 I'm about to give you my honest thoughts on benzodiazepines. These are medications like Xanax and Valium, and this might upset a few people. What is up, everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution and welcome back to another video where we are diving deep into the topic of anxiety. And today I am focusing on some of the most commonly prescribed medications for anxiety. Now, do me a favor and please, please, please share this video. I'm going to be talking about some very, very important information regarding these medications that people often take to help with their anxiety or their panic disorders. All right. So first, let's talk about how these medications actually work. Before I dive into that, let's actually talk about how anxiety works. So anxiety is caused by an overactive amygdala. That is the part of your brain responsible for fight, flight or freeze. When your anxiety kicks in, it is releasing a lot of stress hormones in your body. You get a rush of adrenaline. You can have a beating heart. You'd have racing thoughts. You could be sweating, dilated pupils, all sorts of things. OK, now the way that these benzodiazepines work, like Xanax and Valium, is that they go straight to the amygdala and they tranquilize it. OK, they calm it down. One of the reasons why these are prescribed so, so, so much is because they are fast acting. But the issue is that they come with a price. These are narcotic medications. OK, any medication that is labeled a narcotic means that it has the potential of becoming addictive. And the problem is, is that the way that we're prescribing these medications has risen insanely, insanely over the last couple of decades. Like I was just reading some articles on this and this was a study from 2015. Now, one of the reasons why people develop an addiction to these medications is because they're given for long term use. OK, the longer that you're on these medications, you build up a tolerance as well as a dependence. This means that you need to take more in order for it to calm your anxiety. But you also get more anxious when you don't have the medication. So one of the issues is that when we prescribe these medications, people aren't often doing these in conjunction with another form of treatment like therapy and things like that. If these medications are ever prescribed, in my opinion, it should be a short term solution. This should not be long term, especially, especially because almost 10,000 people per year die from benzodiazepine overdoses, and most of them are accidental. Most of the people who died from these overdoses had no idea how much they were taking. These are depressant medications. OK, when you overdose on it, it depresses the nervous system. You can't breathe. You can die from this. So one of the things that I say that's kind of polarizing is that these medications are lazy. They're very lazy. And I know that seems kind of harsh, but just about any doctor can prescribe these medications, and it's just to get you in and out of their office. Not even thinking about the fact that you might develop an addiction to these things, and you might as well, you might die, too. And that is insane to me. There are so many other alternatives like I get people in my drug and alcohol rehab all the time who are taking these medications for their anxiety. And they're like, I don't know what I'm going to do now. How am I going to calm down my anxiety? Like the problem is, is that nobody has educated you on all of the alternatives. There are so many alternative medications that are non narcotics. I've talked about it in my other videos. The video I just did yesterday was about Lexapro and how that helps me with my generalized anxiety disorder. There are so many other medications. But like I said, the reason why a lot of people don't turn to these medications is because they're not as fast acting, they're not as powerful. And also whether people want to admit it or not, they're not releasing the dopamine in your brain. They're not giving you all that pleasure that you get from taking these benzodiazepines. So please, please, please do me a favor and research all of the other alternatives. Ask your doctor, what else can I take? Do you have any non narcotics? It makes me sick. It makes me sick how most doctors that I've experienced go straight to the narcotics rather than making those the last resort. Narcotic medications, especially, especially with the addiction epidemic going on, narcotic medications should be the absolute last resort. You should be researching and going through every other option. How do you know how many people I talk to on a regular basis with anxiety? They're dependent to these medications. They want to get off of them and they don't know another way. And I ask them, have you tried meditating? No, why not? I can't stop my thoughts. Well, welcome to the human experience. I've talked about this a million times in my mindfulness meditation videos. Meditation is not about stopping your thoughts. If you're trying to stop your thoughts, you are running a fool's errand. The human brain on average has 50 to 70,000 thoughts per day. And they even have the idea that you're going to stop them. Is like it's never going to happen. It is impossible to do that. What meditation does, it allows you to watch your thoughts and experience your thoughts without latching onto them and falling into that state of a panic with all the worry about the future or the worry about the things that you did in the past. This is why meditation is so beneficial. So there are a million, million, million different ways that you can manage your anxiety and a lot of it has to do with rearranging the way that your life is. And I might do some videos on that. I only got so many days this week, but like there's so many changes that you can make in your life that will begin to reduce your anxiety. For example, your relationships, not just boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, but who you're hanging out with, your work, OK, your financial situation. There's so many little baby steps that you could take to start reducing your anxiety that a lot of these other non-narcotic medications and holistic methods of treatment will actually work. But anyways, this is a rant that I needed to go on. There are so many people dying from these medications and it's crazy because we keep prescribing them all willy nilly and whatnot. So again, please, please, please do me a favor. Share this video, share this video for people who are thinking about using this medication or even people who are on this medication so they know there are many other options to treat their anxiety. All right. But anyways, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you are new here, I'm always making videos to help you out with your mental health. Click that little round subscribe button and a big, big, big thank you to everybody supporting me over on Patreon. And if you would like to support the channel on Patreon, you can click or tap right there. All right. Thank you so, so much for watching. Research alternatives to treat your anxiety. And I will see you next time.