How you can use food to lower stress (and why that’s extra important right now)

Let’s start with this undeniable fact: your gastrointestinal (GI) system plays a really important role in your overall health. Known as “the second brain,” the GI system lining houses hundreds of millions of neurons (the enteric nervous system) which in turn manage the digestive process from swallowing to nutrient absorption to elimination. The GI also acts as a communication center for the brain. When we’re stressed, scared, or nervous, our brain notifies our gut, and we may experience abdominal symptoms.

During this moment of high collective tension, taking care of your gut can make a humongous difference in your overall wellbeing. Gut microbes decide how we digest and process the precursors of brain chemicals like serotonin and dopamine and the vagus nerve- which runs from your brainstem to your abdomen- serves as their direct highway to and from our brain. This nervous system MVP- the vagus nerve- runs through the pharynx, larynx, heart, esophagus, small intestine and large intestine and affects many of our most important bodily functions, including our digestion and our hear rate. If we keep this highway happy and fluid, we are not only creating the right conditions for the feel-good brain chemical precursors to flourish, we are also allowing our body to “rest and digest” according to its original design. When our gut is content, our brains are also a lot more likely to be content.

So what do we have to do to keep our gut happy?

A really important thing to remember about gut joy is that inflammation often gets in its way. Inflammation happens when your body senses a threat. Cells get protective and seal the area off so that nothing else can get in. Until the body stops dealing with inflammation, it does not resume its usual metabolic and physiological balance, so our “rest and digest” processes are interrupted. Luckily a lot of research has been done about which foods are inflammatory and which are not, so you can make easy choices every day and note the effects on your mood without much effort.

Want to know what else is lucky? The most inflammatory foods are the usual suspects, so it’s easy to keep them in mind: refined carbohydrates, dairy, sodas, fried foods, processed meats, added sugars, etc. If it hasn’t been around for hundreds of years, chances are your body is still learning that it’s not something it needs to react to, so it freaks out a little bit. On the list of anti-inflammatory list you’ll also find nutritional all-stars: berries, leafy greens, avocados, broccoli, fatty fish, nuts and seeds, green tea, and turmeric. Supplements like Ashwagandha, probiotics, EFA’s, Glutamine and vitamin D can also be very helpful in keeping your gut happy.