The Bio-Psycho-Social Model of Anxiety - What Causes Anxiety Disorders? Break the Anxiety Cycle 8/30

why are some people much more anxious than others and what causes anxiety disorders what makes some people feel anxious when they're actually safe well the cause of an anxiety disorder is actually quite complicated it's not a disease with a single origin there are a lot of factors that go into play so in this video we're going to talk about how the bioc psychosocial model applies to understanding [Music] anxiety this video is sponsored by better help better help makes it really easy for you to get access to a licensed mental health professional from the comfort of

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can get 10% off your first month okay back to the video we've already talked about the psychology behind anxiety but there are some biological factors and even social factors that impact anxiety so let's start with Biology so first the stuff you're born with anxiety disorders run in families heritability estimates show that with generalized anxiety disorder genes play a contributing factor around 25 to 35% of the time but what does that mean right there isn't a single gene or set of genes associated with anxiety disorders it's connected to a lot of physical differences and we'll go

into that a little bit but the one thing to know is that genes can get turned on or off based on life experiences so a traumatic child hood for example might be more likely to turn on physical changes that show up with anxiety disorders and again biology psychology and our environment all interplay in this really interesting way okay next brain structure so this is the obvious physical difference uh for people with anxiety disorders there's often an increased blood flow in the amydala so this is the area associated with fear this is like the smoke alarm

of the brain and the amydala is sometimes larger than that of people without anxiety uh researchers have also found higher ratios of gray matter to white matter and another study of panic disorder showed that there was decreased metabolism in the brain and decreased blood flow between the two sides of the brain there's also some indication that the part of the brain responsible for internal monitoring the insula might be more active in people with anxiety so this is the part of your brain that scans your body for how you're feeling for for signs of pain or

signs of anxiety so someone who's highly sensitive and highly attuned with their body's signals may have a deep sense of Intuition or a powerful sense of empathy or a deep ability to be aware of their emotions around art or music but if they have a fear-based reaction to their internal signals that can make them very sensitive to any physical symptoms of anxiety and develop kind of an unhealthy avoidance of these Sensations this biological predisposition towards anxiety is not usually disordered anxiety serves a function and our society needs more sensitive people and less sensitive people in

order to function well so this is called neurodiversity you know we need slightly anxious caregivers who keep the toddlers away from Cliffs and really unanxious Warriors to protect the village moving on there's some chemical differences too and it's not just as simple as low serotonin like people have commonly believed um an overactive adrenal gland for example can make physical symptoms of anxiety more intense um hyper or hypothyroid can also cause anxiety symptoms and then other physical conditions can increase or decrease one's resilience to stress um and some of these are things you're born with like

your ability to sleep well your ability to absorb nutrients but then also some of that's choices right your decision to prioritize sleep or nutrition so these are physical factors that contribute to anxiety and some of them we can change and some of them we can't uh physical illnesses can decrease resilience so for example if you get cancer that's going to you know decrease your emotional reserves um and conditions like inflammation or allergies researchers have found evidence of biological changes in people with anxiety but it's like a chicken and an egg type problem right brain changes

can contribute to anxiety But anxiety also contributes to brain brain changes your physical brain is built to adapt to how you think it adapts to your experiences and this is called neuroplasticity so for example if you constantly catastrophize your body will probably have more adrenaline and more cortisol flowing through it and if you have calmer thinking you'll have less right and research shows that when anxiety is treated with CBT and changing how you think the amydala can actually decrease in size there was a cool study out of Norway where they took people with social anxiety

they scanned their brains they found that their amydala was kind of larger than average then they did eight weeks of therapy over the Internet just standard CBT scan their brains again and their amydala had decreased in size you can physically change your brain by how you think so that takes us to kind of the psychological aspect of anxiety your brain is wired to learn it adapts physically and psychologically to our experiences and how we think about our experiences so if you're attacked by a dog as a child your brain wires you to be more alert

to dogs it's going to build more physical wiring and structures around dog anxiety and that's going to help you quickly fire off an anxiety response about dogs to prevent you from interacting with them your your brain develops this emotional memory to keep you safe but sometimes it overdoes it a little bit and you end up being hypervigilant all the time right and and remember anxiety isn't as much about actual danger as it is about perceived danger the thoughts we have of danger trigger a real physiological response in our body so if we think oh I'll

never succeed or everyone must be making fun of me I must avoid everything that makes me anxious that's going to keep us anxious versus thinking I'm going to keep trying and learning I'll probably be able to succeed but even if I don't it's worth trying um or you think oh I can allow myself to feel emotions including anxiety I can but I can still choose my actions so this is like a much more resilient way of thinking and thinking that way helps us regulate our nervous system and rewires our brain to be less anxious our

brains are also wired to learn on a deep level through observing others right it makes sense that our brain would want to learn from watching instead of having to experience every bad thing first so if you have a parent for example who is terrified of dogs you're more likely to develop a fear of dogs and if you see someone fall off cliff and get injured you'll be more likely to develop a fear of heights this is a social aspect of anxiety again this is the brain's built-in self-preservation but your brain's ability to learn this stuff

goes both ways experiences can teach you to decrease anxiety too so if you get a friend who has a dog and that friend pets that dog every day and interacts with that dog every day and you just watch them do that eventually your brain will learn see dogs can be safe after all and that fear will decrease so our family and our societal culture can directly impact our relationship with anxiety here's one more thing right we sometimes feel helpless when we believe that past trauma has made us anxious and while trauma and our experiences can

be the situation that initiates our anxiety our anxiety in the present moment is determined by our thoughts and perceptions and behaviors in the present moment we are going to talk about this a ton throughout this course so bear with me here but there is something you are doing that is making your anxiety hang around in the present moment what maintains anxiety are the messages you send to your brain about safety and danger now a lot of people think that the reason they're anxious is because of an experience they had but the maintaining causes of anxiety

are the maladaptive strategies we built around our anxiety basically how we cope with anxiety Keeps Us anxious I'll give you a quick example let's say that when you were in Middle School you blurted out something in class and everyone laughed at you and you felt ashamed and embarrassed now to prevent that from ever happening again you constantly worry about every social situation you constantly ruminate on how you handled social situations all in an attempt to prevent yourself from ever doing something embarrassing again because you didn't know how to tolerate that emotion of embarrassment you didn't

know what to do with that emotion so all you can think is like I need to never feel this right but each time you worry you create the perception of danger in your mind which triggers the anxiety response each time you ruminate about what you said you create the perception of danger in your mind you actively feed your social anxiety through your attempts to avoid it now in this course you're going to learn how to replace the things that are keeping you anxious with actions that will help you be more confident okay so that's the

biopsychosocial model let's play with this for a minute right let's just do some thought experiments let's say we've got twins with the exact same genes and they were raised in the same home environment and let's say this home environment is moderately abusive one may develop PTSD and the other may not what's the difference one let's just say one got psychological support as an adult to change how they thought about themselves they stopped blaming thems for the abuse and thereby they were able to develop healthy relationships in the future while the other continued to shame herself

continued to believe that she wasn't worthy of love and that led her to keep dating jerkwad guys who continued to abuse her so without support her thoughts and her actions maintained her trauma now I know this is an oversimplification apption um there's probably a hundred factors that contribute to each of these twins right but we're just looking at a few small pieces because when we break a problem down into small pieces many of the pieces are treatable okay let's change it up two siblings with different genes same family same psychological support but one sibling has

a more sensitive temperament a mutation in the MTHFR Gene that makes it hard to metabolize folate so they're tired all the time they don't have energy to really face up the challenges of life and let's say this person also has an undiagnosed milk allergy which increases chronic inflammation makes her feel sick and tired all the time so the one without the milk allergy when there's a challenge or a struggle or you know they get dumped by their boyfriend right they're able to kind of rise above it they've got the energy and the physical resources to

like get back up again and try again where the one who feels sick all the time gets overwhelmed they just don't have the energy to hang out with friends who kind of lift them up they stay home more gradually develop depression right so same social environment different genes same resources two different outcomes okay let's talk about twins who both have the MTHFR gen but they were separated at Birth right they both have access to psychological support they both go to these like kind of upper middle class families they both have been taught and utilize positive

thinking and healthy coping skills um one of them grows up in a perfectionist High achieving stressful home and the other grows up in a super chill supportive hippie home one develops anxiety the other doesn't but the one who developed it from who developed anxiety she learned it from her environment she learned that she had to be perfect she learned that messing up was terrible and if you learn it you can unlearn it right the anxi is perpetuated by continuing to believe that she has to be perfect and when she chooses to believe something more helpful

then that anxiety can be treatable right uh you can also treat the folate deficiency you can also avoid milk and all of the sudden life doesn't feel so overwhelming we can break these problems down into tiny pieces and treat them right in all those other scenarios you can treat the trauma you can repair your nervous system you can unlearn the faulty thinking and you can learn to love yourself there's a gazillion different ways to imagine how all of these different factors contribute to mental health but here's the super important thing when we see mental health

as having many causes when we use this bioc psychosocial approach it gives us tons of options to improve our mental health so here's the bottom line when it comes to biological predispositions most of the time no one's going to test you for them no one's going to scan your brain and be like oh yeah your amydala is bigger than everyone else's right they can test for some of these nutrient deficiencies and run some other physical tests but you usually no one is going to tell you what is specifically causing your anxiety we just don't have

tests that are that detailed and accurate we aren't able to tell you how much of it is genetic or psychological so what's the takeaway be gentle with yourself practice some self-compassion around your anxiety instead of beating yourself up with it right maybe you do have some predisposing biological factors can you develop a good relationship with your own unique traits instead of being ashamed of them right and of course stay open keep a growth mindset there's all these different factors which means there's probably something you don't know yet that can help you with your anxiety in

the next video we're going to talk about the amazing gifts that highly sensitive people have and what they bring to our society and then accept what you can't change change what you can there's a very good chance that you'll be able to decrease your anxiety maybe even drastically and there's a very good chance that you are among the the 95% of people who experience some anxiety on a regular basis this is normal and can be healthy right you can learn to relate to that anxiety and to think of that anxiety in a healthy way so

that it no longer bothers you and it's no longer disordered we all have this spectrum of functioning within our biological predispositions and we can choose to be on the healthy end of that okay I hope this is helpful thank you for watching if you want to learn more check out my 30-day course on um working through anxiety and uh links in the description thanks for watching and take [Music] care