How I Started Healing My Anxiety, Part 1

Did you know anxiety affects about 1 in 5 people? Anxiety can come upon you suddenly and leave just as quickly as it came or it can be something you deal with day to day no matter the circumstances. Anxiety can keep you living in fear, never knowing when it will pop up or how long it will stay. I am not sure how many people know this, because I had gotten pretty good at hiding my struggle with anxiety, but I have suffered with it since my senior year in High School. It started with some panic attacks every now and then which turned into bouts of constant anxiety that kept me up at night for months at a time. I was lucky enough to have been raised in a family who spoke openly about it so I knew what it was as soon as it started happening to me but that didn’t make dealing with it any easier. 

I was also lucky because I had been raised around family who had learned to address anxiety naturally. I am not saying that the natural route is always the best, easiest, or the fastest, but it allowed me to get to the root of my anxiety. My goal was to heal it from the source and not just try to address the symptoms. I am also not saying that I never get anxiety anymore, but when I do I usually know what caused it and how to get a hold of it before it brings me down. To me, understanding what anxiety is and how it works in the body is the most important part of dealing with it.

Anxiety in the most simplistic of scientific terms is the imbalance of your neurotransmitters. You have excitatory neurotransmitters and calming neurotransmitters, when there are more excitatory neurotransmitters than calming we live in a state of constant fight or flight. Anxiety can be good when activated at the right time like when you are running from a tiger, but when your body thinks every stressful event is a tiger that you need to run from and your body maintains a constant state of fight or flight, you really have a problem. Constant anxiety can lead to insomnia, high blood pressure, digestive problems, panic attacks and so much more. There are many things that can imbalance your neurotransmitters such as stress, imbalanced diet, lack of exercise, excess sugar in the diet, hormone imbalance, impaired intestinal health or a combination of any of these.

The first thing I did was to address the food I was eating and try to eliminate things that could make a difference in my mood. The ultimate goal is to stabilize your mood as much as possible, here are some foods to reduce your symptoms at the first sign of anxiety.

1. High sugar foods – Sugar can give you blood sugar highs and lows throughout the day, which increases anxiety. Examples: soda, desserts, high sugar fruits, juice, pop tarts, granola bars, sugary cereals
2. Caffeine and Nicotine –These are both stimulants and can cause more anxiety so limit coffee or black tea to no more than one cup per day and please quit smoking.
3. Alcohol – Can cause anxiety-like symptoms and is not a healthy way to manage your stress.
4. Processed and refined flour – These foods act very similarly to sugar in the body, leading to fluctuations in blood sugar and mood swings thus increasing anxiety. Examples: bread, bagels, pasta, muffins, cake. If you do want some processed treats then I would recommend gluten free versions because of the amazing results I have seen with my patients who have cut out gluten.

Here is a recipe that I really enjoy, that tastes great but eliminates all those pesky foods that could be making your anxiety worse. This recipe helps balance your blood sugar with all the good healthy fat from the nuts and is calming because of the magnesium in the dark chocolate, almonds and pumpkin seeds. 

Working to keep these foods under control in your diet is the first line of defense in your body in its fight to regulate its neurotransmitters. In the next post “How I Started Healing My Anxiety Part 2” I will talk about the harder part of addressing anxiety and that is how to actually deal with your stressors and the supplements that have helped me immensely through my anxiety journey.  I’m excited to share the solutions I’ve found as I continue to work towards healing my body. I’m looking forward to sharing more healing steps with you in my next article, Anxiety part 2.