Anxiety empowerment time!

Of the most common and embarrassing side effects of anxiety and panic. And hopefully when you listen to this, you'll feel validated, feel heard, if you do experience the symptom that can come with anxiety. And you'll also hopefully walk away with a solution of what to actually do about it. And so here we teach a lot about panic and anxiety, the root causes of panic and anxiety, and how to overcome. And so we're going to focus specifically on anxiety that can cause severe digestive upset. And so if you deal with digestive symptoms, this is going to be the conversation for you. And let me know in the comments if you like learning about the specifics of the nine types of anxiety and what topic you'd like to hear about next. But before we jump into the details, if you didn't know, I wrote a book that has all of this information inside it and more. And it's on pre order right now. It comes out October 8th. It's called panic Proof and you can find it anywhere books are sold. And I recorded the audiobook, which was like a whole adventure in and of itself. And so I would love it if you would buy the book and if you would kindly leave of words of encouragement or a review, that would be wonderful too. And so it's called Panic Proof and you can find it online or at your bookstores. All right, so let's talk about one of the most common symptoms of anxiety and the embarrassing symptom of anxiety that can show up. I think we need to talk about it more. And so this is called gut anxiety. And gut anxiety is anxiety that shows, shows up, as you would guess, in your gut. And this can cause symptoms in your upper digestive tract or in your lower digestive tract. So let's talk about upper first. Upper digestive tract would be if when you get really stressed or overwhelmed, you feel reflux. Reflux could be burning and it could be rising, it could be pressure. Some people don't feel burning when they get reflux. They just feel indigestion. Maybe you get bubbles. Some people burp when they get really anxious or stressed. Some people get like a yucky taste in the back of their mouth when they get really stressed. And that can be embarrassing. It can cause halitosis or bad breath. And maybe your doctors have given you lots of treatments, mints, oral hygiene strategies. Maybe they've given you Prilosec or reflux pills and you feel like it's not going away. We'll talk about that and what to do. And, and then there's also lower Digestive system, anxiety, gut anxiety, and that's gonna affect more the bowels. And so when you get anxious, maybe you get diarrhea, maybe you get really gassy and bloated, which is not pleasant. When you wanna go out amongst other people and live your life is to be dealing with diarrhea. Gas bloating could also cause constipation. And so we see this in the clinical research where people who are diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome also may receive a diagnosis of anxiety. So those can often co occur. And we also see in the research that your serotonin, in fact 95% of your serotonin is made in your gastrointestinal tract and that the gastrointestinal tract affects your brain and your brain affects your gut, right? So there's the vagus nerve and that creates a through line whereby your gut and your brain can communicate. And so gut anxiety. So here are some signs, just a checklist. So as I go over this, you may be dealing with gut anxiety, is number one, you deal with anxiety and anxiety can be anything from I feel mildly overwhelmed, kind of irritable, stressed, all the way up to the spectrum of dealing with pretty severe panic or rage as attacks, a crisis, right? So that's the first. Do you exist anywhere in this spectrum or are you a very uncommon person and that you're not stressed at all? Most of us are anxious, at least to some degree. Number two is that you experience some sort of digestive upset, whether it's heartburn, gas, bloating, diarrhea, constipation, belching, anything having to do with the gastrointestinal tract. That's number two. So then the question is, what is the root cause of that? Because the symptoms are telling you what needs healing and how. And so we want to reverse engineer that. We don't want to just start with the symptom as the problem. The symptom is something to make it go away. Because if, for example, you have an imbalance in bacteria, let's say you have too much clostridia in your guts, an opportunist infection, many of us experience clostridia overgrowth. And so let's say that you have a clostridia overgrowth in your gut, just as an example, you have gas, bloating, reflux, all the things, right? And you experience anxiety, you go to the doctor and let's say that your doctor isn't yet familiar with gut anxiety. They don't realize that the two can connect. They're trying to treat the Anxiety, they're treating you from the shoulders up, right? And so they may recommend a combination of antidepressants or they may give you a benzodiazepine. Perhaps they're going to recommend talk therapy, or maybe they're a little bit more holistic and they'll give you natural anti anxiety solutions. But unless those anxiety solutions also treat the cause, which in this example is clostridia, you are going to continue to have symptoms because the cause is there, right? It makes sense. It's just logical. The eight types of anxiety, the nine types of anxiety, it all makes sense. And so if you have gut anxiety, this is informing you with symptoms about something that's going on. And the first place you want to start looking is your gut. So let's stick with the example of clostridia. So clostridia, we know from the clinical research, can affect metabolism of dopamine, right? So dopamine metabolically should get broken down into adrenaline, and that should get broken down and should be metabolizing so that you can have balanced neurochemicals. But if there's an infection, if clostridia is overgrowing, this whole process is going to be interfered with. You may have dopamine imbalances too much and dope too much dopamine because that enzymes blocked by the bacteria. So you want to work on improving the health of your gut. So treating your anxiety may start with treating your gut, right? So what you might do is you might go to a functional doctor and they might look at the stool, they might identify the bacteria. So it could be a urine test or an organic acid test, they may do a stool analysis. And if they identify that there's clostridia and there's too much of that, they're going to give you a gut healing protocol, or they may give you a detox. I saw someone here asked a question about a gut detox, but I always recommend that you do this in conjunction with a doctor because then they can make sure that the detox is right for you, that your body is right for detoxing, that it's going to work. Because not every detox works for every single thing. Some detoxing agents are helpful for getting rid of clostridia, some are not. Right? So suddenly the whole conversation about gut anxiety is changing. Instead of going and just getting an antidepressant, which could create more digestive upse, make you feel like a zombie, possibly cause weight gain, possibly reduce your sex drive, your libido, and then instead of just trying to zombie you out and relieve your anxiety. Now we're able to look at the unique symptoms of gut anxiety, dive deeper, figure out what's going on in your gut, and then treat the cause. Because once in this example of clostridia, once that bacteria is back where it's supposed to be, in more appropriate numbers and it's not overwhelming and overtaking everything and interfering with dopamine, then the anxiety gets better because it doesn't have to tell you about that problem anymore. The problem is resolved. Right. So there are lots of other root causes of gut anxiety. It could be pertaining to diet. Are you eating foods that increase histamine? Are you increasing yeast in your diet? Are you taking medications like antibiotics that could be interfering with your gut microbiome? Right. So we want to look at what's going on in just general wellness and health of our gut. And then we also want to work on the emotional component, the emotional piece, too. And so if you struggle with IBS or Crohn's disease or reflux or GERD or heartburn or gallbladder, any digestive symptoms, definitely do the digging on the gut. And know. Keep in mind that it's not all in your head that gut anxiety occurs because of this reciprocal conversation in the gut and the brain. And so I teach about this a whole lot more here on Instagram. You can find tons of free information about gut anxiety. A lot to really get you started. And of course, we get into this in a lot of detail in my book, Panic Proof. There's checklists. I even have a protocol for this. So you'll walk away with this book, with a protocol, you'll know exactly what to do. And so bring it to your doctor. And I hope it really helps you. So tell me what your questions are, leave a comment, and then I'll go back in and we can do stories where I'll answer your questions. So let's talk about your gut. Let's talk about gut anxiety. What have your doctors done for your gut anxiety? What's worked for you? What hasn't worked for you? Have you tried supplements, medications? Let me know in the comments. All right. I'm so glad that you've been here. Hopefully this was really helpful. Today we talked about gut anxiety. All right, my loves, I'll see you later. Bye.