Ever wondered about how eating well can help manage anxiety, or if it’s even possible to reduce anxiety through what you eat? If so, you’re in in the right place, and it’s true that what you put in your body does indeed impact your mental health as much as your physical health. Let me walk you through the foundations of how eating well can help manage anxiety as a licensed therapist and Nutritional Therapy Practitioner who is intimately familiar with the intersection of mental health and nutrition.
Mind-Body Connection
There’s no better place to start when discussing mental health and nutrition than with the mind-body connection. Believe it or not, this idea of the mind-body connection goes all the way back to the 17th century with Rene Descartes (and you are welcome to nerd out over the historical epistemology of the mind-body connection if that piques your interest!). Descartes was interested in the idea of dualism where our bodies are have a spatial existence and our minds have a conscious existence, operating in two different ways so that the interaction between mind and body appears impossible. Of course, this isn’t the case, though.
For a simple example, think of waking up in the morning feeling groggy. Your body is tired and sends messages to you brain that you need help getting energy, so your brain decides it’s time for coffee. Your body then carries you to make or get coffee, using your brain to decide what you want and potentially go through the steps of making it. Your body also physically allows you to drink it once made.
What is the mind-body connection?
In modern times, we define the mind-body connection as the reciprocal relationship when the mind and the body where they both influence and impact each other. Basically, mental health (or emotional health as I think of it it) and physical health are inextricable connected.
Here’s a simple example in relation to anxiety: let’s say you have a big interview for a job you desperately want but you’re doubting your experience and qualifications for the job. You might walk into that interview with a racing heart even though you haven’t run anywhere or climbed any stairs, and your stomach might be hurting or feel like it’s in knots and you know it’s not from hunger. Your palms might be sweaty and you might feel a little light-headed from shortness of breath. These are all quite common physical manifestations of anxiety, and they stem from how you feel about the event and/or yourself. All of our emotions show up in the body as sensations, and these emotions often have thoughts that accompany and reinforce them.
And now, we’ve got the science to back it up.
The Autonomic Nervous System
Dr. Stephen Porges, a psychologist, created polyvagal theory, which is a conceptualization of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS plays a significant role in our emotions, behaviors and our overall health. If you’ve never given your nervous system much thought, no worries. The good news is that much like a car, you don’t need to know how your ANS works in order to use it, but it’s helpful to get a little background info here to understand how eating well can help manage anxiety.
The ANS is a system of wiring that connects from the brain to almost every organ in the body, including the gut. In case you’re keeping track, this is the physical pathway directly connecting mind to body. The job of the ANS is to respond to perceived cues of safety or danger in three places: inside, outside, and in between.
Inside, Outside, & In Between
In terms of inside, I’m referring to both our physical internal state and our emotional internal state. Can I experience and tolerate the physical and emotional sensations I’m experiencing? If the answer is yes, I’m safe. If the answer is no, then I’m not safe.
Outside refers to our perceived safety within our environment. The brain wants to know if a tiger is chasing us, for example, so it can respond appropriately and seek safety. We use our senses (sight, smell, taste, touch, and sound) to take in cues from our environment in order to determine perceived safety or not.
In between means in relationship, like the emotional space between two people. Am I in trouble with this person? Am I going to get yelled at or hurt by this person? Will I be judged, criticized, or misunderstood by this person? If the brain detects a lack of safety in relationship, it also tells the ANS to protect us.
What Does the ANS Do?
The ANS responds to cues of safety and cues of stress. When we feel safe- internally, physically, emotionally safe- we’re in a state of rest and digest, also known as the ventral vagal branch of the ANS. We feel connected to ourselves and others, and we can handle a low level of stress without feeling overwhelmed (meaning we can problem solve). We’re regulated when we’re in ventral vagal.
When we perceive a lack of safety, the nervous system has two basic options: fight or flight, or shut down. When the ANS sends us to fight or flight as our defense mechanism, also known as the sympathetic branch of the nervous system, we unconsciously size up the source of danger and decide if it’s worth our efforts to try to fight, or if we should just run away for safety.
When we sense that neither fight nor flight will work, we move into shutdown or dorsal vagal state. This is like a opossum playing opossum. When a opossum plays dead, it’s because their brain has determined that fighting and fleeing aren’t viable options, so they will conserve resources and shut down as a tactic for life preservation.
When we feel anxious, we’re in a state of fight or flight. We are perceiving danger so our ANS devotes energy to safety. With anxiety, this often looks like persistent worried thoughts, overthinking, ruminating, sweating, constricted breathing, tight muscles, and increased heart rate, to name a few symptoms. All of these symptoms have the intention of helping us protect ourselves.
Rest and Digest
Let’s get a little more specific here with the ANS and how eating well can help manage anxiety. Eating well isn’t just about the types and quality of food we choose to consume. Eating well includes how we consume our food.
Call to mind the feeling of being starving and knowing you literally need to shovel the food in NOW. Oh, and you’ve got a work meeting or a young child who needs your support and focus probably about 2 minutes ago. When we eat in a rush or while we’re stressed, our body isn’t able to digest food because we’re in fight or flight. The nervous system tells our stomach to stop prioritizing digestion when we’re stressed; our bodies need those valuable energy resources for other tasks. This is okay if it happens every now and then- we won’t really see long-lasting impacts for a quick, rushed meals here and there. When it’s chronic or our default pattern for eating, however, it’s pretty likely we’ll struggle with IBS, IBD, gas and bloating, diarrhea or constipation, acid reflux, and a host of other digestive complaints.
On the flip side, imagine having a slow meal on a weekend with friends: you’re soaking up the good company and laughs, you have stories to hear and to tell, and you eat slowly while you chat between bites. You’re not in a rush to scarf down your food and get on to the next task. Think of a multi-course family meal in Italy that lasts for hours. When we eat like this (and it doesn’t have to be this extreme and luxurious), we’re in the state of rest and digest or ventral vagal. Our ANS knows we’re safe, so we can devote time and resources to digesting our food and using it for needed energy.
How to Get Into Rest and Digest
The more time we spend in a state of rest and digest, the easier it will be to digest our food and to feel ease and safety in our bodies. Considering that we can’t control everything in life and stress is inherent in life, it’s important to know how to shift out of fight or flight anxiety patterns before eating, so here are a few exercises to get you there:
- 5 deep breaths: Slow breathe in through your nose and into the bottom of your diaphragm. You’ll know you’re breathing deeply when you feel and see your belly rise. Breathe out through your mouth on the exhale, nice and slow. I like to count to 4 on the inhale and 6 on the exhale to help slow my breathing down. Repeat four time for a total of 5 deep breaths.
- Sighing: Breathe in through the nose deeply, and then sigh out the mouth. Repeat for 4 to 5 breaths.
- Slow down and use your senses to experience your food: Take you time looking at your food before you begin eating- what shapes, colors, sizes, textures, etc. do you see? Smell your food- what do you smell? Listen as you chew and describe the sound (Is it crunchy, soft, etc.?). Really taste your food- pay attention to bite size, flavors, how many bites before your swallow, etc. Feel your stomach getting full as you eat and let your body decide when you’re full, not your brain or your plate being clean.
Reduce Inflammation to Reduce Anxiety
One of the foundational ways we can learn about how eating well can help manage anxiety is by reducing inflammation. Unfortunately, many common foods in the standard American diet are inflammatory, including all processed foods. The thing about processed foods is that they are crafted to be shelf stable- to last a long time until someone buys them, and to be quick, cheap, and easy for the consumer. While it might be inexpensive for our finances (but not really these days with inflation!), we will certainly pay the price with our health.
Most things aren’t black and white, but when it comes to your health and inflammatory foods, it sort of is. Foods are either inflammatory or anti-inflammatory. Some of these is person-dependent if you have allergies or intolerances, but processed foods are inflammatory for everyone. Our bodies weren’t designed to eat so many chemicals, so many Franken-foods.
Although it gets a bad rap now, inflammation isn’t a bad thing. It was designed by our bodies to support our healing. When we have an injury, inflammation shows up to let the rest of the system know what place needs healing and to let us know where we need to take it easy while the immune system does its job. Inflammation starts the healing process, but just like us at work or as a parent getting slammed with multiple requests at once, we won’t be able to keep up when inflammation is chronic. We’ll get overwhelmed and nothing will really get done. When we regularly eat processed food, the body is always trying to heal and never can, so inflammation becomes chronic and that leads to health issues and disease.
In terms of how inflammation and anxiety are connected, we have data to show that brain inflammation is connected to anxiety, OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, a kind of anxiety disorder). and depression. The immune system, which sends helper cells to address and reduce inflammation as it makes the repairs the body needs, can influence our mood. When the immune system is working overtime to address inflammation, especially in the gut where we digest our food, its more likely to tell the brain to make neurotransmitters that lead to anxiety symptoms. This goes back to that mind-body connection from early, further reinforcing how eating well can help manage anxiety.
The body experiences inflammation so it tells the brain to respond in a certain way- with anxiety. Most people, instead of reading the symptom of anxiety as something they can address by looking at their diet, stress and trauma levels, and lifestyle habits, will choose to take a pill to turn off the receptors for anxiety. The choice is yours. When we experience anxiety, it’s for a reason. It’s the body sending a message that something is imbalanced and we need help.
To sum up the connection between anxiety and inflammation, basically what it comes down to is that how you eat and what you eat can help you to manage anxiety. With as little thought as the average person gives to what they put in their bodies, and as much anxiety people are experiencing on a regular basis, I’d say this is a pretty exciting time to about how eating well can help manage anxiety.
Eat Healthy Fats
One way to think about how eating well can help manage anxiety is by consider how many health fats you eat on a daily basis. Healthy fats are fats that come from natural food sources and often contain a natural balance of Omega 3s and Omega 6s. For optimal health, we need a balance of both Omega-3 and Omega-6 to keep the risk of inflammation low, but the standard American diet is drastically imbalanced towards Omega-6s. This is due to the addition of rancid industrial seed oils being used as the standard for cooking and baking. Industrial seed oils to avoid include canola oil, rapeseed oil, soybean oil, cotton oil, and safflower oil as these are all made using a highly unnatural process that produces trans fats. Generally, even the average person not well-versed in nutrition knows to avoid trans fats to support their health.
Omega-3s are found in fish (like salmon, tuna, and mackerel), eggs, nuts (walnuts, cashews, almonds, etc.), olives and olive oil, avocado and avocado oil, flaxseeds, dairy, and animal fats like lard, tallow, etc. Due to some skewed studies, we’ve been led to believe that animal fats (saturated fats) are bad for us, but that’s actually not true. Our bodies have been conditioned to eat animal fats for centuries and many of the studies that state saturated fats are bad use data from consuming ultraprocessed saturated fat foods as opposed to natural animal foods.
Now that we’ve defined what eating well looks like in terms of healthy fats, let’s weave in the connection to anxiety so we can keep building on our foundation for how eating well can help manage anxiety. A recent study found that diets high in processed fats turn on genes that produce neurotransmitters that can increase stress and anxiety in the brain. Adding more Omega-3 foods into your diet can help reduce anxiety by providing that balance between Omega-6 and Omega-3. Ideally, the body prefers a ratio of 2:1 for Omega-6: Omega-3 fats. The average person eats a ratio of 20:1, however, which can only lead to inflammation because the ratio is significantly out of balance.
Take Care of Your Gut Microbiome
You might be surprised to learn it, but your gut microbiome is a crucial piece for how eating well can help manage anxiety. The gut microbiome is the environment inside your intestines comprised of many different kinds of bacteria. These bacteria break down our food, allowing us to absorb essential nutrients, and when functioning well, keep us healthy. Some species of bacteria have the important job of sending chemical signals, known as neurotransmitters, to the brain via the nervous system to impact how we feel emotionally. One of these neurotransmitters that you may be familiar with is serotonin, and 90% of it is produced in the gut. Serotonin is important because it regulates our mood and helps us feel stable emotionally, focused, content, and at ease, amongst other functions throughout the body.
Serotonin is also connected to anxiety, depression, and host of other challenges that people commonly navigate in modern times. This neurotransmitter is created from a common amino acid you may recognize the name of: tryptophan. The body can’t make tryptophan, so it must receive it from our food. Tryptophan isn’t just in your Thanksgiving turkey, but also in salmon, chicken, duck, eggs, spinach and other dark leafy greens, dairy, and nuts and seeds. Notice that all of these foods essential for serotonin production are real, natural foods- not processed foods.
The gut microbiome is also sensitive to inflammation, aside from needing the right nutrients to function at its best. A diet high in processed food negatively impacts the gut microbiome by weakening the cell junctions in the lining of the gut (this is also called leaky gut). This allows food particles and bacteria to leave the digestive system and enter the bloodstream, causing inflammation as the immune system responds to these invaders. As we’ve already discussed, we know inflammation and anxiety go hand-in-hand.
The best way to take care of your gut microbiome as a strategy for how eating well can help manage anxiety is to priortize real foods as much as possible.
Balance Blood Sugar to Reduce Anxiety
We’ve already covered a lot of information for how eating well can help manage anxiety, but we’d be remiss not to discuss blood sugar regulation. When your blood sugar levels get too low, it causes your adrenals to send out cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine (all stress hormones) in order to quickly make glucose to raise blood sugar levels.
Unfortunately, for people who frequently consume sugar, this is a constant process: You wake up, have a sugary coffee and donut, and then a few hours lately you feel like your energy is crashing (it’s actually your blood sugar crashing), so it sends the stress response out to quickly make energy while you run to get more sugar. Your body knows you’re going to give it a lot of sugar- more than it can handle- so it’s at the ready to store it all and fast. It overcompensates, so then before you know it, your out of energy and entering another crash. And this just keeps repeating throughout the day, often leading you to wake at 3 am because your blood sugar dipped to low and your body had to send out the stress hormones to keep you alive. This cycle eventually leads to type 2 diabetes as the body loses its sensitive to sugar and cannot regulate itself without support.
Tying in anxiety and how eating well can help manage anxiety, cortisol and adrenaline are our fight or flight hormones. They get us geared up to do what we have to to ensure our survival, and when they’re spiking several times throughout the day just in response to your blood sugar levels, it’s highly likely you’ll feel on on edge, frantic, wired, and like you’re in survival mode… because you are. Your body will sense a lack of internal safety because unstable, dysregulated blood sugar can lead to death. That’s why it pulls your fight or flight hormones online. in addition, we’ve got research now demonstrating that people with inconsistent blood sugar levels experience more negative moods and a lower quality of life.
What to Do to Regulate Blood Sugar
- Always, always, always start every meal and snack with a protein: Eating protein first helps to slow the digestion and release of carbohydrates (AKA SUGAR), meaning carbs won’t spike your blood sugar levels. It also turns on stomach acid production, which reduces indigestion as it helps us break down our food.
- Prioritize real whole food over processed food: Eat food that comes from animals and grows in the ground over man-made concoctions. Real food doesn’t cause the extreme blood sugar spikes and crashes that lead to stress hormones being released.
- Prioritize getting enough sleep: Research shows that within a week of sleep deprivation, a person can become per-diabetic in their blood sugar levels. Even one night of sleep deprivation can increase a person’s resistance to insulin (which is the hormone responsible for storing blood sugar), meaning that the body is less responsive to sugar being stored.
Eat Nutrient-Dense Food
One last way how eating well can help manage anxiety is by eating nutrient-dense food, which is food that has an abundance of naturally occurring vitamins and minerals. While processed foods can be fortified with vitamins, these are often synthetic and unusable by the body. Nutrient-dense food is simply real food- animal products or plants that grow in the ground. It often doesn’t have a nutrition label. Another factor in nutrient-density is quality: the nutrients in the soil, growing conditions, pesticides, harvesting procedures, etc. impact the amount of nutrients a food will have.
Nutrient-dense food is important to ensure we receive all the vitamins and minerals we need for optimal functioning since deficiencies in some vitamins and minerals are connected to higher rates of anxiety. So, let’s take a look at how eating well can help manage anxiety by exploring some of these vitamins and minerals.
Vitamin B
Vitamin B is used by your body to help make energy. It also helps our brains and nervous systems function well. Vitamin B is found in dairy, eggs, organ meats and animal proteins, dark leafy greens, and fruits. When we’re deficient in vitamin B, we may feel lethargic, have trouble with focus, and anxious or depressed.
It’s been shown in multiple studies that supplementing with vitamin B can reduce anxiety symptoms, so it makes sense that increasing foods with vitamin B in the diet can also support with anxiety reduction. The mechanism for this is also connected to the neurotransmitters in our brain and nervous system (GABA).
Make sure you’re getting a healthy dose of vitamin B in your food by eating leafy greens like kale and collards greens, animal proteins like chicken and beef, eggs, and dairy options like milk and cheese.
Vitamin D
Vitamin D is a fat soluble vitamin, meaning it needs fat to help it dissolve, so this connects to consuming healthy fats like we talked about earlier (Hang around long enough and you’ll definitely see there are so many connections in how things work emotionally and physically for us!). Another connection with vitamin D and what we covered already: vitamin D is essential for the immune system and nervous system to function optionally.
Part of our vitamin D supply comes from exposure to sunlight. The other part comes from what we eat. Dairy, eggs, fish, mushrooms, and almonds are all high vitamin D foods. Regardless of where we get it from, it plays a crucial role in the gut between supporting the absorption of calcium and reducing inflammation in the intestines, and we already know that inflammation in the gut sends neurotransmitters to the brain to signal inflammation. When we’re deficient in vitamin D, we’re more likely to feel depressed and anxious, so eat up and get 15-20 minutes of daily sunlight to keep your vitamin D levels sufficient.
Magnesium
Magnesium is a mineral and it is pretty fascinating how it can support the body. One thing to know right off the bat is that stress depletes magnesium, so if you’re under a lot of stress, it’s even more important to pay attention to making sure you get the magnesium you need. It’s actually quite common to be deficient in magnesium, too, unfortunately: more than half the US population doesn’t get the daily recommended amount.
Magnesium is really important for energy production as well as stabilizing our blood pressure, heart beat, and helping muscles relax. It also plays a role in blood sugar regulation, a health immune system, sleep, and digestive health (supporting regular bowel movements).
Foods chocked full of magnesium (although significantly less than in the past since our soil has reduced nutrients due to industrial farming practices) include leafy greens like spinach, nuts, and seeds. There are also a lot of great magnesium supplements out there, both topical and oral.
Magnesium can support reduction of anxiety through how it supports those neurotransmitters- you know, the ones that tell the brain about our mood and if there’s inflammation going on in our gut. This mighty mineral also helps to reduce the stress response hormones and muscle tension.
How Eating Well Can Help Manage Anxiety
My hope is that now it’s easy to see how eating well can help manage anxiety and it’s given you a loose roadmap to consider adding some of these more nutrient-dense foods into your diet.
I’m sure you noticed that I did not include doses of any vitamin or mineral. One reason for that is because I am a big proponent of real food. Let’s get our macro and micro nutrients from real food first and then fill in the gaps with supplements if we have to. The second reason is because I believe in bioindividuality. What might be just the right amount of magnesium for me could be too much or too little for you. I think it’s really important to work with a practitioner when trying to figure out supplement doses so they can take into account your history, lifestyle, diet, eating habits, and overall health as you look at what supplements would be supportive.
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