Anxious in your 40s for the first time ever? Before you assume it's anxiety, let’s figure out what is actually happening.

In this episode of the Medical Disruptor, I sat down with Dr. Ellen Vora, a board-certified psychiatrist and the author of The Anatomy of Anxiety, and she said something I keep coming back to.

A lot of what doctors call anxiety in women over 40 is actually perimenopause. Progesterone is a calming hormone, so when it starts to drop, you get the 3am wake-ups and the out-of-nowhere dread that look exactly like an anxiety disorder.

This goes deeper than menopause, though. Ellen broke down how to tell the difference between what she calls false anxiety, the avoidable kind that comes from things like blood sugar crashes, bad sleep, inflammation, and hormone shifts, and true anxiety, which is more like your inner compass telling you something is genuinely out of alignment.

We also got into why there isn't solid evidence that anxiety is a serotonin chemical imbalance and why your gut may be driving a lot of it.

If your anxiety has never made sense to you, this is where you stop asking how to feel less anxious and start asking what it's trying to tell you.

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Chapters

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Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction

02:13 – Breaking from the system

13:30 – Why psychiatry never asks "why"

19:41 – The gut-brain connection

23:57 – False vs. true anxiety

30:31 – The real anxiety workup

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