"If you have anxiety, how can you also be depressed?" And my all time favorite, " You must not be praying enough if you are depressed." If I had a dollar for every time time a well- meaning person said those things to me, then I would be whole lot richer. But, I'm not. I'm just a normal person with this set of issues, which happen to be anxiety and depression. And more often than not, the two go hand in hand. When a person is in a state of anxiety, the body produces adrenaline to help them" fight or flight"-basically pick a fight or run away, which is useful when you are actually in a "fight or flight" situation, not so useful when you are not. So what happens with all this adrenaline you don't use?
As you see in the picture, other chemicals take over to bring down your "high alert" state. But when you are in a "high alert" state all the time, it is havoc to your body, because your body chemicals are out of your natural rhythm- and everyone has their own natural unique rhythm. Some people are more just what I call naturally "reactive"-by our basic personality and chemical make-up; we go into high alert a lot easier than others, so therefore our chemical balance upsets easier and requires effort to maintain.
This is a very simplistic explanation of the anxiety-depression link, which is not the same as clinical depression or bi-polar disorder, but this is what a lot of "happy people" deal with in their everyday life.
In my my next blog, I am going to wrap up the month talking about how God provides comfort as we deal with things like anxiety and depression rather than taking those things away.
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