Anxiety and depression are feelings that all of us experience at one time or another. Living through a pandemic only makes those unwanted feelings that much worse, especially during the holiday season. Therefore, it helps to try taking better care of yourself with more sleep, watching your overall health and diet. Therefore, it is more important than ever to know the worst foods bad for anxiety and depression that you want to limit.
Though you may feel a holiday isn’t complete without lots of sugary treats, you may want to cut back a bit on how many of those delicious cookies, cakes, pies, candies, and other fancy desserts that you reach for while feeling so stressed. Sugar happens to be one of those foods bad for anxiety since its cause a brief spurt of energy before it quickly crashes in how it breaks down in your system. As a result, this is why you can feel energized after eating some sugar and then jittery a little time later due to how that particular fuel is processed in your body.
You’re probably drinking more alcohol over the holiday season. Though it is tempting to stop counting all those drinks offered to you or just enjoy while in a festive mood, alcohol is a depressant that does affect the central nervous system. Too much of it can dehydrate you enough to lower your blood pressure to cause those crazy mood swings from how it spikes and crashes. The best thing is trying to limit how much you drink since alcohol is another of these foods bad for anxiety. However, there may be a way to keep your blood pressure more in check.
Something that you may want to try is making a natural nutrient cocktail to follow up after your drinking that could help prevent that unsteady blood pressure. Believe it or not, though also a diuretic, beets may help by flushing the liver and delivering potassium to your body. If you take out your blender, throw in some leafy greens, orange juice along with the beets to process into a liquid cocktail this may help. Sipping on such a natural vitamin B and C rich cocktail may assist your body with the return of those depleted carbohydrates.
Something else that you should be more careful of is watching how much of those processed luncheon meats that are always more prevalent over the holidays that you consume. Studies have shown that the chemicals in those treated meats can cause inflammation that also has effects on the brain and depression.
Another of the foods bad for anxiety that you want to limit especially now through the holidays when depressed are fried fatty foods from ones such as fried chicken, fried fish, French fries, etc. The reason is not a good idea is because of how heating the oil can cause partial hydrogenation resulting in an unhealthy trans fat. Thus, it is better to turn to oils that have a low smoke point above 400 degrees such as ones like olive oil, canola oil, peanut oil, safflower oil, etc. Even so, you want to limit how much of those foods you eat.
The bad foods for anxiety that I shared are just a few of the main culprits that you may want to limit, especially now. Hopefully, our lives will return to normal sooner than later. In the meantime, this material may just help keep you in better spirits through this difficult time.
