Anxiety

Understanding Anxiety

Anxiety is a normal emotion. It's a way your body responds to stress. For example, you might feel anxious when faced with a problem at work, before taking a test, or before making a major decision. However, an anxiety disorder is different. This happens when worry and fear become constant and overwhelming, impacting your daily life.

Anxiety Disorders

It is estimated that one in 10 Canadians suffer from an anxiety disorder. Anxiety shows up in various ways and can be both mental and physical.

Emotionally, you might feel intense fear or dread, have difficulty concentrating, and experience restlessness. Anxiety also triggers intrusive thoughts that may seem impossible to control. This can often lead to persistent fear or the expectation that something terrible is about to happen.

Physically, anxiety can cause a rapid heartbeat, headaches, dizziness, trembling, sweating, and difficulty sleeping. It can also lead to tiredness, as the ongoing worry and fear can be mentally exhausting. These symptoms can disrupt your daily activities, making working, attending school, or maintaining relationships difficult.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

Generalized Anxiety Disorder is characterized by ongoing and excessive worry about various aspects of life, such as health, your job, social interactions, or everyday life circumstances. Often, the worry is unrealistic or out of proportion to the situation. If you suffer from GAD, you may feel worry, fear, and dread on a day to day basis.

Current Treatments for Anxiety

If you live with an anxiety disorder, there are treatments available. Typical anxiety treatments include:

1. Counselling or Therapy: This involves talking to a trained professional who can provide guidance and strategies for managing anxiety.

2. Medication: Certain medicines can balance brain chemicals and reduce anxiety symptoms.

3. Lifestyle Changes: This could include regular exercise, eating a healthier diet, and ensuring plenty of sleep.

4. Stress Reduction Techniques: Activities such as mindfulness, grounding techniques, deep-breathing exercises, meditation, and yoga can help ease feelings of anxiety.

Conventional Treatments Don't Always Work

Typical treatments for mental health conditions aren't always successful. Talking to a counsellor can be beneficial, but sometimes, the root cause of the anxiety isn't easily expressed or understood. On the other hand, medications can cause unwanted side effects, and they might not work effectively to reduce your symptoms.

Lifestyle changes can help, but it's often difficult to start or maintain these changes, especially when feeling anxious or worried most of the time. So while many anxiety treatments exist, they don't always work for everyone.

A New Hope: Ketamine Treatment

That's where ketamine comes in. Many people, who haven't found success with the usual treatments for anxiety, have seen improvements with ketamine.

Ketamine works differently from other anxiety medications. It boosts a chemical in the brain called glutamate , which is vital for your brain's functioning.By increasing glutamate levels, ketamine can improve your brain's remarkable ability to form new neural connections, which is known as neuroplasticity.

By promoting neuroplasticity, ketamine helps disrupt the persistent, negative thought patterns often seen in anxiety disorders. As ketamine "rewires" the brain pathways, it allows healthier thought processes to develop and can make it easier to handle life's everyday challenges. With ketamine, it's possible to feel a sense of calm, and to start enjoying life more.

Ketamine has been shown to work, even when other treatments have failed. At Ketamine Health, 80% of our patients have achieved relief from their symptoms of depression, anxiety or PTSD after a series of ketamine infusions.

Do you or a loved one deal with constant worry and fear? Have you tried other treatments without success? It might be time to consider ketamine. Our clinic specializes in ketamine treatments, and we're here to help. Call us at (416) 343 - 0074 or contact us today to see if you qualify for ketamine therapy.

Research

Study: Tully, J. L., Dahlén, A. D., Haggarty, C. J., Schiöth, H. B., & Brooks, S. (2022). Ketamine treatment for refractory anxiety: A systematic review. British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bcp.15374

Summary: This systematic review examined the effectiveness of ketamine in treating refractory anxiety, further expanding ketamine's potential therapeutic applications.

Study: Glue, P., Medlicott, N. J., Harland, S., Neehoff, S., Anderson-Fahey, B., Le Nedelec, M., Gray, A., & McNaughton, N. (2017). Ketamine's dose-related effects on anxiety symptoms in patients with treatment refractory anxiety disorders. Journal of Psychopharmacology, 31(10), 1302-1305.

Summary: This study investigated the dose-related effects of ketamine on anxiety symptoms in patients with treatment-resistant anxiety disorders and found that ketamine may provide relief for these patients.

Summary: This study examined the dose-related effects of ketamine in patients with treatment-resistant anxiety disorders, finding that ketamine infusions led to significant reductions in anxiety symptoms.

Study: Taylor, J. H., Landeros-Weisenberger, A., Coughlin, C., Mulqueen, J., Johnson, J. A., Gabriel, D., Reed, M. O., Jakubovski, E., & Bloch, M. H. (2018). Ketamine for Social Anxiety Disorder: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Crossover Trial. Neuropsychopharmacology, 43(2), 325-333. https://doi.org/10.1038/npp.2017.194

Summary: This study investigated the use of ketamine in treating social anxiety disorder, finding that participants who received ketamine infusions showed a marked decrease in anxiety symptoms.