It's Not All in Your Head...

It’s Not All in Your Head…

Anxious, depressed, overwhelmed?

You’re not alone.

Forty million adults in the United States are grappling with multiple varieties of anxiety and depressive disorders.

It’s easy to assume that a world falling apart at the seams with contagions, climate disasters, injustices, hardships and more would be the culpable agents.

However, ongoing research points to another factor: the human gut microbiome.

Filled with one hundred trillion microorganisms of bacteria, yeasts, and viruses in the proper ratios, they diligently digest food, and assimilate nutrients, vitamins, hormones, and neurotransmitters, which together impact our overall health and how we feel emotionally.

Stress upsets the whole apple cart by way of the sympathetic nervous system with its charging alchemy of the fight or flight response instigated by a cortisol and adrenaline rush.

Once activated, many bodily systems are down regulated like digestion, reproduction, and healing, while others soar, and can cause mayhem if left to reign unchecked.

Occasionally being upset or anxious is a normal human response to life’s perpetual and fraught instances, but when urgencies become stringed together and there is no time to decompress, it can culminate as an overwhelming onslaught subverting many organs.

The first to suffer will be the miraculous little guys who sustain us as the cortisol surge will place them on hold.

Quick intermittent interruptions are easily resumed without damage, but unrelenting stress from jobs, family, financial, and health matters can sink even a stalwart ship.

Being engaged in fretful thinking most of the time, even subconsciously, enables this vicious toxic cycle to dump more cortisol into an already raging body.

The vagus nerve is the pathway of millions of neurons that link the brain to the gastrointestinal tract, also referred to as the second brain.

Communication is bidirectional with most of the chatter originating in the gut, and as such, a dysfunctional biome will lead to an ill mind due to a lack or reduction of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and GABA.

These vital mood-boosting neurotransmitters are essential for optimal mental health with over ninety percent of serotonin, the happy hormone, manufactured in the gut to ensure mood stabilization.

Diets high in sugar and processed foods and unwavering stress can plummet the beneficial bacteria, bumping homeostasis, and rigging it for dysbiosis.

Gut dysbiosis has substantially revealed alarming links to anxiety and depression, highlighting the importance of your hospitality by eating fermented foods like sugar free yogurt, kefir, kimchi, kombucha, and sauerkraut.

Fortunately, the vagus nerve can also be stimulated by singing, humming, laughing, and meditating, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system, and allows us to rest and digest. What option will you try to improve your gut microbiome?

~ ”If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land;…,” Isaiah 1:19

HEaling Link® will meet Tuesday, October 18, 2022 @ 7:30pm via Zoom. For more information, please contact Jackie: HEalingLink03@gmail.com Isn’t it time to get Linked?