Living with anxiety can be crippling. It’s more than getting anxious sometimes, like before a big test or stage fright.
When anxiety becomes a daily struggle, everything gets magnified, and your worries can spin out of control. That makes it unbearably difficult to go to school or work, socialize, or even relax. And when you’re stuck in “anxious brain,” it feels impossible to escape or think about anything else.
While most experts believe that anxiety is brought on by an imbalanced brain, brand new research has uncovered a different cause: an imbalanced gut.
That’s right. Your gut microbiome, the trillions of bacteria that live in your gut, may be the root cause of your anxiety… and the best way to conquer it.
The Gut-Brain Connection
Weird, but true: Your gut is considered your “second brain.”
That’s because your gut microbiome has a direct connection to your brain – the vagus nerve. The two communicate constantly, and the conversation flows both ways: from your brain to your gut and from your gut to your brain. But the connection doesn’t end there.
“Gut feelings” are instant messages from your gut to your brain.
Along with that express link, your gut also
- hosts a huge portion of your nervous system
- produces most of your neurotransmitters (brain chemicals that affect mood and behavior)
- manages your stress responses
When your gut microbiome is healthy and balanced – meaning there are more beneficial bacteria than harmful bacteria – your brain gets positive messages. But when your gut is out of balance (a condition called dysbiosis), it sends very different messages, and those can create anxiety, fear, and depression. (Learn more)
Your Nervous System Calls the Shots
Your moods, stress response, and mental health come from your autonomic nervous system (ANS). The ANS runs thousands of functions automatically all the time, keying off of messages from both your body and your surroundings. It controls your blood pressure, breathing rate, body temperature, and many more automatic body processes.
Your ANS is split into two main parts:
- Sympathetic nervous system (SNS), which kicks off fight-flight-freeze reactions. This system is supposed to be survival-based, and shut off when the danger has passed (like you’ve escaped being eaten by a tiger). But in today’s constant stress world, your SNS can stay on high alert almost all of the time, and that can lead to big physical and mental health issues.
- Parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), responsible for calming everything down and getting the body back in balance. The PNS sparks repair, rest, and digestion, along with feelings of tranquility, love, and connection.
The part of your nervous system that lives in your gut – the ENS, or enteric nervous system – is supposed to work with the PNS and the SNS pretty evenly, so you feel balanced most of the time. But when your gut is out of balance itself – in dysbiosis – it can start to focus attention on just one side of your ANS… usually the one that makes you feel like you’re constantly being chased by tigers.
How Your Gut Triggers Anxiety
When dysbiosis takes over your gut, and bad bacteria (pathogens) outnumber good bacteria (probiotics), your gut starts sending the wrong messages to your nervous system. Worse, it uses five methods to set off or increase anxiety (and other mood disorders like depression).
- Bad bacteria trigger toxic streaming, and that’s exactly as bad as it sounds. Pathogens attack the gut barrier, which is supposed to keep pathogens and LPS toxins (also called lipopolysaccharides) inside your gut and out of your bloodstream. When the barrier gets damaged, those LPS toxins escape and