Blame Your Anxiety On The Asshole

Waves of anxiety and depression were always up and flowing in sets for me. I could barely be around my own family, let alone total strangers, and leaving the house to go anywhere felt like running the gauntlet.

It felt like I had absolute zero control over my mind, body, and emotions, which seemed to be stuck in a looping cycle of fight and flight response. But to what exactly? I didn’t seem to be in any real danger. Was there something wrong with me?

I used to do some pretty fucked up and dangerous stuff to my body as a wild and crazy teenager; which included chain smoking cigarettes and weed, drinking copious amounts of alcohol, and taking increasingly larger quantities of LSD over a period of days while mixing in other drugs like MDMA (ecstasy, molly, or whatever the kids call it these days), cocaine, meth, and heroine (usually mixed together into pressed pills with funny sounding names like “rolls”, “wafers”, and “disco biscuits”) while also huffing inhalants like butane and gasoline (yep, I was actually that stupid) ALL at the same time and on top of a extremely shitty diet (I lived on fast food, prepackaged microwave food, soda, and the like).

Did I permanently fuck up my brain and nervous system doing shit like that for so long? And was some kind of brain damage what was causing my ongoing depression, anxiety, and subsequent thoughts about suicide?

For years, I was convinced that the answer to those two questions was “yes”.

Listen, most people have been trained to believe that depression and anxiety are caused by a problem with their mind or some imbalance in their brain chemistry; and this idea, that something is broken and wrong with your mind and brain, most often leads to prescriptions for toxic psychoactive pharmaceutical drugs, which in my experience only make matters worse in the long run.

When I sought the help of medical science for my concerns back in the day, I was prescribed drugs like Paxil and Zoloft (both of which had ridiculous side effects that were worse then the depression and anxiety) as well as Xanax and Valium (to which I developed a serious addiction, taking 120mg or more per day, mixed with other drugs and alcohol), without the doctor even taking a proper history; three sentences in to describing my concerns, on my first visit, and the fucking psychiatrist just interrupted me to write a prescription and sent me on my way.

Now, lets talk about why that doesn’t work and what the reality is with conditions like these.

Experiencing depression and anxiety is NOT about being broken or weak; and, although your mind is certainly involved, it’s NOT the only problem. Furthermore, the body plays a huge role, but it’s NOT as related to the six inches between your ears as it is to what is happening in your gut and filter organs.

You may not realize it, but you actually have a “second brain in your gut”, also known as the enteric nervous system, which has a lot more to do with your feelings, performance, and experience in your life than your brain does. And this enteric nervous system, which is sometimes considered part of the autonomic nervous system and sometimes considered totally independent, also governs the function of the gastrointestinal system (your digestion and elimination).

Why is that important?

Because its actually digestion and elimination problems, caused by the stress of over-acidification in the blood and tissues, that are at the root cause of all symptoms of all disease — physical, mental, and especially emotional. Therefore, having healthy digestion and elimination is the foundation for extraordinary physical, mental, and emotional health and fitness.

I felt sick and tired all the time — among other symptoms, I wasn’t sleeping, I had issues with my weight, my digestion and elimination were a mess, and I felt like I had an atlas ball stuck in my gut.

My rectum was filled with pressure, my asshole was on fire, and I was so constipated I thought I was never going to be able to get off the fucking toilet when I went to take a shit, which made me apprehensive to go in the first place.

TMI?

It reminded me of that Eddie Murphy Raw performance of his now infamous Richard Pryor impersonation.

I wasn’t able to shit right for weeks — no, months — at a time; and I even developed something called anal fissures, which were painful little splits in the skin both inside and surrounding my rectum that sometimes extend all the way up my crack — think of it as athlete’s foot up the ass.

It’s no wonder that I wanted to fucking die everyday.

When the digestive system gets overrun and clogged up with undigested food matter, metabolic waste, and other acidic toxins — caused by drinking fluids that are dehydrating (diuretics) like coffee, tea, soda, energy drinks, bottled or boxed “juice” drinks, etc; not eating enough live, water-rich, high fiber, plant foods and enough essential fatty acids; and instead excessively eating too many acidic, condensed, dead, cooked, processed or packaged, hard to digest “food” (that requires more energy to digest than it contributes), like conventional (meaning non-organic, antibiotic laden, improperly fed, factory farmed) dairy products and animal proteins, traditional grains and starchy carbohydrates, and junk/non-food in the majority of your diet; as well as chemical based drugs, alcohol, and/or medications, like I was consuming in excess, then you WILL end up with a “traffic jam” somewhere along the nine yards of your intestines, which leads to damage to the digestive tract and extra stress in your liver, lymphatic system, and other organs and organ systems.

According to Dr. Edward F. Group, founder of Global Healing Center, “Constipation and digestive disorders affect one out of five people in America and most doctors just recommend drugs like laxatives. Bowel compaction (which is, ironically, often drug-induced) is a serious health concern in the United States. By the age of 40, the average person has an estimated 10 to 20 pounds of hard compacted fecal matter lodged in their intestinal tract. Many people are eliminating, but its matter that has been stuck in their digestive tract for months or even YEARS! A healthy bowel transit time should be 12 to 18 hours, but the average transit time in Western countries is at least twice that — 38 hours or more.”

Have you ever had one of those food disposals in your kitchen sink get clogged or backed up? Well, what happens if you keep putting food and shit into a backed up disposal over time?

Answer: The sink would eventually overflow with disorganizing, fermenting, and putrefying matter, your kitchen would begin to stink, and it would eventually have an effect on other areas of your house!

Well, that image is a pretty good description of what happens in your body when you’re not eliminating waste regularly effectively.

Have you ever been severely constipated for days at a time and noticed how irritable and emotionally screwed up you are at the same time? I have been but, if you’re anything like I was, you may not have realized the two conditions were related.

The fact is, your body has to “take out the trash” through the skin, lungs, kidneys, and bowels, and in that particular order; and when it can’t do so effectively, the system gets backed up, which recycles and compounds waste, causes stress and leading to spikes in cortisol (“the stress hormone”) along with all kinds of imbalances, including psychological and emotional ones.

A distinction I originally got from former professional Ironman Triathlete and author of Thrive Diet and Thrive Fitness, Brendan Brazier, is that any form of stress you have in your life — whether emotional, psychological, or phsyical, always leads to higher cortisol levels.

This “stress reaction” in the form of “spikes” in cortisol, initially gives you energy (historically, stress was a signal for fast action that protected us from danger), but it’s NOT clean or lasting energy.

To make matters worse, these cortisol spikes also seizes the proper function of digestion and elimination, makes it difficult to enter into delta or REM sleep (the deep rejuvenative phase of sleep when your body rebuilds and repairs), which causes you to wake up feeling un-rested, leading to cravings for energy from “stimulation” (coffee, refined sugar, refined starch, and so on) in order to fire off the adrenal glands and boost energy in the short term.

Additionally, there are other hormones that get activated and go up when you’re tired that literally give you the illusion that you’re hungry, and this also leads to even more cravings for sugary, starchy, and stimulant based foods.

Overindulging in “stimulants” then leads to even more stress and even higher levels of cortisol and other imbalances,  putting you into a vicious downward spiral.

But Brendan Brazier found, through his own research and experience, that “when you’re well nourished and lower stress, cortisol levels come down naturally and, in the long run, you need less sleep, gain more energy, and can experience faster recovery.”

Therefore, by taking out condensed and difficult to digest foods like beef, pork, chicken, dairy products and grains (at least temporarily) and by putting in massive amounts of alkaline water, leafy greens, green smoothies, green juices, healthy fats, plant proteins, and fiber you can easily clear out the intestines, restore effortless elimination and dazzling digestion, recover the health and fitness of the enteric nervous system, and massively reduce stress while making the management of any necessary stress more effortless, which eliminates the primary cause of depression and anxiety at the source.

However, it can take as much as 20 parts of alkalinity to neutralize one part of acidity in the body and 12-16 liters of alkaline fluids per day to repair the small intestine — which is why I recommend “Liquid Feasting” with alkaline water, fresh green juices, green soups, and green smoothies for a period of time.

Getting your bowels moving properly (at LEAST twice per day and preferably after each meal) must be the primary focus of any strategy for eliminating mental-emotional imbalances (or for any type of healing and long term health for that matter).

Once your bowel is functioning properly, then your liver, lymphatic system, and other organs and organ systems, are released from the excess stress and begin to normalize on their own — that is, as long as you continue to provide the proper resources through a mostly alkaline diet and plenty of hydration.

Herrings Law states that, “All cure starts from the inside out, from the head down and in reverse order as the symptoms have appeared.” Restated, it can be put like this: “All cures start from the bowel outward, from the brain center out to the organs it controls and in reverse order as symptoms are stored in memory.”

I first heard about “the brain in your gut” from an article I stumbled upon that was written by Tom Staverosky, an expert on natural therapy for migraine headaches, in which he shared some research from a book titled, “The Second Brain – Your Gut Has a Mind of Its Own”, by Dr. Michael D. Gershon, MD.

Some of the more important things I pulled out of Dr. Gershon’s book, include:

• There are more than a hundred million nerve cells in your small intestine, which is a number roughly equal to the number of nerve cells in your spinal cord; add the nerve cells of the esophagus, stomach, and large intestine and you have more nerve cells in your digestive system than in your spine.
• The enteric nervous system is a vast chemical warehouse holding every class of neurotransmitters (facilitators of communication between neurons and body cells and therefore all performance and experience) found in the brain; and the extent of neurotransmitters found in your bowel suggests that the “language” spoken by the cells there is rich and “brain-like” in complexity.
• The local nervous system of your gut has properties like your brain and spinal cord and is largely independent of the central nervous system; in fact, if you cut the connection between the brain and your gut, your gut will continue functioning on its own.
• The enteric nervous system actually has more in common, chemically and structurally, with your brain than with the rest of the peripheral nervous system does and, as a result, illnesses thought to only occur in the brain and associated symptoms, also involve the enteric nervous system or, said differently, the health and fitness of your bowels and digestive tract.
• AND 95% of your serotonin is made in your bowel — in the central nervous system, serotonin plays a key role in regulating emotions like anger, feelings of aggression, and overall mood, as well as body temperature,  sleep, sexuality, reproduction, appetite, metabolism, nausea, and much more.

Therefore, the way you think, feel, drink, and eat all have an effect on your biochemistry and, in turn, the quality of your digestion, assimilation, and elimination; and your digestion, assimilation, and elimination, in reverse, have an effect on your biochemistry and, in turn, the way you think and feel.

Said differently, how you “feel” and “perform” — your emotions, mood, energy, sexual performance, reproductive functions, appetite, metabolism, and so on, are all directly related to a healthy intestinal tract, proper digestion, proper assimilation, and proper elimination; and it’s a two way street — meaning, stress and emotions can affect your digestion and elimination and your digestion and elimination can affect your emotions and ability to manage stress.

So, I guess you could say that there’s an asshole in charge of everything — the asshole who’s feeding you and the one your body uses to take out the trash 🙂

The reality is, mental-emotional imbalances are deeply related to the level of “acidity” in your diet and lifestyle (which throws hormones off because they are fat based and get burned up as a buffer of acidity), the level of stress in your life (which also throws hormones out of balance and causes spikes in the “stress hormone” cortisol) which negatively affects the quality of digestion, assimilation, filtering, and elimination, all of which can be traced back to hydration, nutrition, environment, rest, and over all physical health and fitness, both inside and out.

Therefore, pharmaceutical based treatments that alter “brain chemistry” are way off base and, furthermore, because of the damage those prescription drugs cause to your digestive tract and the stress they put on your filter organs, they really only make matters worse by adding to the underlying hidden cause.

Ultimately, depression and anxiety (or happiness and certainty) is caused by a combination of physiology and biochemistry, focus and beliefs, language and meaning, decisions and actions, environment and community upstream and all converging on your experience downstream; your experiences and results in life today are DIRECTLY CORRELATED with who you look up to and model; with your thinking, way of being, and consistent behavior; with who you spend most of your time with; and with the future you are living into.

Personally, I have had the most long term success dealing with my own depression, anxiety, panic, mania, and suicidal thoughts through a combination of holistic nutrition (particularly a mostly alkalizing approach to hydration and nutrition), daily physical exercise, daily meditation, time invested in a loving and supportive community of people who are healthy, happy, and up to something in life, as well as a personal commitment to service to/value creation for others.

And I am passionately dedicated and determined to causing TRANSFORMATION for others who are suffering in similar ways as I have in the past and who haven’t yet found the source of or solution for their suffering.

All transformation occurs inside of a powerful conversation with someone who is prepared to not just hear you, but truly listen to you and “get your world” without judgement or condemnation and with unconditional love and real compassion so that you can gain access to a breakthrough perspective and the possibility of power, freedom, and full self expression as a default way of being beyond the constraints of the past.

If you want to have a powerful conversation with me to see if I can help you, then fill out the confidential form below and lets have a chat about whether or not working together is a fit. At the very least I should be able to point you in the right direction toward new results.

YOUR ADVENTURE AWAITS!