Three Steps to Life After Anxiety, A Journey to End Stuttering (Anxiety Super-Article)

For years I could barely handle talking to strangers for fear of my stutter.

Peers would exclaim “You’re so quiet!” I would just smile and nod, knowing that if I ventured a response, they would realize why I never talked: I could not speak without stuttering myself into embarrassed silence!

From middle school through college, my anxiety would come out, limbs akimbo, striking me down at the worse times.

I have tried every trick under the sun: taking deep breathes before speaking did nothing, pushing through a stutter did not work, and practicing talking in the mirror did not help once a human was in front of me.

At some point I gave up and either let myself stutter or did not talk at all.

Despite my many setbacks, I was determined to one day be stutter free. If nothing else, I was very embarrassed by my inability to speak when I wanted to, it made me feel inferior and for a long time, I believed I was.

At a critical turning point in my life, I made the pivot from running from my anxiety and decided to learn how to begin the journey towards equanimity.

When I first started learning about medicinal herbs, I was only interested in two objectives: repairing any damage I may have done to my memory by smoking weed (my self-medication of choice, it ended up making my anxiety 10 times worse) and settling the frantic rabbit in my chest that called itself Anxiety.

I started off with the basic western herbalism standbys: lemon balm, St. John’s wort, lavender, ginkgo biloba, gotu kola and green tea.

· Lemon Balm and Lavender calm anxiety

· Ginkgo biloba and Gotu kola have been shown to increase blood flow to the brain, help in preventing age-related memory loss by promoting neurogenesis and increasing concentration.

· St John’s Wort (SJW) is an herbal antidepressant and has been clinically shown to be as effective as pharmaceutical SSRI’s for mild to moderate depression. As we can see from the first linked article, SJW affects a lot of different neurotransmitters all at once. Because of this, SJW also interacts with just about every pharmaceutical, so caution is highly advised with SJW if you are taking or planning on taking it with any prescribed medications.

· Green tea is cooling and stimulates a calm yet attentive mindset, perfect for a highly anxious student needing to study but not become manic

I drank a tea of this mixture for about two years.

After the first few months I noticed a stark difference in my mood. The effects were amplified when I stopped smoking weed every day. I felt like the world was a little brighter and that frantic rabbit in my chest was able to finally relax.

I started to notice that I would never stutter, until I smoked weed. With that, I decided to swear off the devil’s lettuce.

With my mind clearer than it had been in years, my anxiety suddenly managed, I felt like I had been given a new chance to live.

Because of my new love for medicinal herbs, I decided to pursue higher education in the oldest herbal tradition I could find, Chinese Medicine!

In Chinese Medicine, stuttering can be a symptom of Heart Heat. This is seen in the anxiously fast heartbeat, the rapid blushing in the cheeks, and trying to talk too fast.

If we keep this image of heat in mind, we can look for changes that are cooling to help alleviate the stuttering and the underlying/resulting anxiety.

Here we have the three steps to life after anxiety! They include Lifestyle Changes, Exercise, and Herbal support.

1) Lifestyle:

Get Enough Sleep

In TCM, we understand that after a bad night of sleep, our tongue will be redder on the tip and edges. This shows the heat that has been created by the Heart Fire not fully descending into Kidney Water.

We can avoid this extra heat accumulation by ensuring we get better sleep. (If you want more info on sleep, check out my articles here and here.) Sleep is the most restorative part of our day, especially if you have anxiety.

Make your sleep a priority and you will notice many benefits unfold over time!

Meditating

Meditating is a crucial practice for settling an anxious spirit.

There are a thousand and one different meditations you can try, but the most basic is simply following your breath. (Check out my meditation article here.)

Following your breath is as simple as taking full, deep inhales with equally full exhales. The trick is to keep your mind gently fixed on this one function for 10 breathes in a row. If you have never tried it, you may be surprised at how easy it is to get distracted!

This practice can carry you far in meditation, once you have practiced for a while, you can begin playing with your breathing or including meditations learned from legitimate teachers.

Start with a small, daily meditation practice and enjoy the growth of inner tranquility!

Journaling

Journaling has saved me more times than I can count.

Having a blank page to dump everything that is bouncing around in your mind can be instrumental in cutting out the mental chatter. For anxious people, we tend to fixate on thoughts that grow out of proportion to the initial idea.

When I am stressed or especially anxious, I start to think that everything I need to do or the events in my life are too much to handle. As soon as I scribble everything I am worried about on to the page, all my problems and worries become comically small.

After journaling for years now, I know that as soon as I am too stressed to sleep or too anxious to make the jump on a project, it is time to write out exactly what my worries are, and it all becomes doable!

Reduce Stress

An important change for anxious people is to reduce the stressful parts of life that they can.

For myself, I cannot smoke weed due to it being an anxiety trigger. Similarly, I do not drink coffee, except on very rare occasions (but if you want to buy me a cup, I would be grateful!)

I love the rush of coffee but at some point, the thrill of productivity turns into manic anxiety about all the things I have not accomplished. Then when the caffeine crash comes, I feel like a pile of feces and regret ever drinking that first cup of coffee.

When you start meditating and journaling, the process of sorting out the unnecessarily anxiety-producing parts of life will become clear.

Mindset

Finally, at the culmination point of all these practices, you can change the way you view and interact with the world to make your life so much easier.

An example is the common anxious thought “everybody is looking at me.”

When we are anxious, we can go through life constantly worrying that everybody cares what we are doing and that they are judging us for it. A turning point is with the realization that everybody is so caught up in their own world that nobody really cares what you do (as long as you are not hurting anyone or yourself).

With the positive application of this mindset, you can free yourself from the constant worry of judgement and live with much less anxiety.

2) Exercise:

Exercise can be a double-edged sword.

When I say exercise, do not think about the Instagram body builders we are constantly told are the ideal. Forget that, most people do not aspire to nor need to spend hours in the gym every day to feel good about their body.

I highly recommend avoiding the gym whenever possible.

Part of exercising is the fresh air, sunlight and sense of human connectedness that comes from sharing the free spaces of the world.

Every able-bodied person should walk every day.

Get outside, pick a direction, and start walking. Listen to music or a podcast if you need to but be sure to stop and enjoy your surroundings as you go. Smell the flowers, watch the trees sway in the wind, make up silly names for the birds you see, just be outside!

If you feel like you can do more, find a place to hike, go for a run, or go exploring on a bike.

If you want to exercise for strength, try out calisthenics!

Start with the easiest regression of pushups, squats, pull-ups, etc. and take your time moving up the progressions so that your tendons and flexibility are brought along for the ride.

Exercise is very effective for anxiety as it causes the body to release endorphins, uses extra energy, and improves sleep.

3) Herbs:

The final piece of managing anxiety involves supplements to settle your spirit.

The problem with supplements and medications is that most people expect that when they take a supplement, their anxiety will disappear. This is not how anxiety works, there is not a magical pill that can instantly make you a less-anxious person without additional work by you.

Anxiety is a journey and supplements are a stepping stone that help move you forward.

a) Lavender is an incredible herbal for anxiety.

Having lavender products around is helpful, the smell itself is calming. Even more powerful is taking the concentrated oil of Lavender in Lavela.

Lavela has been studied and found to be more effective than Ativan (source). I take Lavela daily during times of high anxiety/stress and have been regularly off and on it for the last two years.

My moment of belief came when I was in a period of high anxiety and was stuttering more than I typically do. I started taking Lavela, and within the same week, I could feel where my stutter would usually start but, I was relaxed so the stutter never started.

Ever since, I have been a staunch believer in Lavela and have shared it with anybody that will listen.

b) Ashwagandha got me through the worst of the initial covid quarantine.

At the start of the epidemic I was living in the mountains behind Santa Cruz, CA. My two housemates moved back in with their parents and I stayed because I still had 3 years left of TCM school, and I loved my room.

Suddenly living alone in a world that had gone online, I began experiencing palpitations throughout the day and night.

My anxiety was at an all-time high, the world was suddenly terrifying, and I was stuck in the house. I exercised a lot but despite my best efforts, I could not drive down the panicked rabbit in my chest.

That is when I decided I needed additional help and read up on ashwagandha.

This herb is in the class of “adaptogens,” meaning that they help your body adapt to stress, and reduces the impacts of stress on the body.

After a week or two of regular ashwagandha, my anxiety suddenly felt manageable.

Conclusion:

It has taken me years of regular experimenting to create my anti-anxiety tool kit.

It is never easy to adjust your lifestyle or stick to an exercise routine. Be gentle with yourself and keep the big picture in mind.

The battle with anxiety is not won in a single day.

Try some of the lifestyle changes above, see how they feel for you and create your own anti-anxiety tool kit.

Let me know how it goes! I’d love to hear what you do to manage your anxiety or stress, leave a comment!

Thank you for reading.

Sources:

St John’s Wort: Mechanism , Effectiveness

Lemon Balm: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4245564/

Lavender: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3612440/

Ginkgo biloba: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8014356/

Gotu Kola: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3116297/

Lavela: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19962288/

Ashwaganda: https://ods.od.nih.gov/factsheets/Ashwagandha-HealthProfessional/

Support the author and buy a coffee! https://www.buymeacoffee.com/emerycastex

Check out my store here: TCM-Propaganda.redbubble.com