CLB 008: Is Inflammation Causing Your Anxiety and Depression?

The Calm Living Blueprint: Social Anxiety | Anxiety | Stress | Mindfulness | Inner Peace

Is inflammation causing your anxiety and depression?

Inflammation is our body’s basic reaction to protecting itself to whatever it perceives to be harmful – toxins, irritants, infection, stress, and as we’ll talk about later, even thoughts or emotions.

Essentially inflammation is the body’s attempt to heal itself. So a certain amount of inflammation is actually a good thing.

The problem comes in when that inflammatory response gets out of hand or becomes chronic in nature.

You’re probably familiar with a lot of conditions already where this is known to be the case … rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, allergies, and so on.

And you’ve probably already heard about the link between inflammation and outside influences like environmental toxins, junk food, smoking and alcohol.

Pollution, a doughnut, puffing on a cigarette or downing a martini – those are all pretty easy to understand, how they might cause inflammation or harm to our body. All are outside sources.

But, did you know that our bodies can create inflammation all on their own, with no outside influences as triggers?

Our thoughts, moods, stress levels, and even our social lives can trigger a cascade of inflammatory reactions in our bodies that can lead to all those conditions I mentioned earlier, as well as anxiety and depression.

And that’s what this podcast episode is all about. Learn about what you can to decrease your inflammation levels… and, as a result, heal anxiety and depression…

Key Points

• Researchers have discovered that being anxious, depressed or stressed also has an effect on inflammatory chemicals in our body.
• And the chemicals associated with those emotional states change how our immune, cardiovascular and hormonal systems function.
• Current research suggests that the pain of social injury is very similar to the pain of physical injury like arthritis joint pain or a sports injury. And in large part, this has to do with inflammation. They affect the same regions of the brain, and they can be just as painful, maybe more so for social pain.
• The methods we are using in the Calm Living Blueprint, the step by step process we talk about each episode, not only will that help anxiety and depression, but it is also anti-inflammatory.

Episode Transcript

You can download a copy of this episode’s transcript by clicking here.

A Little Inspiration

“Do not let your thoughts play havoc by worrying about what may happen, and what may not happen, but instead, ask yourself the question what is there in this that I cannot endure? You will then discover there is no situation which may arise that you cannot deal with effectively.”

– Marcus Aurelius

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