Tracy

I am curious about you and why you chose psychiatry and anxiety. Why? What made you think this was a good path for you? That is a great question because it was different from my original path. My original path was going to be electrical engineering. That was my major in college. I realized I wanted to work more with people. I was going to do internal medicine, and that was what I was slated to do up until my fourth year of medical school. I even matched in medicine. The matching process is where you get assigned to a hospital where you will train. I was going into internal medicine. It was not until I did my psychiatry rotation in my fourth year as a student I realized, whoa, this vibes with me a whole lot more as far as helping people with mental pain instead of tweaking their blood pressure medicines and things like that. Those things are important. But I fell in love with psychiatry in medical school.

What are our biggest misconceptions about anxiety? Do we all have it? Is it a disorder?

There is a camp of people who have a lot of anxiety but do not recognize that is what the problem is. We think of anxiety as fearfulness or worry. But sometimes, it can look like anger, irritability, and excessive insecurity. You become very withdrawn and cannot make decisions, things like that. One group of people say I am not anxious but are. The other group is similar to the people who do not recognize it as anxiety. They become fearful and wonder if I am going crazy. They think that they are broken because of it.

Can we know when we have a disorder versus momentary anxiousness?

Our brains are wired to sense and look for threats so that we can take notes and run or fight whatever we decide to do. But reactionary anxiety is an emotion or an experience you have that is temporary and manageable. It is in relation to something that happened. Say you have a big test coming up, and you get anxious. You may have trouble sleeping the night before a presentation. Once the stressor has passed, you come back to your usual state. It is when it becomes more pathological and causes more functional problems, and you have trouble managing it and coping. Or the coping mechanisms you use have adverse outcomes like drinking too much to deal with your anxiety or smoking or even overeating.

Some of the things we would look at as dysfunction from anxiety would be how your anxiety affects major areas of your life. Are you having lots of fights with people you care about? Are you withdrawing from them and not interacting with them because you are so anxious? Is it getting in the way of your work or schooling because you are not sleeping, you cannot think? Some people can wake up every morning throwing up things like that. When it gets to the point where it starts interfering with your normal life functions, and it is persistent, it is not just one night because you have a test; that is when you start looking at this is a disorder.

Is medication always a solution?

There is over-the-counter stuff, and I talk about natural remedies in my book. But medication is a double-edged sword. The medication turns down the dial on anxiety, and that is what is needed. People come to me in their mid-thirties or mid-forties, and they ask why I waited so long. I could have been feeling this good years ago.

On the other hand, medications also have many side effects. Some people cannot tolerate them. In this case, more natural solutions are a better fit for that kind of person. It depends on the person.

All right, so the forensic piece, which brings in your engineering mind where you can be specific about details. You hit the nail on the head with the connection to engineering, and that is exactly what that is about. Forensics is an application of psychiatry. You take your basic understanding of psychiatric disorders and how the mind works and behavior and apply it to a legal situation. That is one aspect of engineering. It is taking formulas and then applying them to something. Medicine and psychiatry are very problem-solving and analytical.

What can readers expect from the book?

The book's first half goes through various reasons you could be anxious. I talk about disorders, the difference between normal anxiety versus the disorder, and different disorders. I address different temperaments and personalities that can cause anxiety, including overparenting, which can make children anxious.

I talk about all those things as reasons, existential anxiety. Then, in the book's second half, I give you tools for coping with anxiety. I divide them up into mind tools like meditation or effective labeling, which is one of the things where you assign words to your emotions. There are body tools that are things like yoga and breathing. I even talk about laughter yoga.

What do the readers or viewers need to know that we have not covered?

I say this in the book similarly, that anxiety is like a wave that ebbs and flows. It comes and goes. And I give the same speech to my patients who are getting treatment. Let us say even with medication and treatment for anxiety; you will never have zero anxiety. No one will because it also responds to life or external stressors. The best we can hope for is that whatever anxiety we experience is manageable and passes. Even an anxiety disorder, it can come and go in waves. You can go through a phase of your life when it is not that bad. You have days where it is unmanageable and very unpleasant. Those times they may need more medication or pull in more tools. The ideal scenario for someone who has a disorder is to take medication to turn down their anxiety and then work with behavioral tools to manage the anxiety.

And only some things work for everyone in every scenario, too. In the appendix of my book, I give different scenarios that show which tools that are good for this, this is what is good for that.

That is beautiful. I love that. That gives me a lot of hope. Dr. Tracy Marks. Thank you so much for being here today. It has been fascinating.

Some of the things we would look at as dysfunction from anxiety would be how your anxiety affects major areas of your life. Are you having lots of fights with people you care about? Are you withdrawing from them and not interacting with them because you are so anxious?