anxiety Archives - Dr. Monica Aggarwal

Building Resilience & Steps to Overcoming Anxious Feelings

Anxiety affects 31% of the American population and this number is increasing. People are noticing more and more anxious feelings, nervousness, depression and inability to cope with day to day activities. Understanding your anxiety is an important first step to building resilience.

Join me as I speak to Dr. Carol Lewis who speaks to us about our emotional health and tools we can use to keep ourselves strong and more capable of dealing with life’s surprises.

Key Areas We Discuss

Anxiety versus calm: the concept of managing anxiety, not battling it
Anxiety’s relation to menopause
The physiology of anxiety: the misfire of the fight or flight response
4 tools to help you with your anxiety
- Sleep allows for a sense of well being. Optimal amount of sleep, blue light’s impact on desire to sleep, sense of well-being
- Nutrition to reduce anxiety; importance of regular meals
- Movement: the role of movement, physical activity to help with sense of well-being.
- Doing something joyful and/or playful every day: finding joy again despite angst

About Carol Lewis, PhD MPH CPH:

Dr. Lewis is a clinical psychologist with more than 30 years of experience. She supervises trainees across all level of training. Dr. Lewis’ expertise includes the treatment of chronically suicidal, self-injurious individuals, using skills-based methods, as well as the treatment of trauma with EMDR. She is trained in several mindfulness-based treatment protocols and runs an adult Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) group. She is very involved in the community and, for many years, has worked with the University of Florida’s Mobile Outreach Clinic, a bus-based clinic providing no-cost healthcare to underserved populations in Gainesville, Florida.

New Year’s Resolutions, Illness and Anxiety

Blog / January 27, 2022

I have been reflecting a lot this month about life and I want to share that. January marks one year since my family had COVID. We were so lucky not to have significant symptoms and I believe it is our clean living that got us through it well. My husband was doing his MBA last year and working full time plus helping manage our 3 kids, and with all that stress and lack of sleep, my husband developed Shingles in his eye. It was horrible. He was in constant pain. He would describe electric shocks going through his eye every other second. There was so much anxiety and worry about him losing his eye. I would wake up every hour to check on him and you feel helpless.

There has been some correlation between COVID and Shingles likely to the immune suppression. But I am always reminded about the impact of stress on the body. Even if you eat a plant-based very healthy diet, but then you don’t take care of your stress, you are still at risk for illness. My husband learned this last year the same way that I learned it 10 years ago. He is better now. He takes more time to breathe, walk and relax. His eye is better and we are okay. Lessons are important but sometimes back-breaking.

Since that time, I have developed a bit of an anxiety problem. Anxiety is not something we like to talk about, especially not as physicians. It is a sign of weakness, isn’t it. Amazing how pride pops in there without realizing it. The anxiety was significant. I am a great sleeper and all the sudden, I wasn’t. I couldn’t go to sleep at night, thinking that someone I loved was going to get sick and die. Or each cough that I heard was COVID and each headache was a brain tumor. Amazing, how our minds work, how anxiety works. This went on for about one year and now I am thankful to feel much better. How did I change? I wrote in my journal daily, thinking of all of the things that are good in my life. I thought about joy. I reflected on how my kids are sturdy and that they would be okay. I thought a lot about my own death and how, my family would be okay. I meditated a lot.

Every day, I learn something new about myself and about life. Each day, there is a new lesson. I have been reading books by Thich Nhat Hanh like Being Peace and Mindful Movements, both of which I recommend. I felt saddened by his recent death but remember Mitch Albom’s Stranger in the Boat and remember to think of death as an extension of life. Hard but important. I take from these books, this mantra, (breathe in), “I calm my mind and body.” (Breathe out and smile), “I smile at myself.” I was at the dentist this week and while I had scrapers and suction and spit everywhere, I did this meditation and my anxiety went down and I was o-k. Dr. Richard Edlich, my mentor in college, used to say, that it is not about finding peace on a mountain but finding it in daily life, in the here and now.

Some of my 2022 resolutions:

Get a job on my terms. I get to choose.

Work on my anxiety.

Make more connections.

Build more muscle.

Heal my inflammation, work at it every day.

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