What Has the Thyroid Got to Do with Anxiety?
Friday 10th July 2pm UK Time
Perhaps the answer begins with the way each of us perceives the world.
Think about the word power.
It’s an interesting word. Its roots trace back to the Old French *poeir* — to be able.
To act. To speak. To choose. To move.
Perhaps that’s why powerlessness can feel so devastating. It isn’t simply lacking power. It’s the moment we no longer feel able.
Over twenty years in practice I’ve heard it countless times: “I felt powerless.” “There was nothing I could do.” Perhaps you’ve said those words too — or more importantly, felt it viscerally.
Powerlessness isn’t always dramatic. Sometimes it’s quiet and familiar. Yet most of us can recall at least one moment when life seemed to stop. A moment when your body knew something was terribly wrong, yet there was nothing you could do.
I remember working with a woman who had lived with what she called generalised anxiety for years. Meetings terrified her. Walking into unfamiliar places terrified her. Her throat would tighten, her heart would race, sweat would pour.
As we explored when those feelings first appeared, we went back to a classroom. She was sitting an exam when there was a knock at the door. The teacher asked her to step outside. Before a single word was spoken, her body already knew. Right in front of her, the teacher’s face said it all.
Her mother had been rushed to hospital. She was critically ill.
She could not leave the school. She could not finish her exam. She did not know if her mother would live. In that moment she was trapped between the immediate powerlessness of the present and the terror of what the future might bring. Everyone else carried on with their day while hers had just changed forever. Her body didn’t simply hear the information. It absorbed the powerlessness.
The Freeze
That’s the freeze so many people recognise — caught, unable to speak, unable to act, even as the world keeps moving. We call it anxiety and ask, “Why am I anxious?”
From a Meta perspective we ask something more revealing: “What exactly was my biology responding to?”
People often ask me what the thyroid has to do with anxiety. That’s exactly what we explore in the upcoming free webinar — how the same feeling of powerlessness can show up as very different biological symptoms in different people.
Different people experience very different biological adaptations to the same feeling of powerlessness.
If you’d like to understand why, and what that might mean for you or the people you support, I’d love you to join me for this free webinar.