Anxiety

It's the symptom which bring seven and a half mil. of italians to become consumers of tranquilizers or more specifically pharmaceuticals against anxiety. Not only! Though the numbers are not definite, it is aproximated that five milions people suffer from from anxiety and utilize pharmaceuticals composed by tranquilizers associated with other molecules which act on one or more specific organs (this is referred mainly to organs such as the heart, stomach, intestine, nack and back muscles). These almost twelve and a half mil. people are consumers of medicines which fight anxiety. We must also say that visceral disorders are considered nervous system disorders, or malfunctioning organ due to anxiety.

But what is it? What explanations does official medicine give for anxiety? Can it only be cured with pharmaceuticals or are there other therapies? Does alternative medicine help the anxious to feel better without taking (or taking in minimum quantities) pharmaceutical which act on the brain?

In this article I will try to explain that phisiological anxiety does exist and it distinguishes itself from an "anxious syndrome". I will explain its symptoms, causes and therapy. Furthermore I will try to make clear why a psychological disorder as anxiety has so many organical symtoms. At last I will show how homeopathy, Bach flowers, acupuncture and psichotherapy can, at different levels, cure anxiety, which is considered a typical modern life disorder.

Anxiety is a simple and common emotional event, which often represents a psychological and physical state of being in relation to life's vicessitudes. For example when a person is to face a test she /he enters a light anxiety state. His/her body and psyche are "oriented" towards the imminent event, almost to prepare themselves to solve it at his/her best.

In this case the "moderate" anxiety is of little duration, and seems a sign of the individual's adaptation to the environmental situation which calls for satisfactory answers. The increase in attention, concentration, memory, muscular tension, and of other psychophisical functions ( for example increase in blood pressure and heart rate) is considered a kind on "energy charge" finalized to the passing of the test. Although when in other situations this state becomes constinuous or too intense it may cause the contrary such as the collapse of the above described functions. In other words, the person can loose their memory, concentration, be distracted, feel tired, and suddenly feel mentally empty and unable to adapt to daily life. This case falls in the category of light anxious disorders, which can be cured over a short period time with the limited use of low dosage pharmaceuticals, or as we will see, with homeopathic and herbal remedies.

The anxious syndrome is a deep psychological disorder characterized by anguish and often accompanied by various corporal symptoms of different intensities. In medicine there are three main anxious syndromes: "acute anxiety" or "panic fit disorder", "chronical anxiety" and "generalized anxiety" caused by traumatic or particularly stressing event. Let's see then one by one.

FITS: Panic fits are defined as immediate and unexpected sensation of terror and anguish accompanied by phisical symptoms as a feel ing of soffocation, palpitations, and a fainting sensation. thus the panic fits start without a notice, and its characteristic is it starts when a person is doing a relatively calm activity, as sitting at a restaurant tabel, driving a car, entering a store. The individual can also have burst of heat , diffused diffused perspiration, thorax pain so acute to believe he/she 's having a heart attack and s going to die.

Generally, these fits reach their highest peak in ten minutes, they decrease in a twenty minutes period, and they leave the individual extremely tired and depressed.. One of the possible complications anxiety might have is that people suffer from a pre-attack syndrome and consequently they try to avoid all the situations they consider particulary stressy or anxious. That's why people don't go to crowded places such as restaurants, shops and don't use public transports. In many advanced cases the individual "rescue" him/herself by staying at home and refusing to have a social life.

Avoiding all kinds of psychological interpretations, that we will see later, I have to highline that panic attacks' causes has not been precisely individuated by modern medicine. It seems that they are related to genetic factors which witness the peron's vulnerability or biological factors which witness that certain substances contained in one's brain are reacting in an unusual way. Anyway, the most adopted therapy to contrast panic attaks is pharmcological, such as anti-depressives.

This kind of anxiety is a persistent "tension-status" with no higest peaks (as the attaks), but it causes a general psycho-physical sickness which can last for long (months and years). The eventual symptoms of this kind of anxiety can be grouped in four categories keeping in mind that they rarely manifest all together:

*motor tension: underlined by shaking hands, muscular pains, incapability to rest and relax, eyelids tremors, getting easily tired.

*vegetative hyperactivity: which involves a part of the central nervous system which is not controlled by will. The symptoms are: tachycardia, vertigo, dried mouth, increase in perspiration, hands and feet tingling, uncorrect digestion, sudden cold and warm sensation, lumps in one's throat, difficoulties in swallowing, increase in breathing, damp and cold hands, diarrea, light or empty head sensation, pains at the mouth of the stomach.

*psychological status of expectation: characterized by fear, regrets, expectation of unpleasant or tragical events to happen to beloved people.

*mental supervision: characterized by hyperattention which paradoxically becomes distraction, difficulties in concentration and memorizing, impatience and irritability

The generalized anxiety, as it is easily understandable, often limits the capabilities or the performances of the disturbed individual, and the complications are serious such as a depression syndrome which brings to the incapability to live a quiet life , or worse than that, to abuse alchool (because it calms down the drowing sensation) and medicines that cure anxiety.

Some diseases can cause anxiety such as the inflammation of the thyroide gland, but after all generalized anxiety doesn't come from any organic disfuntion. Unfortunately, the causes of the disease haven't been discovered, yet, and the research is oriented toward the study of the brain. In some cases, it is responsible for the production of too many substances which bring to anxiety. It's a fact that this syndrome is curable with pharmaceuticals containing "benzodiazepine", which can calm anxiety.

With stress we mean one or more traumatical events happened on a personal basis (such as physical abuses, violenes, deaths, robberies, or natural calamities such as earth-quakes, fires, and so on) rather than those ensamble of typical factors of modrn life that cause tensions and worries continuosly. These experiences can cause a psychological "acute" disturb (when the disturb is shown just after the event) or the "chronical" disturb (when it lasts long after its happening). The symptoms are: memories and repetitive dreams about the traumatical situation, psychological status of "alarm", unreasonable feeling of guilt, sleep disturbs, difficoulties in memorising and keeping attention, avoiding activities that recall the memory of the event, sudden actions or sensations caused by the assumption that the event is going to happen again. Generalized anxiety, depression, alchoolism, social unfitness, pharmaceutical-addiction are all complications of stress anxiety, and the therapy suggested is the pharmaceutical one, associated to behavioural psycotherapy and psychosocial support.

How is it possible that anxiety manifest through both organical and psychological symptoms? The answer lies in the results of researches conducted on the nervous system and its parallels with psychological behaviours. In order to mantain a certain balance of the body toward outside stimuli, the central nervous system plays a major role. The system operates spontaneously with no will and no awareness of the individual. The system, with the exception of the brain, gets divided into two parts: the sypmpathetic one and the para-sympathetic one.

Both are connected with many organs of the body (heart, veins and arterias, lung muscles, stomach, intestine, men's sexual appartatus, all the glands, bladder, skin) working on them in a synergic way to ensure the best functionality in every environmental cirumstance.

In particular, the sympathetic system provides answers in those organs which get ready for the activity or the emergency which is going to take place, producing, for example, the increase of heart beats, of arterious pression, of glycemia and more generally the increase of the availability of energy. The para-sympathetic system produces modification in some other organs, and the functionality of the two systems gets modulated by two nervous centres set in the brain which is the operative and analizing centre of the whole body's exigneces (let's remenmber: with no will).

In recent years, it has been demonstrated that the above-descripted "centres" get influenced directly by a certain area of the brain called limbic system whose main function is to activate and show emotions. Actually, every emotion has not only an affective and behavioural reaction, but also has the response of sertain organs, eventually mediated by the nervous system. That's why feelings like fear and grief or a status of general and persistent tension are coupled with palpitation, lumps in one's throat, tremors, vertigo, hand and feets tingling, uncorrect digestion. All this led us to concieve anxiety as the most corporal psychological disturb of all, and to improve scientific research to understand all those diseases and disturbs we label as psychosomatic. ( gastritis, psoriasis, colitis) which find , in reality, their principal cause in anxiety.

It is possible to find efficient therapies for anxiety with many alternative medicines, and with some of them it's possible to disintoxicate from the abuses of pharmaceuticals. These are the chinese acupuncutre, herbs, homeopathy, Bach Flowers.

One of the most fascinating sentences is the one that says that every part of human body corresponds to a psychocological content, or better, "inside organs we can find even mental energies". In chinese people's opinion, in one's heart lies mental energy, stomach and spleen contain the thought, lungs contain intuition, in the kidneys we can find will, liver contains the power of decisions. Emotions find their ideal places in the same way, and for chinese medicine emotions can influence the correspondent organ: joy influences one's heart, fear disturbs one's kidneys, anger pollute one's liver, regrets and "fixed ideas" damage one's stomach and spleen.

Anxious syndromes born from energetic disequilibrium, toxicity, bad functioning of the organ that damage mental energy as well ( for example an intoxicated liver makes the power of decision decrease, or tired kidneys impair will and so on). The excessive use of energy of the correspondent organs, and the anxious symptoms can be related to that.

Here they are, then, grief, indecision, tireness, all causes by a weakened kidneys' energy; the "empty-head" feeling, the lack of courage, the indecision are related to a bad functioning liver damaged by anger; the inability to ponder, the lack of memory are caused by stomach, spleen, and pancreas compromised by "fixed ideas" and regrets.

Therapy is effectuated by experts in acupuncture. It's possible to intervene re-balancing the organs energy, calming one's mind and bringing back quiet in the whole body.

The homeopathic remedies are many (more or less 180), able to contrast effectively with anxiety.

All of them must be adopted after a doctor's survey because homeopathy tries to cure the entire individual rather than one single disturb.

* Aconitum Napollus: it's the remedy for the anxious terror, the sudden grief characterized by fear of dying, agitation that makes the individual moving constantly to help him relieving of tension. It's a kind of anxiety which manifest even during the night.

* Arsenicum Album: It's wonderful for those who feel guilty, and have obsessive thoughts. The remedies fit anxious people who are also very scrupolous, tidy, "self-controlled", but extremely vulnerable, who pay attention to particulars, those people who keep an eye on everything.

* Argentum Nitricum: Fits the so-called "hurry anxiety", such as that unrestrained tension which invades some induviduals who fear to be always late. Those are people who do everything rapidly, and who wish they already finished everything they just started.

* Calcarea cargonica: It's the remedy indicated to people who fear everything and they are afraid that everybody might know how they feel. Generally these people hide their fear, show what they are not, as to say they preten to be motivated, tough and proud.

* Bach flowers : Bach remedies are very popular and largely use in the UK( they are granted by the Social Insurance) and only in recent years they have been used and recommended in Italy. This method is based on the consideration that it doesn't matter what the symptoms are in an individual, because there's always a pre-existing disequilibrium. Edward Bach (doctor of the beginning of the century) conducted studies on thousand of disturbed people, concluding that it's necessary to take care of the person, rather than cue the single disease. It's necessary to find the exact provenience of the pyscho-emotional symptoms which accompany the illness. In human's body ( intended as an indissoluble mix between body and psyche) there's a natural "vital strenght" or "healer strenght" we must stimulate. There are thirty-eight psychological situations which represent different personalities that combined one another show a big number of "mental behaviours".

Doctor Bach experimented many remedies deriving from flowers ("in flowers we find the vital strenght") discovering thirty-eight different species able to modify negative mental behaviours, improving the positive ones and the above descripted healer strenght. Bach remedies used in order to relive anxiety are:

*Agrimony: that's a plant which helps who is apparently happy, joyful, but despite this happiness disguise, he tries to hide mental tortures, worries, uneasiness, fear of the future, of diseases and solitude. Agrimony improves the positve part of this kind of persons, such as the good mood, their calm, their affability, their optimism, their sense of peace and harmony.

*Aspen (tremour poplar):suits people who feel fear with no reason to feel it and who live in a continuos "tension status" as if something is was going to happen. Aspen shows their positive potential, increasing their courage and their ability to face life without fear.

* Rock rose: this is the remedy for panic, anguish, the emergency, where everything seems to keep them from reacting. People who suffer from panic attacks are often blocked in a sort of disorienting status in which they find no way out. Rock rose is the remedy that allows the reaction of the individual.

Anxiety psychological interpretations have been discussed from more than a century. Talking about this issue, people have formed differnt psychological positions toward it. Let's see some of these interpretations associating them to different ways of thinking.

*Psychoanslysis: Anxiety should derive from an unconscient conflict between the "instinctive pulsions" called primary pulsions (such as hunger, thirst, sexuality, hate, love, aggresivity, possesion) and "secondary pulsions" derived from the understanding of moral and social prohibitions (what Freud called "super-ego"). The Ego (such as the psychic function characterized by the capability of an individual to be find him/herself and to distinguish him/herself from others), generally is able to sort this conflict out. Who suffer from anxiety has a too big "suppr-ego" (excess of prohibitions or moral restrictions) or is weak and unable to re-balnce the harmay between the two kinds of pulsions.

*Psychosocial analysis: Anxiety here is related only to the deepest conlictual problem, but also an uneasiness of the single man toward the society. Anxiety can be considered as an epressionor reflex of a deep crisis of our modern society. Among the principal factors which determine anxiety we can find the ffall of Myths, as to say the fall of those religious, philosophical, political principles that leave the modern man with no "existential project" and with a psychological sensation of uncertainty and abandon. The second factor explains there's a fast transformation of the cultural models, and everything the individual learnt from his/her choldhood doesn't correspond to adult cultural models.All this should give birth to a deep unfitnees ub some induviduals, unable to adapt to the rythm of cultural changes.

*Behavioural psychology:this "school", born in the Usa, explains that every troublesome behavoiour comes from a long indiviual's inability to adapt. Anxiety, then, is a huge emotional reaction towards "life's manacious stimuli". The suggested therapy tries to modify the symptoms which forbid a balanced adapting to reality and helps him learning new and more indicated behaviurs.

In Riza's psychosomatic school's opinion, anxiety crises derive from a deep uneasiness of the individual between a "planning tension", which pushes him/her to realize his/her potential, and a need of passivity, quiet, or better those elements which are possible to relate to the addiction to the mother figure. Furthermore, there are some periods in everybody's life that are subject to anxious manifestation: Puberty, teenage, adulthood, the fast changing of social status (military service, the beginning and the end of the studies, the marriage, divorce, the beginning and the end of work) or biological status such as pregnancy, menopause, all kinds of periods which prove the individual's ability to adapt.

In these cases, anxiety represent a defence mechanism with which the person shows the problems he thinks he cannot solve. This uneasiness could be an "inconscious reaction" to a difficoult life-style, or wrong relatoinships, sick affections, and anxiety could help the individual to be aware of the fact he/she is hiding his/her real nature ( anxiety seen as a positive reaction).

As we have already seen, anxiety is a psychological and corporal disorder. It can be considered under different points of view, which are all interesting and correct, and we can't assume one is better than another. Therapies can be polyvalent, and they will include the use of pharmaceuticals (particularly indicated to relieve acute anxiety crisis) associated with alternative medicine and psychotherapy. It all depends by the doctor's survey who, together with the patience, suggests the most indicated therapeutical ways in order to solve the anxious syndrome.

The rules to feel good

In this table we resumed then simplest and most efficient rules that allows you to feel immediately good

* During a crisis, assume at once four drops of doctor Bach's Rescue Remedy directly on the tongue, and continue the assumption every 15 mins.

* Drink slowly two or three glass of natural water: it helps the elimination of liver an intestine toxins, which interfers negatively on anxiety.

* It's useful to learn a breathing exercise because during a crisis it's common to feel breathless: while sitting or standing leaning the back against a wall and arms along the body, inspire profundly with the nose and expire with the mouth noisily letting head and shoulders fall down.

Repeat the excercise but this time open your hands while expiring, breathe again and hold your breath for five seconds and then expire again with mouth open. Repet these three kinds of breathing for five times.

*You could vary this exercise: close your eyes and recall to mind a "good thought" or an image deriving froma good old experience, orienting as long as we can thought on it.

* It's very useful to do massage on certain points of our body suggested by Chinese traditional medicine.In the middle of the hands with the right thumb massage profundly with a circular movement for about two mins and do the same thing on the other hand. With the first finger of the hand press quite strong the point which stayes between the eyebrows for five minutes. The same effect could be reached by pressing the point behind the ear along the neck.

* At home , another anti-anxiety method is foot-bath. Sitting quietly in a comfy armchair, leave your feet relax in a bucket of warm/hot water for about 15 minutes. Or have a bath. In hot water we could melt relaxing substances such as thyne and maple.try to let your bath last long in time to feel how the body unloads tensions thanks to the heat. Especially in the days in which we feel a great anxiety pressure on us, it's indicated to learn a relaxing technique (Parietti's "immaginative distension", Schulz's autogen training, Jacobson's method).

* We can cure anxiety wiht herbs. The most common is valerian, rauwolfia, bistort, mint, sequoia. Very useful is hawthorn especially in presence of tachycardia.

* Oligotherapy (heals with minerals) suggest to calm the nervous status to take manganese-cobalto once a day for three weeks continuing for two or three weeks. Always respecting the concept of rebalance of the body rather the immediate resulution of the problem, there's an exam called "mineralogram" which, analyzing a small quantity of hair, allows to know the lacking or abundancy of minerals in the organism. The consequent therapy is the assumpion or the elimination of the minerals.