop you the limbic brain is perceiving danger of threat and it wants you to stop and avoid doing things in your life or to move forward it wants you to focus on the threat which could be the pain now could be the symptom and that's why people's brains go right to the symptom in hyper vigilance and focus on it because that serves the anxiety okay it serves you to be looking out for danger threat in your body now understanding this is the first step like i said and practicing it as a second step where we need to learn to challenge and confront and face these are all great words challenge confront face the anxiety symptom okay and move forward with our life understanding that if you're diagnosed with anxiety driven pain we have nothing to fear there's nothing wrong with you which is great there's nothing wrong with you except the brain centers are over activating now anxiety can come from many things it can come from having traumatic events in your life ptsd it can come from adverse childhood events it can come from a lot of stress it can come from other health conditions you had in the past and now you developed the health anxiety fear around your health and around the symptom so you can have many reasons why but at the end of the day the end of the day guys the anxiety is the same in everybody it's a false fear it's a irrational fear that is driven by the brain the amygdala and the limbic brain that is not realizing there's not a real fire going on okay remember that part of your brain the limbic reptilian brain is going to overshoot on the side of caution and depending on what's happened to it if you've been traumatized ptsd high levels of stress previous health conditions parents who are anxious you so you've learned basically anxiety at some point in your life and now it's part of you that limbic brain is not going to self-correct that's what the studies show it's not going to self-correct with anxiety we have to teach it through the prefrontal cortex to correct basically to say hey there's no danger you're fine you are fine you need to teach that brain over and over again until it eventually learns that that it doesn't need to be producing the anxiety anymore because there's no real fire in the body there's no real fire okay so this is the premise of the treatment that we're trying to apply when we do this and we really have to be diligent about this because it comes on and we we don't like that feeling in our body whether it's pure anxiety or it's obviously physical anxiety through a symptom but we have to be able to decipher through the prefrontal cortex what's going on without that you're going to be controlled by your amygdala it's called amygdala hijack talked about that before studies show stanford study 2020 was the first brain study of its kind mentioned this before to show that when a person's in anxiety now they're measuring classic anxiety but you can imagine physical anxiety with symptoms same thing the amygdala is sending one-way signals to your cortex and they were not able to pick up any signals coming back from the cortex to the amygdala now that's really the part of healing we're talking about the cortex is supposed to regulate the amygdala in a way to dampen it down to quiet it down to calm it down it loses its ability and we end up with amygdala hijack it's being hijacked so our job is to start getting the signal going back to the amygdala to say hey look there's nothing here there's not a fire just you know you're gonna dump this stuff in my body either pain or anxiety but i'm not going to listen to it because it's not true it's not real it's it's it feels very real it is real in the sense of the chemicals but there is no danger in my body it's from my brain so i need to not listen to it essentially so that's the premise here guys is that we need to overcome anxiety to heal at the core of it whether you're anxious about whatever it is so this is called facing your fears but again it's not a real fear you're facing your anxiety and i'm always telling people anxiety is not fear it's different because idea is not real fear so again we do not need to listen to it in the sense that your house is on fire and you better run out the door right now so we have to challenge everything you're anxious about in your life we should tick them off and this is what i help people do and it's hard work you know i really push people look you can do this let's go and people are like i don't know i can't i'm going to have a lot of pain i go it's your pain is fine there's nothing wrong with the pain it's just anxiety so once we make that distinction that your pain is a version of anxiety which is what i do with people then we can move forward to regain our life we don't need to be a victim to this because the anxiety is going to weaken you and it's going to push you down okay we'll talk more about that in another video but it's going to push you down it's going to disempower you because when you're in a state of anxiety in in fear like state you're going to feel weak and you need to withdraw from things you need to pull back you're not going to stand up for yourself you're not going to move forward you're going to feel like you're again this victim that's been disempowered and you're going to go down to low-level emotions potentially and that's going to lead to depression for some people it's going to lead to apathy and despair we don't want that so guys this anxiety is a is a big problem and it's very closely associated with physical symptoms your body as a cause of them it can also result on the back end from the condition and then that also feeds your symptoms on the back end so you develop a symptom and then because you've had it for a while you get anxious and now that feeds the symptom so at the core of it it's still anxiety whether it's on the front end or the back end or both the problem is anxiety at this point because the body heals the body will always heal but if you're anxious at any level the pain will continue okay the pain will persist or like i said anxiety will cause the pain in the first place so either way we're dealing with anxiety so i hope this was helpful guys reach out with questions comments here if you need help on your journey you're getting stuck fill out a consultation request form um have been quite busy um i do have a wait list but it can be moved pretty quickly to get you in and get that diagnosis and then from that point on we can start to move forward we can just say what is this what's going on and then we can have a plan of action to get you back to where you want to be all right guys take care hope you're having a great day i'll talk to you soon bye

Channel: Healing Chronic Somatic Symptoms- The Pain PT

Views: 14,228

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Id: e_Px2oj-K24

Length: 17min 29sec (1049 seconds)

Published: Sat May 21 2022