Re: Social Anxiety/Trouble connecting with people

Reading through these posts it is clear that there may be many factors in the development of social anxiety. In my opinion if we want to understand social anxiety, we need a system that proceeds from the simple to the more complex,  from the most frequent causes to the less frequent cause. 

In other words we all know that mood disorders are multi-factorial, and the question is which factor is more important than another factor, if we want to understand social anxiety.

One starting point is to note that most forms of social anxiety - in fact most mood disorders - is characterized by the production of excess stress hormones, quite unrelated as to what may be going on in the environment. IOW, we agree that having social anxieties is not a matter of logic or conscious decisions. The source of he anxiety stems from within, and not the environment.

From a biological point of view, stress hormones function to supply the body with energy to deal with a danger or stress situation. In the case of mood disorders, these dangers are not real, but imagined and sometime not even imagined, as we cannot explain why we have anxiety attacks.

The energy produced by the release stress hormones derive from sugar stores in the body.  For instance, adrenaline convert glycogen stores in muscles and liver into glucose. Cortisol convert other sources of energy such a cholesterol, and stimulates gluconeogenesis in the formation among others of glucose.

The brain, which is highly sensitive to blood sugar levels, will trigger the release of stress hormones, whenever it senses brain energy starvation. Glucose is converted to adenosinetriphosphate (ATP) by a complex biochemical pathway, which is essential in the conversion of nutrients  (such as tryptophan) into feel-good neurotransmitters (such as serotonin). Thus without ATP we cannot manufacture feel good biochemicals and we feel depressed and anxious.

Hence, if the brain is subject to energy starvation it will trigger the release of stress hormones.  There is a common illness, hardly recognized by traditional medicine, that is responsible for brain energy starvation, and this is called hypoglycemia.

This is a pre-diabetic insulin resistance that gives rise to unstable blood sugar levels feeding the brain with erratic energy levels.

In one sense we are lucky that hypoglycemia is a major factor in the development of mental illness, for it cannot be treated by drugs, nor talk-therapy and hence we have a nutritional program that can treat not only hypoglycemia, but also mood disorder of various kinds.

Thus if you want to treat yourself for mood disorders the first step is to adopt the hypoglycemic diet. Thus familiarize yourself with the ramifications of hypoglycemia and you will soon start to understand the various forms of mood disorders.

I have said before that in your hypothesizing about mood disorders, you start from the most frequent to the less frequent, for there are many other silent diseases that in addition to or apart from hypoglycemia, that play a role in the generation of "mental illness".  The signs of "mental illness" are merely symptoms of an underlying disease!

Read:

Depression is a Nutritional Disorder