5 Lifestyle Changes for Treating Anxiety: Taking An Integrative Health Approach
Everybody knows what anxiety feels like. It’s a normal emotion that you feel when you’re under pressure, having problems, or experiencing something new and unfamiliar. However, for some of us, anxiety levels can become too high and take over. Anxiety is a real condition, just like asthma or heart disease. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, 18 percent of the US population has some kind of anxiety disorder. We’re talking about over 19 million adults in America suffer high levels of anxiety that dramatically affects their daily life.
Anxiety may be aggravated by certain chemicals, toxins, environmental stresses, nutritional deficiencies, and/or hormonal imbalances. Common symptoms of an anxiety disorder include: nightmares, palpitations, ritualistic behaviors, feeling panicked, scared, uneasy, uncontrollable obsessive thoughts, muscle tension, dizziness, nausea, inability to stay still or be calm. Treating anxiety depends on what type of anxiety the person is experiencing and the underlying root cause of the anxiety.
In a nutshell, anxiety is the brain's overactive fight, flight, or freeze mechanism. When the brain perceives a threat, it pumps adrenaline through the body and, within a matter of seconds, decides which action to take. With anxiety, the brain becomes stuck in this hyperactive mode. If you're experiencing some of the following symptoms, you may have anxiety:
repetitive, worrisome thoughts keeping you awake at night
feeling like your heart is racing and/or you can't get enough air
thinking that something bad might happen--even when there isn't any direct threat
engaging in ritualistic behaviors, whether knowingly or subconsciously
Integrative Health Treatments for Anxiety
More and more people are turning to integrative medicine to help treat their conditions. Integrative health looks at the whole picture — not just the current problem. For example, if you're suffering from a chronic illness, your doctor may develop a treatment plan not only with the objective of getting the disease under control, but to also better manage the associated anxiety and depression which can occur with many chronic illnesses. The treatment plan may include dietary modifications, meditation, as well as conventional treatment options.
Human beings are complex, with many organs and systems that interchangable work together. Your mood shifts can be directly tied to your digestive system since a high percentage of calming hormones which control one’s mood are produced from the gut. Traditional medicine often will treat anxiety and other mood issues separate from digestive problems, like IBS and chronic constipation, whereas integrative health takes everything into consideration. By using integrative medicine, you're getting a whole-picture approach, which can make a world of difference, and get you feeling better overall.
Next time you're feeling anxious, try one of these natural ways to treat anxiety.
Start a Daily Meditation Practice
Did you know that you can meditate in as little as five minutes? You can use mindfulness meditation techniques to meditate even while you're doing dishes!
Meditation — sometimes also referred to as mindfulness — is the practice of being aware of your breath and surroundings. You don't even have to control your breath with deep inhalations and exhalations; you can simply let your mind step back and just pay attention to your breath.
The benefits of meditation are bountiful. Using mindfulness-based stress reduction is one of the best natural ways to treat anxiety because it teaches you to focus on the present moment, rather than what could happen in the future.
You can also use meditation to help quiet your mind before bed so that you can fall asleep faster and get a well-rested night of sleep.
Eat a Balanced Diet
In today's busy world, you might think you're saving time by skipping meals, but the price your health pays is not worth it. Not only is going without eating bad for your waistline, but it can also trigger anxiety. Plus, during a panic attack, your body depletes itself of blood sugar, making for a bitter cycle.
Getting back to basics and making sure you're eating at least three small meals a day can accomplish two things at once. You'll have more energy and fewer anxiety symptoms. You might even start to lose unwanted weight.
Keep a Daily Journal
Maybe you've never been interested on keeping a journal before, but doing a "brain dump" every morning before you start your day can help you clear your worries so you can focus on your tasks. If need be, you can also do one at night to help you put stresses aside so that you can sleep.
Try committing to writing three pages every morning. Give yourself permission to write down every thought as it comes, without judging yourself (or reading what you've written). When you've finished, put your journal — and your worries — out of your mind.
It is also useful keeping an “anxiety journal” and documenting when you have anxiety spikes. This will help you determine if there is a pattern to your anxiety and can provide useful information for your integrative physician.
Start a Gentle Exercise Regimen
Many people balk at exercise, but getting your body moving doesn't have to be a strenuous session at the gym. Enroll in a beginner's yoga class, or look up free videos on YouTube. If holding a Downward Dog pose isn't your thing, take a walk every day or try Tai Chi.
By exercising regularly, you'll not only get your body moving, you'll also release any negative or anxious thoughts from the areas of your body that they’ve settled in. Many yoga instructors say that stress, for example, tends to get stuck in the hips.
Even if you don't believe that stress can live in our bodies, at the very least daily exercise will definitely help take your mind off things.
Gardening for Treating Anxiety
There are many reasons why doctors, psychologists, and researchers have begun taking a closer look at gardening and its powerful effects on the body and mind. Gardening gets you outside, under the sun, with your hands in the dirt (all great things for your health). To start, spending time in nature has been associated with improved emotion and mood regulation. While it may not seem like much, gardening provides us with moderate aerobic exercise, which increases the production of serotonin and dopamine in our body, the happy hormones. Gardening also helps decrease the production of stress hormones. While you’re out in the sun, you’re also soaking in vitamin D. Not only is it a good mood regulator, vitamin D is critical for every cell function and for our immune system.
Gardening forces you to practice being present in the moment. More importantly, it teaches you how you can be present when you’re not gardening either. Gardening encourages mindfulness because it engages all of your senses— smell, sight, sound, touch, and the special reward at the end: taste. You have to pay attention to the needs of various plants, and be keen to special details that will help your garden flourish. Gardening is a good way to feel a positive sense of control and responsibility. Through nurturing plants and gardens, we feel accomplished with tangible proof of our effort. A little part of you goes into the care of each plant, and seeing it flourish can be very relieving. Gardening, or horticultural therapy, has also been known to reduce blood pressure, improve sleep, and help with dementia.
Animal Companions
Studies have shown owning a pet – especially a dog – can lower your risk of cardiovascular disease. Did you know that pets also help decrease anxiety? When you have to care for a pet, it shifts the focus away from your own problems. Coming from a similar line of thought as gardening, taking care of an animal helps you take care of yourself. Animals also more interactive than a garden and provide owners social support, a great source of fun, laughter, and cuddles. Cats are wonderful companions. Scientifically cats’ purring has a direct therapeutic effect on humans. For instance, the risk of heart attacks is 40% lower in cat owners especially since cats’ calming effect helps lower blood pressure. Dog owners get more playtime and tend to exercise more regularly since dogs have to go for frequent walks. Animals help distract you from racing, anxious thoughts and redirect your energy to something more positive and rewarding. Pets have also been proven to be specifically beneficial for lowering anxiety in children as well.
Essential oils
Using essential oils for aromatherapy has been found to be a safe and effective treatment for anxiety. To calm your body and stress levels, try chamomile, basil, frankincense, peppermint, bergamot, or lavender essential oils. Add a few drops to your bath, dab some on your pillow, or massage a few drops between your palms and wrists and simply inhale. Lavender oil has especially been known to help with anxiety and sleeping problems.
Practice Radical Self-Care
Your well-being comes first. By making self-care your priority, you're giving yourself permission to take time for yourself every day.
Self-care encompasses everything already discussed in this blog post, but it's more than that. It can be as simple as making yourself a cup of tea every evening and ensuring you get a full night's sleep. Self-care can just mean taking your medications on time, or it can be treating yourself to a pedicure every week.
At the heart of it all, self-care just means taking good care of yourself.
How Does Integrative Medicine Differ from Conventional Medicine?
Integrative medicine is a preventive model with a total holistic care approach. The defining elements of Integrative medicine are: preventive, holistic, collaborative, conventional and complementary, rational, and relationship-based. It aims to boost and protect our body’s innate capacity for healing by minimizing the conditions for disease to develop. This approach involves assessing and optimizing lifestyle, nutrition, exercise, education, and mind/body practices. A close and positive relationship between the doctor and patient is necessary in order for proper communication and collaboration to exist. Healing requires addressing primary stressors and root causes in order to return the body to a state of health. The goal is to employ natural and less invasive therapies whenever possible, while ensuring that necessary conventional treatments are not excluded.
AUTHOR
Dr. Payal Bhandari M.D. is one of U.S.'s top leading integrative functional medical physicians and the founder of SF Advanced Health. She combines the best in Eastern and Western Medicine to understand the root causes of diseases and provide patients with personalized treatment plans that quickly deliver effective results. Dr. Bhandari specializes in cell function to understand how the whole body works. Dr. Bhandari received her Bachelor of Arts degree in biology in 1997 and Doctor of Medicine degree in 2001 from West Virginia University. She the completed her Family Medicine residency in 2004 from the University of Massachusetts and joined a family medicine practice in 2005 which was eventually nationally recognized as San Francisco’s 1st patient-centered medical home. To learn more, go to www.sfadvancedhealth.com.