I have this to say about the many common mental-emotional conditions, today, like depression and anxiety. ‘If your mood persists and doesn’t go away, it originates in your biochemistry.’ Take a moment to think on that statement. I am not saying here that anxiety and depression exist only in our biochemistry by any stretch; they have a very real and consuming presence in our minds. However, if no amount of mental work can bring true and long-standing relief, you must seek to rebalance your neurotransmitters and hormones to find emotional peace.
The fleeting successes of current treatment models should point to the fact that we’re missing something. One thought is that it seems like punishment to ask a person suffering through major depression to talk his/her way out of it. We find they become experts at discussing their problems with therapists who at times seem like very qualified strangers. The depressed individual might become an expert in the vague and circuitous language that their therapists use but rarely is there ever any true healing. Any relief is often only short-lived. The dysfunctional biochemistry is the driving force of the emotions and is relatively untouched by talk therapy. The realization that their emotional lability is rooted in their biochemistry and not in their mind offers many a sense of relief and hope. They have not failed in the past; the treatments have and with the right biochemistry, relief is possible.
Our moods regularly wax and wane… week-to-week, day-to-day, even moment-to-moment. It is the nature of the human experience for our emotional pendulum to freely swing from joy to sadness to hope to despair to happiness to anger and on, but never to linger too long in any emotion, or swing to the extremes as in major depression. If it does, it is likely biochemical in nature ie physical, not mental. Your biochemistry is affecting your pattern of thoughts. Let us take anxiety, as an example. Anxiety will come and go as a healthy and normal response to our stressful lives; it should not, however, persist without reasonable cause.
The freefall anxiety of a panic attack is driven by a failure at the biochemical level. The basis of the most prevalent pharmaceutical intervention for anxiety is to affect the biochemical nature of your anxiety with a patentable substance, like a benzodiazepine, that mimics the role of a natural substance in your body, GABA. To be clear, you don’t have a benzodiazepine deficiency but rather the drug targets your biochemistry and acts to promote the effects of GABA in your body. The benzodiazepine is a poor imposter of your natural biochemistry and is heavy-handed in its effects and side effects. Inherent in the pharmaceutical approach, however, is the knowledge that the anxiety has a biochemical cause and cure but I ask why not use a more natural approach. Why not get to the cause of your anxiety.
You have followed conventional wisdom; it has offered only minimal results, but you have hope now. The human frame needs balance at all levels of body, mind and spirit. Too often, only one is addressed and therefore the system will always deviate towards imbalance. Seek out a qualified holistic nutritionist to help you balance your neurotransmitters and hormones and your efforts will bear fruit.