Interview by Ella Rigby, featuring Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Katie Thomson Aitken, the best-selling author of Create Calm: The Professionals Guide To Overcoming Anxiety, the founder of the Tranquil Minds Anxiety Program, and a naturopathic doctor in Guelph. We had a great talk about stress, anxiety, and the brain/body connection and she provided some excellent tips on managing student life in stressful times. Ella: As a naturopathic doctor, a lot of your practice focuses on the brain-body connection. Can you explain why the way that we nourish and take care of our bodies impacts our anxiety levels?
It's also very empowering to know that, for example, if I'm pushing up my protein requirements that means that I have an abundance of protein to make neurotransmitters. If I'm pushing up my produce and I'm eating more fruits and vegetables that’s going to be flooding my body with minerals and vitamins perhaps beyond what I need for those basic functions. What is enough for an average body might not be enough for my body or someone else's individual body. We don't actually know all of our own genetic variances. If I have a single nucleotide polymorphism or a change in my genes that's causing an enzyme that is involved in making something that's great for my body to run a little bit slower, flooding my body with all of the prerequisites such as all of the proteins and all of the vitamin and mineral co-factors that my body needs to run that process is going to help optimize it so it's not looking for bits of a substrate to make those reactions run. Lifestyle and nutrition are incredibly important. The difference between "the only vegetable I had today was the lettuce and tomato that was on my hamburger: vs. "I made a conscious point and got 5, 6, 8, or 10 servings of fruits and vegetables into my day today" is huge in terms of how much nutrients we are getting into our bodies. Blood sugar regulation is very important, so try to eat often and avoid going 8 hours without eating (not including sleep), because it’s important not to run your tank to empty, to prevent anxiety you need to fuel your body before it gets there. It's also important to incorporate foods into your diet that decrease inflammation. Try to eat more whole foods like fruits and vegetables to bring down the body load of inflammation and neuroinflammation, which is the inflammation that could be in your brain. We know that this inflammation happens in trauma, depression, anxiety, and different mental health conditions. Nutritional sufficiency is also important, but the first thing that you should focus on is eating regularly. Ella: Can you give a brief explanation of the three anxiety response types and how they present themselves in students? Dr. Katie: Sure, so in my work, I've identified three anxiety types: defensive anxiety, decision anxiety, and fatigue anxiety. The type that I most commonly see in students is the decision anxiety type. The cause of the decision anxiety is often due to a lack of schedules. One of the physiological impacts of when you don't maintain a regular sleep and nutrition cycle is that it is very challenging on your hormones, it's hard on your blood sugar, and it makes it so that every decision that you make for the day has to use your willpower. Every day when you wake up you have a certain amount of decision power to get through your day, and you can use it up. If there is only a finite amount and you don't have a regular eating time, you don't have a regular bedtime, and you exercise when you feel like it, you're using a lot of decisions to make those small choices. This makes it difficult to make choices that are in alignment with your cognitive thinking and instead, you fall into that's baseline habits and doing what is easiest. When I’m working with people with anxiety, a lot of times we're trying to make sure they are getting scheduled exercise in every day, that they are eating regularly, and that they are having optimal sleep habits. Often, learning to meditate is part of the work we do as well as making sure that you have regular social connections and time for yourself. To get all that done in a day, it works a lot better if there's some structure and you're not having to choose good habits all day because you run out of willpower. So a lot of times in this decision type that's the central struggle is that loss of routine and then therefore the treatment of it is to reinstate a healthy routine. There is also fatigue-type anxiety. This is when the anxiety presents primarily as exhaustion and it is a type that I see in students. This is the “I can't get out of bed I'm so tired I just need to put the blanket over me and this is all so exhausting” response to stress. When that’s the case, I often look at nutritional pieces underlying physical health to try and determine if there's some physiology behind the exhaustion. A lot of the student population is younger so we are looking at things like anemia, especially for women. We look at iron, B12, and vitamin D levels and how well the body is absorbing those nutrients, and how much of those nutrients are coming into the body. The third type that I identify in my practice is defensive-type anxiety, and this can be a normal response to a stressor. The defensive fight or flight response can be normal; that being said, we're in such a time of extreme stress right now with the global pandemic that is a constant daily stressor, that our innate defensive stress response is not helpful towards, which creates some challenges. The other time that I see the defensive type stress response comes out is in folks who have a trauma history. Their experience creates a belief in the mind-body that they are not safe, leaving them in a constantly defensive state. We see this especially in folks who are still not safe and we see this in marginalized populations who have to deal with systemic oppression. I struggle personally with calling it an anxiety disorder, even when it meets the DSM diagnostic criteria for an anxiety disorder, because it's a natural response to a stressed state. Some folks don't feel safe because they truly aren't in this world, which is completely unjust. If we're not talking about that as part of mental health, then we’re missing out on this whole population. I think it’s particularly important especially with that type to examine how we can change our world so that this chronic defensive response isn’t developing. Ella: What strategies can students use to deal with immediate stress such as an upcoming exam? Dr. Katie: In these situations, it's always good to look at what you can control and what you cannot control and begin separating those factors. Some things that you can't control are the time that the exam is going to be and what's going to be on the exam. Thoughts that come up like “oh no this exam is early in the morning what if I miss it!?” or “what if there are topics on the exam that I didn’t study?” are good to identify and recognize as things that are out of your control. The only things that you can control are your behaviors and your thoughts. You can't even control your feelings. So it's better to focus on monitoring your thoughts. Preparation can be helpful for anxiety, although it can go too far. If you know that you do tend to get a little overly structured, have that awareness in your mind and check if you're trying to control things that are not controllable. If you're not allowing for some flexibility, speaking to a mental health professional would probably be a good way to help bring the stakes down so that you're not holding yourself to unrealistically high levels of perfectionism. In general, structure is good for managing your basic needs in times of stress. It can be tempting to just blow off going to the gym or talking to your friend for 20 minutes because you feel like studying is more important. You do have to study, but it will work better when your body needs are met. You will retain more information and your recall will be better. Science shows that taking care of yourself will improve not just your mental health, but it will also improve your grades, and you will do better in the long term. Sleep, food, activity, breathing, and connecting with your friends are all still important during exam season. It's also important to recognize when you've done what you can. You're never going to be able to study every single thing and you're never going to have perfect recall. These are not realistic expectations to put on ourselves, so it's good to practice trying to let go of these things that are out of our control. Ella: How can we foster optimism and calm during these overwhelming times? Dr. Katie: There are lots of really helpful conversations happening on social media right now about the difference between gratitude, having optimistic thinking, and engaging in toxic positivity. What's not helpful when trying to cultivate optimism is toxic positivity, meaning pretending things are fine when they're not or trying to look for the good while not acknowledging that something really sucks. That is not helpful right now. If you are sad because you have not hugged a family member or engaged in a social activity that you enjoy and you're really missing that, saying “oh but it's okay”, is not respectful to your body's experience and your experience moving through this pandemic. That being said, I find that it is most helpful for mental health to acknowledge what is, be real about it, and practice gratitude. Don’t practice gratitude instead of feeling your genuine and valid feelings about an experience. The gratitude also does not have to be about your trauma or stressors. Taking time to appreciate small joys builds neural pathways that look for joy, and that helps to cultivate optimism and positivity. This practice is protective for mental health. There has been research on people who have what's called an unconscious positivity bias, meaning that they think things are better than they are, and are happier. I'm okay with having an unconscious positive bias and I believe that it can be done without overlooking actual problems. For cultivating calm, I fundamentally believe that we all have access to calm at all times and that it is an innate part of who we are. The practice is unlocking it, and I encourage people to think of it as a practice. So just like learning a new skill, you have to practice to get good at it and when you first start you might not be good. It depends on how much practice you've had. Maybe you grew up in a household where it was calm and your parents created a calm environment so your body learns to access that calm easily. Maybe you grew up in a house that did not have a calm environment and your parents were not able to reflect that calm and emotional regulation so you haven't learned as much at this point in your life. That's okay, everybody's got a different starting point, but it is a skill that can be learned. Creating healthy lifestyle habits such as getting enough sleep and nourishing your body will help to set your nervous system up for being able to move into a calm state. The other thing that I encourage in terms of creating calm is meditation and breathwork. You can practice breathing in and out and repeating that and moving towards letting go of thoughts that are not about your breath as a way to cope with stress. There is modern research showing that this helps create peace and it's also present in all traditional cultures and religions. For example, prayer cadences are all the same length because they follow an inhale and exhale. It's designed to go with a very calm breath. This is very ancient wisdom that is being investigated by modern science and they are coming to the conclusion that your breath is a powerful tool for creating calm. What I find most helpful is to think of it as a skill that you can practice, so rather than only trying to do calming breaths when you're freaking out, think of it as something that you do every day as practice drills. This is like your soccer drill. So when you get to the game, aka the exam, you know the drill. You know how to breathe in a way that helps you reconnect with that calm that’s inside of you all of the time that has just become clouded by the anxiety of the situation. Ella is a first-year student at the University of Guelph and is a First Year Representative on the Psychology Society. Do YOU have wellness tips you'd like to share with Psychology students? Make sure you fill out our submission form and send it back to us by email so we can showcase your ideas! Wondering if you can work with Dr. Katie? Yes, I am currently accepting new patients and you can book an initial appointment with me here: https://norfolk.janeapp.com/#/staff_member/2 Also, I wanted to let you know that I’m part of the select savings program with the University of Guelph’s student association’s health insurance MyPlan. You can read about it on your student plan website here https://www.mystudentplan.ca/uofguelph/en/select-savings This type of appointment is not available for online booking so make sure to email me [email protected] if you’d like to book this appointment type. Other Resources
Use the following link to access Dr. Katie's free Student Mental Health Tranquil Toolkit Workbook, as featured at our Mental Health Conference in March 2021! https://www.tranquilmindnaturopath.com/student-workbook
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Want to contribute?If you'd like to share your own content on GetPsyched, download, complete and send this form to our email: Archives
March 2023
Categories
All
Blog CommitteeThis blog has been running thanks to a wonderful committee of students dedicated to uplifting student voices! Read about them here: |