Managing Gut Health and Anxiety
Many of us have heard the saying, “Trust your gut” at least once in our lives. This common idiom speaks to our innate ability to trust the wisdom that comes from within, and we typically associate it with decision making. However, when reflecting on this saying within the context of gut health, I think that there is something more to be gleaned. The gut is one of the most important parts of our bodies, because it helps to maintain our overall health. In fact, many bodily ailments related to skin irritations, the immune system, mental health, and digestive issues can all be linked back to the state of our gut. So, when your gut health is not doing good, you’ll start to see evidence of it through various symptoms that sprout up in your body. Likewise, when your gut is doing well, your overall health will start to flourish too. My hope and prayer is that we could all be like the latter in this situation and live in good health. So, I want to share some useful and practical tips that I’ve learned over the years in my own life, and speak a little bit on how gut health can impact anxiety and what you can do to help manage it!
*While I aim to provide accurate and useful content, this was written for informational purposes only, and should not be treated as professional medical, dietary, or life advice. Questions regarding your personal health, nutrition, or lifestyle should be directed and trusted to a qualified healthcare professional, dietitian/nutritionist, or counselor*
How Your Gut Works
When talking about the gut, we’re actually referring to the entire gastrointestinal tract, which starts with your mouth. Whenever a piece of food passes through your mouth, it goes down your oesophagus and into your stomach. Then, the food makes its way into your small intestine where it gets digested and absorbed into the bloodstream. From there, it’s passed along to the large intestine, which absorbs water and any undigested food, and then it exits through the back passage. Understanding this process is important because it puts into perspective the large role that your gut is playing each and every day. It also reinforces the fact that a healthier gut starts by making healthier decisions. We choose the foods that we want to eat, and those foods then impact our guts positively or negatively. So, it’s up to us to practice more awareness in our food selections, and take more initiative to incorporate gut healthy foods into our diets. I speak more about food awareness in my post The Easiest Way to Go Gluten Free, which played a huge role in my overall gut health journey. If you are wanting to start your own journey to a healthier gut, I recommend to start by examining your diet. Take note of any foods that cause you digestive problems and work to eliminate them. Then work on including more gut boosting foods that support your microbiome.
What to Eat for A Healthier Gut
Fermented Foods: Sauerkraut, kimchi, kombucha, apple cider vinegar, and gluten free miso are all great options to add into your diet on a regular basis because they contain naturally occurring probiotics, which enhance good bacteria in your gut. Probiotics are essential to maintaining good digestion, and they help to boost immunity. Many people opt to take their probiotics in pill or liquid form. However, if you have a sensitive stomach like me, then you may find it easier to just incorporate fermented foods like the ones mentioned above into your diet and receive them that way.
Green Vegetables: Increasing your vegetable intake in general is important for a healthier gut. However, eating more green vegetables specifically like spinach, kale, leeks, and broccoli is good because they’re packed with insoluble fiber, which aids in digestion. They also feed good bacteria to your gut, which promotes a healthy microbiome. Ginger, onions, and avocados are great additions too!
Water: This may seem like a no brainer, but if we’re honest, drinking more often seems so hard to do. A simple change that I’ve implemented in my own life to help me everyday has been to just make water my go-to option no matter what. So, instead of a morning coffee, I’ll just have a morning glass of water, and instead of a bottle of juice, I’ll just grab a bottle of water. This takes effort, and every now and then I do still indulge, but it’s all about moderation. Being intentional with the amount of water that I drink everyday has helped me feel so much better overall.
Limited Caffeine: Different people can tolerate caffeine in varying capacities, but if you have a sensitive stomach, then it’s more likely that caffeine will irritate your gut lining. I’ve actually experienced this first hand myself in the past as an avid coffee drinker. I didn’t realize how much caffeine was impacting my stomach on a daily basis until I quit drinking it. Then, I immediately began to see a decrease in the amount of inflammation I experienced in my gut. Plus, it helped me to manage my anxiety. So, I highly recommend letting caffeine go, if you can.
Limited Sugar: A diet that’s saturated in highly processed foods and loads of refined sugar is detrimental to gut health because it leads to inflammation and harms your microbiome. It’s also just not very nutrient dense, which can lead to weight gain, or even worse a candida overgrowth, which I’ve had the unfortunate pleasure of experiencing too. I’ll speak more on this below because it ties into my experience with anxiety.
Gut Health and Anxiety
Whether it be social anxiety, situational anxiety, or just the anxieties that arise from living everyday life as a human being, it’s very easy to latch onto a loop of thoughts that keep you spinning until you’re dizzy. I’ve struggled with this often throughout my life, but I didn’t realize how much anxiety could impact my gut health until it all came to a head during my time in grad school. I was living in New York and taking classes full-time while also working part-time as an assistant in between. If you’re familiar with NYC, then you know that the pace of the city and daily life alone is enough to make you anxious. So, when you add in a full load of graduate level classes and other work related assignments, what you have on your hands is the recipe for a big anxious mess, and that’s exactly what it was. Back then, my schedule was filled to the brim and I would often just grab whatever I could eat on the go, or make whatever was quick and easy. These foods would almost always be high in sugar and carbs, and to make matters worse, I hadn’t come to the realization that I had a gluten and dairy intolerance yet. So I was eating a ton of gluten and dairy, and I paid the price for it. By the time I graduated my gut health and digestion were in such poor condition, and I was so sick from living in that prolonged state of stress and anxiety.
Symptoms that I experienced were:
Brain fog
Bloating
General stomach discomfort
Migraines
Anxiety and depression
Skin irritations
Hair loss
Anemia
Fatigue
It was then that I really began to understand how serious the gut-brain connection was. So, I started researching possible ways to heal my gut and I ended up coming across The Candida Diet. Then, after consulting with my healthcare provider, I decided to embark on a three month long candida diet program, to see if it would help me get better. It’s important to note that this type of diet is not necessary for everyone and it was a personal choice to do it for my own health. However, if you are experiencing similar things as me and you’re interested, I personally found the program to be very healing in the end. It was also just a great way to reset my system. While it was extremely challenging, it helped to clear away most of my symptoms and I felt so much better afterwards. During this process I also learned about my gluten and dairy intolerance. So, when I finished the program, I immediately began my journey to a gluten free and dairy free lifestyle.
The Main Components of A Candida Diet:
Detox: This stage is admittedly the hardest because you can’t have any sugar (even fruit sugars), no carbs, and no meat for a week. So, your diet will largely consist of vegetables and eggs. Also the only beverage allowed is water.
The Diet: After the initial detox, you can then move onto the actual diet that you will maintain for the remainder for the three months. In this diet you should focus on eating low-inflammatory and sugarless foods that are also non starchy and unprocessed. So, things like quinoa, green veggies,and lean meats are good options. You can also drink dandelion tea (no sugar), plain chicory root coffee, and certain organic nut milks.
Probiotics: After two weeks of the diet, you should start incorporating fermented foods. The probiotics in them will help to replenish good bacteria in your gut.
Antifungal foods: Next, you can start implementing natural antifungal foods like coconut oil, apple cider vinegar, cinnamon, and garlic to help attack the candida.
Reintegration: After about 4-5 weeks, you can slowly start reintroducing regular foods back into your diet, but take your time so that you don’t fall back into the same pattern as before. I recommend starting with fruits.
Stress Management
Aside from diet, taking the time to implement daily stress management habits are imperative to keeping your gut health in check. However, if I’m honest, this can often be easier said than done. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of stress and anxiety, it’s hard to think practically about how to calm yourself down. However, when I can't remember to do anything else, I always try to just focus on my breath. It may seem obvious because we breathe all of the time, but when I say that I focus on my breath, I don’t just mean shallow breaths that you take reflexively every second of the day. I mean long, deep, and intentional breaths. By doing this, you not only fill your body with loads of fresh oxygen, you also give your mind a moment to slow down and regroup. It also gives you space to think more practically about other steps you can take to further de-escalate your emotions.
Things that help me manage my anxiety:
Intentional Breathing
Moments to sit in silence
Intentional breaks from social media and the internet
Daily walks outside
Prayer and meditation
The quiet times that I take to pray and meditate throughout the day are my most impactful strategy of all when it comes to dealing with anxious thoughts because as I talk with God, I realize that I don’t have to be in it alone. The thing about anxiety is that it is a mental dance that keeps you locked inside your own mind. When I pray, I open a conversation that was once just between me, myself, and I up to someone far wiser than me for input. I would equate it to speaking with your best friend who knows you the best. The end result is that I am left feeling calmer and I have a renewed perspective. One of my favorite scriptures for combating anxiety is Philippians 4: 6-7 where it says, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” I love that these verses urge us to bring our burdens and anxieties to The Lord because they reinforce the understanding that he is willing and able to meet us wherever we are and provide the peace that we need in every moment. It’s the perfect ray of light in a dark space. So remember to breathe, eat well, and know that you aren’t alone.
Xo,
Raven