Lise Van Susteren - Emotional Inflammation

Lise Van Susteren , MD, and Stacey Colino

Sounds True

Boulder, CO 80306

2020 Lise Van Susteren and Stacey Colino

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author(s) and publisher.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians, mental health professionals, or other health-care providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with physicians, mental health professionals, and health-care providers in a mutual quest for optimal well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional if you have any concerns or if you feel like youre in crisis. The anecdotes in this book are from real people and patients but their names and other identifying characteristics have been changed to protect their privacy.

Published 2020

Book design by Maureen Forys, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in Canada

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Susteren, Lise van, author. | Colino, Stacey, author.

Title: Emotional inflammation: discover your triggers and reclaim your

equilibrium during anxious times / Lise Van Susteren, MD, and Stacey

Colino.

Description: Boulder, CO: Sounds True, Inc., 2020. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019036164 (print) | LCCN 2019036165 (ebook) | ISBN

9781683644552 (hardback) | ISBN 9781683644569 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Emotions. | Self-help techniques.

Classification: LCC BF531 .S87 2020 (print) | LCC BF531 (ebook) | DDC

152.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036164

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036165

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H it the pause button on your regularly scheduled life for a moment, and ask yourself: Am I spending a substantial part of my time feeling unusually stressed out and on edge or anxious about the future? Do I feel like Im being bombarded with bad or alarming news or other peoples mercurial moods? Am I experiencing emotional whiplash as my feelings swing from sadness to fear to anger or hopelessness in the span of minutes or hours when I hear about the latest natural disaster, human rights crisis, or political debacle? If you answered yes to any of these questions, youre hardly alone.

A rising number of adults in the US are troubled by a phenomenon they dont know theres a name for. It may be marked by a sense of agitation, foreboding, spiraling negative thoughts, sleep disturbances, and a sense of hardly recognizing the lighthearted, fun-loving people they used to be. Its what I call emotional inflammation, and when I look around, hear the expressed thoughts of my patients, colleagues, and friends, and even consider times in my own life, it feels like we are in the midst of an epidemic of it. While life goes on, and many of us put on a happy face, our sense of well-being is still badly shaken. Some people suffer from symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)with worry, disturbing and intrusive thoughts, hyperreactivity, hypervigilance, grief, sleep problems, and nightmaresbut in this case the symptoms stem not from a traumatic event or series of events but from how it feels to live in todays world and from anxiety about what it could be like in the future.

The intention here is not to make you feel more demoralized or despondent than you do already but to validate your feelings and show you that you have plenty of company in your emotional unease. When people hear about the concept of emotional inflammation and its symptoms, they often have an aha moment of recognition and relatability, one that makes them feel understood and less alone. Knowing theres a name for the way theyve been feeling helps it feel less unsettling. And realizing that your distressing emotions are being triggered on a fairly regular basis by the turmoil in the world around you, rather than by something inside you, should provide some relief. That doesnt mean you should simply accept your current emotional state as the new normal. On the contrary, you can consciously take steps to ease it and navigate toward steadier emotional ground.

The first step is to recognize emotional inflammation for what it is. Many of us are rattled by the political situations in the US and around the globe, the health of the planet, and even the state of humanity. With all the recent disasters in the natural worldthe hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, searing heat, and bizarre weatherthat are linked to the climate crisis, people are starting to wonder if Mother Natures patience has run out. The fear that no one is really in control in the government leaves us feeling deeply vulnerable. People are shaken by the unrelenting mass shootings, the rise of hate crimes, nuclear missile testing, the stream of sexual abuse or misconduct scandals, and general news about how our health and well-being are threatened by the increasingly degraded and depleted natural world.

Given this, its not surprising that the prevalence of major depression in the US has risen dramatically since 2005, with the most rapid rate of increase among teenagers and young adults. The World Health Organization reports that both depression and anxiety have risen to unprecedented levelsepidemic proportionsthroughout the world. Depression is now especially high among women in North and South America, and anxiety disorders are higher among men and women in the US than anywhere else in the world. The use of antidepressants in the US has nearly doubled since 2000, and nine million people regularly use prescription sleeping pills.

The (mis)use of opioids has skyrocketed, too. Since 1999, opioid overdose deaths have increased fivefold among women in the US. In 2017 alone, opioid overdoses killed more than 47,000 people in the US. Thats more than six times the number of US military service members that were killed in the post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. While some of the factors contributing to the opioid crisis are obviousoverprescribing by physicians and unconscionable and unlawful business practices of pharmaceutical companies and distributorsin my experience other questions beg to be asked, including, Why do so many people want them so badly?

One answer is obvious: People are hurting emotionally.

With the threats and worries swirling around us becoming so pervasiveoverwhelming, reallyour culture has recently coined terms for new forms of fatigue or depletion, including outrage fatigue, evacuation fatigue, scandal fatigue, compassion fatigue, racial battle fatigue, apocalypse fatigue, and eco-anxiety. Recently, the term solastalgia, coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe the distress of seeing treasured land permanently damaged by industrial activity or extreme weather events, has entered the cultural lexicon, particularly in the mental health field and environmental activism community. This term speaks to my changing experience in nature, Mark Coleman, a mindfulness meditation teacher and nature guide, wrote in a 2019 issue of Mindful magazine. In the past, nature had always been an unending source of nourishment, joy, wonder, and love. Now, it is often tinged with sadness, grief, or loss over what is happening to diverse habitats, species, and bodies of water.