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In this episode, we delve into my personal journey with anxiety, a condition that has been a significant part of my life since I was 17. My experiences with anxiety began with a misdiagnosed gallbladder issue, which led to unnecessary surgery and subsequent health complications. This medical ordeal during my teenage years was the precursor to my first encounter with severe anxiety and panic attacks.

The decision coincided with the engagement in a twelve-step program and therapy, which introduced the new frameworks for dealing with stress and anxiety. The process of discontinuing the medication was arduous and accompanied by intense withdrawal symptoms.

Through therapy and personal reflection, I uncovered that much of anxiety stemmed from deep-seated beliefs about the self-worth and capabilities, beliefs that were inadvertently inherited from my family dynamics. Addressing these issues head-on allowed me to reconnect with my emotions and intuition, which had been numbed by years of medication and substance abuse. This newfound clarity brought about a significant shift in how I processed everyday stressors and led to a more fulfilling engagement with life.

Join us as we explore the testament to the power of personal growth and the importance of addressing mental health issues at their roots. together lets explore the paths to healing and start viewing anxiety not just as a barrier, but as a gateway to deeper self-discovery and resilience.

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What We Explored This Episode

00:06:16 - Understanding Anxiety and Its Origins

00:13:30 - The Breakthrough of Getting Off Medications

00:16:10 - The Impact of Twelve Step Programs and Therapy

00:27:33 - The Realization of Root Causes of Anxiety

00:33:02 - The Transformation Through Personal Growth

00:35:18 - The Importance of Processing Childhood Traumas

00:40:13 - The Role of Limiting Beliefs and Misunderstandings

Memorable Quotes

"Therapy was helpful, but as I developed my own toolsets and frameworks, I found a much greater level of support for handling daily stressors."

"After getting off anxiety medications, I realized I had been numbing out. Without them, I began to feel again, experiencing a deeper connection to life and my emotions."

"The anxiety I experienced was a compressed form of energy that my body was managing. As I processed and transformed this energy, it significantly contributed to my personal growth."

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Virtual Intensive Podcast Promo (Oct 8 - Nov 8)

Hey, it's David. Welcome back to A Changed Mind, a sanctuary for your spirit, a place where each and every episode I will remind you of the certainty of goodness, future, friend, host, guide. I'm really excited for today's episode because what I'm going to be sharing with you has probably contributed to the number one breakthrough that I've experienced in life. And if you have been struggling with anxiety, if you know someone who struggles with anxiety, if you've had panic attacks, you've been experiencing some form of anxiety related depression, you're going to love this episode because I'm going to be sharing with you my journey going through anxiety since I was 17 years old, my experience of taking anxiety medications, getting off medication and how that contributed the biggest breakthrough I ever had in my entire life. And so I'm going to share with you what happened after 15 years of being on medications. I'm also going to be talking to you about what anxiety is, where it comes from, how to overcome it, work with the anxiety. So there should be a product tool and the incredible result being able to do. And this conversation is important. I think now more than ever before, because 20% of just American are experiencing some form of anxiety. 13% of Americans are on some form of anxiety or depression. One in 20 people are actually on some form of a benzodiazepine, which is also something that I had taken for many, many years. It is highly, highly addictive. And so I want to share with you what my experience was. It may be a value to you. Let me be very, very clear. I'm not a doctor. I'm not a physician. However, I am someone who has had a very intimate relationship with anxiety. I am someone who studies human performance, who understands neuroscience and neurobiology and human physiology. And so I am coming with a level of education around the subject that we're talking about, but most importantly, I'm coming personal experience and I'm going to start by sharing a story with you because it'll help to magnify the source of anxiety. And that story was when I was 17 years old, I was at a friend's house and started having extreme abdominal and the pain just got worse and worse and worse until it was unbearable. They called 911, called the paramedics. They ended up taking me to hospital and one of the markers that they had identified that was elevated called my liver enzyme and nothing else seemed to be wrong with. And when that occurs, generally physicians believe that in addition to the abdominal pain that you're having a gallbladder. And so it was diagnosed as a gallbladder attack, which was very unusual for a 17 year old. Normally gallbladder problems are for more overweight women in the forties, call it fat female forties. That was sort of the classic hallmark of having gallbladder problems. And here I was a very fit, very thin 17 year old boy. And so after that occurred, it was, it was a pretty shocking experience, just because of the extreme level of pain and just going through the emergency room experience, having never experienced something. And around three or four months later, the same, I was school president at that time. I was about to give a speech to parent teacher association. Again, this was my senior year of high school, started having extreme abdominal pain, rush off to the hospital, liver enzyme, you're having an attack. And so at that point in time, the recommendation from physicians to, to my parents really time and therefore to me was to remove my gallbladder. And so I had a colostectomy, which was a gallbladder removal. I had it done laparoscopically. And the idea was that, Hey, if there's no gallbladder, then there's no risk of having a gallbladder attack. And around three or four months after I had my gallbladder removed, I had an, and so this was clearly problematic. I was rushed back into the hospital. And the doctor said to my father, Hey, your son is having gallbladder attack. And my dad said, well, that difficult. And that began around a six month journey of going from specialist to specialist, specialist, try to figure out what's wrong with me. I continued to have ongoing symptoms in terms of abdominal discomfort, pretty significant nausea. And I ended up missing about six months of my senior year of high school. I didn't pay it in a lot. I tried to go to school and then I wouldn't feel well at home. I was home for weeks at a time. And we ended up identifying at least at that time, what we believe the problem was. And I haven't had any problems since then. We ended up finding a doctor at the university of Indianapolis, which was pretty far away. I was living in Southern California, but through referral through referral who said, Hey, I've seen this once before in a, in a, in a young athletic woman. And what happens is that there's a muscle at the end of the bile that carries the bile to the liver and it can spasm and simulate a closing as if it was a gallstone. And so they made an incision in that muscle, so that it would always be open. And I haven't had a problem since, but what occurred after that around three months later was I started to experiencing, I remember very specifically, I was driving on the highway because I was training anticipating being a collegiate athlete. I played basketball at Columbia university. And towards the tail end of my senior year of high school, I was, I was training with a very specific high performance sports trainer. I was driving back forth to my house 30 minutes every day. And I'm coming back on the highway and I was stuck in traffic and I had my first panic and a panic attack is one of the scariest things that you experience. It's just flood of fear on your cysts of feeling of impending doom. It's feeling that going to die. There's no explanation for it. There's a desire to actually get out of the experience of being in your own body, but there's nowhere to go. And and I started having these on a regular base. And even in between these panic attacks, I started experiencing pretty significant levels of anxiety on an ongoing just really feeling like there was something that going to go. And so I started seeing a therapist. I started seeing my mom's therapist. And at that point in time, I was still before the age of 18. He recommended that I get on a drug called Prozac. And so I started taking Prozac. It was supposed to help decrease my anxiety. My experience was that it did decrease my anxiety. There's a lot of research come out recently that has indicated that what are called serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which is what these medications hold because they're designed to prevent the reuptake serotonin in your system that is supposed to help reduce anxiety. At least that's my understanding. Again, I'm not a doctor that there actually isn't an effect medications have on serotonin take. Perhaps it's the placebo effect, but for me, my anxiety was. And then I was on Prozac for a couple of years. My psychiatrist at one point in time also said, Hey, we've got better medications that come out. And so I moved into something called Fexer and then I moved into another medication called Pac. And so for the course of about 15 years, I was taking medication to manage my, and it was great, right? I wasn't struggling with panic attacks anymore. I could live my life normally and be function in society. So for me, the medication provided a great support for me, being able to have a baseline wellbeing allowed me to operate in. And at the age of 33 and this is a separate story, if you've listened to any of my other episodes, I realized that I had a problem with addiction. I had a problem with alcoholism, drug addiction, pornography abuse. And I started working a 12 step program. And as I started working the 12 step program and working with a therapist who understood the brain and I started getting into neuroscience, I started just having this intuitive inclination that, Hey, maybe it was time for me to get off of my anxiety med. And you know, one would sort of look at it. It's like, as I'm, as I'm working through the initial stages of addiction recovery, it may not seem like the best time to get off of something that stabilized my emotional experience. Um, but for whatever reason, you know, I think it was like the whispers of my higher power. Um, I decided to get off of the medication. Um, getting off of the medication was very, very difficult. And when I was first prescribed with Prozac and then later Effexor and Paxil, um, it was believed at that time that there weren't really any side effects, but at least that's what my psychiatrist had indicated to me. These were very safe drugs. They were easy to come off of at any point in time. But as I started doing the research and I looked backwards, what I realized is most people were not coming off off of these drugs. Uh, in fact, my doctor at one point in time had told my mom, Hey, this is just something that David can be on for the rest of us to match his anxiety. And there actually wasn't a lot of research around, um, coming off of these medications because, uh, the, the, what I'm assuming the pharmaceutical companies were telling the doctors and what the research was indicating was like, Hey, people can stay on this for the rest of their life. Why take them off of it? They're going to go back into experiencing anxiety and having panic attack. And, uh, and so, you know, for the most part, there wasn't a lot of data around people getting cases. They were either staying on them or they were transitioning to new version of the drug. When I got off of, um, the last medication that I was on, uh, I experienced some pretty extreme side effects. Uh, and it's what doctors at that point in time, now 15 laters, or at least my doctor referred to as brain shock. And just in the name, it doesn't sound particularly pleasant. Uh, but even on a slow taper getting off of the medication that I was on, um, I would experience brain shock. And what that basically was, anytime I would move my head to the side or I'd look around, uh, I literally feel as if there was a shock, uh, in my brain. And, um, and it was very difficult. It took me about three months to get off of the medications. Um, and what I experienced afterwards, frankly, initially was even more challenging brain shock. And that was, um, the return of my anxiety. So I started experiencing anxiety again after having not experienced it for around 15 years. Um, and really it was just a matter of, I guess, coincidence or synchronicity or what I would call God in my life that at the same time I was working through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. And I was working with a therapist to actually process the day-to-day experiences that were causing me stress and anxiety, and to actually start to identify some of the originating sources from childhood of those stressors, some of the limiting belief systems, some of the what people call childhood traumas that I experienced and processing and metabolizing those. I was doing that simultaneously, uh, as I was coming off of, uh, of medication. And so I had a really phenomenal tool set for working with the anxiety head on. And it occurred to me at one point in time that that what was happening was I was starting to allow my nervousness feeling. It was quite incredible as I looked backwards from that point in time. Again, I was, you know, 34, 35, getting off of anxiety medication and looking backwards. I didn't realize how much I had been numbing out as a result of my alcohol abuse, my pornography abuse, my, my addiction to marijuana. Um, and also the medication that I was on, I believe was pressing my nervousness, it was suppressing my ability to feel. And that, that suppression was a tool that I was using because I didn't have the proper tools to process the emotions coming. Most people don't have the proper tools to process the emotions as they come up. You know, I was in therapy for 15 years and I can't say that therapy wasn't helpful. It served its role. But I also look back on therapy and realize it's limited in its capacity to support me as I got into the 12 step program. And then as I started developing my own tool sets and my own frameworks, um, there was much greater level of support for, um, working with the, the, the day-to-day stressor, the fears, the anxieties, feeling like I wasn't good enough, feeling like I wasn't as far along as I should getting angry at the way other people were reacting, judging myself, um, living in a fear of financial insecurity. All of these were, you know, day-to-day experiences that many, many, many people experience, which I think is a primary indication of why many, many, many people are struggling with anxiety or depression. And as a result of that struggle, in order to be able to operate effectively in their day-to-day lives are turning towards medication. But as I started to process what was coming up, and I'm going to share with you where, where my original anxiety I came from, because it may give you insights to where your anxiety from or, or invite you to explore through the lens of my own self. Uh, as I, as I started to understand the origination of my anxiety and to, and to work through it, I received a tremendous benefit, which was I feel, I didn't realize that I wasn't feeling, I was numbed out. I wasn't feeling, um, it's sort of difficult to explain if you haven't actually experienced it, because it would be easy to say, well, yeah, I feel half times I laugh. I feel joyful. Sometimes I feel stressed. Sometimes I feel sad. Sometimes I feel elated. Sometimes I'm able to feel compassion or empathy. But for me, even though I was able to experience those feelings, it was nothing compared to when I got off of medication. And when I stopped using drugs and alcohol, because it's important to acknowledge that that was part of my, um, cocktail as well, right? It wasn't just the anxiety man, but I was sober for around six months and was able to distinguish almost like a trolled experiment, the difference between no longer using drugs and alcohol and pornography and how I felt. And then the difference once I got off of anti-anxiety medication, but I started really feeling it. I started feeling a relationship with life around, started feeling more connected. I started feeling a relationship with what I would describe as my higher power. I started hearing my intuition, which I had never heard or perhaps had forgotten that I heard before the age of 17, I felt like my nervous system and my senses coming alive. This had a great benefit. It was also tremendously challenging because as I was starting to feel excited and feel my purpose,purpose and feel clarity and feel connected spiritually. I was also having a full-on frontal attack from what life offers, which is also the sadness, fear, the unexpected disappointment. And again, I had this amazing tool set between the therapist that I was working with, the 12-step program that I was working, and then the books that I started reading and getting into personal growth and understanding myself and having tools, journaling and beginning to meditate and doing breathwork, I came out the other side. And what I believe is that the anxiety that I was experiencing was just a compressed form of energy that my body was doing best to manage for me to offload my system. And as I was able to actually transform or digest or metabolize that energy, it contributed significantly to David that I've come. In other words, I believe that the anxiety that you might be experiencing is the seed for the next level of who you're becoming. It just needs to be properly nurtured and transformed. And we're not able to properly nurture and transform that energy when we're suppressing our nervous system through the use of drugs or alcohol or pornography or pharmaceutical medication. That's what I believe. And as I got clean and soap, got off the medication, experienced that my nervous system was becoming reactive, I started gaining some insights that I had never had. You know, I realized that as an adult, I always felt like there was something wrong. There's something wrong with me that I wasn't more successful. There was something wrong with me that I was single before I was in a relationship. You know, there's something wrong with me. I would say things and maybe upset people. I wouldn't do it right. I would do it. But what I fundamentally believed but wasn't able to see when I was caught up in both my addiction and while I was on anti-anxiety medications was that there was this fundamental belief that I had that there was something. And I was able to go back and see that that is also the fundamental belief of one of my parents, right? That I adopted that from my mother. She had a mother who made her feel worthless, according to my understanding, right? I didn't really experience. Told my mom that she was worthless. She wished she was never born. And so my mom felt like there was something wrong with her. And so that was a learned behavior that I got from my mom. I also watched my mom as she aged have chronic health problems. And as I experienced chronic health problems, as I aged, the reaction I had to those health challenges was there's something wrong with me physically. And I was able to go back and see that at 17 years old, I was watching all of my friends have their senior year of high school while I was essentially locked in my bedroom, feeling nauseous and having stomach pains. And the psychological reaction I had to that experience was the same psychological reaction, there's something wrong. And so, there's something wrong with me had materialized in my body at 17 years old as a very unusual gallbladder related condition. But the there's something wrong with me was actually the root cause of the materialization of the manifestation body. And I felt like there was something wrong with me when I was younger, I was a little bit different. I was a deep thinker, I was in templates, I was a nerd, I was sort of encouraged into playing sports in high school and college basketball with I don't know, I guess it's a difficult right guys who are teasing each other coaches who are yelling at you and criticize. It wasn't a health culture for me. And so I felt like there was something wrong with me. And actually, my use of drugs and alcohol and pornography was to numb that emotional pain that there was something wrong with me that I didn't know how to process. And my body knew how to process. If you haven't yet checked out my episode on anxiety, where I go much deeper into what I believe anxiety is, it's called Anxiety Endgame. It's one of the earlier podcasts that I recorded. And it's a YouTube video that you can find if you do a search for it. I talk about how actually anxiety is your body's mechanism for coping. It's a healing. So in the same way that we experience a fever when we're sick, which activates the immune system and brings in troops to address any bacterial or viral or microbial imbalance. In the same way, you know, our body utilizes anxiety as a way to offload tension from the system that we can no longer hold. You know, I think everybody experiences some form of stress. But when your cup is filled up too much, and there's no more room for the stress, it turns into anxiety. And anxiety is not an enemy. Anxiety isn't your body trying to hurt you. Anxiety is simply the mechanism I believe that your body is utilizing in order to manage the accumulation of unprocessed emotional energy as a result of childhood traumas and limiting beliefs that occurred way back then and that continue to mirror themselves through your perception of the experiences you're having today, or even the experiences that you create as a result of that create. And anxiety is a way that your body is able to offload the accumulation of stress and that tension so that it doesn't materialize into other more significant stress related disorders or diseases. Arthritis or autoimmune disease, cancering, all of these things Western medicine is now telling us. Really the top 100 physical challenges that most people have, or what we would call diseases, are stress related. And so anxiety is your body's front line of defense before there's a deepening of physical experience of the unprocessed energy or the processed trauma. And so that's what anxiety is, number one. Number two, where does it come from? Well, it comes from these unprocessed early childhood. For me, it was this learned behavior witnessing both through my five senses, but also experiencing in a sixth sense energetic sort of way, my mother's own experience not being good enough and that there was something wrong with her learned behavior. And then that perception was created and then my environment supported it, right? Highly intellectual, prospective, not like the other kid, pushed into an environment with other kids that aren't really like that in terms of athletics. It just reinforced that learned behavior. And then over time, that materialized into a physical experience because I learned from my mom as well that not being good enough and there's something wrong with me would materialize into a physical experience. So your parents leave clues for sure, or the absence of your parents, however you experienced that. They leave clues, but anxiety is again, in effect of this root cause, which is this unprocessed misunderstanding. And the reason why I call traumas or limiting beliefs and misunderstandings is because as you get into the work that we teach or other great teachers and start to have tools to be able to look at those experiences from a different perspective, what you realize is that the meanings that you gave that those experiences or the beliefs that you have as a result of those experiences, 100% of the time end up not true. Limiting beliefs and traumas are mispercept, misunderstandings. That's not to say that the experience didn't happen, but what occurred inside of us in terms of the meaning that give the experience was a misunderstanding or a misinterpretation. And that's actually why the stress is created. Anytime we experience something in our life where we're giving it a meaning that isn't actually accurate, like I'm good enough or I'm loved, there's something wrong with me or whatever the meaning is, we experience that misinterpretation or that wrong belief as stress in the body. And so if we're living our day-to-day lives, constantly interpreting our external experience through what I would call an unintelligent lens, meaning not aligned with the fact that we live in a very loving universe and that we're here and perfect worthy, then we're going to accumulate stress. And that accumulation over time translates into anxiety. Left long enough, that anxiety will then translate into some form of physical. So how do we overcome it? Well, part of it is understanding. So how do we overcome it? Well, part of it is understanding what this anxiety is and realizing that if we're using drugs or alcohol or medication to suppress the anxiety, we don't actually have access to the information that we want to be metabolized for. So we can create a baseline new norm that is except for our lives, but we're not able to actually utilize the experience or the information that's there for what it was designed for. As a result of having access to the material of childhood, I not only am able to see that this idea that there's something wrong with me is a false idea, but as a result of seeing that, I'm able to actually experience that I'm worth and that I'm worthy of love, that I'm worthy of money, that I'm good enough. And that has tremendous value. And because now I'm not just showing up as a person who's not, let's call it symptomatized, there's something wrong with, but I'm actually showing up as someone who has self-esteem and self-confidence. And so when you think about what you want to create in your life, it's important to understand that if you want to have more, be more, do more, you have to show up as more of who you really are. And our ability to do that, to show up as someone who's worthy, to show up as someone confident, to show up as someone who's courageous, to show up as someone who's calm and trust life, to show up as someone who's humble, to show up as someone who's compassionate and empathetic, the mechanism to be able to develop those skills is to actually transform all of the opposites of that that we learned from our child. But if we don't have access to the opposites, then we can't gain the new skill. And so I think a lot of people are stuck right now in a developmental purgatory because number one, we're afraid of the experience of stress or anxiety, and so we medicate it. We medicate it through medications or through drugs or alcohol or other means. And then number two, because we don't really understand the rules of game, which is that these things that happened to us when we were younger that are producing stress on a day-to-day basis are actually the seeds or the material for our growth span. Number three, having the tools to actually transform those misunderstandings. And that's, I think, why my life has become dedicated to understanding this and sharing it with other people. Because we all experience trauma. We all have limiting relief. That's not actually the problem. The problem is we don't understand that this is material for our next level growth, and we don't have tools to actually transform or utilize material into our level evolution. And instead, we treat those experiences and the emotions associated as something that we need to kill, something that we need to suppress, something that we need to go away. And so if you're somebody who's experiencing anxiety or depression, some form of high-level stress, what I would suggest is there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. And we've got a ton of resources. You can look in the show notes and jump on over to my website if you want to get our tools. But it's not really about tools with me. It's about tools with anyone and you understanding that there's nothing wrong. The fact that you have anxiety, stress, or have childhood traumas, have limiting beliefs, totally normal, it's actually a good thing because those things are the seeds for everything that you're wanting to become. Whether it's to make more money, whether it's to cover your purpose, whether it's to launch a business, whether it's to have a healthier relationship, whether it's be in a relationship, whether it's heal your body, all of that is possible. And the source of you being able to do that actually in the disc. And if we create an intermediary that suppresses our ability to assess all of that, then we get stuck in an ordinary. And I don't want an ordinary because I know you're an extraordinary person. And so I think it's even important to say, hey, if you're experiencing stress or anxiety right now, congratulations. That's great, right? It means that you're on the brink of break. And you may say, hey, I've been experiencing this for a really, really long time. Yes, but this is a new conversation. You've attracted this conversation into your awareness. And so that means you're actually on the right path too. And by no means am I suggesting that everybody should just get off of their medications. I think you have to work with your doctor, your therapist, your psychiatrist in order to figure out what's best for you. What I'm suggesting is that the discomforts that we experience, that we use medication to avoid or suppress, they have their root in very valuable material that we're best served by being able to assess direct in order to create transformation in our own growth. I hope you loved this episode. I hope it was helpful for you. And I hope wherever you are on your anxiety journey that you just accept, kind of take it one day at a time. I know that you're exactly where you need to be right now. And that whatever it is that you're looking for in terms of emotional or your physical experience, life, help is on. So I love you very much. And I'll see you in the next one.