Natural Treatments to Heal Anxiety and Relieve Stress

Health Is PowHerPodcast Ep. #26

Anxiety is one of the most common symptoms worldwide, where our sympathetic nervous system is in a state of heightened alert!! 

The fight or flight response that is amazing at ensuring our survival.

But it's not so great when it’s constantly turned on. Our bodies can’t go into a rest or relax and chill out state to sleep, focus at work or school, and play with our children, or spend quality time with our families. 

I discuss the top evidence-based therapies including nutrition, gut health, exercise, sleep, light therapy, and supplements to decrease anxiety and live life to its fullest.

Anxiety Symptoms

Anxiety is super devastating - we all know some of the symptoms can include difficulty breathing, chest tightness, difficulty speaking, stumbling on your words, shaking, feeling tired but revved up at the same time. Anxiety can also cause difficulty concentrating, your mind just going “blank”, restlessness, having intrusive thoughts with persistent worrying, overthinking every decision or option to avoid any negative outcomes.

"Anxiety is like having an invisible threat that isn’t really there" - only in the deep crevices of our mind making us fear to protect ourselves. 

The Emotions of Anxiety

The emotions that come with anxiety can manifest itself so differently. It can even manifest itself in anger. Recall being snapped at by your superior when something goes wrong - that boss may actually have underlying anxiety.

Feelings of embarassment, humiliation, or experiencing something similar to a past stressful situation or trauma will manifest itself in anxiety as well. 

Physical Health Symptoms of Anxiety

And when this sympathetic or fight or flight state becomes too active, our nervous system changes its own circuitry creating an environment for chronic pain, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and chronic fatigue. This hyperarousal causes a multitude of physical health problems, not just mental health problems.

In fact, it can even change other health systems including cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, and gut health, including constipation, diarrhea, or irritable bowel syndrome. Tension-type headaches and worsening migraines that become resistant to treatment are more likely to occur in the face of anxiety. 

What are some of the therapies that you can do at home to diminish anxiety’s hold on you?

Nutrition and Gut Health

Gut health, nutrition, and anxiety can be interchangeable. 

The term gut-brain-axis has been coined by healthcare researchers in that the brain and central nervous system communicates with the gut. 

Input of situations, sensory feelings whether it be from life’s stress or even more health visceral situations occurring in the gut for example, can send messages to the anxiety neural circuitry. 

Excessive caffeine and stimulant use can increase anxiety symptoms, so limiting these may be helpful for anxiety symptoms. 

There have been a couple case studies that report positive outcomes of decreased anxiety and improved mental health when incorporating a healthy diet of whole foods balanced with high healthy fats (as fat coats every single cell in our body and many of us don’t get enough), healthy proteins, and complex carbohydrates. Check out episode #8 on healthy eating by Randy Evans, one of few Master’s level integrative/functional medicine dietitians in the country!

The gut microbiome plays a large role in the developmental of anxiety or other mental health dysfunction as research has documented multiple pathways and models for this. 

Exercise

Exercise in a large systematic review concluded that exercise has a small effect on reducing anxiety and depression scores (and that was back in 2006, so if they repeated this review now, we might see even better results). 

What’s cool about exercising decreasing anxiety is that exercise actually balances the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system to restore its natural state. 

Sleep

We discussed in episode 20 and 22 about how to improve sleep and how pain can cause sleep issues but more importantly sleep dysfunction causes pain.  There may also be a bidirectional state with sleep and anxiety. Anxiety causes sleep problems, but not getting enough sleep or having poor sleep quality may cause anxiety. Check out episode 20 and 22 to improve and deepen sleep!!

Active Relaxation

Everytime I ask a patient what they do for “relaxation”, they respond “I sleep” or “I play video games” or “I read a book” or “I listen to music”. While those are great relaxing activities, they are not considered active relaxation, like hypnosis, guided imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, meditation and mindfulness that actually change your neural circuits to lessen anxiety.

And these have been thoroughly studied to show small to moderate reductions of many dimensions of negative stress and anxiety. Active relaxation changes the way your brain signaling gets activated and perceives information (including the way it perceives stress). 

Check out episode 14 where we teach you a hypnosis technique and episode 18 and episode# 24 where I teach you a meditation technique to help anxiety. 

Light Therapy

Bright light therapy has been found to reduce anxiety symptoms in patients with certain chronic conditions. If living in an area especially during the winter time with less natural sunlight exposure, using at least a 2500 lux light box for approximately 1 hour or a 10,000 lux for 20 minutes in the morning may help improve mood. 

Supplements:

The most commonly used complementary health approaches to anxiety may be supplements because it’s taking a pill, and a bit easier than putting in the work to sleep better, meditate, exercise and eat better. But these are so worth it and absolutely necessary. However, most of the supplements need further research to say they actually work for anxiety with some studies or reviews suggesting that some of these supplements have promising results for anxiety. 

Chamomile, lemon balm (melissa officinalis), and fennel are herbal supplements that have anti-anxiety properties. 

These herbs can be found in tea or tinctures or capsules even. I drink organic lemon balm tea that has 1500 mg in it when I’m a bit too revved up after one of my late night evening medical board meetings!  

Chamomile should be avoided who have allergies to ragweed or similar plants and cautious use with certain medications, such as cyclosporine or warfarin. 

Fennel is also beneficial to ease digestion as well. 

Passionflower may be as effective as benzodiazepines in treating anxiety. Adverse effects include dizziness, drowsiness or confusion.

Kava has also been studied as an anxiolytic, showing benefits for individuals that may not tolerate benzodiazepines or other antianxiety medicines. In a review of 435 clinical trials, no adverse liver toxicity was found, though there have been a few case reports though they were speculating this was due to overdose, prolonged therapy, co-medication with other liver problematic drugs or poor quality of the kava that they used. 

St. John’s Wort is most recognized for its role in depression and in a meta-analysis found St. john’s wort to be more effective than placebo in treating mild to moderate depression. While St. John’s Wort has been found to significantly improve obsessive compulsive disorder symptoms, it hasn’t been found to benefit anxiety as much though more research needs to be done. 

L-lysine and L-Arginine

Two trials done on L-lysine and L-arginine effectively reduced anxiety symptoms without any side effects. 

Magnesium

Magnesium may often be low (difficult to determine unless an RBC magnesium level is done not a serum magnesium level) in many individuals as dietary surveys in Europe and United States revealed that magnesium intake is much lower than the recommended amount. 

Magnesium has been studied in a few trials and has been shown to effectively treat anxiety when used in combination with other supplements.  Magnesium plays a role in the psycho-neuro-endocrine system and is an enzyme used in more than 300 biochemical reactions in our bodies. It also blocks glutamate which is a primary excitatory neurotransmitter than may be involved in anxiety disorders. 

Podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify

And if you enjoyed this episode and haven't subscribed, rated, or reviewed us, please head over to iTunes, Stitcher, or Spotify to help us reach more women in need of integrative approaches to health and well-being!

Comment and DM us at Instagram @Health_Is_PowHer. We'd love to meet you and see you over there!