Podcast: E14 - My Journey of Anxiety and the 3 Legged Stool

Listen to the episode here: E14 - My Journey of Anxiety and the 3 Legged Stool - https://apple.co/3Tx5Rix

Hello there, it's Dr. Tiffany, and welcome to the Integrative Mental Health Therapy with Dr. Tiffany podcast. It's been a while since we connected, and I appreciate your patience with my process. I like to wait until I'm clear on my inspiration and where I am in the journey of communicating with you.

Why Are You Miserable? And the one before that was neuroinflammation and those were released practically at the same time and those are very well received and I'm so glad. And I wanted to make sure that as, you know, I navigated the month of February, I was true to kind of where my heart was and what I wanted to share with you and the kinds of things that I was really noticing as patterns in my work and my own journey and my practice.

And so I launched into a series mid February around anxiety. And so a lot of what I've been posting about and sharing and felt really authentic and helpful to the people that I serve and sending an email has been around this anxiety piece. And here's why.

So remember, if you're listening to me, you know I believe things are to be addressed and treated holistically. This idea in Western medicine that things are in a silo doesn't honor how we were designed as human beings, what we see in nature. So we need to approach this from the brain, body, mind perspective. Everything has a synergy. What goes on in the body, what goes on in the brain absolutely affects the mind right? What goes on in the mind, oh my gosh, affects the body and brain. It really does.

And just the power of the mind to impact just health and just that piece is where I was like, I just need to take time. I need to take some time with myself and my journaling and my prayer and my meditation. I need to take time with my coach. I need to figure out how I want to position just this next podcast episode and then my messaging and the world and the way that I approach things because I am living and doing and existing in this paradigm of like a mind-body treatment, mind body brain treatment, how it all ties in. But I don't know if I am beating that drum enough in what I'm communicating.

And so I really just tried to refocus in on not just it being an anxiety series, but just that connection. So I want to have this episode. kind of tee off this anxiety series. We're going to be talking about it over the next few episodes. They may come more frequently now that I've got a better sense of how I'm centering and approaching it. And then I would love to hear from you because I am very passionate about this particular topic. So as they roll out, as the episodes become more and more available, Tell me how it's working for you. Tell me your thoughts.

And if you're not on the mailing list, or you don't follow me on like Facebook or Instagram, more on Facebook, I know that like dates me, but I seem to have Facebook better figured out. So if you're not following me on those places, please get on the mailing list. So this is my journey from my signature method approach of emotional healing holistically, right? So my signature approach of looking at this my journey of anxiety, of overwhelm, of the connection between health and the brain, all of those things.

And I won't get into this. I've told my story a lot on this podcast and I've gone into great depth about my own healing and my own healing journey and where I came from, what I want to snapshot a little bit more is the crisis moment. Okay? And I want you, as long as it's not triggering, I want you to think about your crisis moment. I want you to think about your crisis moment of like where your health changed or where you really got clarity around something has to be different. Right? Something broke my health or broke me mentally, emotionally and has to be different, okay?

My big shift really occurred in 2016. My system had been working up to, and when I say my system, I'm talking about my brain, body, and mind, but I'm also talking about my system of parts from a psychological perspective as well. I had been working my way up to just more and more chronic overwhelm and anxiety. I had a lot going on with businesses. I had a lot, I had way too much going on business-wise. I had, and this is gonna be an important part of the story, and you may find that this is the case with you, so professionally you may have a lot going on. Professionally I had too many things going on.

And so there was that part without getting into all those things. And then I had a car accident. This was a critical piece, because a lot of the people that I work with suffer from severe brain injury to mild brain injury. So some know they were concussed, they've played sports, they know that they hit their head, their nervous system took a hit. Neurologically, their brain spine took a major hit, and some don't even know that they did. You can have just brain trauma occur because of a slow car accident and your brain just whips forward and backwards too aggressively.

I was driving a car going appropriate speed limit, but ran into a deer on the interstate and almost totaled my car. If it hadn't been the car that it was, it would have been totaled. That also happened at that time in 2016. And then we had, I hadn't been married that long. I'd only been married a couple of years. My husband and I were navigating that experience. There was a lot of stress there. We were receiving intermittently like Christian counseling and navigating that. It was just all hard. And then we had a bit of a crisis with some just, both of us got an infection of something called ehrlichiosis. I've done a podcast about this.

And so we both ended up struggling with Ehrlichia, which is a co-infection of Lyme, of Borrelia burgdorferi, but that's Lyme. It's a tick-borne infection. That's when my health broke. And so I had been dealing with a lot of overwhelm and anxiety. Here's the way I want you to see this, and here's how I want you to look at this for yourself.

Your nervous system has various states that it needs to be in, right? So some of you listeners know about polyvagal theory. Some of you have done the safe and sound protocol with me. You know way too much about the vagus nerve, about HRV, about polyvagal theory, and you know the autonomic nervous system, right? And ventral vagal is where we're all aspiring to be in, which is where we're relational, we're connected, we're loving, we feel safe. And then there's sympathetic dominance, which is that feeling of being overwhelmed and anxious and chronically activated where there's tension in the body and there's too much cortisol dumping and you feel like things and people are out to get you. Dorsal vagal is collapse that will present as feeling depressed and flat and not wanting to do anything and uninspired and no energy and those types of things.

And so many times people will say they're anxious and they're overwhelmed. And at the same time, I want us to

 look at this from a nervous system perspective, you are operating in sympathetic dominance, right? So there are bracing patterns in your neck and your shoulders and your body, you're tight, you're tense. With your, if you're working with me, you know, we monitor HRV, so you're looking at your scores and your whoop or your aura ring and you were seeing low HRV status, which you and I are probably working on, right? We may have done adrenal testing like I did on myself and you are in like hyper arousal and dumping too much cortisol or you are crashing at certain times of the day.

So what we do with the way that I see things is we have to get out of like, I'm stressed out or I'm just anxious and we need to start looking at multiple areas of your life, which is the picture I'm painting here of when my health broke. All the different areas, looking at the brain, like I have a car accident, so this is an injury to my brain, this is an injury to my spine, my neck has never been the same since this car accident. We're looking at what I had going on professionally and personally, right? There's too much sympathetic dominance on the system.

So we're looking at all the different pressures and pushes on the system, but we're looking at that nervous system response to all this as well. We're looking at infection. We're looking at just overall health and the body. That is how we do my method. That is how we do my method is we look at all of it. And when I go back and I talk to people and I have people who have moments where they feel like they've never been the same or they turned a corner, it may be a divorce, a business was lost. They were fired from a job. something really traumatic happened to them and their system has been stuck in a space since then, or they developed an autoimmune disorder or something like that. They stopped functioning. Many of my clients just don't feel like they can function in school or work anymore. It was all of these things showing up at the same time.

And there's like this mind-body syndrome thing that has also occurred for the person. So when people say, You know diagnose someone with an generalizing anxiety disorder or like I say someone's anxious. I Always I always have people coming into my practice where I am looking at them from these three perspectives And I am looking at them From all of these inputs because that's the way you get people healthy for real like long term Not stuck in therapy for forever not working on the same problem, right? Because I do think that there's a lot of value in long-term therapy if we're not still working on the same exact problem, right? And then this is how you don't have people on medications is when you take that holistic perspective.

And 2016 was the beginning of the end for me starting to develop lupus, right? There were things that made me vulnerable going into that time, to that year, excuse me. But after that, that's where things kind of broke and then the decline of my health occurred and I would later develop a diagnosis of lupus. And what I was feeling was this chronic overwhelm and anxiety, but I was also feeling like it was going crazy. Like clients will describe like these rushes in their system of cortisol and just like their head ringing and there's like this is just something that's a little bit above and beyond, just the feeling, emotional feeling of anxiety, that is also the physical sympathetic dominance piece.

So I am telling you this part of the story, and this is the episode. I'm gonna stop here and I'll have more episodes about just thoughts and emotions and parts and all those things around all of this. Pay attention to the moment where you feel like everything changed. What was going on in all of the areas. Right? And could you parse out that it wasn't just this feeling of anxiety, but it was this sensation in your body and your system of something really being way too activated. Right? Because we need to be able to identify that and theN later we need to know how to kind of work with that from the different psychological perspectives but also the polyvagal perspective, the vagus nerve, like how do you really do this?

And this is why I do my five-day intensives and I spend days working with people on just rebuilding their nervous system and rewiring the way their brain works and calming their system down because some of this requires remodeling and I would ultimately I would have to do three rounds of Safe and Sound Protocol to get my system to recover from that crash that started in 2016. So I'm super passionate about this series and really just honing in on all that needs to be looked at when you start talking about this idea of being anxious. Okay.

I hope this holds together for you. I hope you've learned something in this session that I've put together here, this episode that's gone on for almost 15 minutes. And remember that three legs stool, brain, body, mind, until next time, be well.