Anxiety is a nervous system disorder where your body gets locked into a state of fear. This is what we call the fight or flight response. What’s happening is your mind is perceiving that there’s some kind of a threat or a danger, so your glands start releasing more cortisol and adrenaline.
These hormones raise your blood pressure, make your heart beat faster, rush blood into your muscles, and cause breathing changes so that you can either escape the situation or attack the threat as a survival instinct. The problem is that, unfortunately, your mind can’t tell the difference between a real threat and an imaginary threat.
So if you’re feeling lots of worries, doubt, or fear in your life, like financial concerns, worrying about different people that stress you out, or you’re listening, or reading too much bad news on the Internet or the TV, over time you become emotionally involved with these fears and doubts. Your body and mind perceive this as a constant danger, so it locks you into this fight or flight state.
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Anxiety Symptoms
Here are some of the common symptoms that you may have anxiety. Firstly, you may find it hard to switch your thoughts off and get into a proper sleep cycle. Your mind may be constantly trying to analyze and fix different problems, causing a stream of mental chatter, especially at night. The higher levels of stress can also cause you to find it hard to access your memories.
You may draw a blank or forget things more often, especially when you aren’t sleeping right. Some people also experience tightness in their throat, causing a lump sensation, and the voice sometimes sounds higher and softer the more anxious you become.
You may feel nauseous in anxious situations, such as talking in a large group. People with chronic anxiety will also find that they fall back into a negative mindset where you notice all of the bad in the world, but not the good. You can fall in and out of this mindset when you have chronic anxiety.
And finally, you may also start avoiding normal life situations like social events, because you don’t feel that you can handle the emotions and the feelings of it. Unfortunately, if you suffer from anxiety for many years, it can raise the risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, and other health problems because your adrenal glands start wearing out, causing hormone imbalances in both women and men.
For this reason, today I’m going to share with you the top six vitamins that help to turn off anxiety. By calming down the stress response in your body, you’ll also learn about some simple lifestyle changes you can make to fix the underlying root of the problem. I use the words vitamins broadly to include phytonutrients, minerals, and herbs that you can use to ease your anxiety permanently.
Just a quick reminder this article is for educational purposes only, so do speak to your doctor before replacing or supplementing alongside any existing medications.
Vitamin B1 (Thiamine)
The first item on my list is the most important for anxiety vitamin B1. Most people with anxiety also suffer from a thiamine deficiency, which is vitamin B1. Because parts of your brain, like the amygdala and the hippocampus, use up your B1 stores to make energy whenever you feel stressed, emotional, or threatened. Eating lots of sugar, refined foods, or drinking caffeinated drinks can also deplete your vitamin B1.
So to fix this, start taking two to three tablespoons of unfortified nutritional yeast on a daily basis. To load up on vitamin B1 and the B complex, I recommend mixing this with yogurt, soups, and stews, or just sprinkling it over a salad. Within minutes of eating nutritional yeast, you’ll start to feel calmer and more relaxed.
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Because B vitamins are water-soluble and they’re absorbed very quickly, they B vitamins will help to calm and bring the autonomic nervous system into balance, which starts to turn off the fight or flight response that’s causing your anxiety. You’ll notice that you feel less nervous, less irritable, and have fewer nightmares or panic attacks.
If you eat this often, you can also relax your body by getting B1 from sunflower seeds, organic pork, pasture-raised eggs, and wild fish.
Probiotics
Next on the list is probiotics. Inside the large intestine in your gut, there are many different species of live-friendly microbes. These are very important as they help you to break down and digest foods.
And maintain a healthy overall body. What’s very interesting is that these microbes actually produce B vitamins on their own, like vitamins B1, B2, B12, et c. all of which help to keep your mood stable and prevent a prolonged state of anxiety. Unfortunately, these microbes are susceptible and they can easily be destroyed when we take antibiotic drugs or medications, consume artificial sweeteners, like aspartame in diet soda drinks, or when eating non-organic produce that’s been sprayed with chemical weed killers and insecticides.
Another reason that you may have problems with your microbes is you may simply not be eating enough soluble fiber, which causes them to become sluggish. So to boost the health of your friendly bacteria and your microbiome, start eating fermented vegetables as a side dish at least three times per week.
I highly recommend Sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, and also Kiefer, which are all loaded with probiotic bacteria. You should also eat foods that are rich in soluble fiber, which is called prebiotics, like chia seeds, avocados, asparagus, cocoa powder, and pecans. This feeds the bacteria in your gut. If you’d like to, you could also take a probiotic supplement. Just make sure that it contains at least 100 billion CFUs and many different strains of microbes.
As you start to boost the health of your own microbes, they will reward you by producing neurotransmitters used by your brain to calm you down and make you feel happy, such as Garba, Dopamine, and serotonin.
Vitamin D
Let’s jump right back in now to number three vitamin D. People with anxiety, sleeping problems, or problems with overthinking usually have high levels of cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that’s part of the fight or flight mechanism, and it keeps the body in an alert, responsive state when it perceives any type of threat.
However, when you’re trying to calm down and relax, it’s important that you find ways to switch cortisol off. Going outside in nature and getting sunlight on your skin triggers the production of vitamin D, which can counter this high cortisol and help you to feel more relaxed. Unfortunately, billions of people worldwide are deficient in vitamin D because of living or working indoors and other factors which can make your anxiety symptoms much worse.
So it’s recommended to take a supplement of 10000 international units of vitamin D3 daily, along with 100 micrograms of vitamin K2. This will help to counter the stress hormone called cortisol and put your body back into a state of focus, calm, and balance.
Magnesium And Potassium
Up next are two very powerful minerals called magnesium and potassium. Magnesium and potassium are two key minerals and electrolytes that play a role in controlling how energy is produced in the energy factories called mitochondria in your cells. These minerals come mostly from vegetables like leafy greens, for example.
Without enough of these minerals, you’re far more likely to have a low tolerance to stress, depression, sleeping problems, and brain fog. Magnesium, for example, is important for building neurotransmitters like serotonin and GABA, which are needed to make you feel calm, happy, and in a state of well-being.
Magnesium is also important for activating and converting vitamin B1, which I talked about earlier, to its active form inside your body. Getting more of this brings down tension and stress that’s locked up in your muscles, and it’s often used to get rid of leg cramps. Likewise, potassium also helps to uplift your mood by improving certain mechanisms in the brain and the nervous system in turning off the fight or flight response.
So to boost your potassium and magnesium, start eating avocados often and lots of leafy greens like kale, broccoli, beet tops, collard greens, brussels sprouts, cabbage, and radish, for example. If you wish, you could also get this as an electrolyte powder in the forms of potassium, citrate, and magnesium citrate, which you can drink in a glass of water.
Passionflower Tea
Up next is an old remedy called passion flower tea. If you suffer from anxiety, it’s very important that you cut back on caffeinated drinks like coffee and soda as these can raise cortisol and make your anxiety worse. However, there are certain herbal teas that have been used for thousands of years to soothe stress and anxiety. Passionflower is a herbal flower that is rich in certain plant compounds that have been shown to boost GABA in your brain.
Garba basically slows down certain signals in your central nervous system, helping to calm excited nerves down in order to relax you. In fact, studies show that passion flower tea is as effective as a tranquilizer drug called Oxazepam which is often used for anxiety.
But passion flour doesn’t have the usual side effects. So drink one cup of passion flower tea in the evening or steep one tablespoon of dried passion flour in hot water. Drinking this tea will relax you and increase the amount of deep sleep you get per night in order to bring your entire body into a state of balance.
Ashwagandha
Lastly, I’d like to talk about an ancient herb called ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is a herbal shrub it grows in Asia and Africa. This has actually been used for over 3000 years as a natural treatment for both stress and anxiety. As an adaptogen, it helps various systems in your body adapt to stress by balancing out your hormones and improving how your tissues and your brain respond to any changes. You can take 1200 milligrams of ashwagandha extract in a capsule form daily to quickly help soothe nervous tension in your body.
This herb is rich in phytochemicals called withanolides and these have scientifically been shown to lower cortisol and help to balance out your blood sugars. This will stabilize your mood, help you to sleep better at night and it works wonders for people with chronic anxiety. A few other ancient adaptogen herbs that have similar effects include Rhodiola Panax, ginseng, astragalus, and holy Basil.
As you can see, there are many foods and nutrients that can be used to help turn off the fight or flight response in your body and activate the rest and digest systems that help to calm you down and release any built-up tension. I’ve personally suffered from anxiety and bouts of stress for many many years and have found that all of these remedies are very helpful.
Although certain nutrients are essential for stabilizing your mood like B1, potassium, and magnesium, you may also want to take some extra steps to really fix the root problems of anxiety in your own life so that you can unlock a permanent state of peace. It’s often tempting to just push through anxiety as you have things to do and places to be.
However, eventually, this pushing through can lead to bouts of depression and major health problems in the long term. But if you take an hour each day to simply focus on relaxation calming down your body. You’ll start gaining an enormous amount of mental focus and control over your emotions.
You’ll start getting more things done without the need to push through as daily activities and your work will seem to flow more effortlessly and you’ll become more creative at solving different problems.
Lifestyle Tips To Eliminate Anxiety
Let’s take a look at the additional steps that I’ve personally used which will help to keep anxiety at bay permanently.
- Cut out any stimulants and caffeine from your diet, like coffee, tea, soda drinks, energy drinks, and sugar. The caffeine or the sugar in these foods will raise your cortisol deplete vitamin B1 and make your anxiety much worse.
- Start drinking herbal teas that boost GABA to replace your usual drinks like valerian root, lemon balm, passion flower, lavender, peppermint, or rosemary by increasing GABA, this will inhibit the excitement and the fear in your nervous system.
- Get more physical activity outside. Start taking slow walks in nature for 45 minutes a day in a park or in areas where there are lots of trees and plants. Essential oils that are released from tree tops and the steady stream of oxygen will naturally calm down your nervous system and turn off the fight or flight response.
- Organize your work and your living environment and start minimalizing throwing away any useless objects that are cluttering your environment and your mind. We tend to have emotional connections psychologically linked to the items that are around us. So when you start throwing junk away and organizing, you bring order to your environment, which brings order to your mind.
- Burn calming essential oils in your homes such as Ylang Ylang, black cherry, lavender, sage, or jasmine. Like trees, these oils release aromatic compounds into the room that you gently breathe in, and these calm your nervous system down.
- Finally, to truly overcome anxiety, you need to start getting at least 8 hours of sleep per night consistently. Go to bed an hour earlier, turn off your phone and focus on relaxing each muscle in your body until you drift off to sleep. If you’re overthinking and your mind’s chattering away, simply visualize each thought as a bubble floating away into the distance. Eventually, the thoughts will start to slow down and you’ll feel more peaceful. Don’t try to force sleep to allow it to happen when it’s ready.
Over time, this will gradually balance out your cortisol levels, helping you to achieve deeper sleep and a healthier overall body. I wish you great health, wealth, and happiness.
