Kick It Naturally – Anxiety and Panic Attacks

You can listen to the episode HERE.

Disclaimer

T.C. Hale is not a doctor and does not claim to be a doctor, licensed in any type of medical field. Don’t be an idiot and use anything heard on this show as medical advice. This information should be used for educational purposes only and you should contact your doctor for any medical advice. Now get off me.

Kinna: Hey everybody and welcome to Kick it Naturally. I’m Kinna McInroe and I’m here with T.C. Hale; natural health expert, author, film producer, sometimes jerk. Hey T.C., what’s up?

Tony: To each of you, I say hello.

Kinna: And I’m also here with Cutie Patootie Will Schmidt whose also ladies a great chef. I tried his French toast this morning. I won’t tell you why I was eating with him in the morning.

Tony: Breakfast with Will.

Kinna: Mmmhmm, breakfast with Will. Uh say hi Will.

Will: Hello.

Tony: He did it. He did just what you told him to do.

Kinna: Mmmhmm, exactly.

Tony: That’s fun.

Will: Well I said hello instead of hi. Sorry.

Kinna: Uh okay. So today’s topic, we’re gonna be talking about anxiety panic, panic attacks. So don’t get all anxious on us.

Tony: Simmer down.

Kinna: Yeah. We’re gonna be discussing all this stuff but first thing I have to say, are panic attacks real? Because some people think that that’s just BS.

Tony: They really do. And, and, and uh if you’ve never experienced it you just don’t know and you just think somebody, hey maybe you’re a bit of a drama queen. Why, why don’t you just come to reality a little bit. You don’t got to be such a sissy all the time. And it’s really not the case. It really is physiological things going on that create these stresses that can cause horrible situations. So we’re gonna kinda explain how that happens. Um but yeah it’s, it’s real stuff. It’s not something that’s just in your head. And it’s not even always something that originates in your head like most psychologists will tell you.

Kinna: Psychologists, are they stupid?

Tony: I don’t think they’re so much stupid as much as they just need to pay their bills.

Kinna: Oh.

Tony: I’m kidding. There’s, there’s a lot of value in, in what they do. Um just not all the time.

Kinna: Mmm, okay. So if you’re listening right now go ahead, I mean you can pull off the side of the road of course, and then follow us on Facebook at Kick it in the Nuts. And we’ll post topics there uh about future shows we’ll be doing and you guys can post any questions you want to cover uh blah, blah, blah, blah. I can’t talk today.

Tony: We’ll do this tomorrow then. You want to pick this up tomorrow?

Kinna: It’s all this anxiety. Yeah I’m so anxious right now.

Tony: Okay.

Kinna: Uh you know you can post questions or we’ll post questions and then you can post more questions… This is not going anywhere.

Tony: Yeah, yeah. Let’s, let’s questions.

Kinna: We’ll answer you.

Tony: Yeah. Do stuff and we’ll tell you about it.

Kinna: Yeah, okay. Yes. But just go to us on Facebook at Kick it in the Nuts. Okay. So uh guys can y’all tell me a little bit about anxiety and what causes anxiety and panic attacks in the first place.

Tony: Yeah. We’ll, we’ll talk about that. You take five.

Kinna: Okay. I’m gonna go meditate.

Tony: We’ll regroup.

Will: Go do some vocal warm-ups.

Kinna: I’m still thinking about that French toast with Will.

Will: Right.

Tony: Um okay, so the important thing if you have anxiety and panic attacks uh either/or, or both um is to understand that you don’t want to just try a remedy to fix it. That’s not what we’re wanting you to do. It’s more important to understand what’s causing your anxiety or panic attacks, what physiological things are going wrong to create that in your body so that you can better understand how to fix that. So don’t just do something that we say to, to try without understanding if it’s right for you. Cause you could make it worse for yourself if you’re pushing yourself the wrong way. So the big thing that I see with a lot of my clients is that someone will have an anabolic imbalance. And if you’re new to this show, you don’t know what we’re talking about or you’ve never read any of my books or taken uh me and Will’s courses. Um the anabolic state is just a cellular state, and we move into an anabolic state at night. We’re supposed to do that. But some people get stuck there and they’re there all the time. So the problem with this is that uh if you wanna induce a panic attack in somebody you would inject them with lactic acid. That’s how a lot of pharmaceutical companies will, will test out uh you know medications is they’ll induce a panic attack and then they’ll try to do something to see if they can help them out of it.

Kinna: That’s freaky.

Tony: It’s freaky. But that’s how you induce a panic attack is inject uh a lot of lactic acid into a person. And we make lactic acid so we know that we can have it in our body without flipping out.

Kinna: Yeah and you do it to me by making me really sore after a workout.

Tony: Right so it’s a different kinda anxious that you get with lactic acid. So uh but if someone is stuck in an anabolic state, in this state our body makes energy through fermentation. And a byproduct of making energy that way is lactic acid. So if a person is making energy that way all the time, we’re not supposed to make energy like that all the time. We’re supposed to use other pathways as well. But if they’re creating all this lactic acid with all the energy that they’re making then it really builds up in the system and they can create a panic attack. And even before the panic attack can occur they can still uh increase anxiety levels. And it’s just a situation of, of the body uh reaching an anxiety from all that lactic acid build up.

Kinna: Well I heard a key word there, fermentation. So does that mean we can actually make wine in our body?

Tony: And, and that’s why I act drunk sometimes even though I’m not.

Kinna: Oh, okay.

Will: You, you know that, that actually is the case with some people that are severe diabetics and their blood sugar gets so high.

Kinna: Really? I was kidding.

Will: I, I, no I’ve actually heard of cases of people being pulled over and testing positive, like DUI violating state.

Tony: I’ve never heard that. That’s amazing.

Kinna: Oh how bad would that suck?

Will: Yeah. Violating state alcohol levels. An they’re like “I swear to god I didn’t drink anything.” But they had like Krispy Kreme, you know.

Kinna: Wow.

Will: And their body fermented it.

Tony: Wow.

Will: Yeah, that’s bad.

Tony: That’s fantastic.

Kinna: Either that or you could make cheese. Just bring a couple of crackers and you know…

Will: Yeah.

Kinna: …slice some off.

Tony: Pull some out of your in between your toes.

Kinna: That, ohhhh.

Tony: So, so that’s one issue that can cause panic attacks. And, but other issues can cause it as well. As well as some problems with oxygen and, and also uh low resources, low minerals. So Will why don’t you explain how that can happen sometimes.

Will: Yeah. So if you’re someone who has panic attacks or general anxiety it’s good to know of like all the different possible things that could be causing it in your body chemistry. And, and Tony you just talked about the anabolic imbalance and lactic acid. The other main things you probably want to look for is if your blood pressure’s low, it kinda relates to low level of minerals that could throw, if it got severe, it could throw you into a seizure. So your body knows that and it wants to, and that’s, we talked about it when we talked about insomnia. One reason why it’ll wake you up in the middle of the night to go get some minerals cause your body can’t have that. It can’t let the blood pressure and electrolyte levels go so low or else the blood will collapse that suspension that it’s in and that’s when you get a seizure. So…

Tony: Right.

Will: …that’s one thing, low blood pressure. And then another one, there two that I want to like mention just, and then we’ll go into more depth uh throughout this episode is being stuck in the sympathetic or the flight or flight state. And then also being too alkaline. If your blood stream gets too alkaline which is kinda hard to do unless you start alkalizing on purpose then it’s really easy to do.

Tony: Cause there are some gurus out there now that are telling everybody that alkalize, alkalize, alkalize. And you must alkalize or your going to die. And people use a lot of these products will uh, to alkalize. And it ends up alkalizing their blood stream too far and then that can cause um oxygen utilization.

Will: Yeah, yeah. It’s uh, it’s called the bohr effect. And what that basically is, is the higher the blood plasma pH, or more alkaline the blood plasma pH the better the blood cells can pick up oxygen as they go through the lungs but the worse they are at getting rid of and getting it to the tissues. So the tissues they’re, they’re naturally, usually making carbonic acid. And that, that carbonic acid, when it runs into the blood cell that’s carrying oxygen through the cardiovascular system, that acid pulls the oxygen off the blood and allows it to go into the tissues.

Tony: Where it needs to be, it should be. We, we want oxygen there.

Will: Yeah, yeah. That’s all the blood is carrying the oxygen on purpose to give it to the tissues not just to have it and be a big floaty red balloon.

Tony: Just to show off.

Will: Like weeee. And it’s interesting like when you, if you look at the blood when it is really high pH you’ll see the red blood cells are super inflated. Like they’re really, really full. And the more acid someone is the less full they are. But that doesn’t mean you just want them to be super full. You want them to be delivering that oxygen. And I know this first hand cause for years I was on the whole alkalizing boat myself…

Tony: Sure.

Will: …and it causes some really intense problems. Uh for me I didn’t, I, I did notice like a low level of anxiety but I took it really far and started to develop tetany. Like I was over pH, over alkalizing way too far. And that not only ruins your digestion by neutralizing your stomach acid but tetany is when your uh your hands and feet and muscles start to clench and cramp. Which can happen sometimes if people are like hyperventilated on purpose like if they’re doing a hypa, hypertrophic breath work where they’re breathing way faster they need to. Or like in kunalini yoga they breathe way faster than they need to. And they’re blowing out all their CO2. And that means the blood can’t give the oxygen to the tissues so it starts to clench and cramp like dead person, like rigor mortis.

Tony: Sure.

Will: And that’s, that, that’s what’s happening chemically, like biochemically. Not that the tissues dead but that’s what happens when someone dies, they stop breathing and that whole cycle stops.

Tony: One of my tips that I give to a lot of my clients is that you don’t want to be like a dead person.

Will: Yeah. Right, right.

Tony: That may be deep for some people to understand but just trust me that you don’t want to be like a dead person.

Will: It, it helps them, it helps them orient. You know like oh not that way. Right, good.

Tony: Right. Go the other direction.

Will: So you can fix that by like one, stop alkalizing. You know and stop adding pH supplements or baking soda to your water. That sort of thing cause that is not at all how your body’s trying to regulate pH.

Tony: Right.

Will: And even if you are too acid, that is not the way to correct it.

Tony: Right. And one thing to understand is that people can be uh, their bloodstream can be leaning too acidic. And trying to do things to alkalize that can be beneficial. So people do improve uh a lot of situations doing that. Don’t say, think we’re saying they don’t. But a lot of people make themselves much worse as well.

Will: Yeah. And, and yeah you can sort of like, if you did have a bloodstream that was leaning too acidic you could potentially feel symptomatically better and actually shift your blood pH a little bit by drinking like a high alkaline water. But you’d want to dig deeper than that and find out why was your bloodstream too acidic.

Tony: There’s better ways of fixing it than that.

Will: Yeah. Because drinking alkaline water while it may temporarily shift your blood pH, it’s still gonna mess up your digestion. And it’s not getting at the reason why the blood plasma was too acidic, which usually has to do with impaired digestion. Like if you can’t break down proteins then, cause you don’t have enough stomach acid then you’ll usually end up eating a lot more carbs which would then create more carbonic acid make your bloodstream too acidic. So when you look at it that way in a kind of indirect but yet still kind of direct way. If you just improve your ability to digest protein and use it for fuel then you could use less carbs in your diet, then your bloodstream wouldn’t be too acidic and you could fix the whole imbalances at the real level.

Tony: Right, right. So let’s get into some people’s questions and then we’ll bit more, explain some of these things further. But those are some of the main underlying causes that can be causing anxiety and panic attacks.

Kinna: Mmmkay. Well I have…

Tony: Let’s see how Kinna’s mouth is doing now.

Kinna: I do have a couple questions myself. Why do I always get anxiety when I over sleep for the gym?

Tony: Well that’s different. That’s cause you know I’m gonna make you do burpies or something.

Kinna: Yeah I overslept for Tony this morning so I was um, I had a lot of anxiety coming into the office today. Uh does time of year, holiday, family cause more anxiety? I mean so anxiety can be caused by outside, you know things that are happening in your life.

Tony: Sure.

Kinna: Uh but we’re talking about more like physiological here, right? Or…

Tony: Well I think it, I think that every, anybody that has anxiety or panic attacks that a lot of times uh it’s not just coming out of nowhere, that life is really instigating those things. Um what we want to do, is we wanna help peoples move their physiology to where uh something that’s on a scale of 1 to 10, you know a 2 or a 3, like being scared that I’m gonna make you do burpies uh won’t affect that person physically like a 10. Because a lot of people are walking around and they’re already like on 7 with nothing going on.

Kinna: And then you think about going home for the holidays and there’s your perverted Uncle George that you see.

Tony: Right.

Kinna: And you already get anxiety, you know.

Tony: Yeah, your butt starts to sweat.

Kinna: Then you start eating to protect yourself. It’s just like a vicious cycle.

Will: He likes that. It’s awful.

Tony: Right, right, right. Yeah. It’s, it’s a bad situation.

Kinna: Uh huh. So…

Tony: So think about that, don’t look at life as like it’s not, it’s not part of the problem. You know those things that your psychologist or whatever are talking to you about are real. And if you can manage the things in your life you can reduce your anxiety. But you can also move your physiology to a place to where those things don’t affect you so much. And then all the sudden your anxiety’s much easier to handle.

Kinna: Which leads me to how can you ward off an anxiety and panic attack from even happening? Like at the first signs of it.

Tony: Well think about how we do in life, you know what like how we were built. We were built to when we see a lion that’s going to eat us that all of these you know adrenaline, all these things kick in to make us function at a higher level in that immediate moment. So we were built to handle stresses like that. So the fact that um our aunt is gonna make us eat this disgusting stew she makes every year should not create a panic attack to us. It’s physiology already bringing us up to a 7 or 8 that lets a little thing like that push us over the edge.

Kinna: Hmm. Okay. Jane from Danville, California, “My anxiety level seems to be highest around my period.” Well, there you go.

Tony: Will’s good with girls so we’ll let him talk about the period.

Kinna: Ah yeah.

Will: This gets into and I think so does the last question too when we talk about to ward off um an anxiety attack. It gets into like the individual causes of anxiety for that person. So when this person’s reporting they get anxiety around their period we look at well what’s happening in their body that is shift their chemistry into that state. And usually in the case of having a period it’s, the period itself, the menstrual cycle demands so many minerals and nutrients and resources that that person whose already kind of low blood pressure will drop even lower and that creates a panic attack for the reasons we talked about related to low blood pressure. So that person could minimize the anxiety caused by their cycle by doing stuff to raise their blood pressure and their mineral reserves like improve their digestion, take more salts, keep blood sugar balanced.

Tony: Right. And, and what, and a way to look at it is, think about it like you are trying pay uh $900 in bills with $18 bucks. You know that’s a, that’s a stressful situation to be in. So if you’re…

Kinna: That’s my exact situation.

Tony: That’s why I used it as an example. So if, if your body is trying to, has all these things to do, all these functions to handle and you don’t have the resources to do that it’s a stressful situation just for your body. So then you start to feel what your body’s feeling. And I don’t want you to think that we’re saying that low minerals causes anxiety physiologically. Um, we don’t know that exactly, we just see that a lot. And it could be um, see the thing is that with low minerals causes so many problems with people. Um and not allowing the body to function like it should that it could be creating some other deficit that we don’t know about that makes some other hormone jack up and then all the sudden there’s panic attacks and anxiety. We don’t, we don’t know that exactly but um what we do know is that most the cases of anxiety and or panic attacks that I see even are, are almost always anabolic imbalances and people with very low electrolytes.

Kinna: I’m screwed.

Tony: You’re pretty screwed.

Kinna: I have everything possible.

Tony: Going for you.

Kinna: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Pancho from Phoenix, Arizona, “As I’m sober for three months from alcohol working out has been hard anxiety.”

Tony: Way to go Pancho!

Kinna: Wait, “working out has been hard.” Okay although he stopped drinking he needs to use punctuation. “Uh working out has been hard. Anxiety creeps up and then turns into a panic attack. I never had anxiety till the day I quit drinking. Why all of the sudden?” Well because you quit drinking.

Tony: Sure. Drunk is better all the time.

Will: Back on it. Don’t be a quitter.

Kinna: Your too drunk to know you were anxious.

Tony: Right. You don’t care about anything when you’re, when you’re all sloppy.

Kinna: Yeah. So my, my advice would go back to drinking.

Tony: And that’s, we’re here to listen to Kinna’s advice.

Will: Yeah, right.

Kinna: Yeah exactly. I’m a health expert.

Tony: Yeah but you know it could be a few things I think about that sugars thicken up blood and uh give your body more resources to function even though that might not be the healthiest way to do it, it’s still resources. So Will what do you think about the sugars going up and down, you know.

Will: Yeah, absolutely. And, and alcohol is an especially potent uh I guess crutch that people could start to lean on it for bi, physiological reasons. Not only the sugars but also I guess alcohol is an actual form of energy that your liver makes called acetate. And when the liver, the less well your liver’s working, the less acetate reserves you have. And alcohol can sort of like skip that process of needing a well functioning liver and just give you acetate straight which helps keep your body warm and it’s a source of energy that your body can run off of. So if you just cut that out cold turkey and your liver functions still really isn’t on par then you’re missing a really important energy resource that your body is accustomed to having around whether you made it or whether you drank it.

Tony: Right.

Will: So that, that can really throw you off as well as the whole blood sugar issues like you know.

Tony: Yeah and plus if, if you were drinking enough that you felt like you needed to stop and to be sober then your liver is probably not in the best amount of shape right now.

Will: Probably not. Yeah.

Tony: So that’s probably pretty valid thing. So but the thing to remember is look at your physiology. What’s, what’s your blood pressure now? It could have dropped into the dirt after you stopped drinking. So look at that where it is. And, and if, if you guys are new and you haven’t read uh any of our books um go to kickitinthenuts.com and sign up for one of the courses. The, the digestion one is free and it shows you how to uh um look at your physiology and do simple tests at home so you can see where you’re at.

Kinna: All this talk about drinking you guys wanna get a cocktail after the show or anything?

Will: Yeah.

Kinna: Okay, sure. Um Amber, uh Amber has a lot here.

Tony: Let’s do the first part and then we’ll just…

Kinna: Okay we’ll do the first part of Amber. “My advice; know your triggers. Seek professional help if possible. Build a support group. Two, people in my life are on standby for a phone call if I go into an attack.”

Tony: I think two people of the people in her life are on standby.

Kinna: Oh “two of the people in my life…” Okay. This is on Facebook. People write in complete sentences! Okay. And then it says something like “five flowers, box remedy, box rescue remedy are awesome. Kava root, yogi tea has a tea is cool too. Pepsi in extreme scenarios.” I bet, I bet that Tony’s not gonna like the Pepsi.

Tony: Actually I’m okay with the Pepsi thing. You’re gonna freak out about this…

Kinna: I’m gonna go get a Pepsi.

Tony: No, cause you’re not having a panic attack. I, I would only say that in a panic attack and, and here’s why. Um actually any kind of bubbly water or carbonated water can be great for people that are high anxiety uh panic attacks, especially if that, if they’re being caused from the blood, from their bloodstream being too alkaline. Because the CO2 is acidic, and that helps acidify our bloodstream, and that allows oxygen to get where it needs to be. And uh Pepsi uh happens to be the most acidic of the, of the soft drinks that I’ve seen out there. So that doesn’t mean I want everybody drinking Pepsi but in a, in a panic attack moment you know a Pepsi could really pull you out of that.

Kinna: And this program’s sponsored by Pepsi.

Tony: Right. Um so think of it like uh you know Will talked about a couple weeks ago about how the brain needs glucose to function correctly. And um a, a lot of times to facilitate the burning of glucose you have to have oxygen to be able to do that. Are you excited because I said facilitate?

Kinna: Mmmhmm. Yeah I’m, it’s, it’s nearly sending me into a panic attack.

Tony: Yeah. So um and if, if a person is too alkaline in their bloodstream then that could be a beneficial thing. The other remedies that she mentioned, the kava root, I’ve never tried that. Have you tried that Will?

Will: Yeah, yeah. And that and the bok uh flowers. I’ve tried both of those. And those uh I believe work more directly on the autonomic nervous system. So…

Tony: Pushing them more parasympathetic, kinda?

Will: Yeah.

Tony: To simma down.

Will: Yeah. Which would speak something about Amber like sometimes the sympathetic state is causing her anxiety and other times alkalosis is probably causing it.

Tony: Sure. And also um I know Amber. Amber’s in our support group and she’s mentioned her physiology. And I remember that she was very anabolic too. So think about sometimes that you could have more than one underlying cause and different ones could kick in at different times. You could be like just the bonus round anxiety captain cause you have all of them things going for you.

Kinna: What about chamomile tea? I love chamomile, it makes me very relaxed.

Tony: I don’t know.

Kinna: You’re supposed to be the expert!

Tony: Yeah.

Kinna: Alright, okay.

Tony: I, I don’t know what that would do to physiology but I, I like chamomile too.

Kinna: Okay, okay.

Tony: So maybe we’ll have tea after this instead of jagermeister shots.

Kinna: Ah, damn. Okay so uh the second part is “also if you’re working out, exercise cardio mimics the symptoms of an anxiety attack. Sometimes your brain gets confused, recognizes the symptoms and actually will have an attack. This happened to me three or four times at the gym before I asked my psy, uh psychology professor and he explained it.” Is this true, is her professor full of crap?

Tony: He’s not full of crap. I just think that he looks at it like panic attacks are started in the brain and it’s because of a trauma that you received as a child and, and not that that can’t be a factor, I absolutely believe it can. But I mean Will’s a fancy uh trainer so we can just ask him what does your body make when you’re working out?

Will: Yeah. I mean it does make a lot of lactic acid.

Tony: So if somebody already has a butt load of lactic acid going on because they’re overly anabolic, now all the sudden jumping, it ramps up even higher during that workout. So that’s a problem.

Will: Yeah.

Kinna: Interesting. Keelie from Worchester, Mass. “Why do I sometimes feel super anxious while I’m on the treadmill?” And that’s uh kinda like the last question.

Tony: Yeah. Kinna can probably answer that question now.

Kinna: Because of the lactic acid.

Tony: That’s why, that’s why we turn to Kinna.

Kinna: It’s a build up. Yeah, yeah. Even though I was zoned out and look like I wasn’t paying attention, a couple of those things did get into my head. Um Cory from Mininami, Michigan, “Anxiety plain and simple sucks if you’ve ever experienced it as part of your life. Not once I had it. Then you just don’t get the feeling. Thankful for my hubby and family for understanding.”
She, there wasn’t really a question there.

Will: Yeah, yeah. But you know for people that are kind of stuck in this state I would say like you can get your like your finger on what’s causing it for you by looking at a couple different measurements like check your blood pressure, is it low? Check uh…

Tony: And what would you say is, is considered low?

Will: I would say like, like under 113 systolic, and what would you say diastolic under like?

Tony: It could vary a lot but…

Will: Yeah.

Tony: Just look at the top number so you don’t get too complicated.

Will: Yeah. If it’s, if it’s under 113 on the top number on the little meter thingy, systolic, then that points towards maybe that’s an issue.

Tony: And we see a lot of people that are like 89. I mean it’s like in the dirt.

Will: Yeah.

Tony: And just so you know like, it’s not like dollars; 89 is a lot lower than 112.

Will: Yeah. If you think of it, it’s like 2/3 of what your blood pressure should be. And so you’re missing a whole 1/3 of blood.

Tony: Right. That’s a problem.

Will: Like 1/3 of you like if made it all, like 1/3 of the blood in your body fell on the floor…

Tony: Right.

Will: …it’s a problem. Not just…

Tony: You would, you would, you would be concerned about that.

Will: Yes.

Tony: So with a blood pressure that low you should also be concerned.

Will: And then when you look at like, well is alkalosis my issue? You can, either you yourself count or have a friend count how many breaths you take in a minute. And if your breath rate’s really slow, like if it’s much under 15, like somewhere like around like 10 or 9 or…

Tony: Yeah.

Will: And that points towards hey maybe alkalosis is my issue.

Tony: And just count inhales, don’t count both. And we teach you how to do all these tests too in the courses and books.

Will: Yeah, yeah. So you know for someone who just feels like they’re stuck in anxiety for life look at those, just those two measurements for now and see like am I either of those. And if so now you have some little ground to start orienting yourself on what you could do to shift it.

Tony: Right. And it’s kinda fun, and this is a thing you know you, you look at Cory, what she’s saying and she’s found ways to navigate herself through life. And that’s kinda what we, we do when we have an issue that we deal with. We just go in a way that allows us to function and be a human. But um they usually people feel like I’m stuck, this is just me. This is my personality. Um I’m just touchy about these kinda specific things. And just know that you don’t have to exist that way. You can improve things to at least make it better and easier to manage.

Will: Yeah. And you know one tricky thing that I see with a lot of women that try to be thin is like they’ll see these measurements and they’ll start taking ground to fix it. Like they’ll take, fix their digestion, start eating more on time, eating more protein and stuff and they’ll start to gain weight cause now they have blood pressure. And you know they’ll start to maybe even possibly build muscle and they’ll freak out because now they have…

Tony: Cause the scale said something they didn’t want to hear.

Will: Yeah. And not they’re “oh my god, I weigh over 100 pounds now.” You know. And then they’ll stop eating. And even in like severe hypothyroid bed-ridden girls like they’ve been you know struggling, they finally can walk around and buy groceries again and they’ll, they’re scared to like gain any weight so then they just start cutting their portions again and they fall back into the same patterns of like you know chronic fatigue and anxiety, and you know digestive issues. So…

Kinna: So all that skinniness and beautifulness just goes to waste because…

Will: Yeah.

Tony: Yeah.

Will: They can’t even go out.

Kinna: Yeah and they have no personality with being in the dumps.

Will: Right.

Kinna: So, so…

Tony: Kinna…

Will: You just love it don’t you?

Tony: You want to do a whole show topic just on that.

Kinna: Uh huh. Skinny bi-aches. No I, I have no problem with them as long as they stay away.

Will: Yeah. So I’d say try to shift your chemistry back into the ideal ranges and then once you do that you’ll feel better. And then look and see like do you stick with those changes or are they starting to make you gain weight or whatever and then do you sabotage yourself? Cause you’re, you have a lot of gravity and emotional sort of resonance with the patterns you grew up with. So unless you stay mindful about those things you’ll probably go back to those old ways and then just feel like oh that didn’t work for me. Probably because you stopped doing it.

Tony: Right. And like a, with a, with a lot of people I’ll just tell them you know don’t get on the scale cause the scales a liar. You know it doesn’t uh tell you what’s really going on cause muscle weighs more and all these things that are happening.

Will: Yeah.

Tony: Um so I just tell people just it’s better off if you’re, you know, measure you waist and use that as a gauge uh if you want to be a wafey little chick or something.

Will: Yeah. And you can make it, all the weight go to the good places by working out right and all these things.

Tony: Sure.

Will: So don’t think that you’re gonna look bad just cause you put on a couple pounds of lean muscle.

Tony: Right. So just get past having to know what the number is.

Kinna: Uh okay. Billy from Phoenix, “my football coach used to have breathe into a paper bag and it always worked.” Why is that? That sounds like asthma more to me. And I’m a doctor. So…

Tony: Kinna’s not a doctor.

Will: No. It’s not…

Kinna: I’m a doctor of love.

Will: Yeah. And this goes back to the whole um CO2 to oxygen balance that we talked about earlier when we mentioned the bohr effect and the blood cells trying to get uh the oxygen to the tissues. So when you breath into a paper you’re, you’re just breathing in the CO2 you just exhaled. So you’re helping to shift your blood chemistry back to having enough carbonic acid for your blood cells to let go of the oxygen they’re carrying and reach your tissues.

Tony: Right.

Kinna: I hope he had good breath.

Tony: Yeah, yeah. Cause that’d be gross. But that’s how a lot of people that are doing the exercises that Will was talking about where they’re breathing very fast, they’re dispelling a lot of CO2 and then the bloodstream can go too alkaline and that person can either pass out or create and emotional anxiety situation. So by putting it into a bag all the sudden you get it all back you can, you can hold on to more CO2 which is acidic.

Kinna: So when I’m doing tantra and I pass out uh, no I’m kidding. I’m kidding! Uh Glen, “I’d like to hear your take on the optimal balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic,” good words Glen, “nervous system. I’d like to learn about the hormonal underpinning of anxiety and panic attacks, adrenaline, cortisone, thyroid function.” Wow, does he have like a medical journal sitting there that he’s looking up these words? He’s, he’s doing good.

Tony: I think he was, I think I remember that Glen said he was a, he worked for a naturapath or something. I think he found us, he found us a couple weeks ago and liked, liked the books.

Kinna: Smarty britches.

Tony: So talk about the autonomic stuff Will.

Will: Yeah, yeah. I think we mentioned this, and I think I even said this on the last episode we were talking about depression where Glen you can look at the equation that you get by taking your blood pressure and subtracting the systolic by the diastolic; so the top number minus the bottom number which gives you your pulse differential and then you divide that by your breath rate, and that gives you a resultant number. If that resultant number is over 3 you’re in a sympathetic imbalance; if it’s under 2 you’re in a parasympathetic imbalance.

Tony: Or it’s a strong indication that you yeah, yeah.

Will: Yeah. It’s a strong indication. You can look at other things too like the hand versus tricep temperature, and the pupil dilation levels, and this, like if you scratch their skin if it turns red or white. All those will give you indications one way or the other. But they do directly affect all those hormone systems that you’re talking about because the body is constantly trying to regulate again that flow of glucose and the speed of oxidation in our tissues and our cells, and the stream of glucose to our brain. So it wants it to be balanced and it will secrete the right kind of hormones to either speed or slow uh oxidation to try to keep you there.

Tony: Yeah. Cause think about like you know the, you know adrenaline is built in us so that when that lion comes after us we can jack ourselves up and be turbo, superman run away kinda thing. But uh when we’re just stressed because of traffic or rent is due then we carry that stress for hours when we’re built to just carry it for a short amount of time. And so that can start affecting hormones and jacking things up in, in a wrong way, uh that way. But Glen one, you know I, as far as looking at the hormonal situation it’s hard to, I don’t like to say uh it’s because of this hormone that you’re having anxiety and panic attack situations because a lot of times the body will increase hormone production of a specific hormone because it doesn’t have the resources it needs because maybe it doesn’t have enough minerals to function correctly or other nutrients so it’ll try to increase specific hormones just to get the body to function. And then people kinda blame it on a hormone when it was really just the body didn’t have what it needed and it was just making stuff up in a pinch. So I don’t look at those so specifically when I’m looking at anxiety. I, I, I kinda find that it’s better to look at the stuff that Will was talking about.

Will: Yeah. And I think it’s kinda dangerous too when you start to look at it from the level of, of like hormone like operation and hormone regulation because then you’re getting into pushing the body around you know.

Tony: Right.

Will: Like whereas nutrients are like an opportunity for the body to do stuff with. If you like inject or supplement with hormones whether synthetic or organic they’re, they’re like commands telling your body “do this.” Right.

Tony: Yeah. You’re not the boss of me.

Will: Right. So when you look at like well actually taking the more sort of agrarian or farmer sort of approach to health and nutrition like you wanna make the bio-terrain or the soil of, of the tissues to be balanced and healthy so that all your hormones can you know just help everything go as, as it should. As opposed to just saying “oh like your thyroids’ underactive, he’s some thyroid enzymes to like speed it up.” Well it’s like well the thyroid was underactive on purpose cause you can’t digest anything and you don’t have any gas in your tank.

Tony: Right, right.

Will: You know. So it’s pushed the gas pedal down, you’re asking for a car crash. You’re asking for a wreck, you know.

Tony: That’s all I have to say about that.

Kinna: Alright. So uh Shane from Alcoa, Tennessee. “I know my triggers and what helps me cope the best in that situation.”

Tony: Kinna, how, how come, how come you stopped doing different voice for each person?

Kinna: Oh I don’t know. I’ll go back.

Tony: We didn’t, we didn’t talk about that.

Kinna: “I know my triggers and what helps me cope the best in that situation. The hardest part is explaining to people why you need to remove yourself in that moment when they don’t get it at all. I would love to not have them at all but when you don’t know why, it’s hard to fix ‘em.”

Tony: Yeah and that’s I think where people get uh stuck Loretta. I mean Shane, it just sounded like Loretta the way Kinna was talking you know. Um but people feel like it’s, it’s them and it’s their personality. So if I just find the things in life that make me feel this way, I just stay away from those things in life. But if one of those things in life is exiting the house then that’s a problem.

Kinna: Tony I can’t come in anymore.

Tony: Right, yeah. Yeah that’s a problem.

Kinna: Parting ways.

Tony: So um, so try and just look away from the, the, the, way of thinking of it’s my personality. How can I, how can I, what ideas can I have that would change this. Um instead look at your numbers. Let’s see where you are and then you can help your body function better and then all the sudden those things are easier.

Kinna: Damn those numbers. Um okay Stephanie, “they happen when I’m sleeping, working etcetera. People that talk too much and don’t stop to breathe irritate me. People that take too long to answer or explain something irritates me.”

Tony: Well I, I’d be a problem with her wouldn’t I?

Kinna: “I don’t like crowds, public speaking etcetera. The easy answer is avoidance but that’s wrong. I could tell them to get to the point, please stop talking, but then I’m the jerk. Instead I keep to myself and have to find ways not to crawl out of my skin in certain scenarios. Once I have established a friendship I’m good. I take medicine and I want off it. I just need to find a way to wipe this from my life completely. It’s annoyance that has set up shop in my life for way too long.” Wow.

Tony: Wow that was pretty impressive.

Will: Yeah it was, you held that.

Kinna: Ah there you go.

Tony: And you went right back to Kinna.

Kinna: Uh huh. Exactly.

Will: I usually start to drift into Australian or something. Try British…

Kinna: Little New Zealand there. Giving y’all the flava.

Tony: But you can see if you’re not a person that deals with anxiety that these people it’s, it’s a real thing. It’s like it, it controls a lot of their life. And it’s, if, if they don’t do the things they’ve learned that allow them to function they’re, they’re pretty screwed. And it sounds like they might be punching somebody at a dinner party and telling them to shut up!

Kinna: Yeah. Stephanie’s got a short fuse there, you know. Maybe she works for the post office or something.

Will: Yeah. I mean I, I think for this person, like we always say helping the body chemistry can help the situation but also sounds like there’s some real interpersonal dynamics and ways of interacting with people that she could alter and have better results with. Like reframing what confronting someone is. You know and saying like “Oh I’m the bad guy.” It’s like no you’re just trying to get clear whatever it is. You know so…

Tony: Right, right.

Will: Chemistry’s not the whole thing. It’s just we can help improve our capacity to…

Tony: Right. Or she, if, if she can go 30 seconds listening to somebody talk if she helps her body function later, you know better she might be able to make it a minute and a half before she punches them in the throat.

Kinna: Yeah.

Will: Right.

Tony: And that’s all we want. We’re just looking to give you an extra 45 seconds. That’s our goal.

Kinna: But I’m with Stephanie.There’s a lot of stupid people out there. And they just you know, they get on my nerves.

Tony: Yeah. Some quote I saw the, the other day about, something about whoever thought, whoever turned, coined the term “common sense” didn’t know very many people.

Kinna: Yeah, exactly. Um I had a question too this is kinda off point but like in the times of cavemen and stuff were there all these imbalances then because they didn’t have processed food? So pretty much their bodies were working correctly, right at that time or when we just over time we’ve screwed ourselves up with this crappy food that we’re eating, calling food.

Tony: Or the cave drawing that were depicting this bipolar bitch trying to get out of the village…

Kinna: Experiencing a, a panic attack…

Tony: We didn’t understand what it meant. Yeah so.

Kinna: Okay. She was trying to like draw anabolic and we didn’t get it. Okay.

Will: Right.

Tony: Right, right. Yeah, so who knows but. So Will what would you say is the, our theme, or what, what’s, what do you want to take away from this?

Kinna: Tie us up Will.

Tony: Oh well from this I would say like if you have problems of anxiety don’t just think that it’s something you got to sort out mentally. Look at like what bio markers are off in you. Is your blood pressure low? Is your breath rate really slow? That uh, is your nervous system kinda tweeked? And then take…

Kinna: Are you on cocaine?

Will: Right. Are you, are you out of meth? Like whatever it is that you need to get your fix to balance out. But no, if you’re off in any of those markers then recognize those, identify them and then start working through our, our courses like our free course in digestion or the fat loss course even could teach you a lot about these terms that we’ve been throwing around. And you can bring yourself back into balance and find that even if you do have real life external sources of anxiety you’re gonna be able to handle them a lot better. And if it was just biochemical well then you’ll be fixed really quickly with your results.

Tony: Yeah.

Kinna: So the deep breathing and stuff like that, meditation and that will help. Will that help too? I mean is that kinda like with the breathing in the bag thing that people…

Will: I find personally for me I, I get a lot out of meditation and um but that’s, like that’s because for me like I’ll have my mind going really fast all day trying to manage things. And it just helps me sort out what’s going on mentally. But I know like the difference between that versus the anxiety I feel if I get too alkaline or if I tweak my nervous system too hard. So…

Kinna: But you’re already working on all the digestion and all that stuff too…

Will: Yeah.

Kinna: So like if somebody wasn’t working on anything, any of that and they were just like sitting there breathing or it may not…

Will: Just trying to meditate. I, I know plenty of people that are deep into meditation practices and they come in and we look at their chemistry and we find like, I’m able to just tell them right away “your mind is always on, it’s never calm cause your stuck in a sympathetic state.” And they’re like “yeah, even though I meditate like, like three hours a day. It’s still, just it’s always racing.” And, and it’s just because that’s what’s happening in their brain chemistry cause that’s what need to happen to keep their body balanced.

Tony: Right. And, and, and think about it this way, that just because that breathing in a bag and increasing the acid levels in the blood could pull one person out of a panic attack, doesn’t mean it would pull everybody cause if another persons panic attack is caused from too much lactic acid in the body then that bag isn’t going to do anything for you. It, it’s just gonna make you suck up your own bad breath. But um so and if you are listeners that are uh familiar with what we’re talking about, you’ve read the books and you know where your chemistry is um when I see a client that is dealing with panic attacks or high anxiety most commonly I see them in an extreme anabolic state so if you, if you’re anabolic then you know that that’s something that uh you really want to focus on to improve your anxiety. Um I also see a lot of clients with really low blood pressure. So if that’s you, that’s another thing you know okay, I, I want to work on these things and when I see them start to move, if I start to feel better then I know I’m on the right track.

Kinna: When I’m nicer to you, you know my numbers are good.

Tony: Yeah. I don’t even ask for you numbers when you’re nice.

Kinna: Yeah. Exactly.

Tony: Instead of saying “hey Kinna you’re a little bitchy today,” I’m like “hey could you check your blood pressure?”

Kinna: Yeah. Exactly.

Tony: And then also the third one is um an over alkaline bloodstream. So those are the three things that I see most commonly with people that are dealing with high anxiety issues. So look at those and see which one is, is more appropriate for you to work on.

Kinna: Alright. So thanks everybody for tuning in. If you want to learn more about how to look at your own chemistry you can read any of Tony’s books or take the free four week Digestion Course at kickitinthenuts.com. Catch us on the next episode where we’ll be talking about I don’t know something interesting, maybe stress or something.

Tony: It’s, it’s gonna be amazing. Yeah, maybe we’ll talk about stress.

Kinna: Yeah, we’ll talk about something fancy. But it’ll be fun. So thanks for tuning in and just remember uh to poop.

Tony: Yeah, poop!

Kinna: Keep poopin.

Tony: Poop on.

Kinna: Alright. Later.