I see many patients who have diagnosed anxiety and depression from a medical doctor. They are never told what the problem is other than they have to work on their stress and take a medication. The patient is left feeling like they have nothing to do but follow the doctor’s orders. It does not have to be this way. You can make your body more resilient to stress in many ways. I want to highlight 3 of ways.
3 Ways to make your body more resilient to stress
1. Improve the health of the gut.
Many people do not know that most of your serotonin is made in your gut. If you have gut issues like IBS (which is a diagnosis that means the doctor doesn’t know what is going on), you will have more of a chance of having anxiety. Another issue that often comes up is Small Intestinal Bacterial Overgrowth (SIBO). This occurs when bacteria from the large intestine crawls into the small intestine and ferments your food creating either methane or hydrogen gas. When your gut health is poor, your brain health is poor. Your gut talks to your brain 90% of the time, so what you are often feeling is coming from your gut and not your head. I like patients to complete a process that helps clean up the SIBO issue, work on digestion of your food, repopulate the large intestine with good bacteria, and then feed those bacteria so they have a chance to grow and thrive. This often starts to clear up anxiety.
2. Work on the “Tryptophan Steal.”
This is when your body starts to “steal” tryptophan (which is an amino acid from the protein you eat) causing you to not be able to make serotonin. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that causes you to feel happiness. Why does your body not want you to be happy and stress resilient? It doesn’t want you to die! What do I mean by that? Your body has a great need to keep your cells alive so it will “steal” tryptophan to make Niacin (B3), which is needed to keep your cells alive. I will have patients use a combination of both Niacin, tryptophan, and something called 5-HTP to help the restore proper levels in the body of both Niacin and serotonin.
3. Work on estrogen levels in both males and females.
There are many toxins that act like estrogen in our body. Things like plastic, pesticides, and personal hygiene products cause an estrogen toxicity issue in your body. This toxicity affects the liver and gut where estrogen is broken down. When you overload the body with these toxins, it slows down the breakdown of dopamine (reward chemical) in the body. This then causes you to be anxious and more stressed than you would normally be. Cortisol levels increase, blood sugar levels increase, and you experience brain fog. I like my patients to clean up their environments at home. Suggestions are to filter water, stay away from plastic as much as possible, eat organic foods, and use the Healthy Living App to guide purchasing products for their personal use. You can’t be a clean fish in a dirty bowl.
These three things will cause improvement in most of the anxiety and depression issues in people. If you feel overwhelmed, I suggest working on the chemicals at home first, making small changes to your habits and the products you use. Next try to eat as much clean, real food as possible. This will help supply your body with the necessary nutrients it needs to make more serotonin. Lastly, I would work with someone who can get your gut working well, improve your detoxification process in your body, and give you the tools you need to help with your anxiety.
-Dr. Brian Opp D.C.