Note: The following is the output of a transcription from the video above. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.
because a lot of people’s anxiety, are pretty high. Anxieties are pretty high at this point in time. Is Hashimoto’s related to anxiety? Can Hashimoto’s cause anxiety? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes. What is anxiety? Okay. Anxiety is an over-firing of a certain part of your brain, and you have something called the amygdala and that amygdala is the fear center of your brain. And when the amygdala has been either programmed and it’s in a chronic fight, flight response, because maybe you’re in the middle of the coronavirus issue or other issues in your life, then that fear center starts to fire to give us the adrenaline that we need to get through it.
Unfortunately, a lot of times that fear center stays engaged and the definition of anxiety is fear of the unknown. Well, there’s a lot of fear of the unknown right now and there’s a lot of fear in the unknown in life. I mean, most of us don’t even know we’re going to be here tomorrow. So there’s a lot of anxiety. So we think of it that way, that was my whole point of that beginning diatribe. We think of it that way. We think of it as a personality disorder. It is not a personality disorder, period. If I have 10 people come in here with Hashimoto’s or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia, eight or nine of them have anxiety as prominent symptoms that they want to address.
So how’s the Hashimoto’s connect? So there’s a lot of things that contribute to anxiety. Low blood pressure contributes to anxiety. Low blood sugar contributes to anxiety, chemically. And what these things do is they alter chemistry in your frontal lobe, in your brain. So if you start to get too much inflammation in your frontal lobe, you start to get a lack of oxygen in your frontal lobe, you don’t have enough central fatty acids or you get too much inflammation. For those people who’ve watched me, you probably understand that I say that a lot, those four things.
That frontal lobe, it’s the part of your brain that’s supposed to shut down that stress response and shut down the anxiety. So Hashimoto’s kind of attacks from two directions when it comes to anxiety. Number one, it creates inflammation in your frontal lobe and some people would say throughout your whole brain, but it certainly creates inflammatory responses in your frontal lobe, and it decreases blood supply to your frontal lobe. So from a purely functional neurology point of view, you have this frontal lobe that’s supposed to be shutting down the stress response and the anxiety response, and it can’t do so because it doesn’t have the proper chemistry because you have Hashimoto’s.
I think more prominently, Hashimoto’s, when you… So Hashimoto’s hypothyroid. Okay, when you’re in hypothyroid mode, you’re probably not having anxiety. It’s when one of the many, many, many things that can trigger an immune response, a food sensitivity, a blood sugar swing, a stress, bad, bad gut bacteria, and on and on and on. When these things trigger an inflammatory response, that ultimately triggers a response against your thyroid, your thyroid starts vomiting out all kinds of thyroid hormones, and you have receptor sites all over your body, every cell of your body, for receptors, and when you get too much thyroid hormone going into an area, it will create an exacerbative response.
And so these thyroid hormones can create a global inflammatory response. You eat a food, the food is a food sensitivity that you’re not aware of. You eat it, it creates inflammatory spots, hits the thyroid, thyroid flares up, you start getting anxiety, and the next step by the way, is panic attacks. Okay, you start getting anxiety and panic attacks out of nowhere and you don’t realize what happened because it was a food sensitivity from three days before that just hit you now, that flared this up. It flared inflammation up that caused your amygdala and your hippocampus to flare up, and the next thing you know, you have anxiety out of nowhere, for no reason at all.
So yes. So anxiety, when that is a prominent symptom on the assessment forms that we use, just because I see so much Hashimoto’s, it’s always one of the first things I’m looking for if the patient hasn’t already come in with that diagnosis. Yep. Anxiety, Hashimoto’s, that should cover it.
