I remember my first panic attack. It came out of nowhere and I was so terrified that I (honestly) thought I was going to die! I had no idea what was happening but it left me a complete mental wreck afterward. That was the start of daily anxiety attacks, which resulted in me developing agoraphobia.
For a number of years, I tried so many different therapies, and spent thousands of dollars, desperately trying to regain my health, my sanity, and MY LIFE. Nothing seemed to work and as each therapy failed to provide me with the relief I was hoping for, my faith that I would be ‘cured’ started to wane.
It got to the point that I no longer became excited with each new ‘therapy’ that promised a cure as I couldn’t take the disappointment anymore. I was losing hope fast and the thought that I would be like this forever was both terrifying and very depressing.
Then one day, I came across a lady who mentioned that she had healed her anxiety/agoraphobia by healing her Leaky Gut and by taking probiotics. She stated that nothing had worked up to this point and this was the ‘miracle’ she had prayed for! I, too, had been praying for a miracle and something in me ‘lit up’ and I felt that this was a ‘sign’ that I may have found MY own miracle also.
Gut and Anxiety connection
When the body goes through severe distress, this leads to increased levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) being transported through your blood. All of this result in an increase in the storage of fats, declination of immune system function and, you guessed it, anxiety. To put it simply, there is an undeniable relationship between gut health and anxiety (which can also be known as the gut-brain axis) as studies continue to illustrate how people suffering from anxiety tend to exhibit other symptoms of diarrhea, irregular bowel movements and bloating.
The gut alone contains 100 000 times more microbes than the current population of people in the world, with a high concentration of immune cells in our stomachs compared to any other place in our body. Healthy gut or not, the microbes all around the intestinal lining stand to heavily influence the overall psychological state and because of this, it becomes so very important to watch what we put in our bodies as it might also have an indirect effect on our brain!
Probiotics and Anxiety link
New research sheds light on how probiotics go straight to working on your body’s overall health. The live bacteria (such as Lactobacillus rhamnosus) and yeast levels in probiotics are also proven to exist as psychobiotics which help to produce certain biologically active compounds to balance out psychological states in 3 apparent ways:
- Releasing neurotransmitters which contain serotonin, also known as the ‘happy hormone’. These neurotransmitters go straight to work, urging cells in the intestinal lining to secrete hormones that can boost brain function and therefore change overall behavior.
- Repairing signals on the body’s stress response system. The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA axis) directly affects the body’s endocrine response to both physical and psychological stress –which becomes dysfunctional to a certain extent during situations of extreme stress. Probiotics and psychobiotics can exert a direct impact on our state of mind by influencing adrenal glands and brain activity.
- Reducing inflammation in the body. Significant amounts of research all point to inflammatory properties being just some of the hidden causes for depression and a variety of other mood disorders. Surprisingly enough, increased levels of inflammation for an extended period of time is commonly attributed to a problem in the gut (gut dysbiosis, etc) and can stand to negatively impact its host physically and mentally over the long run. Perhaps one of the most apparent reasons people consume probiotics is to lower inflammation levels in their body (probiotics for treating acne, etc) and using this same logic is able to act on the brain of the host by reducing the risk of cognitive mood disorders before they occur.
Armed with this knowledge, I researched further and discovered that excessive antibiotic use had resulted in a number of people experiencing anxiety, depression and various mental health issues. This was due to the ‘good’ bacteria being wiped out along with the bad bacteria and therefore the internal ‘balance’ had been altered significantly.
A bell went off in my head – before my first anxiety attack, I had been prescribed FIVE different types of antibiotics, over a 6-month period, for a chest infection that wouldn’t clear up. As the antibiotics ‘corrected’ my chest infection, but it had also wiped out the bacterial flora in my gut, and this explained why I was now suffering from terrible anxiety!!??!! This really made sense to me.
Ok – NOW I was excited!!!
So, I started ‘the road to recovery’ (as I like to call it). It began with the GAPS Diet. This was basically a diet that corrects the digestive tract by fixing the gut lining (leaky gut). This involved significantly changing my diet and eliminating a number of foods that caused inflammation within my body. Then, I introduced probiotics into my diet and that is when things really did change.
It’s important to use the right probiotic and the one that seemed to work for me was ‘Ultra-Jarro-Dophilus’. Within one month, I felt a significant improvement. I no longer had generalized anxiety. I no longer feared to leave the house. I felt like socializing again (I had become quite reclusive and didn’t really like speaking to other people) and I was feeling positive about the future again.
Jarrow Formulas Jarro-Dophilus EPS, Supports Intestinal Health, 25 Billion Per Capsule, Supports Gastrointestinal Health, 30 Caps
I will say that I also started taking some key vitamins such as:
I included these into my new protocol after the first month of taking the probiotics and I feel that really helped too. That was when I felt my energy sore and I felt like a completely different person!!
If you are suffering from anxiety, agoraphobia, OCD, ADD, ADHD or any other mental illness, I would strongly advise that you give this a try. Life is meant to be lived. Mental illness takes this away from you and the sooner you get your life BACK, the sooner you can start living again!!
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