Episode 271: Simple Strategies for Anxiety Relief
Listen on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify
In this episode, Erin shares specific and accessible practices for anxiety, many of which are free and can be utilized right away. These strategies aren’t just helpful for immediate relief — they can also become daily rituals that will invite a better connection with your thoughts and your anxiety’s messages for you.
A continuation of last week's episode on anxiety root causes, this conversation will give you clear strategies and resources to start feeling good again.
In this episode:
Morning practices for real change [2:45]
Coffee alternatives & nutrition as a safety signal [7:35]
A new approach to experiencing emotions [26:47]
EFT, brain waves & rituals [34:16]
Herbs to support your nervous system [42:40]
Breathwork you can try NOW [45:56]
Resources mentioned:
Carb Compatibility Project™ (Available for free within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Your Hormone Revival™ (Only available within the Funk’tional Nutrition Collective)
Wheat Zoomer Functional Lab Test
Functional C.A.R.E. Method™ 1:1 Services
Qualia Mind (get $100 off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with code FUNK)
Organifi supplement powder (Save 20% on your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
Learn more about Mindset
Related episodes:
270: Understanding Anxiety & the Brain-Body Connection
210: Coffee & Adrenals: Do You Have to Wean the Caffeine?
165: Hormone Lab Testing, Estrogen Dominance & Balancing Hormones at Home
220: Hormone Lab Testing: A Non-Algorithmic Approach
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
Welcome to the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. I'm your host, Erin Holt. I'm an integrative and functional medicine nutritionist with a feisty attitude and well over a decade of clinical experience. I work with women all over the world through my online programs and I'm also the founder of the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school and practitioner mentorship where we help other clinicians level up with functional medicine methodologies. I've got a bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model that are both systematically failing so many of us. Creating a new model is my life's work and this is what this show is all about. 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 like what you hear today, I would love for you to subscribe to the show, leave a review in iTunes, share with a friend and keep coming back for more.
Erin Holt [00:00:55]:
Now give me the mic so I can take it away. Hello my friends. I am excited to be here with you today and I mean that wholeheartedly. I feel good today. I've got some good energy to share with you, high vibing. If you're in a down day, tune in and you can pick up some on some of this energy. I'm kind of interrupting our regularly scheduled programming a little bit. I had a different episode that I was planning to release today, but someone near and dear to my health told me that she listened to last week's episode and she started implementing a couple of things that I talked about on the show. She said that she was getting outside every morning to drink her coffee and sit in the sunshine and take some deep breaths and I thought, well, I'd really like to provide a lot more resources and different tools.
Erin Holt [00:01:50]:
On the heels of last week's episode about anxiety, that one definitely, I think it came at a good time for a lot of people. It sounds like that was a popular episode and so I realized I wanted to do a follow up episode to provide more tools, not just information, but actual tools, resources, strategy, and practices that you can use and you can apply as soon as today that can make a really big difference. And a lot of what I'm going to talk about today are totally free and you can access them right now. Now if you do put these in practice in earnest and you see absolutely no improvement over the next month or so, email us and let us know and then we can talk about getting you into our 1:1 functional medicine work. There might be some deeper root causes going on, stuff that I talked about last week and we can certainly help you figure those things out, but I feel like this is a great starting point. Start here, see how you do.
Erin Holt [00:02:48]:
So let's start first things first is when your eyes open up in the morning. We're going to start literally as soon as that, because the second you open your eyes, every single morning is an opportunity to either recreate the past or to choose something different. So if the second you awaken, you're thinking the same thoughts as yesterday, you're picking up right where you left off. You went to bed thinking about things, and you're waking up thinking about the same exact things, telling yourself the same stories, going over and over and over, waking up with the same stressors and the same anxieties. If that's the case, you are going to get the exact sames. In order to change, we have to change. And there's always a reframe. There's always a perspective shift available to you.
Erin Holt [00:03:33]:
It's just up to you to decide to actually take it. So one of the greatest ways to do this is to wake up and just think thoughts that make you feel good. So this takes no extra time, like no real extra effort. You open your eyes, you're going to start thinking thoughts anyway. So why don't you take advantage of this opportunity to begin again and to think about thoughts that make you feel good. Those feel bad thoughts are still going to be there. They're still going to be available to you later on, but imprint in your brain exactly the experience that you want to have. So a really great way to do this is to just think about the things that you are grateful for.
Erin Holt [00:04:15]:
I know it sounds cheesy, I know it sounds basic AF. I know at least half the people listening are going to be like, I've already done that, I've already tried that. Try it again and again and again, but try it with feeling this time. So when you are thinking about the things that you're grateful for, see if you can produce the feelings of gratitude in your actual physical body. So I had somebody who's currently in Manifest Your Health shared that she's had a gratitude journal practice for a long time now. And she's like, but I just treated it as something on my to do list. Okay, check the box, I did my gratitude check. Moving on.
Erin Holt [00:04:57]:
And that's a good start. But the shift that she changed in Manifest Your Health is that while she's writing her gratitude list, she's also actively experiencing feelings of gratitude within her body. So take a moment to really feel those feelings and it can make such a big difference. So that's a really easy way to shift your energy from the second your eyes open. Another thing that you could do, this takes a little bit more time, so it kind of depends on your morning situation. But an actual meditation practice, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. The reason that this works so well to shift your state first thing in the morning is because meditation helps to shift our brainwaves. So we have higher brainwaves known as beta, and these are more active.
Erin Holt [00:05:45]:
When we're fixated on the outer world, we're obsessing over problems, we're ruminating on negative things, there's a higher emotional intensity, there's more stress, there's more anxiety. These are the brainwaves that are really the zone of anxiety. And in these brainwaves, you're essentially being altered by survival chemicals, by your stress chemicals, and then you're feeling the emotions that are derived from that stress response. And when we're in this high beta state, it's really challenging, if not impossible to consciously change. When we're operating from this safety and protection zone, there really isn't room for expansion and growth. So meditation allows for more alpha and even theta brainwaves. These are slower brainwaves. This is the relaxation response.
Erin Holt [00:06:37]:
This puts us into optimal healing mode. This is where we can rewrite the program. We transition away from that anxiety zone into more of a relaxation response. So if you can take the time, again, 10, 15, 20 minutes in the morning to have time for meditation, that is a really, really wonderful way to set your day off in an antianxiety framework. So in my estimation, meditation is definitely an underutilized tool. Again, you can do it for free. It's easy access. You do want to find a style of meditation that works for you.
Erin Holt [00:07:15]:
I offer a tremendous amount of different styles of meditation throughout my programs. I've been meditating for a solid 15 years. It's just a part of what I do, so I tend to bake it into a lot of my programs. Like even the Carb Compatibility Project has meditations. So you just find a style that works for you and don't give up until you find one. The next thing you want to think about is your coffee and your caffeine intake. Pretty big deal when it comes to anxiety. Caffeine will absolutely ratchet up your catecholamines and at the same time it inhibits GABA release.
Erin Holt [00:07:52]:
So these are all things that we talked about last week. So you have an understanding that these two things are not great for anxiety. So this is why caffeine can really ratchet up your anxiety. So you do want to be very mindful of your intake of coffee and caffeine. And some options for you are to opt for matcha instead. So matcha green tea powder. It has less caffeine than coffee and it also contains L-theanine, and L-theanine enhances GABA. So remember that GABA is that calming inhibitory neurotransmitter.
Erin Holt [00:08:29]:
So it calms things down, it has an antianxiety effect. Another option if you're like, I love matcha, but I still need my coffee because that's me. I drink my matcha midday, but I drink my coffee in the morning. And there was definitely times where my stress response was too high. And actually the past couple of weeks, I've had to be really mindful of my caffeine consumption in the morning just because my anxiety has been high. And it's like once that anxiety gets trip wired, and it can get trip wired in the morning by caffeine and not eating breakfast really easily. It's so easy to kind of get distracted and you're running around doing lots of different things in the morning and you drink the coffee and you're not eating the breakfast and you're maybe in a stress response. And that's such an easy way to trip wire anxiety.
Erin Holt [00:09:18]:
So a couple of things, just number one, bring your awareness to this. Number two, you can try to switch out to matcha. Number three, you can just reduce the amount of caffeine. So buy decaf coffee and do half caffeine, half decaf, and you can wean yourself down from full caffeine because caffeine withdrawals can be kind of gnarly too. So I actually talk about this on episode 210. Coffee and adrenals. Do you have to wean the caffeine? So that's a really good episode to listen to for some strategies on how to and why to pare back on the caffeine intake. Another idea if you're like, I definitely want to keep my coffee.
Erin Holt [00:10:00]:
I just enjoy it so much. Don't do it on an empty stomach. Drink your coffee, your breakfast. So rather than drink coffee and wait an hour and eat food, do it all in one fell swoop. So of course, this suggestion is predicated on the idea that you actually are eating breakfast. And if you are not, holy smokes we need to start there. Because like I explained last week, low blood sugar is going to dip into those stress neurotransmitters and hormones and trigger that anxiety. So ideally, you are eating breakfast within 30 minutes to an hour of waking up.
Erin Holt [00:10:40]:
You want to prioritize protein for breakfast. Try to get about 30 grams of protein for breakfast. So this might look like a few hard boiled eggs, a smoothie with protein powder, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, leftovers from the night before, like turkey sausage or chicken sausage. You could do overnight oats with protein powder. There's a lot of different ways to get that protein in and get that food in, but it's really important that you do that as a way to prevent anxiety. And again, I'll remind you that this is exactly what we do in the Carb Compatibility Project. We teach you how to eat, how to structure your meals for good blood sugar control. And when you've got good blood sugar control, that really helps to prevent anxiety in a lot of cases.
Erin Holt [00:11:30]:
And the CCP is open for enrollment. We opened the cart last week and within a day we had 20 people sign up. I was like, oh, okay, people are ready. Let's go. Let's do the damn thing. Last week I talked about low progesterone as a driver of anxiety. And this can also come back to food because your body needs to feel safe in order to ovulate. And ovulation is how we produce progesterone in the body.
Erin Holt [00:11:56]:
Proper nutrition is a safety signal to your brain. And so some of the most common reasons for low progesterone are undereating, under fueling your female body. And it can be undereating overall carbohydrates, it can be undereating overall calories, over training, high stress, pushing yourself to the limit. Right? This is all going to signal to the brain that, hey, this environment, environment might not be super safe to bring a baby into, and so it's not going to trigger ovulation and it's not going to produce that progesterone.
Erin Holt [00:16:42]:
And you know it doesn't require a functional lab test to do the basic things to support your body. Sometimes, I've said this before and I'll say it again. Sometimes, getting the lab data back to see proof positive oh, shit, the way that I've been living my life has led to this current physical reality. That can inspire and motivate you to make the appropriate changes.
Erin Holt [00:17:14]:
So sometimes seeing that data on paper really, really does help. If you're interested in learning more about hormone testing, I've got at least two episodes. Episode 165, I talk about hormone testing, estrogen, dominance, low progesterone. And episode 220, I talk about hormone testing as well. We do offer functional hormone testing in Your Hormone Revival. That's a program where we test your hormones and we teach you all about them as well. So that is available to you for sure, without question. But if you haven't dialed in your nutrition yet, you might want to start with the Carb Compatibility Project.
Erin Holt [00:17:54]:
And like I said, the CCP teaches you how to fuel yourself, but it also teaches you how to understand your unique carb threshold, which can be pretty important for hormone balance. A question that will always come up is, how many grams of carbs do I need? And I can't tell you that, and really, nobody can tell you that if somebody is giving you a prescriptive amount of carbohydrates, that always raises a little bit of red flag suspicion to me. I had a client who came to me. She had gone to a razzamatazzy jazzy functional medicine clinic. Oh. Functional Medicine Clinic for the Stars. And before she even had any lab testing done, she walked in the office and the doctor was like, you have estrogen dominance.
Erin Holt [00:18:41]:
You can't eat more than 100 grams of carbohydrates a day. And I was like, literally what? I was like, what? Based on what? What is this information based on? So if anyone's giving you a very specific number of carbs that you need, I am always just very suspect about that because I just don't see any data to back that up. But what can be super helpful and beneficial is for you to figure out that information. Remember, we're always trying to self source instead of outsource. That's how we hone our own inner authority. We'll talk more about that in the Carb Compatibility Project. Don't worry. But essentially, essentially you kind of have to figure out that threshold.
Erin Holt [00:19:25]:
Like, where do you feel your best? Cool. Let's do that. Now, talking about food and nutrients, one thing I intentionally stayed away from last week was talking about nutrient depletions and insufficiencies as a root cause of anxiety. And honestly, that's just because I typically don't see that as the primary driver. Could it be a factor for some people? Absolutely. Last week we talked about the brain and neurochemical and hormone responses with anxiety. And all of that can actually lead to nutrient depletion. So there are certain nutrients that we really burn through at a more rapid rate when we're under stress often.
Erin Holt [00:20:10]:
So things like B vitamins and magnesium and vitamin C. That's because it takes a lot of resources in your body to operate at that fight or flight consistently. Our bodies are not designed to be in an active stress response most of the time. They're designed to be calm and relaxed and at peace more often than not. And then we have the stress response to kick in when we need it, when there is a threat to survival. Well, modern day life can be interpreted as a threat to survival. So most of us, many of us are really kicked up into that fight or flight response. Or if we've got anxiety, it's like pitching us there. And so when I think about nutrient depletions, I'm kind of like chicken or egg type situation.
Erin Holt [00:20:56]:
Like what came first? Did chronic stress in your propensity to experience anxiety deplete the nutrients or did the nutrient depletion cause the anxiety? Now, I am sure that other practitioners and providers might disagree with this, and of course I always welcome that disagreement based on what you see in your practice. If you're like, I actually see this quite a lot in my practice, cool. I mean, that's totally valid. I believe in lived experience. Just clinically speaking personally on my end, I've never seen me giving somebody a multivitamin or B vitamins or magnesium that has completely resolved their anxiety. It can be part of the overall picture, but there's usually something else going on as well. Again, that's just my experience.
Erin Holt [00:21:48]:
But you do still want to cover your bases and make sure you're eating a well rounded, well balanced diet that's a non negotiable. And if I happen to be running lab tests, if I happen to be running an organic acids test or a DUTCH test, and we see that you have low B vitamin status, we're going to recommend that you take some Bs. Of course we're going to do that. But essentially, we can really significantly impact inflammation and neuroinflammation through diet. I want you to understand just how much power you have at your fingertips with the food that your putting in your mouth. Like, for real. And this is why when people go through the Carb Compatibility Project, which does help to lower inflammation and neuroinflammation, people see improvements with mood, with cognition, with brain fog. So diet really can make a huge difference in the brain and then also your mood.
Erin Holt [00:22:42]:
Since I'm talking about neuroinflammation, another thing that I didn't talk about last week that I at least want to give a head nod to here is celiac disease and non celiac gluten sensitivity, which is you're sensitive to gluten, but you do not have celiac disease. We know in these situations, gluten can be a trigger for neuroinflammation, and we tend to think about gluten as causing GI issues, digestive issues, gut issues, and it absolutely can. But it can also create symptoms beyond the gut, and that's pretty darn common. So we might see concentration issues like inability to concentrate. In fact, when I was in high school, I started and I've always been, school has always come easy to me. Studying has always come easy to me. Focus has never been a problem. Around, I think it was like junior or senior year, I started to have really hard time concentrating, and at the same time, I was experiencing pain in both of my hands. And so, long story less long, I ended up, my mom took me to a Lyme specialist, and they were like, she has Lyme.
Erin Holt [00:23:50]:
And I don't know. Not that I can do anything about it now, but I've thought a lot about this, and I always wonder, was that just a missed gluten sensitivity? Because at that time, like early 2000s, gluten sensitivity wasn't huge. And it wasn't until, gosh, maybe like ten years later, five years later, ten years later, I don't know where, my mom brought me to an osteopath, and he tested me for gluten sensitivity and found out that I was sensitive to gluten. The point is, it can kind of be a great mimicker because of the symptoms that it produces. So brain fog is another one, anxiety, depression. We can see a lot of mood disorders with gluten sensitivity, if you're consuming gluten. Fatigue, headaches, migraines. I will also say that the year that I stopped eating gluten in earnest really was like, okay, I'm not going to do this anymore because I was still in college when I found out and I was like, I'm going to eat pizza and drink beer and just look the other way.
Erin Holt [00:24:52]:
So when I was like, no, this is the year that I'm really going to stop doing this. That was the year that I fully recovered from eating disorders. And we know that eating disorders is more of a mental health crisis than a food crisis, right? And I'm always really hesitant and careful to say that because obviously in the wrong hands that information isn't helpful for me. I really believe part of my mental health recovery was pulling gluten out of my diet. I felt like the fog had been lifted. Now I was making other changes too, but again I was like chicken or egg? Did I have the willpower, the drive, the motivation to make those life changes because I removed the fog that was in my brain from the inflammation from eating the gluten? Or was it just like the constellation of changes that I made that really improved my life? I don't know. I'll never know. One of the world's greatest mysteries.
Erin Holt [00:25:59]:
But it's funny in a lot of the manifestation work that I do and visualizing whenever I need to access an emotion of like, how do you want to feel? I always go back to that year. Like my visualizations, doing that's the year I met my husband Scott and we were running a lot and for those of you who are local, we would always run the Newcastle Loop which is just like beautiful. Newcastle, New Hampshire is beautiful. It's along the water and I just have such good memories and I can feel those feelings in my body so easily. I don't know. It was a good year. It was a good year for your girl and it happened to be the year that I stopped eating gluten. Coincidence? I don't know. Maybe so, maybe not. Or I should say that was probably like a year after I started stopped eating gluten because that stuff can take time to kind of like redirect.
Erin Holt [00:26:53]:
Anyway, I digress. It's important. It's good to know, especially if you struggle with anxiety and depression. I would really recommend testing for celiac disease and or non celiac gluten sensitivity. One way to do this is through the Wheat Zoomer and it is the only à la carte lab that we offer on my entire website. You can purchase that and when you purchase it, you get an analyzation. So we send you a video analyzing your test and then we also make recommendations based on what we're seeing so you could do that. And we decided to do a little gifty gift. Anyone who enrolls in this current round of the Carb Compatibility Project can save $100 off of the Wheat Zoomer.
Erin Holt [00:27:41]:
So that's a little special bonus we're throwing at you. All right, so moving on to more of the emotional side of things, because we did get into that last week. You may have heard of emotions referred to as e-motion. So, like written out, it would be e-motion, energy in motion, emotion. And that's really what they're designed to do, move. We receive information via emotions. So our internal guidance system is telling us stuff about our environment through emotions. So they're data points, they're messages, they're information. We're supposed to take that information, and then the emotions are supposed to move on.
Erin Holt [00:28:27]:
Energy in motion. But the way that many of us were raised doesn't always provide a health outlet for emotions. We're taught to hold things in, to bite things back, to push things down, to be a good little girl and not cry. Don't be so sensitive. We are taught from a very young formative age and in ways that may be subtle or not so subtle, to not showcase or express emotion. So we can adopt a belief that having emotions and feelings are bad. It's not the way to be a part of the tribe. It's not the way to fit in.
Erin Holt [00:29:02]:
It's not the way to receive love. It's not appropriate. It is bad. And as soon as that happens, as soon as we adopt that belief that having emotions is not good, it becomes harder to experience emotions in isolation. So what I mean by that is that you'll experience an emotion, let's say anger or frustration or sadness, and then immediately after that, you feel like you are doing something wrong by having that emotion. So then it comes with a sidecar of guilt or shame around having the emotion, because you're like, I shouldn't be experiencing this. So you have the emotion, and then you immediately are like, I shouldn't be having this emotion. So you don't just have the pure emotional experience and isolation.
Erin Holt [00:29:52]:
And anytime we feel shame about something, we try to press it down even further. We try to hide it away. So these emotions can get stuck in us if we don't have an appropriate way to metabolize them. But that's really what emotions need to do. They need to be in motion. So we need to experience them. We must extract the information and the medicine in them, because, remember, emotions are messages, right? And then we have to let them process and move on. And I always use the term unmetabolized emotion from Gabor Maté, because it is the perfect term.
Erin Holt [00:30:29]:
And just like we have to metabolize catecholamines, just like we have to metabolize hormones, we have to metabolize our emotions as well. And if we don't have the ability to do this, if we were never taught to do this, if we never learned a skill set to do this, if we have years of experience of pushing down the emotions. If that's our go to default, just push it down. Of course that can translate to anxiety. Of course it can. The body is holding on to something that it's not really designed to hold on to. So one of the things that we need to learn how to do if something upsets us, we have an outlet, we have an off ramp, we have a drain to release.
Erin Holt [00:31:11]:
So for some people, that might be talking to a therapist. For other people, it might be doing breath work or EFT, which I'll talk about in a second. And for some people, it might just be identifying how you feel in the moment. And this is a really, really handy tool. We talked a lot about the amygdala last week, that fear center of the brain, right? And when we are in an anxiety trigger, we can experience what is known as the amygdala hijack, where our amygdala response overrides our ability to think rationally. The logical brain gets temporarily overridden, and the amygdala can't distinguish between a real threat and a perceived threat. So there's this big emotional overreaction. So you can just be thinking of the worst possible outcome. You could be catastrophizing.
Erin Holt [00:32:09]:
You could be like, what if this happens? What if this happens? Your brain doesn't know the difference between you just thinking about the potential of that thing happening and that thing actually happening. So your body is responding as though that threat is real, even though it's just in your head. And because the amygdala has essentially taken over the prefrontal cortex, our logical, rational mind doesn't have the ability to come in and say, hey, this isn't real. This isn't real. But when we pause in one of those moments and we take a step back and we ask ourselves, what emotion am I experiencing right now? That's affect labeling. Labeling the emotional experience. Brain scans show that when we are able to label our emotions, it decreases that amygdala hijack. It decreases the activity of the amygdala. So this is another really wonderful tool to put into your pocket.
Erin Holt [00:33:12]:
Again, totally free 99. Cost you $0. Put it in your pocket and then pull it out the next time that you need it. If you have a tendency to catastrophize, to think about and plan for and prepare for the worst possible outcome, this hasn't happened. But just in case it does, I'm going to be ready for it. Do the same thing with that. Just take a moment to say, oh, I'm catastrophizing right now. It doesn't mean that you can't continue on with that thought trajectory.
Erin Holt [00:33:42]:
It just creates a little bit of distance, right, a little bit of space when you take the time to label exactly what's going on. And that little bit of distance and that little bit of space allows the logical, rational part of your mind to say, is this something that we should really be worried about? You know that I'm a huge fan of changing our thoughts, changing our mind, changing our brain in order to change our health and our life. But what if I told you that there was a way to help yourself in this department with the use of 28 of the most research backed neurotropic ingredients? That's what I've been doing for the past couple of months using Qualia Mind from Neurohacker. It's a combo of neurotropics, neurovitamins, antioxidants adaptogens and amino acids that together support optimal brain function pathways. Your can consider it like brain fuel. It supports brain mitochondrial function, it enhances BDNF, it supports neuron and synaptic function, supports neurotransmitter signaling, and it enhances stress resilience.
Erin Holt [00:34:39]:
All of this gives you more brain energy, mental clarity, attention, focus, motivation, and drive. See what it can do for your mindset. By going to neurohacker.com/funk, you can save $100. And as a listener of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast, if you use code FUNK at checkout, you'll get an extra 15% off of your purchase. You can try it for 100 days. If you are not totally satisfied, you can get 100% money back guaranteed. So head to neurohacker.com/funk to try Qualia Mind with the code FUNK to experience life changing mental performance. Another thing that you can do, and this is one of my favorite tools is EFT Emotional Freedom Technique, or tapping.
Erin Holt [00:35:29]:
I use and have used EFT. I think I was first introduced to it because my mom has been an EFT practitioner for a lot of years. So I think I was first introduced to it like, I don't know, somewhere between 15 to 20 years ago. And I had sessions with her colleagues. So I've been doing EFT. I've had a lot of exposure and a lot of practice, a lot of experience. And then I even got certified so I could lead people through it as well. So I use EFT as a tool to reduce anxiety.
Erin Holt [00:35:57]:
It reduces cortisol, it reduces stress, and you can use it in the acute moment. So like, if you're in a period of high anxiety, you can stop, drop an EFT, and then the more you do it over time, the more it helps to rewire the brain away from anxiety, away from stress. So you can use it as a tool in the moment and then you can just kind of use it as a tool to practice, like a meditation practice as well. I also use it as a tool and for my friends in FNA, you guys know, because I led you through an EFT manifestation session. So I do use it as a tool to call in what I want just as an aside. But it's a beautiful tool to release emotions, even the stuck ones that might be trapped down deep. We can use EFT as an opportunity to bring up those emotions to the surface for resolution. So how it works there's a series of meridian points in the body and we tap on those with our fingertips.
Erin Holt [00:37:00]:
So it kind of pulls from some acupressure points and it helps to desensitize any emotions that are occurring and release them so you can feel better really quickly. You can notice a big shift in a matter of minutes. And the cool thing about it is that there are over 100 peer reviewed scientific studies that demonstrate its effectiveness for anxiety, depression, cortisol levels, like I said, in severity of symptoms too, like physical symptoms of IBS, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia addiction, insomnia, OCD, phobias. So it's such a powerful tool and the more you do it, the more you see solutions that kind of stick. We were talking about the amygdala and how important it is to kind of calm that down. EFT does have a calming effect on the amygdala and like I said, the more you do it, the more you wire the brain away from that amygdala overactivation or the anxiety tendencies. EFT also has a positive impact on brainwaves. So we were talking about brainwaves earlier and it can decrease those high beta and allow for more alpha and theta waves, which is that calming relaxation response.
Erin Holt [00:38:21]:
And as it relates to emotions, rather than feel like you have those emotions like cooped up inside of you, you actually have a tool to release it and let it dissipate. So you're releasing any densities, any blocks. When you tap on the meridians, you're allowing the energy to flow and move. So emotions can be energy in motion and you get to rebalance your entire energy system. So this is definitely a tool that we leverage and use in Manifest Your Health. But I'm also bringing it into the Carb Compatibility Project this time around as just like a little experiment to see how people do with that. I'm super excited. I think people are looking for more tools, right? And so we are having an orientation call for the CCP and I'm going to walk you through an EFT practice.
Erin Holt [00:39:11]:
And so if you've already joined the CCP, cool. If you know you're going to join, definitely bring a goal in with you, like an intention. What do you want to do with the CCP? Like, is it weight loss? Is it lowering anxiety? Is it just feeling more confident with food, having more trust in yourself? Whatever it is, bring it in. And so what we're going to do is use EFT to clear any blocks to that goal and then call in what we want. And so you can use this as a practice to not just reduce any anxiety that you have around food, but actually help to bring you closer to your goal. So I'm pumped about that because we've never done that in the CCP before. And then let's talk about rituals. If you've been a longtime listener of the podcast, you know I'm a big fan of rituals.
Erin Holt [00:39:58]:
Episode 123 creating your morning ritual was a biggie. A lot of people really resonated with that where I talked about my morning ritual, which has since changed, because that was probably like two, three years ago that I released that. Anyway, rituals can change, but I love rituals because they help us feel connected. They help us feel grounded, they help us feel anchored. And so much of that, that feeling of groundedness connectedness, of being anchored to something, is pretty antianxiety anxiety by nature. And so currently, my evening ritual is I will mix up some Mellö magnesium drink. So you've probably seen me in my stories make this. It's so pretty. The lavender berry is my favorite flavor, so that's the one that I get.
Erin Holt [00:40:48]:
And it's like this beautiful purpley blue color. So I mix up some of that every evening, and then I listen to my Manifest Your Health, one of my meditations. I'm more of an evening meditator. I don't usually meditate a lot in the morning, but I love to meditate in the evening, like 7 or 8 at night when my family is watching TV, we'll all be sitting on the couch. I'll pop my headphones in, I'll drink my magnesium, and I'll meditate. So Ned's Mellö magnesium is a powerful daily magnesium supplement. It has amino acids, trace minerals that promote memory, mood, brain function, stress response, nerve and muscle health, and sleep.
Erin Holt [00:41:33]:
Most of us here in America, most of us adults, are low in magnesium, which stinks because we need that mineral. It's essential for hundreds of functions in the body. And like I said earlier, it's one of those nutrients that we absolutely burn through during periods of stress. And when that happens, low magnesium can actually contribute to even more feelings of stress and anxiety. I love this particular blend just because I like to drink it. It's easier for me than taking pills at night. Not only that, it contains GABA and L-theanine. And as we talked about last week, both of those have anti anxiety effects.
Erin Holt [00:42:12]:
We love Ned. I love their products. They're a sponsor of the show, and you can become the best version of yourself and get 15% off Ned products with code FUNK. Go to helloned.com/funk or enter code FUNK at checkout. That's helloned.com/funk to get 15% off. We thank you, Ned, for sponsoring the show and offering our listeners a natural remedy for some of life's most common health issues. So that's my current evening ritual. But it would make good sense for you to create some type of ritual for yourself, whether it's the morning, the afternoon, the evening.
Erin Holt [00:42:50]:
A couple of weeks ago, I talked about taking lunch outside and just eating outside in the sunshine. That can be a ritual. It's something that you do that helps you feel connected to something bigger than yourself. It helps you feel grounded. It helps you land in your own space. It helps you feel settled in and not so untethered. So I love a ritual, actually. It's funny, that timing.
Erin Holt [00:43:17]:
I wasn't planning on this, but just last night I was like, you know what? I haven't really done anything with my altar. So I have this table. It's my grandmother's. It got handed down to me, and I keep it in my office and it's kind of like accumulated just like random stuff. And I'm like, last night I was like, I am going to revamp my altar and have a little moment, a little altar moment in my office. And that can be a ritual too. Okay, anyway, let's move on to nervines, because I think that nervine herbs are an absolute must for any anxiety toolkit. Nervines are just herbs that support the nervous system.
Erin Holt [00:43:57]:
They even just seeing the bottles in my kitchen, they just calm me down. So two of my absolute favorites are lemon balm and passion flower. If I had to pick a third, I would probably say skullcap. But other nervine herbs are ashwagandha, valerian, chamomile, St. John's wort, lavender. And by the way, when I say those are my favorite, it's not because they're the best. It's just the herbs that I've developed or the plants that I've developed a relationship with. And I prefer to take these as tinctures, as like, liquid, because number one, they're easier for me to dose.
Erin Holt [00:44:37]:
Number two, it's less pills to have to swallow. But number three, and probably the most important part for myself, is when I'm taking the tinctures, I do feel a deeper connection to the actual plant that way. And spending time with true herbalists, like people who are in relation to plant medicine and who have kind of made this their life and their livelihood and have studied herbs, I am certainly not that. But I'm in awe of people, and I want to be around people that do, really. I've really learned about just being in relationship to plants. And Amy McKelvey, we've had her on the show gosh a couple of times. It's been a hot minute. I should bring her back because listening to her is like, such good medicine.
Erin Holt [00:45:27]:
But she really talks a lot about this. So if you want to hear more about it, you can find those episodes. They're oldies, but real goodies. I also try to source locally, source some of these plants locally. So we have a wonderful place. I live in Nottingham, New Hampshire. There's a place called The Mustard Seed, and so I go there when I need to. Like, I'm feeling weird today.
Erin Holt [00:45:55]:
I'm going to go to The Mustard Seed and just catch some vibes. And then they also have a lot of bulk teas. So that's another awesome way to get nervine herbs in, is the dried herbs in different combinations and making teas. And I think about it, I like sourcing local. Obviously, that might not be available to you, but if it is, I would recommend it because it's like you've got human beings, like, harvesting the herbs in a lot of cases, or at the very least, mixing up the different blends. So there's this love component that goes into the manufacturing of these tinctures and these teas. And I just feel like it's like, I don't know. I get all of that when I take the tincture, I just get all of that.
Erin Holt [00:46:42]:
So that was a little far out. That's how I feel about my nervine herbs. So for anxiety, maybe you try one. If I was going to start with one herb, for anxiety, I would probably go with passion flower. That's a really good one to start with and just kind of see how you do. Next up, I want to talk about breathing. So I talked about the diaphragm last week a little bit, but I want to get into specifics, and I want to close out today's episode with some specific practices. So the first one is pelvic floor breath.
Erin Holt [00:47:21]:
And shout out to Cristin Zaimes at Oceanside Physical Therapy in Stratum and in Dover, because she was the one that truly taught me how to do this. After years of teaching yoga, I still wasn't, like, breathing in a way that allowed my pelvic floor to relax and expand. And the imagery that she gave me that really helped to lock it all in was almost like a balloon. So on the inhale, you are filling in the balloon. And so you think about that from your lungs, right, in your rib cage. So your rib cage is expanding out side to side, but the body, the torso is also expanding out front to back. So the belly is relaxing. You're breathing into your low back, your upper back.
Erin Holt [00:48:06]:
So everything is expanding outward, and the balloon is expanding down. And that's your pelvic floor. It's the muscles that are at the base of your body, essentially. I'm sorry to my anatomy experts right now. Are you guys just shaking your head and just, like, tsk tsk? I'm explaining it in layman's terms to the best of my ability. Okay. But you want to imagine on the inhales that that's the bottom of the balloon and that's relaxing and expanding as well. And then on the exhale, it all comes back into center.
Erin Holt [00:48:45]:
And you don't have to squeeze your abs, and it doesn't have to be an aggressive thing, like, where you're squeezing everything in. But if you have that mental picture in your mind, inhale, everything extends out and then exhale, everything comes back to center. It really creates, for me, more of a hypnotic and, like, a deeper breath. And after, like, I swear, three to four to five true deep pelvic floor breaths, I can calm myself down pretty quickly. Two more suggestions if you have kind of a hard time doing this or figuring this out. One, you can try to do it in child's pose, and that might allow you to feel like you're really expanding because you can feel your low back expand or you can do it on the floor. So if you're lying on your back and you bend your knees, feet flat on the floor, kind of like you're going to lift your hips up into a bridge pose. You can try it that way too.
Erin Holt [00:49:44]:
And that allows the pelvic floor to relax. And when you're breathing, you can breathe into the back like you're pressing the back into the floor a little bit. So those are my suggestions. I like to do that at night when I'm watching TV. And if you have issues with your pelvic floor, it's like a really wonderful therapeutic strategy anyway, so it calms you down. But it also is good for your body. The other one that you can do is just like a simple box breathing. There's a lot of different pranayama techniques, but a good old fashioned box breathing is great.
Erin Holt [00:50:18]:
And you can do this anywhere, anytime. So you breathe in and you count to four slowly and then you hold the breath in to the count of four. And then you exhale to the count of four. And then you hold the breath out, the count of four and then you inhale. Pause, exhale, pause. And you just keep doing that for a minute or two. And that's a really great way to just bring your attention back to the breath. And the act of breathing, no matter what technique you're using, the act of breathing creates more space.
Erin Holt [00:50:56]:
Quite literally. You're creating space in your lungs, you're creating space in your body. You are literally creating more space for you to exist. You're allowing more space for your intuition to arise and to speak to you more clearly, which is a big thing we talked about last week. Sometimes that's why anxiety is presenting itself. Your body has a message for you. It may be you have not created the space to receive and to listen, to hear that message. So breathing allows you the space for yourself to exist.
Erin Holt [00:51:35]:
We're running into some time here and I've got a meeting in 15 minutes. So I don't know how far into this I can go, but maybe this could be another episode and it probably should be. But I know that we talked last week about one of the roots of anxiety is feeling other people's feelings. Somebody walks into the room, they're feeling anxious, you sense it and now all of a sudden you're feeling anxious. So breathing, even any of the practices that we talked about, breathing, meditating, EFT, tapping, all of this creates more space for you. And the more you take the time to create space for you, the more you separate you from non you, you're able to distinguish self from non self. And this is really important for folks who are more empathic or sensitive to other people's feelings and emotional states, those who feel other people's emotions in their bodies, in their energy field. And so I think I'll end it
Erin Holt [00:52:41]:
on that note, get in your own space. Do some of these practices, calm your anxiety down, and then let me know how you do. I would love to hear back from some of you. How are you doing with these practices? Again, Carb Compatibility Project is open for enrollment. If you want to come learn how to eat, try some EFT on for size as well. Let's do it. We're doing a big orientation call to kick things off. It's going to be fun.
Erin Holt [00:53:11]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
