Dr. Ann J. Peters, a prominent anti-aging physician may have some answers. You may wonder what a doctor who specializes in anti-aging medicine knows about depression and anxiety. Dr. Peters would put it plainly that depression and anxiety may speed the aging process. Sounds simple, right? It makes sense when you think about feeling tired and overwhelmed. Those feeling are very similar to the symptoms of depression and anxiety. Our brains can only handle so much information at any given time. When we feel overwhelmed it creates a feeling of nervousness and helplessness or depression and anxiety. It’s easy to see how in today’s busy and demanding world one could easily become overwhelmed and nervous leading to feelings of depression and anxiety.
Stay or Go
Many experts believe that Depression or Anxiety are feelings humans were programmed with millions of years ago as a response to dangerous situations. When the human brain reaches a point of saturation at which it feels it has too much information to handle, an urge to stay and fight or run occurs. Therapists would call this the urge to fight or fly. Fight or fly goes back millions of years to the era of cavemen. If a caveman can upon a dangerous animal he had to decide — even though he may have felt overwhelmed and no doubt anxious — whether to stay and fight or fly, thus the terminology. Experts believe that the urge to fight or fly is part of an anti-aging strategy in our brains. Anti-aging medicine, the kind practiced by Dr. Ann J. Peters MD, supports this theory and believes that this is the case. Dr. Peters is among a group of physicians who think that depression and anxiety are closely tied to fight or flight, and thus the aging process. After all, if you spend a good percentage of your time just trying to stay alive there’s a good chance the results will take their toll on your physical as well as your mental and emotional health.
Temper, Temper
Obviously, your life would be more than filled with Depression or Anxiety if you got in fights frequently, but that’s exactly the point of the fight or flight urge and why Dr. Ann J. Peters and others like her specializing in anti-aging medicine support this theory and tie it to depression. Even the earliest version of man, the caveman, knew he couldn’t win every fight. As the saying goes, “you have to pick your battles.” Sometimes we have no choice except to fight, but often there is the opportunity to run, and sometimes running is the best choice. But it’s the very fact that early man knew he couldn’t win every battle and knew that he had the option of flight that enabled our race to live on. If an early man chose his battles unwisely, would any of us be here right now? Would you be reading a fascinating article on the Internet? Would the Internet even exist? Probably not. Because you can’t win every fight, you become overwhelmed with feelings of anxiety and anxiety turned inward become depression. And depression is characterized as a feeling of hopelessness and helplessness. Anxiety is characterized by feelings of worry, nervousness, irritability, and so forth surrounding the outcome of a situation over which we feel we have no control.
How to Fight Overload or Feeling Overwhelmed
Because you can’t actually run away from yourself, the human brain will find a place where its consciousness is more comfortable, perhaps somewhere deep inside an individual’s mind. This kind of escape is often necessary for those who fight depression and anxiety. Essentially the mind creates a haven for the person’s consciousness, somewhere where the individual can feel safe and protected unlike out in the world facing dangerous animals and other such threats. Some anti-aging physicians call this phenomenon withdrawing. Whether it truly is withdrawal or not, if it means that the individual lives to fight another day, then both the conscious and the unconscious mind are happy. The human brain can tackle living under the most strenuous circumstances, but dying is another story altogether. One which the human brain does not want to occur which is why we have such reflexes and fight or flight in the first place as it relates to Depression or Anxiety. This is precisely what Dr. Ann J. Peters believes. She advocates that while fight or flight is a necessary safety net created by our need to survive, it can also be terribly aging on the body and the mind.
Understanding
Gaining a good understanding of why you feel overloaded or overwhelmed is the first step toward less anxiety and reduced depression; two strong components of anti-aging medicine according to Ann Peters, MD. If the caveman finds a safe peak from which to carefully survey his world he will feel less anxiety and consequently less depression. If he decides to set up camp right in the middle of a field with no protection from the weather or wild animals, he will undoubtedly feel more anxiety and greater depression. Therefore, according to anti-aging doctors like Dr. Peters, the more opportunities that man can remove from his environment which causes Depression or Anxiety the better he’ll feel and the longer he’ll live. And he won’t just live longer; he’ll live longer because he’s healthier. Remember, the goal is to take away obstacles to calmness and lack of worry. Take on too much mentally or emotionally and your survival instinct will kick in and prepare you to fight or to take flight.
