your brain hates you.
*Trigger warning; cancer, death & grief*
10 minute read.
So other than the welcome to IAB, this is my first official post; & what a clickbait title I have given it. I listen to a lot of podcasts, & one of my favourites to listen to is Feel Better, Live More by Dr Rangan Chattergee; a General Practitioner in the NHS who, through his podcasts, books & social media, aims to give people the tools to help live a better, healthier life. Sounds ideal, right? My new found science geek loves the conversations between Dr Chatterjee, & a spectrum of specialists in different fields such as medicine, psychology, neuroscience, nutrition, physiotherapy, I mean the list goes on. There is nothing I love more than hearing someone who has an interest talk so passionately about it.
How does this link to this post? Well, during the many conversations I listen to on this podcast, I hear these little tidbits that give me food for thought; things I want to understand more, research & write about. I can’t remember which episode I heard this, but in a conversation focused around anxiety & stress, the guest speaker simply said ‘your brain hates you’ *cue podcast laughter*. & for me it all kind of made sense. It is a very dramatic sentence, your brain obviously does not hate you. In fact your brain works blo*dy hard to keep you alive, healthy & well. However there is some wiring within our brain that seemingly works against us, in order to protect us. I believe if we have more understanding of how our brain works, it will enable us to better rationalise our emotions, our reactions, & our view of a situation. The topic of anxiety is incredibly broad. & here, I am not attempting to present a full understanding of anxiety. There are so many different nuances, lots of other intertwining conditions, situations, times in our lives that can change the presence of anxiety in us. Today, I’m here mainly to look at the very top line of what anxiety is, as there is absolutely no doubt that all of us experience anxiety in some parts of our lives, no matter how big or small.
It’s important to note the differences between worry & anxiety. Worry tends to be thoughts in our mind, whereas anxiety lives more physically in our bodies, thus the two can be interchangeable. Worrying thoughts lead to anxious thoughts, that leads to physical reactions in our bodies. That nervous feeling in your stomach, the sudden hot flush across your body, the feeling of ‘fizzy blood’ (not sure if this is just me..?), the nervous need to poo, or the nerves actually leading you to poo, & other physical reactions. In more serious cases, anxiety can lead to panic attacks, which I cannot draw from experience from, but can be a very scary place anyone to be. In anxious thoughts, we often ‘grasshopper think’, meaning we leap to worse case scenarios believing that this is going to happen, or we catastrophize a situation in order to prepare ourselves for the worse, even though a situation may be minimal at that point in time. Over time, anxiety can become all-consuming & spiral out of our control. All from just thoughts in your brain. We need to go back & look at our evolution to understand why we worry, & in turn, why we have anxious feelings.
Fight or flight. I’m sure we have all heard of this. The fight or flight response we have as humans is to prepare our body to fight or flee in a dangerous situation. In today’s world (here, I am speaking amongst the world in which I live; right now as we all know there are so many horrendous things happening in the world that I cannot even fathom the affect on those effected), technology has advanced so much faster than we have as humans. As part of human evolution way back in the day, we needed to be prepared for dangers that threatened our lives. The most common example given here when talking about fight or flight is the attack of a predatory animal. Your senses pick up on the threatening animal to you, your family, your tribe. The animal is dangerous & far more of a threat to you than you are to them. Your brain sends signals to either prepare to fight, or flee. In short in order to do either of these, you need the following; adrenaline to fight, or to be as light as possible to flee, hence why anxiety affects the feeling in your stomach in the ‘feel like I was gonna sh*t myself’ way, & you also have what feels like a rush of nervousness as the stress hormone of adrenaline is pumped through your body preparing you to fight.
Nowadays we are not threatened by large animals wanting to eat us. Industrial & technological advancements keep us safer from these sorts of threats. Unfortunately, we can still be threatened by other humans who may want to attack us, thus it is likely in an attack we will have the same feelings of adrenaline & nervousness in our stomachs as we try to protect ourselves. Our threats nowadays come in so many forms, & so many of these come from our own thoughts, thus the ‘your brain hates you’.
Anxious thoughts in our mind are often rooted from past experiences & traumas. Intertwined with depression (although not always), they can also come from a place of low self esteem. I will use my experience as an example; as I mentioned in my welcome post (which you can read here), in 2014 my Dad was diagnosed with bowel cancer About a month later it was confirmed as stage four cancer it had spread throughout his body. The original prognosis of life was approximately 2 years with chemotherapy, however, he died suddenly from septicaemia 7 weeks after his diagnosis. One of his tumours had burst in his colon, in turn tearing his colon leading to the said septicaemia. There is a lot happening there in a short time, with very little time to deal with each piece of news as it came across over the 7 weeks. I had up to that point never experienced the death of someone close, so grief was incredibly foreign to me. I had unwavering support from friends, family, & my workplace which I was, & still am so fortunate to have. Nearly 8 years later, I still have anxious thoughts about death & illness. Not just my own, but about the people I care about as well, & it will come in the form of a hot flush, a knot in my stomach & racing thoughts about what might happened, & what I need to do right now. Cancer is a very real threat to all of us alive today, & as statistics show, will affect 1 in 3 of us in our lifetime, & touch every single person in some form . However it’s not like the animal who’s there in front of us as an immediate danger. A big poo is not going to help my thoughts, nor is the adrenaline going to fight cancer or potential cancer (although I’m a big advocate for gut health for overall physical health, & the gut also being linked to mental health; that’s all to come), & of course it’s never going to stop death. We cannot change our fight or flight function, we can only manage it.
The example above is quite a whooping big example. Anxious thoughts & reactions can happen with other events. Let’s look in the context of dating. Dealing with dating & relationships in todays world is an entire own massive sandwich of a topic, but for the sake of this post, a series of unsuccessful dates (unsuccessful in terms of not finding what you were looking for in a particular date) can lead to thoughts of never ‘finding’ what you are looking for (I am going to leave this very loose here as dating means different things to different people so interpret as you will), thus a threat to your happiness, your future contentedness, your self esteem, your life. An unpleasant boss can make you anxious whenever your current boss asks to speak to you. A bad break up can be incredibly scarring & affect our behaviour in future relationships. In our head, these situations are threatening to us, but so incredibly different to the human eating animal from yesteryear. You may have met a person who is frightened of dogs, & 9 times out of 10 it because they have had a scary experience with a dog as a child. Often this stays with someone through adulthood meaning when they encounter a dog, their brain immediately goes into defensive mode to protect them. Very similar to how anxiety is rooted to our past experiences. As seemingly un-life threatening as they are compared to the human-eating animal, they are just important to manage & to try & heal from the experience so we are not all-consumed with anxious thoughts & the reactions that come with them. We cannot wait for evolution to kick in for us, we need to actively manage this ourselves.
In more serious circumstances, a person can be diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). According to DSM5*, GAD includes a number of mental & physical symptoms, which have been present in a person more days than not over a 6 month period. These include excessive worry, being unable to control the worry (grasshopper thinking), muscle tension, sleep disturbance & difficulty concentrating (again, the overthinking/grasshopper thinking/catastrophizing) (DSM5 2013). As you can imagine, living a life full of anxiety is incredibly debilitating, as well as potentially being damaging to your physical health.
Researching some statistics on everyones best friend, google; in 2013 there were 8.2million cases of GAD in the UK (Mental Health Foundation 2021), which was 13% of the total population. Women are also twice as likely to to be diagnosed with anxiety in comparison to men (which in itself leads to an entirely different conversation for another time). Now, this statistic is obviously 9 years old, & having just lived through a pandemic, the Office of National Statistics (ONS) has found that more people have reported an increase in anxiety in individuals since the beginning of lockdown at the end of March 2020. Almost 50% of people scored their anxiety as an average of 5.2/10 vs 3/10 in the last quarter of 2019 (ONS 2020). Which is a very unsurprising statistic given what was happening.
Anxiety isn’t going anywhere, & to an extent, it is a very normal part of life. There are larger threats out there where fight or flight will be necessary, hopefully few & far between for the majority of us. Nervousness can also helps us rationalise when we need to make a difficult decision (however anxiety is not good when you need to make an important decision, & if you can I would avoid making one if feeling VERY anxious). However, before a job interview, feeling nervous & thinking they may not want to employ you. Before asking someone out, being worried about rejection & not being able to get to know that person; there are endless times in our lives where we will have that drop in the stomach & hot arms (really, is this just me?!), but that temporary experience of life is also part of wonderfully complex experience of living & being human. Sometimes these thoughts come from a place of love, care & passion for something. When you’ve worked really hard on a presentation or project & are waiting for feedback. Waiting for that person on a first date that you really like, & really want it to go well. Waiting to hear back on some test results from a doctor for a relative, or yourself of course. It’s when these feelings become overwhelming & unmanageable & effect our day to day lives that we need to actively intervene. Do not let the thoughts in your brain make you think that your brain hates you. Cause although it may feel like it; it really really doesn’t hate you; your brain is protecting you.
*DSM5 is Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder; version 5 published in 2013, thus the latest version. It serves as the principal authority for psychiatric diagnoses. Fun fact, GAD was not recognised as a psychiatric condition until 1980. The DSM has been around since 1952.
Resources
Generalised Anxiety Disorder as per DSM5.
Office of National Statistic Report for Corona Virus & Anxiety published June 2020
Live Better, Feel More Podcast by Dr Rangan Chattergee
Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s Instagram
I absolutely love this and can relate so much. You are an amazing writer x
Thank you thank you! & I’m glad it’s relatable. I think it’s so unfortunately common in our society nowadays that if we understand a little more about it, we can hopefully manage it a bit better.