Everyone experiences anxiety from time to time, but for people with chronic anxiety it can be debilitating, interfering with sleep, social interactions, work production, and ultimately health and wellness. As our anxiety accumulates, we produce stress hormones and our bodies have to deal with the effects. Loss, grief or unhappy relationships at work, home and social situations can lead to depression, as can long-term stress. All negative emotional feelings are due to an imbalance of the excitatory and inhibitory hormones in the brain sometimes called brain chemistry.
What is Chemical Imbalance?
Chronic anxiety is believed to be the result of a body chemical imbalance that begins in the brain. The human brain is responsible for the constant transmission of chemical messengers called neurotransmitters that control overall body function. Everything from breathing, swallowing, digesting and crying, to thought processes, sleep cycles and emotions like aggression and fear begin with this communication. For the purposes of discussing anxiety, it is seratonin, epinephrine, norephinephrine and GABA, among others, that serve as relevant chemical messengers. These “feel good” neurotransmitters are naturally produced by the body and are responsible for any sense of well being or satisfaction a patient experiences. Conversely, decreased production of these feel-good chemicals results in increased anxiety and other mood disorders such as depression, fatigue and brain fog.
There are many factors that can impair neurotransmitter function and lead to a body chemical imbalance including, stress, poor diet and lifestyle habits, environmental pollutants, infections, and genetics.
But there is good news. Neurotransmitter levels can now actually be measured through neuroadrenal testing (or neurotransmitter testing).
Why Neurotransmitter Testing for Balancing the Brain Chemistry?
The human brain and nervous system is a very complicated one, as is the treatment of anxiety disorders. Although we know that brain chemicals contribute to anxiety and mood, any perceived imbalance is unique to the individual patient. Therefore, treatments and therapies, which increasingly involve prescription medications, begin with trial and error. These meds, designed to manipulate the production of the body’s feel-good neurotransmitters, often must be changed and adjusted over time to suitably alter brain chemistry until the individual patient (hopefully) levels out. This is educated guesswork, sure, but guesswork still.
Testing of an individual’s brain chemistry can reveal patient-specific neurotransmitter imbalances through a simple (needle-free) neuroadrenal test, the results of which can point you and your healthcare professional toward a more individualized protocol sooner. This might include dietary changes, case-specific vitamins and supplements in the correct doses or certain detoxification therapies, all designed to balance out deficiencies that lead to symptoms of anxiety disorders.
At Whole Body Health, we not only can perform the neurotransmitter testing but we walk you through your results explaining what each number means and advise you on ways to improve your brain balance. Brain chemistry testing adds to the arsenal of holistic ways Whole Body Health can address emotional and hormonal disorders.