Keating Born Anxious
Dear Reader, You might be interested in this book: Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity--and How to Break the Cycle; St. Martin's Press, NY; 2017. by Daniel Keating. It looks at what happened to your brain and what you learned in utero or prenatally and in the first three years of your life. It explains how the stress, your pregnant mother experienced, changed the activity of a DNA segment (without changing the sequence of the DNA.) This process is called methylation. This in turn gave her a hyper active reaction to perceived danger that was passed on you, her child (epigenetics) because the fetus was growing and living in this biochemical environment of heightened corticosteroids.
Keating clearly explains the mechanism through which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) signals danger. The HPA cycle keeps running and can't be turned off and it keeps growing into a panic attack.
One of my clients told me about this book. He says it finally explained for him why he's always anxious; why he gets anxious about things he knows he shouldn't and why he has a hard time dampening it down. How it stopped optimal achievement in himself and his sons, too. It was comforting for him just to know about the biochemical mechanism---epigenetics. It's not just a mind over matter. It's not just a matter of free will. This was highly reassuring and allowed him to believe that it wasn't that he wasn't trying hard enough or that he liked being dramatic. He could "fix this." It changed his thinking so he could change his actions and feelings.
Keating says treatment is mainly in prevention of maternal stress and treating the consequences of the child's prenatal stress. I agree it'd be best prevented. On the other hand, most of us don't have that opportunity. We know why our alarm systems are so uncontrollable. Information and relearning is another way to handle anxiety. Many of my anxiety ridden clients, (children, teens and adults) make significant changes in their lives by using cognitive behavioral modification techniques. They learn to handle anxiety and keep it from going into a panic state. (It really feels like death is imminent. The reaction to perceived danger is running overtime, over normal limits and being unable to shut off the alarm system.) I know this relearning worked for many.
First, understand that Eric Kandel (won a Nobel Prize for this) demonstrated that whenever you learn something new, your brain cell changes in shape and function. Normally, the HPA axis response gets hardwired by what you've learned from life situations; certain triggers--thoughts, sights, sounds, smells, etc. can set off the response to be alert. On the other hand, for those methylated prenatally or in early childhood, once triggered your autonomic nervous system responds by getting your body and mind ready to fight or runaway beyond normal limits. Your heart starts pounding, your focus narrows on fighting or running, your breathing deepens and your blood sugars and fats increase and continue to rise. You may feel like you're having a heart attack or stroke. It's pretty scary and very uncomfortable. Second, once you've learned something, you can't delete it, but you can modify it. Try visualizing the fight-flight response as a computer application that needs patching. When an application or program develops a bug/glitch, you don't usually dump the whole application. You patch it or edit it. You delete, modify or add more conditional statements. To better discriminate when you should or shouldn't continue to be ready to fight or flight or just go back to homeostasis or balance. You give yourself more choices, such as "If no one has to die, then go back to homeostasis, you're safe."
I think another gift of Keating's book is the idea that the methylation mechanism can be generalized or transferred to many other learned situations. Would a confident, serene and happy pregnant mother provide a serene and happy methylated biochemical environment for the fetus? Methylation may not just be about anxiety but about other kinds of learning. Could other kinds of responses be epigenetically transferred? What kind of other feelings and responses? What do you think?
