Depression/anxiety: You've Been Doing This to Yourself

The modern world is maladaptive, disengaged, disingenuous and dysfunctional. At least in the context of the modern brain which is still the same as when we were hunter-gatherers.

The chief reasons to be "nervous" then was if food was unavailable or physical safety was threatened and these were usually major threats against survival resulting in outright fear, as opposed to chronic, daily, mind-numbing anxiety.

Today, the threat of not being dressed "appropriately" can cause one to spiral into a panic attack with physiological/physical symptoms that result in the belief one is out of control or actually dying. The modern brain has literally linked up fast-paced modern customs and lifestyles with the actual fear of physical death or "insanity." Not conforming to socially prescribed behaviors has become as frightening as a Saber Toothed Tiger lunging for your jugular.

And once these circuits are hard-wired, they will remain with you for decades, lighting up the brain as if death, or complete loss of control, could happen at any moment.

Depression and anxiety unfold in a macabre dance significantly depreciating the quality of your life. As you sink ever lower into depression, anxiety rises equally. The rock bottom of depression is suicidal thoughts or wanting to die. The highest summit of anxiety are panic attacks and the feeling of completely losing control or going "insane." Either way, you can only go so far down and so far up (often simultaneously), before the survival/fear circuits of the brain give you no other choice but to obsess regularly on these themes. 

But, the good news is that, all along, you were doing this to yourself. Hence, it can be undone.

This year (winter 2013-14) has been the worst, in my 30 yrs experience, for anxiety/depression/panic. People experiencing prolonged stressors prior to the winter months, due to various reasons, had their anxieties magnified by one of the worst winters we've had in many years. Come spring/summer, the symptoms have been so rigidly hard-wired in the grey matter, that daily moods eventually spin out of control, simply because nothing was done to alleviate the daily grinding of the previous stressors. People cocoon or isolate from significant others. They stuff and repress negative beliefs/emotions, failing to seek confirmation on the accuracy of those beliefs, thereby, compounding and intensifying the physiological symptoms and move gradually down the road to a feeling of complete "insanity."

You didn't know you were doing it, but you were bringing yourself to the point of death or insanity, but only in your mind. Everything else was fine and, for some, a visit to the ER confirms the fact that you weren't dying, only chronically obsessing on death, which only intensified the physiological symptoms.

Society prescribes all the financial and materialistic methods of seeking "happiness." Yet, if you follow these prescriptions you will never find peace only an anxious state of dissatisfaction.

Your fast-paced, overly anxious lifestyle, is obstructing a psycho-emotional state of peace. Modern society demands chronic anxiety and worry and if you surrender to that, then you surrender to maintaining a state of mind focused on loss of control and, eventually, over time, to death itself.

Bring down your anxiety and rise out of your depression, by understanding that, all along...

...you've been doing this to yourself.