Did you know that anxiety can affect our ability to engage effectively in all areas of life? Whether it’s an inability to complete our daily responsibilities, struggling with relationships, or finding ourselves distanced from God, anxiety is a destroyer.
And, it doesn’t simply affect us. The people who love us most will be hurt by our distance and their inability to help us in our struggle with anxiety. That’s why anxiety is such a BIG DEAL!
The list of causes of anxiety is extensive. For instance, anxiety can be caused by childhood trauma. It can be attributed to social isolation, but at the same time, it is also triggered by social overload. Adverse life events such as divorce, job loss, or broken relationships can cause anxiety. Work stress, school stress, parenting stress, and the stress caused by singleness add to the anxiety equation.
Physical health issues can also cause anxiety, and that’s where I want to camp today. While scratching our heads and searching desperately for the cause of our anxious thoughts, we sometimes neglect to shine a spotlight on our physical well-being.
In 1993, I went to my dentist for a regular check-up. He looked in my mouth, left the room, then returned to tell me that he had scheduled a biopsy for the next day. What he saw on my cheeks led him to believe that I might have mouth cancer. (Talk about anxiety-producing!)
Thankfully, the biopsy was negative for cancer, but positive for the first of my three autoimmune disorders.
When I visited the specialist, he chuckled and commented that my diagnosis (Lichen Planus) was more common in elderly women than in women my age. He asked if I was experiencing a high stress level in my life, to which I responded that life was pretty standard and same-old/same-old.
He didn’t buy my answer…
As he probed a little deeper, I shared that I was pregnant with our sixth child, and the other five were all under the age of seven. I was homeschooling three of the children. My husband was a pilot for American Airlines (with a union that was about to strike), a high-time reservist in the Navy instructing pilots several days a week, and a student at the local Seminary working on his Master of Divinity. My mom had died several months prior, and my dad had recently been diagnosed with lung cancer.
The doctor stared at me for a few seconds, then told me that technically, I should be dead.
Honestly, I didn’t FEEL stressed. I didn’t walk through my days feeling overwhelmed or hopeless. However, my body recognized the stress. Even though I wasn’t mentally acknowledging stress, my body was in stress overload and trying to find an escape through an autoimmune reaction.
In the 30+ years since that first diagnosis, I’ve developed two more manifestations of the same root autoimmune disease. And in the past few years, my body began to struggle to bear the weight of that stress alone; the internal stress suddenly bloomed as full-blown anxiety.
For the first time in my life, my mental state matched my physical state.
When the 3rd autoimmune issue began, I visited my primary care doctor. Without blood tests, and just based on what I shared, she advised me to start anti-anxiety medication. Let me be clear, I believe there is a time and place for medication, but I didn’t feel like drugs should be my first resort.
So, I found a functional medicine doctor, gave eighteen vials of blood (who knew we had that much!!), and waited for the results.
Long story short, everything was backwards. Numbers that should have been high were critically low, and numbers that should have been low were off-the-charts high. Of the eighteen tests, only one was in the normal range.
In other words, my body was in a constant state of fight-or-flight. It’s no wonder I was feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and dealing with chest pain!
Since getting my results, I’ve changed my diet to a strict (aka boring) autoimmune diet, changed my exercise routine, increased my exposure to sunlight, and begun taking supplements. Honestly, I never even took a multi-vitamin, so there’s that…
For almost three years, I had beaten myself up. I was constantly feeling guilty for my anxiety. I assumed that there must be some unconfessed sin. I questioned my effectiveness as a counselor when I, too, was struggling.
To be clear, there are still many external stressors in my life. I have eight young adult kids (IYKYK), work alongside my husband in ministry, travel frequently, and live six months of the year in one home and six months in another. As an introverted homebody, some of those things just really mess with my head!
Those are the realities of my life, and there’s not much I can do to change them. (My functional medicine doctor actually asked what stressor could be eliminated and laughed when I asked her if she knew anyone in the market for young adults.)
However, making the necessary changes to eliminate the physical elements that were exacerbating my anxiety has given me the ability to deal with the external stressors much more effectively.
This leads me to this question: When was the last time you had your bloodwork done? In the counseling business, we refer to physical issues as “low-hanging fruit.” It’s amazing how easily some BIG DEAL counseling issues can be resolved by determining how levels like Vitamin D, testosterone, cortisol, and more are doing.
Sometimes, the whole answer is physical.
Or, sometimes, like in my case, the physical component is just one step in dealing with the other anxiety-producing issues in our lives. Would it surprise you to know that anxiety is more often seen in women than in men? We’re so used to juggling schedules, carpooling, meal-planning, children, and more that we may not even notice that our bodies are overwhelmed.
Trust me, when it catches us with you, it is No Fun At All.
In our next lesson, we’ll look at the first of our Biblical friends and how they dealt with anxiety. They couldn’t find out if they were physically affected by the stress they faced, but we can. If you’re struggling with anxiety, please eliminate the physical causes.
I promise that dealing with external issues will be much easier if your body is on your team!
Megan Scheibner 