How a Sympathetic Mindset Can Cause Anxiety and Depression
If you haven’t been following my last few posts, you are probably wondering what this post is all about. I am not talking about “being sympathetic”. I am referring to the state of your mind when you enter sympathetic overdrive mindset. Because this is a major factor for Anxiety and depression in our culture.
A Brief Refresher
In the first post of this series, we learned how anxiety and depression have skyrocketed since the COVID thing. The second post we learned that the reason for the increase was due to the brain being put into sympathetic overdrive mode. In the last post we learned that it doesn’t take a major stress to get into sympathetic overdrive. If you have a number of smaller stresses all the time, that can be enough.
To be clear, we need the sympathetic overdrive in order to survive stressful times. But the reason the sympathetic overdrive mode is so helpful is also the reason why it causes the problems. In a normal day, you should spend most of your time in parasympathetic mode. That is the mode that allows you to relax, take everything in, read a book, digest your food and fall asleep when you want.
The Sympathetic brain is what allows us to react to a threatening environment. Instead of just sitting back, your brain goes into a hyper awareness state. It starts to analyze everything immediately looking for an escape or a weapon to use. All of that processing is important in a life threatening situation. However if the situation is not life-threatening, that mindset will give you the symptoms of anxiety.
The sympathetic overdrive also takes you blood and pushes it to the extremities. This way you have energy to run away or fight off the danger. If you stay in this state too long, you will become very tired physically and mentally and you will exhibit some symptoms of depression.
Not all cases of anxiety and depression ae created by this mode. But, you can see how powerful this method is in creating the symptoms of these problems.
In our next post we will go over how you can tell if this is your problem. Also we will go over a method to keep your brain from going into this mode and stop the symptoms.
