The Thammasat University Library has newly acquired a book that should be useful for students interested in psychology, psychiatry, the allied health sciences, philosophy, and related fields.

The Anatomy of Anxiety: Understanding and Overcoming the Body’s Fear Response is by Dr. Ellen Vora, an American psychiatrist, acupuncturist, and yoga teacher.

The TU Library collection also includes other books about different aspects of anxiety.

The noun anxiety means a feeling of uneasiness of mind related to some uncertainty or worry.

It can be an expected reaction to stress.

For example, students might feel anxious before taking a test or before making an important decision.

The word derives from a Latin term meaning anguish or troubled in mind.

In an online interview, Dr. Vora suggested that

Technology has influenced students’ mental health. Even something as simple as one’s relation to one’s phone works on many levels to increase anxiety. One part of that is social media, “compare and despair,” and fear of missing out. There’s even the effect technology has on our sleep quality […]  so we’re not getting tired at the right time, not falling asleep or sleeping deeply, and then we go through our days feeling anxious.

The author also notes that what we consider to be anxiety may be a result of sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, or using social media late at night.

These activities

are capable of creating a stress response in the body, which prompts the release of hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline—signaling a state of emergency to the brain that can leave us feeling anxious. In other words: mental health is physical health. And anxiety—that hypervigilant feeling that escalates swiftly to a sense of catastrophe and doom—is as grounded in the body as it is in the mind.

So while brain chemistry and thought patterns do play a role in anxiety, I would argue that these are actually downstream effects—meaning that frequently our brain chemistry changes as a result of an imbalance in the body. And this is a hopeful message! In understanding that the body is as capable of informing our moods as the brain is, we have come to realize that our anxiety is far more preventable than previously known. That is, through relatively straightforward adjustments to our diet and lifestyle, we can avoid unnecessary stress responses and head anxiety off at the pass.

Some feelings of anxiety can be avoided, such as by not drinking caffeinated beverages:

Indeed, sleep deprivation, chronic inflammation from eating foods you don’t tolerate, and the comment section in Twitter—these are all, from your body’s perspective, indications that your environment is not safe. As such, diet and lifestyle factors are critical contributors to our mental health, given that they can trip the body into a stress response.

Our genes and thoughts do, of course, have sway over our moods, but our daily habits are the real determinants of much of our anxiety. And intervening at the level of the body, when indeed the source of a person’s anxiety is physical, is often quicker, less expensive, and more effective.

Sometimes diet can be a factor in anxiety, when we eat too much gluten, dairy, sugar, and processed foods:

• Blood sugar: Given that the modern food landscape is built on a foundation of coffee drinks (which are secretly milkshakes) and rosé all day, many of us are riding the blood sugar roller coaster, with our blood sugar swinging up and down throughout the day. And every blood sugar crash generates a stress response, which can feel identical to anxiety. If you’re familiar with the experience of being “hangry,” then you probably also get “hanxious,” meaning you get anxious when your blood sugar is low. These blood sugar crashes are a largely avoidable cause of anxiety, and I’ve found adjustments to blood sugar to be among the most immediate and effective salves for anxiety.
• Caffeine: To be clear, caffeine is not inherently bad. However, just as with blood sugar crashes, when we ingest caffeine, it promotes the release of cortisol, which revs up the sympathetic response. In other words, caffeine makes our nervous system ready for a fight. Then if we introduce a stressor—say, a difficult commute or an unsettling work email—we have a more pronounced reaction to that stress. Before you know it, your heart is pounding, your hands are tremulous, your body feels shaky, and your mind gets trapped in a ruminative spiral.

I realize that the idea of quitting coffee may be giving you anxiety right about now. Indeed, coffee sometimes feels like the only reliable joy in our day, and our one true friend in the world. But remember that caffeine feels so good, in part, because it’s the antidote to its own withdrawal—we wake up in caffeine withdrawal, and then coffee gets the credit for being the salvation to the very problem it created! Fortunately, there are ways to wean ourselves off caffeine without undue suffering. The key is to go very gradually.

• Alcohol: Humans have long used alcohol to self-medicate for anxiety, and for good reason—it works. In the short run, at least. […]

But the body doesn’t really care whether or not we’re relaxed; it just wants us to survive. So when we’ve had a glass or two of wine, the body becomes aware that if a leopard came around the corner, we’d be too buzzed to care. The brain then goes to great lengths to restore homeostasis—the original state of balance. It does this by reabsorbing GABA and converting it into glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter. The resulting feeling is anxiety. Alcohol chills us out temporarily, but in the end, it leaves us feeling more anxious than we were to begin with. And this effect can accumulate over time, so it’s easy to see how alcohol creates the need for itself, looping us into a vicious cycle.

• Micronutrient deficiencies: Finally, many of us are anxious because we’re deficient in critical nutrients. In the U.S., our relationship with food has become so fraught that we have nearly forgotten the connection between food and nourishment. The fact is that the functioning of our brains rests on whether our food provides the necessary raw materials. When we’re well-nourished, we feel good. And when we rely on nutritionally bankrupt processed foods, we are left overfed but undernourished, and feeling anxious. To get the necessary nutrients from our diet, we need to eat a wide variety of nutrient-dense foods.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)