All of us are familiar with anxiety — sweaty palms and pounding heart, tense muscles and upset stomach. Anxiety is a normal response to stress and helps us to pay attention, prepare for important events, and avoid danger. However, sometimes our anxiety can feel like more of a hindrance than a help. Overreacting to stress might look like excessive worry, panic, freezing in social situations, or hiding from situations that we need to address. These mismatched reactions can be difficult to manage and can make dealing with the stressor much more difficult than it needs to be.
Anxiety disorders differ from normal anxiousness and can make it difficult to function normally. Almost 1 in 3 adults experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives, many of whom do not seek treatment.
In some circumstances, medication is an effective way to restore quality of life. Beyond medication, functional medicine offers support to everyone dealing with anxiety, from mild cases to treatment in conjunction with medical interventions.
How Else Can I Deal With My Anxiety Besides Meds?
A functional medicine approach aims to identify the underlying biological processes or nutritional needs to fundamentally restore balance and normal function to the body. It aims to help the body heal itself by giving it what it needs and removing things that are toxic to it. These factors will be different for each person — the functional medicine approach is individualized, identifying the specific needs and sensitivities of each person.
There are a surprising number of things that can contribute to anxiety — dietary sensitivities to ingredients like gluten and dairy, effects from substances like alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine, heavy metals, some medications, nutrient deficiencies, and metabolic conditions like hypoglycaemia and pyloria. A functional medicine practitioner can work with you to identify underlying causes using various comprehensive lab tests and may use vitamins, minerals, and amino acids to support your wellbeing.
Gut Health And Anxiety
The gut-brain connection is no joke; it can link anxiety to stomach problems and vice versa. Have you ever had a "gut-wrenching" experience? Do certain situations make you "feel nauseous"? Have you ever felt "butterflies" in your stomach? We use these expressions for a reason. The gastrointestinal tract is sensitive to emotion. Anger, anxiety, sadness, elation — all of these feelings (and others) can trigger symptoms in the gut.
The brain has a direct effect on the stomach and intestines. For example, the very thought of eating can release the stomach's juices before food gets there. This connection goes both ways. A troubled intestine can send signals to the brain, just as a troubled brain can send signals to the gut. Therefore, a person's stomach or intestinal distress can be the cause or the product of anxiety, stress, or depression. That's because the brain and the gastrointestinal (GI) system are intimately connected.
This is especially true in cases where a person experiences gastrointestinal upset with no obvious physical cause. For such functional GI disorders, it is difficult to try to heal a distressed gut without considering the role of stress and emotion.
Given how closely the gut and brain interact, it becomes easier to understand why you might feel nauseated before giving a presentation or feel intestinal pain during times of stress. That doesn't mean, however, that functional gastrointestinal conditions are imagined or "all in your head." Psychology combines with physical factors to cause pain and other bowel symptoms. Psychosocial factors influence the actual physiology of the gut, as well as symptoms. In other words, stress (or depression or other psychological factors) can affect movement and contractions of the GI tract.
In addition, many people with functional GI disorders perceive pain more acutely than other people do because their brains are more responsive to pain signals from the GI tract. Stress can make the existing pain seem even worse.
Based on these observations, you might expect that at least some patients with functional GI conditions might improve with therapy to reduce stress or treat anxiety or depression. Multiple studies have found that psychologically based approaches lead to greater improvement in digestive symptoms compared with only conventional medical treatment.
Lifestyle Changes For Anxiety
There are also a number of lifestyle changes you can make at home to help your body better manage anxiety. Our modern lifestyles can contribute a surprising amount to our experience of anxiety. Dr. Ellen Vora, who is a functional medicine practitioner, coined the term ‘fake anxiety’ to mean the anxiety we feel when the body’s physiological stress response is triggered by modern-day lifestyle. The body has the same response to all kinds of stressors — it releases stress hormones that get the body ready for action by pumping blood to the heart and legs. That same stress response can be triggered by unsuspecting parts of our lifestyles like strong coffee, staying up too late, too much screen time, and sugar crashes from sugary foods. Unfortunately, many of us often aren’t aware of how our lifestyle choices contribute to extra stress on our bodies. Relieving lifestyle stress can free up your body’s capacity to deal with regular stressors and respect our body's needs for movement, nutrition, and the needs of our circadian rhythm.
The following tips can be done at home that will help your body to better manage anxiety:
1. Diet and Nutrition for Anxiety: Maintaining stable sugar levels can be a game changer for reducing feelings of anxiety. After eating too much sugar or simple carbohydrates, our blood sugar levels can crash, imitating a stress reaction that feels identical to anxiety. Eating regular meals that are high in protein, fats, complex carbohydrates, and fibre can help keep your sugar levels more stable.
2. Sleep Helps Anxiety: Our circadian rhythm is sensitive to light exposure. Exposure to natural sunlight early in the day and reducing exposure to light from technology later in the evening can help you to feel more wakeful during the day and sleepy at night. Slowly reducing caffeine consumption may also help you to fall asleep earlier and rest more deeply.
3. Regular movement: Our sedentary lifestyles can create a lot of anxiety. Walking, jogging, and stretching, are all ways to add a little bit of movement to your day.
When it comes to reducing anxiety, healthy lifestyle changes are low-hanging fruit that are accessible, affordable, and can be done at home. Checking your gut health is an essential part of this process, as imbalances in the gut can significantly influence mood and stress levels. You may also consider working with a functional medicine practitioner to identify specific needs of your body that may be driving anxiety. Sometimes, our bodies have additional nutritional or microbial imbalances that aren’t addressed through diet alone, or we may have a sensitivity or allergy to something that triggers anxiety. A functional medicine practitioner can help assess your gut health, identify underlying issues, and correct them, empowering you to reduce anxiety and improve your overall well-being.