For years I thought my anxiety was my superpower.

Let me explain.

I wouldn’t call it anxiety. I would call it drive of course 🙂

It got me up early. It kept me up late. Calling it a health problem – or a problem at all - never crossed my mind, because it was working.

I assumed when I questioned my efficiency and use of my time it was driving me to be more efficient. But a few years back when I measured my inflammation and really slowed down to ask the right questions – I realized this ‘superpower’ was robbing me of all my joy. I also wonder how much of that ‘drive’ was really cortisol linked to some nutritional absorption issues.

There is ground under that. Chronic stress keeps cortisol elevated, and elevated cortisol loosens the tight junctions in your gut wall, shifts which bacteria live there, and changes what you actually pull out of your food. That leaky, inflamed state then feeds back into the same stress axis that started it.

Too often, mood gets treated as a head problem. You talk to somebody, or you take something. What's on your plate – what is absorbed in your gut - almost never comes up.

Could Anxiety and Depression and Mood – be more closely related to our Food than we realize?

More than 90 percent of your serotonin is made in your gut, not your brain.

The controversy comes down to whether that serotonin is impacting your gut or your brain. But increasingly some call the gut a second brain.

That name is not a metaphor somebody invented for a magazine. The wall of your gut holds more than 500 million neurons, its own wiring, and its own neurotransmitters. It runs most of digestion without ever asking your head for permission.

So, what is the connection between what is going on in your gut and what is taking place with your mood and mind?

Studies show that some foods like beans, oats, berries and fermented vegetables can lead to greater serotonin production in the gut and lower inflammation. Those details are key because of what happens next…

The mechanism is specific. Your gut bacteria ferment the fiber in those plants into short-chain fatty acids, and butyrate in particular switches on the enzyme your gut uses to build serotonin. Raise a mouse with no bacteria at all and its colonic serotonin drops. Put the right bacteria back and it climbs again. Most of that work is in mice and cell cultures, not people, so call it a lead rather than a proof. The inflammation half does have human trials behind it: fermented foods lowered 19 inflammatory markers in 10 weeks at Stanford, and omega-3 fats from walnuts, flax and fish move depression scores in pooled trials of 2,160 people.

The vagus nerve is communicating between the gut and the brain. Researchers fed mice a single strain of bacteria and watched their anxiety behavior drop. Then they cut the vagus nerve and ran it again. The effect disappeared. Same bacteria, same dose, no wire, no result.

Inflammation, and where your tryptophan goes. Your brain has to build its own serotonin, and it needs tryptophan to do it. Inflammation switches on an enzyme that pulls tryptophan down a different road entirely, turning it into kynurenine instead. You ate the raw material. Your brain never got it.

The bugs themselves. Belgian researchers sequenced the gut bacteria of more than a thousand people and found two groups, Coprococcus and Dialister, missing in people with depression. It held up in a second cohort in the Netherlands, and it held up after they accounted for antidepressants.

The bacteria that track best with quality of life are the ones that make butyrate, and butyrate is what your gut bugs produce when you feed them fiber.

Harvard followed more than 31,000 women for years. The ones eating the most ultra-processed food, nine or more servings a day, were about 50 percent more likely to develop depression than the ones eating four or fewer. When they broke it down by category, one thing lit up: artificial sweeteners and diet drinks.

The women who changed got a different result. Cut three servings a day of that stuff, and depression risk dropped compared to women whose intake stayed flat.

Three servings. Not a cleanse. Not a whole new identity. The soda, the packaged snack, the thing in the drive-through bag.

Fiber is how you feed the bacteria that make butyrate. Pull the studies together and every extra 5 grams a day tracks with about 5 percent lower odds of depression. Most Americans eat about half the fiber amount of what they should. About 16 grams a day, against a target that runs from 25 to 38 depending on who you are. Fiber has been on the government's list of nutrients Americans don't get enough of since 2005.

Stanford put 36 adults on either a high-fiber diet or a high-fermented-food diet for 10 weeks. The fermented group's microbiome diversity climbed and 19 inflammatory markers fell. The high-fiber group? Diversity stayed flat. None of those markers moved.

The researchers' read was that fiber needs the right bacteria already in residence to break it down, and 10 weeks was not long enough to build that crew from scratch. Fiber still matters. It is slower than the internet promises, and fermented food gets you moving faster.

Sleep duration gets all the attention. Timing may matter just as much.

Researchers put wrist trackers on 79,666 people and watched them for a week, then followed them for seven and a half years. Compared to the irregular sleepers, the people who went to bed and got up at consistent times had 38 percent lower risk of depression and 33 percent lower risk of anxiety.

Among the people who were hitting the recommended hours anyway, the most irregular sleepers still carried 48 percent higher depression risk. Eight hours from 10 to 6 on Tuesday and 2 to 10 on Saturday is not the same eight hours.

A survey of 1.2 million American adults found that people who exercised reported roughly 43 percent fewer bad mental health days in the past month. The sweet spot was 45 minutes, three to five times a week. Going past 90-minute sessions or exercising more than 23 times a month tracked with worse mental health, not better.

And unlike most of what you read about exercise and mood, this one has been tested properly. 218 randomized trials, 14,170 people. Walking or jogging, yoga, and strength training all beat the control groups by a real margin. Strength training and yoga had the fewest people quit.

Walking beat most of it.

-Jared

P.S. - My wife Baddie Crocker has a beautiful newsletter where she shares her perspectives on tending the land, recipes, women’s health and more.

P.S. - This newsletter does not provide medical advice. The content, such as graphics, images, text, and all other materials, are provided for reference and educational purposes only. The content is not meant to be complete or exhaustive or to be applicable to any specific individual's medical condition.

Here are links to things that have helped me improve my health:

Whoop - Track your HRV and REM Sleep

Function Health - Optimize Your Health via 160+ BioMarkers

Here are a few topics I think you’ll love if you haven’t checked them out before:

How to Breathe for Better Health

How to Supercharge Your Sleep

The Power of the Sauna