The Chemistry of Calm

A Powerful, Drug-Free Plan to Quiet Your Fears and Overcome Your Anxiety

Henry Emmons, MD

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781439149539
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Blending Eastern techniques of meditation with traditional Western solutions of diet and exercise, celebrated psychiatrist Dr. Henry Emmons offers a proven plan to combat anxiety—without medication—that has helped tens of thousands gain inner peace and start enjoying life. The debilitating effects of anxiety can affect your sense of well-being, health, longevity, productivity, and relationships. In The Chemistry of Calm, Dr. Henry Emmons presents his Resilience Training Program—a groundbreaking regimen designed to relieve anxiety and restore physical and mental strength. This step-by-step plan for mental calmness and emotional wisdom focuses on ways to create resilience as a key to resolving anxiety in everyday life, incorporating the latest science on: -Diet—you've got to eat good food to feel good
-Exercise—it's proven: moving makes you less anxious
-Nutritional Supplements—boosting your natural anxiety resistance
-Mindfulness—including meditation techniques to calm your body and brain Using this program, Dr. Emmons has helped countless patients reduce their anxiety and reclaim the resilience that is their birthright. Now, with The Chemistry of Calm, you can be anxiety free too!

PART ONE
Build a Strong Foundation

1
The Promise of Tranquility

Why Anxiety Hurts, and How You Can Fix It

“I’M HAVING round two of PTSD. I haven’t slept in seven months!”

Meeting me for the first time, Catherine slumped in her chair with fatigue, yet her body was so tense and restless that she could not stop moving. What bothered her most was the ceaseless movement of her mind, so locked in activity that it allowed her no rest, not even in sleep. “I’ve tried everything I’ve been told to do, and nothing has worked. I’m afraid I’ll never come out of this. Is there any hope for me?”

Catherine’s life had been entirely halted by anxiety. Nine years earlier, she had experienced a similar episode that left her paralyzed by fear. Then, too, she couldn’t sleep well for months. She found sleeping medications to be helpful at that time. But now, reeling from her diagnosis of cancer just seven months ago, nothing was helping. She had tried half a dozen medications, yet slept only three to four hours per night. She could not turn off the cascade of fear, and despite trips to a sleep center and several doctors, she had lost any hope of improvement.

“I know it seems like it will never end,” I told her, “but this is only temporary.” I explained to Catherine that she was actually a very resilient person who normally enjoyed good health. Her fear switch was just locked in the on position right now, and it was keeping her stress hormones so high that she couldn’t sleep. “We need to find some things to calm that down, and to get you sleeping again,” I reassured her. “If you can get some sleep, I’m confident that you’ll feel a whole lot better within a few days. Then we can look at ways to keep this from happening again.”

And it was true. This bout with anxiety started when she learned that she had cancer, but the cancer was successfully treated and her prognosis was good. It’s entirely normal to feel scared when one gets such a diagnosis, but for some reason her body and mind were unable to shut down that automatic stress reaction as they should have. And since she couldn’t sleep, there was very little chance that they would do so.

I told Catherine to take a combination of supplements that I thought would calm her nervous system and help her sleep. I believed this to be the key to turning things around for her. She began using B vitamins, magnesium, and 5-HTP twice daily, along with tryptophan and a melatonin complex at night. Sure enough, within five days she clearly began to feel better. “It’s amazing, the calming feeling these supplements give me. And the antianxiety medications I used before did nothing!” she told me, smiling for the first time since I had met her. Her sleep improved quickly and, as I expected, this allowed her mind to calm and her body to relax. The fear switch became unstuck, her stress hormones could return to normal, and she was able to turn her attention to getting her life back on track.

As so often happens, Catherine’s entire life had been derailed by anxiety—not just once but twice. After her cancer diagnosis she had quit her job, left a community and lifestyle that she loved, and moved back in with her parents, who could help care for her. Though she was grateful to have her parents’ support, she found herself socially isolated, as do so many who live with strong anxiety. She also feared that this spiral of anxiety would happen to her again. What could she do to prevent the cycle from starting all over again?

She decided to enter the Resilience Training Program. I started this program because our usual ways of treating anxiety and mood problems are so often insufficient. People like Catherine are frustrated with medications, want to learn things they can do for themselves, and desperately want to know how to prevent their debilitating bouts of anxiety from coming back again and again. They are looking for relief and are not finding it in the usual places. Resilience Training is a proven eight-week program that incorporates the latest science on diet, exercise, and nutritional supplements along with the best emotional self-care available—what I call the “psychology of mindfulness.” Resilience Training is a step-by-step training in mental calmness and emotional wisdom, designed to help patients recover from and prevent relapse of anxiety, depression, and similar stress related problems. It has been effective even when medications are not—and in fact, many of my patients find they don’t need to use traditional prescription antianxiety medication at all. In The Chemistry of Calm, I outline my entire approach to stress and anxiety problems, working with body and mind, heart and soul. We humans are complex beings, integrated and whole. When dealing with something as far-reaching as stress and anxiety can be, we need solutions that are as integrated and whole as we are.

Fear, worry, stress, and compulsivity, the unpleasant and unproductive states known collectively as anxiety, are even more common than depression. And anxiety states are increasingly frequent, especially in recent times. Like depression, the effects of anxiety extend beyond the body and mind to the entire being, affecting not only one’s sense of well-being but also health, longevity, work productivity, relationships—the entire human condition.

As I explained to Catherine, fear itself is a normal, necessary part of being human. Like pain, it is a useful, even indispensable signal that there is something in our environment that is threatening or simply needs our attention. The problem comes when something goes awry in an otherwise normal process—when the reaction becomes excessive or unyielding. Parts of the body-mind turn off, while other areas get locked in the on position, unable to shut down even after the threat, if there ever was one, is long past. Catherine, for example, had a real scare with her cancer diagnosis. But it was a curable form of cancer that left her at no greater risk than anyone else. The problem was that she could not turn off her fear response.

Genetics plays a role in determining who gets an anxiety disorder, what type it is (e.g., worry, compulsive anxiety, or avoidant anxiety), and its severity. Genetic variability evolves over many millennia, yet we know that the rates of anxiety disorders have skyrocketed in just the last century, not to mention the last decade. I believe this has to do partly with changes in lifestyle, diet, sleep and work patterns, and especially our relationship with stress. Our world is unquestionably complex and in some ways intimidating. Much of the problem, though, lies not with how things have changed outside of us but with our lack of a skillful means for dealing with a challenging world. Catherine, for example, could have spared herself a great deal of suffering if she’d had the ability to fully face the sense of vulnerability that washed over her during her first brush with anxiety nine years earlier. Instead, it lodged in her body, ready to pounce again when faced with another overwhelming stress.

The Chemistry of Calm outlines a clear, holistic program for coping with fear and anxiety in much the same way my first book, The Chemistry of Joy, offered steps for overcoming depression. This book focuses on ways to create innate health and resilience as a key to resolving anxiety in everyday life—from the ordinary to the extreme. My goal is to help you understand fear and anxiety through a holistic lens and learn practical, integrative solutions that draw from new science, effective self-care, and solid spiritual practices. As I hear from so many of my patients: “I don’t want to rely on medication for the rest of my life. I just want to know what I can do for myself!” This book is meant to give you just that—effective things that you can do for yourself to reclaim the resilience that is your birthright.

The Age of Anxiety

In just a few decades, dramatic changes have occurred in our relationship to stress. There are many illnesses that are now associated with stress—and they have become epidemic in scope.

The issue is not that life is so much more stressful now than ever before—a brief look at history may convince us otherwise. Imagine, for example, how stressful it was in times past to routinely lose children to illness; to truly not know whether you and your family would survive the winter; to endure plague, the Civil War, or the Great Depression. But while life has always been stressful, there is something different about how it affects us today, or perhaps how we respond to it.

Likewise, anxiety and its various disorders are nothing new. The ancient Greeks, for example, described agoraphobia (literally “fear of the marketplace”) even in their day, when some had such severe anxiety that they could not leave their homes. Yet the scientific evidence reinforces our perceptions that modern life is stressful in different ways than before, that anxiety disorders are on the rise, and that other chronic illnesses have become entwined with the stress response. The phrase “the age of anxiety” has been used before, but perhaps never more aptly than now.

Anxiety disorders are easily the most common mental illnesses, affecting nearly one in five adult Americans in any given year and 30 percent of people in the United States at some point in their lives.¹ That’s more than forty million people per year who have a diagnosable anxiety condition—not to mention those whose suffering doesn’t quite cross the threshold into illness. Anxiety disorders are estimated to cost the economy over $50 billion per year, mostly from lost productivity.² Other consequences include an increased rate of heart disease, suicide, or death by other physical causes.³

At the same time, we have witnessed in the Western world an explosion of other chronic diseases that apparently are affected by the stress response. Heart disease, Alzheimer’s, chronic fatigue, high blood pressure, asthma, immune system diseases, and even cancer are linked to unhealthy levels of stress and the stress hormones. This problem is highlighted in a recent report by the Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsibility and Science and Environmental Health Network. Titled “Environmental Threats to Healthy Aging,” the report notes that while we live longer today than ever before, we are at increasing risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases. The report refers to the “Western disease cluster” (diabetes, obesity, hypertension, elevated blood lipids, and metabolic syndrome) as factors in the development and progression of various brain disorders.⁴

It’s Not All in Your Head …

I don’t see the mind, body, and spirit as separate things—they are just different reflections of a unified whole. But too often we focus on one and forget the others. The physical and emotional conditions of stress and anxiety have become the scourges of modern life, and they create a huge amount of suffering. What you do to relieve these in the mind also helps the body and spirit—and vice versa. Let’s take a closer look at some of the different aspects of the stress/fear cycle, all of which we will address in the Resilience Training Program.

The Adrenal/Stress Response

The adrenal/stress response is the key to whether or not fear makes us sick. It is not that stress itself is bad. Studies show that short-term stress can even be good for us. But as the military has discovered, if the amount of stress is great enough, anyone can be broken down by it. Most of us, of course, don’t experience severe stress in our day-to-day lives. But if your daily life is filled with constant, unremitting stress—if stress is ever present, like background noise—it can be destructive. Still, what determines how well you survive chronic stress is how you react to it and whether you are able to shut it down. Throughout this book you will learn how to protect your body from the corrosive effects of stress.

Brain on Fire: The Destructive Effects of Inflammation

Inflammation is supposed to be one of the ways by which the body protec...