Episode 405: Why Anxiety Might Be the Message You Keep Missing - and What To Do About It
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
If you’ve outgrown parts of your life, your identity, maybe even the way you used to cope, and the “what’s next” feels blurry, it can feel destabilizing as hell in your body.
Your body is not designed to live in a constant state of fear, panic, and anxiety. And yet, so many of us are stuck there in that in-between space.
Erin is sharing the exact tools she uses to de-escalate anxiety in real time, from breathwork, EFT tapping, and nervous system support, so you can move out of panic without abandoning yourself, and start responding to your body instead of fighting it.
In this episode:
What happened when Erin had her first panic attack in years, and how she de-escalated it
The simple shift of saying “this is anxiety” and how it interrupts the spiral before it takes over
The reframe that turns anxiety from a threat into an initiation (yes, really!)
How EFT tapping helps your body process and move emotional energy instead of holding onto it
Breathwork techniques, nervine herbs, and yoga poses that can drop you into parasympathetic faster
Resources mentioned:
The doors for Manifest Your Health officially open on April 27th. Join our neuroscience backed membership that blends systems biology with nervous system regulation, subconscious rewiring and emotional release.
Subscribe to Erin’s Substack for a no-nonsense space about health, entrepreneurship, and manifestation.
Episode 384: The Top 7 Physiological Causes of Anxiety You Might Be Overlooking
Organifi supplement powder (save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK and get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
OneSkin (Use code FUNK for 15% off your first purchase)
-
Affect labeling is the process of putting feelings into words. Labeling anxiety or labeling panic creates a little bit of a distance from the emotional takeover. So the amygdala hijack is what happens from a brain standpoint when we're triggered. Since the amygdala, that region in your brain, that part of your brain can't distinguish between a real threat and a perceived threat, it leads to an emotional overreaction. So when we take the time, when we take a beat, when we take a minute to pause and name what we're actually feeling, it allows us to interrupt and then override that amygdala hijack. And then we're therefore able to access our logical, rational, thinking mind.
Welcome to the Funk’tional Nutrition podcast, spelled with a K, because we do things a little differently around here. I'm your host, Erin Holt, and I've got 15 years of clinical experience as a functional nutritionist and mindset coach, creating a new model that I call Intuitive Functional Medicine™, where we combine root cause medicine with the innate intelligence of your body. This is where science meets self trust. Your body already knows how to heal and this show is going to show you how. If you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health, be sure to follow and share with a friend because you never know whose life you might change.
Hello my friends. Today let's chat about ye ol anxiety, why anxiety might be the message you keep missing and what to do about it. A few weeks ago, I had a panic attack. It was the first one that I've had in a lot of years. I was like, what is happening? Is this really happening? I just have not felt that sensation in so long.
Luckily, because of the tools and the resources and the reframes that I've collected over the years, I was able to deescalate myself pretty quickly, which is a good thing because I actually had to teach a live class and then I had a client, so I had to get myself out of that state lickety split. On my substack, I'm sharing the exact reason why. There was a very clear reason why I had a panic attack. It wasn't random. So I'm talking about that. For those of you guys who are my paid subscribers over there on substack, you'll get a little insight into that this week and it's a pretty big thing that I've been working through for a while and I'm talking about it over there. By the way, if you're not a subscriber, you can join anytime.
If you're not familiar with Substack, it's basically where I'm hosting my personal blog. I am back to my beginnings, my origins, writing longer form content. Really the only long form content I create outside of my programs is this podcast. And it just feels so nice to be able to write again. And I am sharing more of my personal stuff over there. Personal practices, things I'm working on, things I'm working through. It gives me a place to share all of that because here on the podcast I usually show up to teach. Same deal with Instagram.
Subsack is more of my space to kind of peel back the curtain and share what I'm navigating and how I am. So if you're interested in why I had a panic attack, you can head over there. Today though, here on the podcast, I'm going to share with you some of the tools, the resources in the reframes, because I really want to support you. When I talked about this on Instagram, a lot of you shared that you were experiencing higher anxiety than normal now, and it's a pretty wild time. I probably don't need to tell you that we've got collective crossroads and transformations happening alongside personal crossroads in transformations. It's just really, really intense. For many of us, it feels like one chapter is ending, but the next one hasn't fully started. Let me know.
Send me a DM on Instagram if or if you're on substack, connect with me there too. But let me know if that lands true for you. If that rings true for you. Like you're letting go of something, but you haven't totally filled in the what's next yet. Maybe you feel like you've outgrown an old identity, but you haven't fully clicked into a new one yet. It might feel like something in your life is ready to evolve, but you have no clue what it's going to look like or when it's even going to take shape. That is kind of the collective energy that a lot of us are experiencing right now. Carl Jung would call this the liminal space.
It's the inbetween stage. And it can be earmuffs, super fucking disorienting and confusing. And yeah, anxiety producing uncertainty can easily translate to anxiety in our bodies and even panic. When we are uncertain, we don't really know where to land. Our brains and our nervous system love familiarity and they love certainty. So we can feel pretty darn anxious when things are uncertain. Now, as I alluded to before, I am no stranger to panic attacks. I used to get them daily in my early 20s.
Which is another very big transition time. And I was actually pretty heavily medicated for it. I was able to wean myself off of the meds. I think I was, like, in my mid… early to mid 20s when I did that. I renegotiated my relationship to anxiety and also to myself, and things really began to settle down. Now, for those of you guys who have experienced debilitating panic attacks, you know what a big deal this is, and I am being so for real with you guys when I tell you that the five phase system in Manifest Your Health™ outlines how I did it. So last week, I announced that we actually have a cart open date for the Manifest Your Health, the new membership, the new app.
We are cracking it open officially April 27th. So that's just in a couple of weeks. But I'm really grateful that I can offer this now at this time. Those of you guys who follow the podcast regularly know that I have been sort of teasing this out for months because I wasn't sure when it was gonna come out. My team and I sat down and we're like, all right, we gotta. People need this. We gotta get it out there, so it's coming your way. But I truly, truly am so proud of myself because it's been 18 years since I weaned myself off Lexapro, Xanax, and Lorazepam, and I'm just, like, out here just raw, dogging reality.
Sometimes. I like microdose mushrooms. You know, just get a little whisper of that once in a blue moon. But for the most part, it's just me in reality, which absolutely does not need to be everyone's goal, but it was for sure my goal as a Pisces. I'm a big feeler. That can be really, really hard sometimes, but it can also be really, really beautiful. And it's kind of like, you know, this one wild and precious life, I want it all. And what I found is that when I was dulling some of the downer feelings, I was also dulling some of the upper feelings for myself.
So, generally speaking, I am not a huge fan of pathologizing anxiety, because oftentimes anxiety presents as a message. And if we're just trying to curb the anxiety and silence the symptoms, it's pretty likely we will also silence the message. And those messages coming from inside are usually pretty darn important. So I do see anxiety. I do see panic attacks as symptoms. And even though I don't medicate my anxiety, it doesn't mean I ignore it. You understand the difference there? So I'm not medicated for anxiety, but I am also not ignoring anxiety, just like I don't ignore any symptom in my body. I learned years ago that when my body talks, I listen.
That should be something that you adopt too, right now, if you haven't, it's a good one. Manifest Your health can teach you how to do that if you don't know how. P.S. but when we stop listening or we're unable to listen, or we've got ear muffs over our ears to the whispers, they can and they will, and they eventually become screams. Anxiety often presents to tell you that something is off, something needs your attention, something needs to be different than what it currently is. And sometimes, you guys, that's a physical thing. So certain physiological things can trigger anxiety, like low progesterone, thyroid dysfunction, methylation issues, blood sugar imbalance, neuroinflammation, gut brain axis issues. These are all real physiological drivers of anxiety.
Or they can be. Anxiety can be a symptom of all of these things. Not what we're going to talk about here today, but I did a whole podcast dedicated to this. So if you need the debrief, I totally have got you. It's episode 384, the top seven physiological causes of anxiety that you might be overlooking. So you can go listen to that. But for today's discussion, we're going to assume that you've got your health house in order and that those things are not the chief things contributing to your anxiety. I think it's also worth noting here that ongoing chronic anxiety can also take a physical toll on your health.
The mind, the body and the nervous system are in constant communication with one another and they're continuously impacting each other.
Our bodies are literally not designed to live in fear, in panic and anxiety all of the time.
I'm going to say that again.
Our bodies, your body is not designed to live in fear and anxiety and panic.
So if you are, you can also see physiological health consequences on the other side of that. So today I'm going to share all of the ways that I support myself and de-escalate when the panic and anxiety set in. And my hope and my entire attention is that these are things that you can start to employ in your life and they will help you too.
So I've long made fun of the ‘gummies as supplements’ trend. It's kind of like adults taking candy and calling it health, until I realized that it's the only way my husband will actually consistently take supplements. Every day he takes Organifi’s creatine cherry chews and organifies Shilajit gummies, which is super mineral rich with fulvic acid and humic acids. But my personal favorite, and I do take them every day, is the Happy Drops. They're yummy little lemon gummies that are made with ginger, kotu cola, and passion flower, all of which are shown to have positive effects on mood and emotional well being. Plus it has saffron, which is shown to help your brain modulate its levels of serotonin. And I do notice a difference in my mood when I am taking these gummies every day, even if they do taste like candy. So if you're excited to try Happy Drops or you're just sick of taking your supplements in pill form and you want to get in on the gummy action, head to organifi.com/funk. That's O-R-G-A-N-I-F-I.com/funk. And you can save 20% off your order with that code FUNK.
The very first place that I have to start is to reframe and recontextualize. So when I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was descending into an actual panic attack, I paused and I labeled what was happening. Affect Labeling is the process of putting feelings into words. Labeling anxiety, or labeling panic creates a little bit of a distance from the emotional takeover. So the amygdala hijack is what happens from a brain standpoint when we're triggered.
Since the amygdala, that region in your brain, that part of your brain can't distinguish between a real threat and a perceived threat, it leads to an emotional overreaction. So this temporarily overrides the logical brain and our ability to think or respond rationally. I mean, who's been there before? So when we take the time, when we take a beat, when we take a minute to pause in name of what we're actually feeling, it allows us to interrupt and then override that amygdala hijack. And then we're therefore able to access our logical, rational, thinking mind. And when we can do this, we can tell ourselves a different story. So that's exactly what I did. Rather than say, I don't know what's happening to me. This is really scary.
What's going on? Why do I feel like this? It became, oh, wait, okay, this is a panic attack. I know that this is anxiety. I know that anxiety and panic arises when my body's trying to communicate with me. I wonder what it needs to communicate. Let's investigate. So my logic brain was able to take over and then my emotional hyper reactive brain was able to take a back seat. The second thing that I do, and I recommend you do as well, is to see anxiety as an initiation. Emotions are the language of the body.
So I always give myself the opportunity to sit with what is coming up for me. So when I was experiencing that really intensified anxiety and panic, I was like, hey, what brought this on? What was happening right before this? What was I doing and thinking? What led up to this moment? What is my body trying to express through these symptoms? And the big thing here is to create the space to actually hear those messages. If this is new for you, don't freak out if it doesn't happen right away. This is a skill that we have to build the rapport with our body. This back and forth dialogue is a skill that needs to come online and like anything new, how do we get good at it? We practice. So we have to continue to return to the self. You don't sit down once and say, body, what's up? And then it's crickets. And you say, nevermind, never going to do that again.
We keep coming back, we keep coming back. These are the things that I no longer do. I am no longer available for these things. And I really believe this is why I rarely get anxiety and have not had a panic attack in like literal years, years and years. Here's what I do not do. I do not mute the messages. I do not go dark on myself. I do not betray myself in my greatest times of need.
I do not turn away from myself. I do not ignore my inner asks. These are all things that I used to do. And I used to get raging panic attacks. I don't do those things anymore. And by the way, not really the point of today's conversation, but I'm gonna add in anyway. I also used to get raging symptoms, chronic illness, autoimmune gut issues, food sensitivities. It wasn't just anxiety and panic.
It was anxiety and panic and a whole smorgasbord of other symptoms as well. Because I was ignoring the messages coming from inside. So my body had no choice but to scream out externally, do you see how this works? So while I am no longer medicated for anxiety, my anxiety still requires medicine. It's just a different kind of medicine. It's me willing to be with me. I understand that anxiety can be an initiation. It's an opportunity, it's an invitation to meet yourself at deeper levels than ever before so you can understand yourself more deeply. And that ultimately can create a lot more trust in yourself.
And I've said it before, I will say it again. Self trust is an antidote to anxiety. Creating more trust in yourself can really, really, really abate anxiety. Try it on for size. Let me know what you think. So I'm big on listening to the messages coming from inside because what the mind suppresses, the body often expresses. Now this is a really, really big thing we're going to get into in manifest your health and uncover and discover. I map out my whole process.
I've personally been studying energy, medicine, intuition, clairvoyance, and mindfulness for close to 20 years. So I have for sure collected a lot of practices and I use different ones at different times, depending on what's coming up and depending on what's going on. But in Manifest Your Health, you are going to learn how to decode symptoms as communication rather than constantly perceive them as threats. So messages coming from inside the house, they don't have to flag anxiety, they don't have to flag fear. You can build that rapport, that relationship, that communication with your body. So instead of fearing emotional responses or physical sensation, you learn how to listen to them, how to interpret them, and how to resolve the patterns underneath. When we can resolve the patterns underneath, we resolve the external symptoms. So whether that's anxiety, panic attacks, or some other physical symptom that you're experiencing.
But honestly, before we do all of that, before I can get into the inner messages, the calls coming from inside the house, if you will, I first have to stabilize myself. I have to send messages to my nervous system that I am a. Okay, I need to de-escalate and downregulate the panic first, first and foremost, because it's really, really hard to listen to your intuition when you're in a state of sheer panic. So you might have things that you've tried that just don't seem to work. This might be part of the reason why when all the alarm bells are ringing, it doesn't create a lot of space for our intuition to come online. So we do need practices and we do need processes. We do need resources to essentially calm the system down. So the next things I'm going to outline for you are my tried and true ways of, of actually doing that.
The first one is an emotional release tool. Here's why. Emotion is energy in motion. I'm sure you've heard that before, or at least seen it spelled out somewhere. That's really what emotions are designed to do, move. But the way many of us were raised didn't always provide a very healthy outlet for emotions. I definitely think the tides are turning on this. Like, I know how I parent my kids.
I see how my friends parent their kids. Like, I think we're like kind of hip to dip. We're kind of getting this. So maybe the new generation will be a little bit more emotionally intelligent. But for us, the kiddos that were raised in the 90s, the 80s and before, you know, we just gotta figure this shit out on our own. Because many of us were taught to hold things in, to bite things back, to push things down, to be a good little girl, to not cry, to not be so sensitive. From a really young, formative age, we were taught in subtle and then not so subtle ways to basically not showcase or express emotion. So we adopt this belief that emotions are bad or they shouldn't be felt.
And as soon as that happens, it becomes harder to experience emotions in isolation. Meaning anytime we experience an emotion like anger, frustration, sadness, anxiety, we can also experience a sidecar of guilt or shame around having the emotion. And anytime we feel shame about something, we try to press it down even further. We try to hide it away. So emotions can get kind of stuck within us if we don't have an appropriate way to process and metabolize them. But remember, that's what emotions actually need to do. They need to be in motion, we need to experience them. We gotta extract the information from them because they're messengers.
And then we have to metabolize them and release them. And if we don't have the ability to do this, if we have years of experience pushing down emotions, of course that can translate to anxiety because the body is holding onto something that it will, is not designed to hold onto. Of course that's going to create some friction within the body. So we have to have an outlet, we have to have an off ramp, a drain to release this energy, to allow it to be in motion, to move out and through us. One of my favorite ways to do this is EFT. The reason that I'm bringing this up as something to share with you is because it's free. You can do it anytime, anywhere. You don't need a tool.
You don't have to buy anything. You just need to know how to do it. So EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique or Tapping. It's called any of those three: EFT Tapping or Emotional Freedom Technique. And it is a tool. I use it as a tool to reduce acute anxiety when I'm feeling it in the moment. But it's also a tool to regulate cortisol and stress. In general, EFT I would say is my top tool.
Second probably only to breathe work to release emotions, even for the stuck ones. Like especially for the stuck ones, I have other ways to process things. But if things just feel stuck in my body, I go to breath work or eft. And so essentially what you're doing is tapping on meridian points in the body and by doing so it allows the energy to flow into move. So rather than feeling like you have an emotion cooped up inside you, you can use it to bring the emotion up to the surface and that way we can resolve it and release it. So if you've never heard of it before, it can sound kind of woo. I've shared this on the podcast before. My mom has been an EFT practitioner for like 20, maybe 25 years.
So I've known about it forever and I thought it was like the weirdest, like cheesiest, corniest thing back in the day and now I love it. So it might sound a little bit weird, it might sound a little bit woo, but there are actually over a hundred peer reviewed studies that demonstrate its efficacy. So how effective it is for anxiety, cortisol regulation, it's really good for ibs, for chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and insomnia, ocd. It can really help to deescalate physical symptoms as well. And so if you want to check it out, you can find videos to follow on YouTube. I will admit I am really super picky, so I don't follow any YouTube videos. If I did I would recommend an account for you. I prefer to lead myself through an EFT session.
We are including EFT sessions in Manifest Your Health in the membership in the app. So you can just open up the app on your phone and there will be some things you can tap along with. That's one ton of the resources that will be provided in the Daily Integration Lab. I can give you the framework and then if you like following, there'll be some videos to follow. If you don't like following, if you're like me and you just want to go solo, I'll teach you how to do that. So I use it to release emotional blocks. I also will use it to release limiting beliefs and ideas. I also love to use it as a manifestation tool where I tap on future goals and future ideas and like my future self.
So love it, love it, love it. And honestly, just once you learn the tapping points, if you're like in the middle of a panic attack or an anxiety burst, even just tapping on the points can have a calming effect on the body even if you don't have a script or words to say as you are doing it. So check it out: EFT.
We've talked before about why OneSkin stands out as a skin care company. It's real science. The founding team are longevity researchers who ask the question if many visible signs of aging wrinkles, fine lines and loss of elasticity are driven by so called ‘zombie cells’, what if you could actually reduce those cells to slow the aging process down? That research led to OS-1, OneSkin's proprietary peptide. It's the first ingredient proven to switch off damaged senescent cells and actually slow skin aging. The reason I started using OneSkin is because I really like the story and the science behind the brand, but also because as a 41 year old, I was looking for effective skin care that didn't bother my sensitive skin. So no fragrance, no other really intense ingredients. Radiance. When I use OneSkin, I'm giving my skin a clear signal to repair damaged cells, support collagen and strengthen my skin barrier. Born from over a decade of longevity research, OneSkin's OS1 peptide is proven to target the visible signs of aging, helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15% off using code funk at OneSkin.Co/FUNK. That's 15% off OneSkin.Co/FUNK. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them that we sent you.
The next one is Breathing. I know I referenced breathwork before, so I do use a very specific style of breathwork to process and to move through stuff. You bet your ass that's going to be part of Manifest Your Health. Breath work is medicine to me, but I don't do that when my nervous system is already super revved up. Like for example, when I'm in the middle of a bona fide panic attack, that wouldn't be a supportive tool. So that's when I move into more diaphragmatic pelvic floor. Deep breathing. It's basically deep breathing, but you're doing it the way that your body is actually designed to breathe.
That drops me into a parasympathetic state and I can literally feel my body fill up with life force. I say literally because that is what the breath is. It is your life force. No breath, breath, no life. It's basically that simple. So I really consider this free medicine. If you do not know how to breathe correctly, make sure you take the time to learn that when a lot of us attempt deep breathing, we can do one of two things super common. Take a deep breath in and just notice what happens.
I want you to do it right now. Just observe yourself. You can even do this while you're driving. So take a deep breath in and then what happens? A lot of us will, will shrug our shoulders up into the ears, so we're breathing into the upper body. If we're kind of hip to that game, what we will do is breathe more into the belly. So we'll do belly breathing, sending the breath down into the belly. It's not necessarily wrong, but most of us actually need to focus more on sending the breath into our back ribs, into our low back, and down into the pelvic bowl as well. And that is what is going to tripwire that parasympathetic response.
It can be really helpful, if you're not familiar with this, to practice in child's pose so you can practice exhaling the breath all the way down into the pelvic floor. You can also do this on your back with your knees bent. You can even hug your knees into your chest or do like happy baby pose, if you're familiar with that from yoga. And really practice inhaling into the back ribs in the low back, because if they're touching the floor, you have that tactile sensation. I'll use a Pilates ball and I'll put that under my front ribs. I'll put it behind my ribs, and I'm really, really, really focusing. Just breathing into the rib cage, breathing down into the pelvis. So powerful, so helpful.
And once you get that deep breathing, you can try box breathing, or you could layer on 4, 7, 8 breathing as well. But breath is life. It is the gateway in the ticket to your parasympathetic rest and digest. It is the fastest way to tell your nervous system that you are safe. And what's super interesting to me is that during times of high stress or emotional intensity, the diaphragm muscle can get super rigid, it can get tight, it can get bound down. And that can have a direct effect on the parasympathetic nervous system response as well. The diaphragm tends to be the place where we store emotional tension. In Chinese medicine, the diaphragm is said to be the bridge between the conscious in the unconscious emotions.
So the diaphragm can be this emotional storage point where we just lock things into the body, or it also has the opportunity to be the gateway into emotional processing, emotional release and guess how we access that? We access it through the breath. The act of breathing creates more space literally in your body. But it also creates more energetic space for your intuition to arise and speak to you more clearly. You are creating more space for yourself, all of your parts, all aspects of you, to come online. So if you just sit, breathe deeply, that is creating more of that connection, that rapport with your body. And it's creating more space for your intuition to land and to speak with you. I also really see it as an opportunity to create more space in separation between yourself and your non-self. This is kind of a really big deal when it comes to anxiety.
Sometimes our anxiety is actually us feeling other people's emotions, other people's feelings, other people's projections, other people's fears and insecurities. Sometimes we can pick up on collective energy and that can make us feel really anxious. Our bodies are not, not places to run the energy of other people through. And it's not because other people's energy is toxic necessarily. It's just because our bodies, our energy fields are designed for us. So if we have a lot of other people's stuff cluttering up our field, that is going to make us feel anxious, just kind of makes sense, doesn't it? So I know I keep teasing out Manifest Your Health because I gotta, because it's coming out soon, but I teach you a lot of energy hygiene tools. I am a highly sensitive person. I'm a deep feeler.
So these things are non negotiables for me. If you're an empath, if you're a highly sensitive person, if you're a deeply feeling person, same for you too. You gotta learn these things because it can be challenging to discern is this my anxiety or is this someone else's? But the more energy hygiene tools that you have, the more you bring these online, the more you're able to get familiar with what your own energy feels like. And so you kind of know right away like, oh, this isn't even mine. Like I shouldn't be feeling this anxiety. It's not even mine, doesn't even belong to me. And you can do some clearing practices and be back in your energy. So breath is one of those ways to do it.
It can be really, really great Energy hygiene tool to protect your own energy field and your body. Next up is my beloved nervines. Nervine herbs are an absolute must for any anxiety toolkit. They are herbs that support the nervous system and they include lemon balm, passionflower skullcap, those are my three faves. Valerian, chamomile, ashwagandha, lavender. These are also nervines as well. I really prefer, this is a personal preference, but I prefer to take them as tinctures because they're easier for me to dose. I can ramp things up when I need to and kind of dose it down when I need to.
And I also just feel a deeper connection to the actual plant this way versus taking it in capsule form. You can also get some of these herbs as teas. Just keep in mind when you're brewing tea bags, if you want a therapeutic effect, always use two bags. Cover it, let it steep for five to ten minutes and you'll get the maximum effect that way. Cover it with something that's not plastic, by the way. I usually just use like a saucer in my house, but that's how you'll get the most out of your tea. And if you can. I just love love sourcing herbs locally from an herbalist.
I swear that I can feel the love and the attention from the humans tending to the plants when I take my tinctures. And that alone has a soothing effect on me. Now keep in mind, just throwing nervine herbs at anxiety or panic isn't going to magically make it go away. We still have to do all the stuff that I've just discussed. But they can absolutely soothe your nervous system enough to actually access the deep inner work and actually hear your own intuition. And then my last tip here is, you got to cool it with the caffeine. I'm a coffee drinker. I have no problem with caffeine.
I love it. But hear me out. When your anxiety is ramped up, it's probably not the best thing for you. Caffeine inhibits GABA release. GABA is our major inhibitory neurotransmitter. And decreased GABA induces anxiety. Coffee's gonna ratchet up your catecholamines, which can absolutely ratchet up your anxiety. So when my anxiety freak flag is flying high, I have to be really easy with my coffee intake.
I'll either reduce my intake, I'll do half caf. Sometimes I'll opt for Matcha just because Matcha has less caffeine than coffee. Plus it also contains L theanine, which enhances GABA and can have an anti anxiety effect. So try all of those tools out. I'm gonna leave you with some final thoughts. Here's the final thought where you direct your focus, you direct your life force. So a question I had to ask myself is: Am I directing my focus to things that are ramping up my anxiety? And guess what? I was. So that was a shift that had to happen quickly.
Another thing to consider. If the things that are making you anxious are outside of your control, what can you control? What do you have control over? We can always control two things. One, where we're directing our focus and two, our own internal state. And I'm going to be so for real with you right now, tending to my own internal state, my own frequency, my own energy, my own thought patterns indefinitely. My focus feels more important to me now, now than ever. It's giving. Put your own oxygen mask on first vibes right now. So take care of you and then you can take care of others.
This is why I feel so honored to be rolling manifest your health out later this month. I think it's the membership and the app that we all need right now and I'm really just so excited for you guys to get your hands on it soon. I know you're gonna love it. I know it's gonna be so helpful. So April 27th month, get ready. And in the meantime, I really hope that these anxiety tools help you out. Let me know if they did and I'll catch you guys next week. Love you.
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk’tional Nutrition Podcast. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. If you got something from today's show, don't forget, subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.