My body is a home: treating anxiety through my gut microbiome
Understanding the world of microbes inside me was the key to my healing — it could be yours, too
Written by Sydney Jackson
When people learn they have a serious medical condition, oftentimes it’s a somber event. For me, it was the happiest I’d felt in a long time.
In 2019, I began to have episodes that would last from minutes to days during which I couldn’t feel my torso or hands. I experienced brain fog, nausea, abdominal pain and an overwhelming sense of doom that resulted in several 911 calls and hospital visits.
Medical professionals said the episodes were likely a combination of panic attacks and indigestion and advised me to take anti-anxiety and antacid medication. I tried to accept these answers but wondered why my body was creating false realities I had no choice but to ignore or sedate.
Over three years, my condition worsened — I developed an agoraphobic panic disorder and severe irritable bowel syndrome, or IBS. I struggled to leave the house and missed college classes, social gatherings and job opportunities.
I was sure I had a serious condition but had no proof — I felt my body was trying to tell me something in a language I didn’t understand. It would blare symptoms like sirens, indicating that I was in a life-threatening situation even when I was spending time with a good friend or folding laundry.
Invisible illnesses, in which signs and symptoms are not externally observable, can be difficult to research, diagnose and treat. Most medical professionals in the west are trained to treat anxiety symptoms with brain chemistry-altering medication and talk therapy, but research indicates the root cause of these symptoms is not always in our heads.
“Anxiety is not what’s wrong with you — it is your body and mind fiercely alerting you to the fact that something else is wrong,” holistic psychiatrist Ellen Vora, M.D., writes in her book “The Anatomy of Anxiety”.
Through her research and medical practice, Vora has found that gut-related inflammation and internal imbalances from constant stressors like sleep deprivation, long work hours and unstable blood sugar cause most people’s anxiety.
“Your brain and your gut are talking to each other, even if your psychiatrist and gastroenterologist are not,” she writes.
To manage my symptoms, I improved my diet and restricted potential trigger foods, meditated, talked with a therapist once a week, exercised and slept well. I discovered IBS hypnotherapy through the Nerva app, which uses guided hypnotherapy to send signals to your brain that you are not in mortal danger and that your symptoms can improve. Your brain then sends signals through the vagus nerve to your gut to reduce sensitivity and stress.
I continued to explore the gut-brain connection and met with Bellingham naturopath Joseph Garrett, N.D., who specializes in anxiety and IBS. I was shocked and relieved when Garrett diagnosed me with small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, or SIBO, a serious condition in which a person’s small intestine is compromised by harmful bacteria.
The human body is home to trillions of microorganisms — bacteria, fungi, parasites, viruses and other microbes — that we need to survive. Mostly in our gut, these microorganisms, known collectively as a microbiome, aid in digestion as well as hormone and neurotransmitter synthesis. In other words, they help us function and communicate to our brain and the rest of our body about how to feel.
In a healthy microbiome, microbes are plentiful and diverse. Dysbiosis, or microbiota imbalance, happens when there are too few healthy microbes, an overgrowth of harmful ones, or both. Antibiotic use, chronic stress and diets high in processed foods can cause this — in an experiment published by the Journal of Neuroinflammation in 2018, researchers found that mice exposed to chronic stress through noise pollution had reduced microbiome diversity and symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
After my diagnosis, I tailored my approach to heal my gut, first by killing the harmful bacteria with prescribed oregano oil — targeted antibiotics are largely unavailable and expensive — and later with probiotics. Over a few months, my daily panic attacks and horrible stomach pain reduced. I had more energy, optimism and confidence. I went from bedridden fear to feeling freer to drive, go to school and start a new job.
There are several ways poor gut health can cause anxiety, depression and other mood or behavior disorders.
For example, our gut microbiome synthesizes neurotransmitters from food we eat. Two neurotransmitters are the main heroes of mental wellness: serotonin, which is responsible for messages including mood, nausea and sexual desire, and GABA, which is responsible for creating a sense of calm in the mind and body. Most people think of the brain when they imagine the “happy hormone” serotonin, but 95% of our serotonin is created and stored in our gut. When we don’t have a healthy microbiome to make these messengers, it changes our mood and behavior.
In addition, the overgrowth of bad bacteria can contribute to poor mental health. According to a 2023 article on the connection between gut bacteria and health in the Iranian Journal of Microbiology, “some bacteria have been implicated in causing mental disorders in humans such as depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, psychiatric disorders, stress disorders, schizophrenia and autism.”
This has massive implications — anxiety, for example, is the most common mental illness in the world. Nearly 300 million people have generalized anxiety disorder according to research aggregated by Our World in Data, and a 2015 study on the epidemiology of anxiety disorders published by the National Library of Medicine mentions that in the United States alone, 33.7% of the population will experience an anxiety disorder in their lifetime.
Since most anxiety diagnoses and treatments are focused on the brain through medication and therapy, other important factors in mental health like the gut microbiome are neglected. Brain-centered treatments are useful and even necessary for many people, but they aren’t the only or best solution for all people. Sometimes, their effect can be more like a bandage.
Understanding the gut microbiome is not only important for the future of healing mood and behavior disorders like anxiety and depression but for other illnesses — in part because the gut is the headquarters of our immune system, hosting 70% of our immune cell population.
Research funded by the National Institute of Health has found that the gut microbiome may be the key to understanding the invisible illness chronic fatigue syndrome. Other invisible illnesses like fibromyalgia and multiple sclerosis have also been linked to gut microbiome health. In addition, an article in the journal Therapeutic Advances in Gastroenterology pinned the gut microbiome as a factor in our susceptibility to COVID-19 infections, and an article in the journal Gut says the virus’ presence in the intestines could be the reason for severe or long-COVID symptoms. According to an article published by Seminars in Cancer Biology, improving the gut microbiome can even combat the progression of cancer.
“Your microbiome is extremely dynamic, able to change composition within twenty-four hours in response to stress, antibiotics, and illness and able to change within a few weeks or even days in response to diet, supplements, and exercise,” Raphael Kellman, M.D. writes in his book “The Microbiome Diet”.
There are many ways to love your gut. Eating nutritious, whole foods, exercising regularly, consuming probiotics and engaging with nature are some of them. For someone with dysbiosis like me, specific treatments may be needed — it’s best to consult a trusted physician who understands gut health to discover what’s right for your health.
