Vesna: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna and today we're going to talk about two things, health anxiety
weight anxiety so let's talk about weight first. Do you feel like you don't like the way that your body looks? You walk past a mirror or reflection of yourself and you judge yourself.
You're always thinking about your weight. You're always [00:01:00] thinking about your belly fat. You have good days or bad days with food. You feel guilty for eating things that you shouldn't or. You have that thought that once I lose weight, then I can have confidence, go to the gym, start dating, do what I want to do, whatever.
Right? So this focus on weight, for example, or it can be on our symptoms. So I often see clients as well who, Focus on, why am I so tired all the time? Why do I have this pain? This pain doesn't leave me alone. Anxiety about anxiety. They think, I'm so sick of it, why do I still have it? Why do I have these tingling in my hands?
Why do I get this bloating? this anxiety about our symptoms is known as hypervigilance. And the reason why it's important to understand this is that because your hypervigilance or you're overthinking about your symptoms and where you're at right now. Could be the very thing that's keeping you stuck.
So, hypervigilance, if I can explain it in the most basic way, is when we're over focused [00:02:00] on something. We have complete tunnel vision, you focus on your weight, you know, you're not going to be happy until it's gone, or you're not going to be happy until the symptoms are over. know, too much attention, you're consumed by this, right?
And it can be very subconscious. Okay, so the example I like to give is that when I travel overseas, I don't realize that I'm being hyper vigilant about my bags. I have been robbed a number of times in Europe and so now I'm very hyper vigilant about my bags. But I don't notice it. It's just little things like I won't ever put my bag down on a seat at a restaurant.
I'll always keep it with me. I'll always, lock it away in the hotel. I'm always guarded with it. Right. And it's not until I get home that I realized that I was being hypervigilant because I put the bag down and I'm like, ah, I can put the bag anywhere. And then my nervous system's like relaxed.
But again, I don't notice it at the time in Europe or wherever I travel, but I notice the difference when I'm back, right? So that's hypervigilance. It's very sometimes unconscious because we have this habitual patterns which is [00:03:00] really zoned in on these problems that we have and these things or these situations that we want to change or that concern us, which takes up a lot of our mental space and we end up overthinking having hypervigilance.
So the question I sometimes ask people is, What would you do if you never had to think about your weight again? Or what would you do if you never had to have anxiety or worry about your anxiety again? Because that tends to open up the mind and then you can kind of see, well, actually that is on my mind a lot, right?
So hypervigilance can be making your symptoms worse for sure, could actually be creating your symptoms. Okay. So what they've found is that three minutes of negative thinking, they've, you know, done these fMRI scans and MRI scans, and they've looked at. In the brain, three minutes of negative thinking will change our hormones.
It'll activate the fight or flight response. We'll have a surge of adrenaline and cortisol and glucose and insulin. It will activate [00:04:00] silent genes. So much happens within that three minutes. So you can imagine, if you're thinking about your weight multiple times a day, say more than three times a day, or you're thinking about your pain or anxiety or your symptoms or your illness.
more than a few times a day, you're getting these surges of these hormones.
Now, when it comes to weight, the irony is, and it's not a funny irony, the irony is, is that we do this overthinking, right? We, we try to control what we eat. If we don't watch what we're doing, what we're eating, we'll completely blow out and our weight will blow out and be out of control. And we'll never be able to address it, right?
Never be able to reign it back in. But the very fact that you're hyper vigilant about it, that you're thinking about it so much, is is changing your hormones. So for example, when we trigger the stress response through this thinking, this negative thinking about our body and controlling and resistance, right?
It's triggering the fight or flight response stress hormones, which hijack everything. Okay. Stress hormones, hijack all the other processes in the body. [00:05:00] And in particular, for example, it can hijack thyroid nutrients. Thyroid being the queen of the metabolism, okay? It's the gland that regulates our body weight and our metabolic burn rate.
And the nutrients won't be going to the thyroid. They'll go to the stress response. They'll go to the adrenals and the fight or flight response. So the very act of, you know, we're trying to maintain our weight and be good and be, you know, willpower and all of that. But actually that hypervigilance is changing our hormone profile, making it harder to lose weight.
And when we think about symptoms like anxiety, like nothing brings on anxiety more than worrying about anxiety, right? if you had an anxiety attack. And I've seen, you know, I've had many clients with this and thought nothing of it, rather than, it's a symptom of an overactive mind, it would fall away and it would become less and less frequent until it disappeared.
And so we have, you know, whether it be anxiety, whether it be pain, whether it be that tingling in the fingers, whether it be the [00:06:00] bloating, whatever it is that gets into your mind and is like, you Oh, I don't know what that is. I think it could be really bad. I think I could be really sick. Okay, so that's health anxiety.
And I think it's important to realize and to know that sometimes your symptoms don't mean anything at all. Okay, we have a body. It's not, you know, it has aches and pains and little tingles and little twitches and little things happening that mean absolutely nothing at all. But what's happening in that process is the panic, the habitual thinking around those symptoms that has you worried.
Okay.
That worry, that stress triggers, again, the stress hormones, it triggers inflammation, which will make more pain and exacerbate all of your symptoms. And in fact, stress alone will trigger anxiety.
Another thing to note about health anxiety is that you're thinking, like, you're concerned about yourself. the thoughts that you have about it is also not information about what's really happening in the body, right? I always say, like, absolutely [00:07:00] get yourself checked out, but at some point when you have the test and nothing's coming back, there has to be a level of reassurance that everything's okay.
And so it's the resistance to the symptoms that perpetuates the health anxiety, that perpetuates the anxiety. So, Recently, I had a client who has a thyroid disorder, um, disruption and autoimmune and high blood pressure. And she had this surge in her blood pressure and her thyroid became unbalanced and it was triggered by viral infection.
But at the time, you know, she was just like I can't stand this anymore. What supplements do I need to take? Why do I feel like this anymore? I'm so over it. I don't want to feel like this anymore. I've done all the right things. I've improved my diet. I'm taking all of my supplements. This is everything she was saying to me, right?
And I said to her, you just have so much resistance to where you're at. You're at war. You're fighting your body. Your symptoms are here. This is your current picture. because you're so focused on getting rid of those symptoms and [00:08:00] changing it like that, it's creating so much more anxiety and it's making your worse, right?
And so I really had her see that. She was in resistance to her body. She was really fighting against where her body was at and how much of that resistance was actually keeping her stuck. Now, a big aha for her after that conversation was in, you know, the next couple of hours.
Her symptoms had disappeared. Okay, that feeling that she felt from the high blood pressure and all the thyroid symptoms had disappeared. Now that was a real aha moment for her, that she could see how much her mental stress hypervigilance, resistance to her symptoms and where she was at in that moment was actually keeping her really stuck in those symptoms.
The other thing that anxiety or lack of acceptance of Whep or Ab Because one thing I see with women who are overweight, we get to that place if we've, been eating the wrong foods. Maybe we didn't know that the ultra processed foods were creating so much [00:09:00] havoc to our hormones.
Or maybe it's been a really stressful time and you used food as a crutch, right? Whatever it is, you have to accept that you did the best that you could in those moments. And even though you are where you are today, with the clarity, with the goals that you have now, you can move forward, but you can't move forward.
When you have resistance to where you're at, right? When you're judging where you're at, when you're giving yourself a hard time how to get here, you know, like and I hear this from women We can't move forward from that place Okay You did the very best that you could up until you got to this point, right?
And now you see things differently you have more clarity. You can make a different decision So the other thing that all of this stress and mental stress and hypervigilance does it burns through a lot of our neurotransmitters the very You You know, the happy hormones in our brain, the chemicals that keep us relaxed and calm and keep us rational and enjoy our life and feel on top of things and we can handle things, right?
We burn through a lot of that, okay? Because the mind is just being overused.
So there's no strategies here, right? There are no [00:10:00] strategies for you to come into acceptance with your body, but the first thing is to really start with yourself. Are you in resistance to where you are right now? Are you in resistance to your weight? Are you in resistance to your symptoms, your anxiety, whatever it is?
Are you? in constant resistance that they need to change, go away, whatever it is for you to feel better. That's the number one thing to first really recognize. And how can you come to a place of acceptance of where you are? Because that, we can't fake it. That place is where you start to move forward, right?
How can you accept that, right? This is where I'm at right now. This is what my body is, you know, the symptoms that my body is giving. Some of them are probably absolutely nothing. The anxiety that I feel in my mind is not information about what's happening in my body. And for the rest of the stuff, how can I accept where I'm at right now and stop being at war with my body and really start to listen to what it needs so you can move forward?
Let me know in the comments below if you [00:11:00] have noticed this, that you are in resistance to your weight or to your symptoms. Let me know below.
