Have Anxiety or PTSD? Eat the right breakfast!

If you have PTSD or an anxiety disorder, you could be triggering yourself in the morning without even knowing it, with a blood sugar crash.

Eat a high-fat, high-protein breakfast. Here's why:

The brain, like the rest of your body, runs on sugar, water, and oxygen. We need all sorts of other nutrients, but these three things are way our bodies make energy.

When you are asleep, you are not using much energy. Your blood pressure goes down, your gut mostly turns off, and your body takes as much of a break as possible. But, when you wake up, energy demands skyrocket. Everything cuts on at once. Breathing isn't hard! But you don't have the other two things you need--sugar and oxygen.

If you do not fuel up your brain in 30 minutes, a blood sugar crash will occur. This naturally causes anxiety, but because we associate anxiety with stressors in life, we don't notice it. Furthermore, someone without PTSD or anxiety can get away with treating their brain poorly, without noticing it.

When anxiety is activated, our brain goes looking for reasons, but the actual reason may be a blood sugar crash. If you have PTSD, for instance, anxiety is certainly one of the most painful symptoms. A flashback creates a lot of anxiety, to say the least. If you have a social phobia, being in a crowd may be panic-inducing.

So, if you experience a blood sugar crash, you will activate trauma symptoms, because they are associated with anxiety. Or, in the other example above, getting out of the house will seem even more scary than it ought to. Expect the day to get worse from there. But it was all a trick that you just played on your brain, by not fueling it properly!

However, not just any breakfast is proper fuel. Here's an explanation:

On the negative side, obviously, if you don't eat anything at all, forget it.

Also on the negative side, if you eat a carb-heavy or sugary breakfast (including fruit), your body will experience a sugar spike and then crash big-time. Same effect as eating nothing, just delayed.

However, if you eat a good-sized, high-fat, high-protein breakfast, you have just fueled body and mind until lunch. Bacon and eggs is a great example, and enough to feel satisfied. Why does this work? Because fat breaks down into sugar at a slow rate. The body is designed to burn fat into sugar. Blood sugar stays stable.

Not only does this prevent an anxiety crash, it makes the mind more able to do daily tasks while managing symptoms. Research shows that multitasking low-level tasks uses more brain energy than doing one complex activity. If you have anxiety or PTSD, and are also living life, you are multitasking.

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Here is a miracle story (identifying details altered for privacy), something not exactly common, but certainly illustrative. I had a client with PTSD, not only from an unspeakably horrific childhood, but also from being a first responder. Her symptoms were so bad that she also had a dissociative disorder, in which she would lose days (not remembering them) to a "child state" in which she would giggle and draw stick figures. Her trauma in this form would have an estimated treatment time of perhaps 5-10 years. However, after I found out that she was drinking an energy drink for breakfast, I suggested bacon and eggs daily. In two weeks, she did not have any symptoms of PTSD or a dissociative disorder, and memories became simple to treat. Her mind was so much more powerful than she ever realized, when properly fueled. The symptoms arose (as they always do) from the extreme multitasking of PTSD, the exhaustion arising from holding off terrible memories all day without even realizing it. Treatment also involved balancing all areas of life, most importantly her marriage.

Even if this change makes a 10% difference in symptoms, that's great. But the more important factor may be that treatment becomes a simpler task with more mental energy available.

The brain hasn't changed much over the years, much less 500 years. The complex brain is still optimized for a hard, primitive life rather than our civilized, modern world that allows us to be lazy with self-care. Primitives did not have the term "poor self-care." They called it "being eaten by lions."

Think about being a tribesman, a warrior and parent, in the Kalahari 500 years ago. What is happening if this person is not eating a high protein/fat breakfast, or none at all? The only reason is, they are screwed. The herd has moved on, or they have been kicked out of the tribe, or an enemy attack has destroyed their tribe. This tribesman is going to be depressed and anxious! Depression is not an absence of happiness, it is an absence of meaning.

When you don't feed yourself a primitive warrior's breakfast, your primitive mind senses that life is meaningless, whether you actually feel that in your civilized mind. Expect to feel that way if meaninglessness is already a struggle.

At this point, it is also useful to dispel a common myth--that this is physically unhealthy. Many clients, when I present this to them, say, "I would do that, and it makes sense, but I don't want to gain weight or get heart disease." Actually, although I don't have a trauma disorder, not only can I sense my mood affected by missing my breakfast bacon sandwich, I also no longer struggle with weight fluctuation, and I no longer have high cholesterol. When you don't eat, or you eat something that either provides no energy or short-term energy, two things happen. 1) Your primitive mind says "store that fat--the herd has moved on, and you need to prepare for starvation." This is well-established in the world of medicine. And 2) the long-term fullness and sense of well-being provided by protein and fat means that you don't feel like snacking between breakfast and lunch. It's those snacks that put on the weight--the body senses a deep need for sugar, and cheap sugar is the most accessible at the gas station. It goes straight to fat.

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If you are vegan (etc.), there are options. For instance, the Seventh-Day Adventist church has traditionally been vegetarian. Over 150 or so years, they have developed extremely effective recipes that stand the test of time, unlike modern vegan fad diets. And they live longer than any other people groups, with less disease. I am not endorsing their theology, but this is simply proof that bacon and eggs isn't the only way to do things. But personally, I want bacon and sausage.

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What about a high fat/protein breakfast like cheese toast or peanut butter (etc.)? These non-animal fats do not break down in the same healthy, predictable manner as animal fats. You have eyes in the front of your head. You have sharp canine teeth. You are a predator. A human being can survive on water and fatty meat for a VERY long time, although the body is certainly designed for a balanced diet. We may be hunters, but we are also gatherers.

Incidentally, these principles are also what makes EMDR work. For instance, EMDR reprocessing of traumatic memories uses multitasking to alter working memory. And side to side eye movements work best. Hunter-gatherers use this movement to scan for resources. If we were eagles, we would use up and down eye movements for EMDR (although those work too). Please reference my entry on "What makes EMDR work."

Soon, I will write another blog entry on "thinking like a Masai warrior," to emphasize and justify balancing one's life (EMDR Phase 2) as essential to making trauma therapy REAL therapy, rather than simply numbing out traumatic memories. What good is healing from PTSD if life still feels meaningless?